https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ASSASSINS-CREED-VALHALLA-104-AJUDO-OU-NAO-O-REI.jpg7201280DecayeD20https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngDecayeD202024-11-05 15:01:092024-11-05 15:01:09ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA #104 | AJUDO OU NÃO O REI ALFRED?
For 25 years, chip giant Intel has been a key measure of the strength of the semiconductor market, being one of just 30 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. However, a year of non-stop financial losses and a portfolio of late or underwhelming products have taken their toll on Intel’s share price. As a result, S&P Dow Jones has deleted it from the IA index in favour of the AI darling Nvidia.
As things currently stand, Intel’s share price is around $23, roughly half what it was a year ago. It has dropped heavily after each financial statement and it’s not surprising when one sees the figures. While this year’s revenues have been slightly better than in 2023, Intel has suffered a net income loss each quarter.
Unless something akin to a miracle happens in the final months of this year, Intel will be on track to have losses of over $20 billion, which isn’t exactly great news for investors. Hence the removal of Intel from the IA index, as S&P Dow Jones explains in its press release (pdf warning ): “The index changes were initiated to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry and the materials sector respectively.”
News of the deletion, as reported by Ars Technica, couldn’t come at a worse time for Intel. With financial losses mounting, it’s shed 15% of its workforce to save money. Its new desktop Arrow Lake processors, such as the Core Ultra 9 285K, have been poorly received in the gaming sector. It’s been sidelined by AMD and Nvidia too, generating less revenue than either company in the data centre and AI sector.
But as grim as things may seem for the 56-year-old company, it’s not game over. Intel is a key US military contractor, it’s on track to receive funds from the CHIPS and Science Act, and it still holds the largest market share in the CPU client sector.
There’s plenty of money coming in—the issue is that too much is going out, right now, and that can be managed by reducing overheads and shutting down divisions that generate little or no income.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
From a gaming perspective, that means we’re very unlikely to see much in the way of Nvidia-beating graphics cards next year, so if you were hoping that Battlemage would be a great alternative to RDNA 4 or Blackwell in 2025, you’re likely to be disappointed.
Alchemist wasn’t much of a success for Intel, in terms of revenue and income, so there’s little chance that additional funding will be put aside for gaming GPUs (AI GPUs are a different story).
AMD has shown that it’s possible to come back from a dire situation, though the market as a whole is very different now from how it was 16 years ago. It’s important to consumers that Intel does survive as competition is the best way to keep prices in check but only time will tell what Team Blue will look like in the future.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1730808053_Its-the-end-of-an-era-Nvidia-replaces-Intel-in.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-05 11:51:532024-11-05 11:51:53It’s the end of an era: Nvidia replaces Intel in a key Dow Jones index, as Team Blue’s fortunes tumble
Last week, Ubisoft baffled us all by launching Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, an NFT tactics game, in the year of our lord 2024. Its characters cost as much as $63,000 in cryptocurrency, despite the fact that I’m not entirely sure what you can do with them once you own them. Mostly, it seems like they’re good for, well, playing Champions Tactics—unless you wanted to play over the weekend, when every player found themselves connecting and immediately losing to the same guy, at the same time.
On Friday afternoon, players began appearing in the bugs-and-feedback channel of the official Champions Tactics Discord to report that ranked matches had become unplayable. They would connect to a game, only to immediately get a server error message. Despite the message saying that their “stats and ratings have not been impacted,” players were watching their competitive rankings plummet as they repeatedly joined matches they’d immediately lose.
Gradually, those players all realized that in their busted game, they’d been matched to the same player: “Paulstar111.” By Friday night, the Discord’s users were demanding that the Champions Tactics devs ban Paulstar111, who’d somehow managed to hack the game’s matchmaking and feed himself wins.
Unfortunately, one of the Discord’s mods appeared with bad news: The devs weren’t able to access their office over the weekend. “Hey fam. We all share the same frustrations and it’s a known issue which so many of us have reported already,” said moderator Unchartedblock. “Unfortunately, we have to wait until Monday for team to fix the issues.”
“If this guy stay whole weekend connected doing this he doomed this game,” said Discord user Ketaros in response. “GL for you guys.”
Saturday morning, however, brought a welcome surprise. Game director Biloukat announced that the devs had been able to administer justice to the rogue Paulstar111. “We observed a weird behavior for this player ‘paulstar111,” Biloukat said. “We decided to ban him and we’ll deeply investigate on his behavior on Monday!”
Sadly, as soon as Paulstar111 was struck down, his villainy reemerged by another name. Within minutes of Biloukat’s announcement, players were experiencing the same instant losses as they all found themselves matching with the latest unkillable demigod: a user named “Schilleri11.” Spirits had plummeted through the floor, as though pouring a bunch of fake money into a bunch of fake tactics figurines might not have been the canny investment it’d seemed.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Monday brought the strangest wrinkle yet. Biloukat returned this morning with another announcement: Matchmaking, for now at least, should be functional. Players are once again free to battle their crypto-forged tchotchkes. The sordid tale, however, had a baffling conclusion: Paulstar111 and Schilleri11 might have become unconquerable archvillains, but they hadn’t known what the hell was happening either. Through no fault of their own, a networking error earned them the hatred of—well, however many people are playing Champions Tactics. Couple dozen, at least.
“We sincerely apologize to Schilleri11 and Paulstar111, as the problem was due to a matchmaking bug, and they were banned for security reasons,” Biloukat said. “We have, of course, lifted their bans and kindly ask everyone to be understanding towards them.”
Just in case you took this as a sign to sprint headlong into Champions Tactics yourself, it sounds like things haven’t been entirely buttoned up over at Ubisoft Web3 HQ. In this morning’s announcement about restored matchmaking, Biloukat asked players to “please keep in mind that the bug might reoccur” while the dev team works on a long-term solution.
The Champions Tactics marketplace seems unphased, at least. As I write this, its most expensive champion is listed at $256,570,000. After the game’s first week, I can only imagine how many eager buyers are eyeing it now.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1730772018_Ubisofts-NFT-dumpster-fire-flares-up-as-a-matchmaking-bug.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-05 00:03:192024-11-05 00:03:19Ubisoft’s NFT dumpster fire flares up as a matchmaking bug leaves every player connecting and losing to the same confused, unkillable guy
What would the world be without its maker community? While the giants of the tech industry have begun playing around with all sorts of AR and VR tech, one enthusiast has already built a functioning prototype of their own vision of an AR future.
Miroslav Kotalík has been showing off his latest creation on Twitter—a set of AR glasses powered by a Raspberry Pi (via Tom’s Hardware). What’s really impressive here is the dedication to the “build-it-from-scratch” ethos, as while the frames are 3D printed—as you might expect from a maker community build—Kotalík has gone one step further and figured out a way to cast the lenses from scratch, too.
How I built Zero, the cheap, self contained pair of AR goggles running web apps. What I’ve learned and where I’m heading:A thread 🧵 (0/10)#ar #vr #xr pic.twitter.com/rSSIbOVYLaOctober 18, 2024
The project is called Zero, and began with a series of tests using telescope optics. After figuring out a projection system, Kotalík experimented with 3D printing for the lenses, although quickly realised that unavoidable air gaps made the results less than ideal. Instead, he pivoted to casting, creating 3D printed moulds that were then filled with clear resin and cured, sanded and polished to create a useable lens.
Two tiny SPI displays were then fitted in front of a housing, and a driver was created allowing for low-latency 60 fps image reproduction through the Raspberry Pi. A frame was then 3D printed, with the majority of the components being pushed to the sides of the glasses, before the results went through a series of iterations to adjust distance and switch the optical component to a single lens.
Finally, a backend was designed to integrate sensors and to run apps. Kotalík says building apps for the system is “super easy”, and only requires writing them as an HTML, CSS, or JavaScript page and putting them in the correct folder to run.
The end results look like something of a cross between a fashionable pair of hipster glasses, and a Bladerunner-style goggle setup. While Kotalík seems happy with the results, he also admits that the prototype is “obviously very far from a consumer device”, and has big plans for the future.
This includes the integration of a camera, GPS, and sim slot, adding a wide range of extra functionality to the goggles. The idea here seems to be to create something that’s much more slimmed-down, portable, and useable than some other offerings in the works from companies like Meta, which showed off its own AI-powered “neural AI glasses” earlier this year.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Kotalík has also created a video showing him wearing the glasses in public, along with some slightly blurry footage of what they look like for the wearer in usage.
While wearing a hoodie hides a lot of the side-sections to create a more seamless result, it’s impressive that the glasses blend in to his overall getup enough that you might not look twice if you were to pass someone wearing them on the street.
The overall AR effect looks hazy in the footage, but it can be difficult to capture this sort of display on a traditional camera—and as a first iteration of the prototype, I reckon it’s an excellent demonstration of where Kotalík’s ambitious product is heading.
I’d still rather wear a pair of these over the Meta offerings, which to me look uncomfortably close to the sort of thing Michael Caine was attaching to his face in the 70s. More power to your elbow, that’s what I say, and this project stands out as a brilliant example of maker ingenuity tackling the cutting edge of technology, and coming up with properly useable results.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1730735968_The-goggles-they-do-everything-These-scratch-built-AR-glasses-even.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-04 15:43:172024-11-04 15:43:17The goggles, they do everything: These scratch-built AR glasses even have homemade lenses
A cheap little indie released this week combines two notoriously time-sucking genres into one monstrous whole. Widget Inc has the production-matching flow of a factory game but the gameplay of an incremental, letting you build up successive layers of industry in order to make ever more complex technology over 12 tiers of tech and associated upgrades. By cleverly expanding to take advantage of machine adjacency bonuses and terrain types you can get those production numbers ever-higher in order to unlock and research new tech at a good pace.
It has a demo that takes a couple hours to beat and gives you a good taste of how the game’s simple first few tiers of tech play as you begin to unlock optimizations for a growing industrial complex. It’s pretty neat stuff and so far hasn’t shown the kind of bog-down points that other incremental games sometimes rely on to expand their playtime.
Here’s how developer Leaping Turtle describes Widget Inc:
“A hybrid factory builder / incremental clicker game. Starting from humble beginnings, master the many crafting processes to build up resources and expand your factory. Then, using your newly automated production, unlock new technology and grow ever closer to your goal of spreading to the stars.”
That first part really is a succinct description of how it plays. Each little building has its own button to click or minigame to play so that you can get its product—all of which gets automated as you buy ugprades for that building until you never have to do it again. In a capacitor factory, for example, you add up numbers to reach a specific goal, while in a power plant you just hold open the valve to let oil flow in.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Heres-a-time-devouring-combination-of-factory-building-and-incremental-game.jpg6741200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-04 02:23:482024-11-04 02:23:48Here’s a time-devouring combination of factory-building and incremental game
In a new interview with former Industrial Light and Magic concept artist Iain McCaig from StarWars.com (via Variety), the illustrator revealed that there was initially supposed to be a wild twist at the end of the divisive first prequel film, The Phantom Menace: Liam Neeson’s character was to be the original “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” with Ewan McGregor as Qui-Gon Jinn. McGregor would have taken up the name after Neeson’s character’s death at the hands of Darth Maul.
“It’s interesting how things evolve,” McCaig said of designing the characters’ appearances. “For a time, the older Jedi was named Obi-Wan and the younger Jedi was named Qui-Gon. It was very poignant that at the end, as Obi-Wan dies and Qui-Gon defeats Darth Maul and stays with his Master as he passes away, he not only takes on his Master’s quest, but he takes on his name.
“Qui-Gon becomes Obi-Wan. That’s why when you see Alec Guinness in A New Hope, he puts his hood down and goes, ‘Obi-Wan? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard….’ Because he’s not Obi-Wan, he’s Qui-Gon. And right at the end, George changed it.”
The twist would have been kind of nuts, and the first things that come to my mind are quibbling nitpicks: Wouldn’t all the people on the Jedi Council be all like “Hey, you’re not Obi-Wan!” Yaddle and Ki-Adi-Mundi would never stand for this. It’s reminiscent of some of the other name weirdness from before Star Wars fully calcified as an intellectual property Death Star—Alec Guinness going incognito as “Ben” Kenobi and calling Vader “Darth” like it’s his name when they meet. I also just really love the name “Obi-Wan Kenobi” being some kind of title that gets passed down from mentor to apprentice, like the Nite Owl or something.
But who cares, this is Star Wars. Nothing in the setting makes sense anthropologically or economically—there’s multiple entire planets made of city! A guy can have a funky name change if he wants, and I think this would have been rad as hell.
It makes me think of the Principal and the Pauper from The Simpsons, where Skinner’s revealed to have adopted the identity of an MIA comrade from Vietnam, or the end of Metal Gear Solid 5, with Venom Snake realizing his true relationship to Big Boss. It would have been weird and memorable, a perfect capstone to the weird and memorable Phantom Menace, while also having some real thematic resonance with Anakin Skywalker’s own fated name change.
This certainly isn’t the worst abandoned George Lucas idea we’ve heard of. The original interview is tragically gone with the wiping out of Game Informer’s online archive, but you can still read on the Wayback Machine about how the legendary director supposedly wanted to name The Force Unleashed’s Starkiller either “Darth Icky” or “Darth Insanius.”
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
“The team threw a Hail Mary to George, saying the game would have more credibility if the apprentice had a ‘Darth’ title,” a former LucasArts employee told Game Informer. “He threw out ‘Darth Icky’ and ‘Darth Insanius.’ There was a pregnant pause in the room after that. People waiting for George to say ‘just kidding,’ but it never comes, and he just moved on to another point.”
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1730663814_Apparently-George-Lucas-originally-wanted-Liam-Neeson-to-be-the.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-03 18:11:022024-11-03 18:11:02Apparently George Lucas originally wanted Liam Neeson to be the ‘real’ Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor taking up the name after he died
Relax, put your feet up, and win Sunday’s Wordle. If you want a bit of a nudge if you’re stuck, but love the thought of puzzling the answer out yourself, then you’ll want to take a look at today’s clue. Need a straight answer?` Then click your way to November 3’s (1233) winning word.
From a certain point of view, that was the perfect game. I found some great clues at the start, and then I got to apply them to my next row and watch it all fall into place, piece by piece. Could I have been a little quicker? Probably. But I was having too much fun to care.
Wordle today: A hint
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, November 3
You’ve got to find a red-hot word today, something fierce and fiery. The intensity is important—this is no ordinary candle flame.
Is there a double letter in Wordle today?
There are no double letters in today’s Wordle.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sure where to start, I’ll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips:
A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants.
The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
Avoid words that include letters you’ve already eliminated.
You’re not racing against the clock so there’s no reason to rush. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Future)
What is today’s Wordle answer?
Have a super Sunday. The answer to the November 3 (1233) Wordle is BLAZE.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Previous Wordle answers
The last 10 Wordle answers
Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer isn’t likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle answers:
November 2: SNOOP
November 1: SIXTH
October 31: WEIRD
October 30: EASEL
October 29: TUNIC
October 28: BAWDY
October 27: SANDY
October 26: WREAK
October 25: FROWN
October 24: BOSSY
Learn more about Wordle
(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)
There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you’ll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.
Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don’t waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you’ve typed your guess and hit Enter, you’ll see which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.
Your second guess should compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don’t forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don’t forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
Baldur’s Gate 3 YouTuber SlimX has released a 25-minute video about all the offscreen tricks and shortcuts Larian used to make Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act work. Among them are a holding pen for plot-critical NPCs to hang out in, and a “magical teleporting death journal” to point you in the direction of Act 2 should you kill all the NPCs who would otherwise direct you there.
One consistently impressive thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is how elastic and responsive it is to player choice. Part of this comes from having more consistent rules than any RPG I’ve ever played. For example, items and characters never appear or disappear out of thin air. If you sell Dammon a +1 Dagger in Act 1, he’ll still have it in his inventory come Act 3, because BG3 uses the same NPC data across the entire game rather than separate instances or copies like you might see elsewhere. To help support all of that, BG3 has some fairly unique and strange digital machinery whirring away behind the scenes.
These Dev Secrets Are Hidden Out of Sight in BG3 Act 1 – YouTube
A big focus of SlimX’s video is something referred to in BG3’s files as “the asylum.” This is where characters who can’t be found somewhere in the overworld get stored when they’re not in use. Everyone from Mizora to goblin butler Sceleritas Fel hangs out in this digital green room when it’s not their turn. Pantsless bard murder victim stand-in Quil Grootslag is also in attendance, as is “the Absolute,” or at least an NPC stand-in who delivers the deity’s voice lines from offscreen. There’s even the full power, Act 3 boss fight-ready vampire lord Cazador, who’s on-call for a dream cutscene experienced by player origin Astarion.
Halsin’s Journal Vol. 2 is another curiosity you can find out here. It’s meant to clue you in to the Shadow Curse and Moonrise, should you kill both Halsin and Minthara before they can tell you about them. The book will teleport into the inventory of whichever one of the two is the last to die, leading to its name in BG3’s script files, “magical teleporting death journal.”
There are plenty of other oddities out there as well. “The realm of naked men” makes an appearance, as do the backgrounds from character creation, level up, and some key cutscenes that don’t have corresponding locations on the map. The version of the House of Hope seen in Act 1 is a small slice, separate from the real dungeon. There are also some early access and otherwise cut NPCs still hanging out, like Oscar-worthy Tiefling scammer Nerela.
One of the most surprising secrets, for my money, is a field of portrait backgrounds out in the void, the backdrops for our characters’ little in-game icons. It’s unclear to me how exactly they work, but I wonder if Larian’s unique system for producing the portraits helps explain some of the persistent little bugs with the portraits, like the weird duplicates Oscar Fevras used to make.
More than anything, I find it gratifying to see what it took to get one of my favorite games running, and videos like this may prove useful to any Baldur’s Gate 3 modders looking to make their own adventures with BG3’s cracked toolkit. SlimX has also indicated that he might do a similar treatment for the game’s other acts, and you can check out the YouTuber’s full body of work over on his channel.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Baldurs-Gate-3s-offscreen-secrets-include-an-asylum-for-plot-critical.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-02 20:49:572024-11-02 20:49:57Baldur’s Gate 3’s offscreen secrets include an ‘asylum’ for plot-critical NPCs and a ‘magical teleporting death journal’ to help particularly murderous players find Act 2
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ESCAPE-FROM-TARKOV-1-VOLTANTO-AO-ATIVO.jpg7201280DecayeD20https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngDecayeD202024-11-02 15:00:492024-11-02 15:00:49ESCAPE FROM TARKOV #1 | VOLTANTO AO ATIVO
“China,” observed Charles de Gaulle*, “is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese people.” You can’t knock the guy: he was right. There are loads of Chinese people in China, it turns out, and they’re all upset with me specifically. My strategy of allying with the most widely despised people in the nation has not paid dividends. The wars I have gotten us into? Unpopular. Loosing the army on a funeral? An ambitious, some might say courageous move, and yet not one that has earned me friends.
But that’s the way it goes in China: Mao’s Legacy, a rickety political strategy game from the same studio that put out such bangers as Crisis in the Kremlin, Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, and Collapse: A Political Simulator. Canny readers will note a theme here—simulations of historical epochs that you might politely call ‘transitions’ or honestly call ‘disintegrations’.
Mao’s Legacy is no different. The game kicks off in April 1976. Former premier, consummate diplomat, and archetypal reformer Zhou Enlai has been dead for three months. Mao Zedong—the chairman himself—is visibly ailing. Factions are already vying for control over the post-Mao direction of the country like dogs over a T-bone steak.
I am not equipped to deal with any of this. I am Hua Guofeng, China’s doomed and hapless premier who briefly assumed leadership over the country in the aftermath of Mao’s death. You probably don’t know his name for two reasons. One, he was swiftly ousted by Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese reformers who would set the country on the course it remains on today. Two, his most notable contribution to China’s political thought is a policy literally called the “Two Whatevers.” His was not the substance of which the great people of history are made.
Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman
Unlucky for me, then, that I can’t be anybody else. Your goal in China: Mao’s Legacy is, more than anything, to keep a grip on power. Everything else is subordinate to that. This is why the first two entries on the game’s charmingly homespun (almost Flash game-like) UI record your popularity among the party and your popularity among the people simultaneously.
What happens to them is mostly event-driven. As the days pass by, you’ll be hit by circumstance after circumstance after circumstance, all modelled after real historical events: How do you respond to the 1976 Tiananmen Incident? How do you deal with the Gang of Four? Should you cremate Mao according to his wishes or set him up in a Lenin’s Tomb-like mausoleum on Tiananmen Square (no points for guessing which one happened in real life)?
How you respond to these events can have major and immediate consequences for your political standing. By throwing in with the ultra-leftist Gang of Four, I won the ardent support of some party factions, but earned the bottomless hatred of every moderate and reformer in the Central Committee. The same applies to international affairs: did Uncle Sam like it when I sent guns to Maoists over the globe? He wasn’t thrilled about it.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
But you also have buttons to push and knobs to twiddle to adjust your longer-term prospects. If I were to compare Mao’s Legacy to anything, it would be a kind of ultra-budget Paradox game: CK3 on the back of a few bucks. You can flick between screens to muck with the budget, tinker with your international diplomatic stances, set domestic policy and all that other stuff you’re used to doing in the Europa Universalises of the world. Dump your budget into propaganda and welfare and your popular support will go up, drop it into the bureaucracy and the party will like you more, use it to grease your comrades’ palms and, sure, their opinion of you will skyrocket, but you’ll also send corruption through the roof.
(Image credit: Nostalgames)
When my first attempt at the most ultra-leftist administration possible ended with the people politely yet firmly explaining I was not in charge anymore, I dumped all my money in the next game into keeping them happy: a welfare state, constant propaganda, increased standards of living. I still took dings for every event that I took the most communist option possible in, but the drip-drip-drip of positive opinion that came in as the months went by kept my head mostly above water. That is until the party decided it was sick of me subjecting everyone to show trials and struggle sessions and forced me into early retirement. What’s the problem with the odd show trial? They keep you on your toes.
Next round? Trying to fix that too, dividing my annual budget between the party machinery and buffering my public support. I even directed our scientific research (there’s a tech tree) into better industrial technology to try to give me more money to spend on all these ingrates. It worked for a little bit, but not forever.
(Image credit: Nostalgames)
It soon becomes clear that following the historical route—reform and opening up—is the path of least resistance. I don’t think that’s a flaw. In fact, it might be what I find most admirable about this strange, scrappy little sim that looks partially like it was made in MS Paint. China in 1976 was tired, and looking for a new direction. Radicalism had produced the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, two events that public and (the majority of) party opinion regarded as catastrophes. I couldn’t just flip a switch and get everyone hype for the revolution again.
At the same time, of course, both party and public were committed enough to the revolution for which so many had fought and died that you couldn’t just flip a switch and transition the whole country to some kind of humdrum capitalist republic, either. Under those conditions, of course Dengist state-led developmentalism is the easiest path to pursue. Living standards go up, the revolution endures, and no one gets plunged back into the pseudo civil war of the Cultural Revolution. It’s a real triumph of this weird, rinky-dink little game full of strange UI and slightly garbled English that it manages to capture that so well.
(Image credit: Nostalgames)
But also, I don’t care. Next time through we’re building supersonic-communism, baby. I just have to find precisely the right way to allocate this month’s budget.
*This quote is likely apocryphal. However it is also very funny, so let’s all agree that he said it anyway.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1730555607_China-Maos-Legacy-is-like-an-absurdly-specific-Paradox-game.jpg6741200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2024-11-02 13:00:002024-11-02 13:00:00China: Mao’s Legacy is like an absurdly specific Paradox game on a tight budget, and also one of the best sims I’ve ever played
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
Essential Website Cookies
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
Google Analytics Cookies
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
Other external services
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
Other cookies
The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:
Privacy Policy
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.
