Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries

Staff writer, Christian Guyton, and executive editor, Alan Dexter, discuss what’s been entertaining them recently

WARFRAME

What have I been doing this month? Getting sucked back down the rabbit hole that is Warframe. This free indie title about heavily armed space ninjas recently hit its sixth anniversary, and I’ve been playing on and off since release, but when the game’s open-world Plains of Eidolon update launched in 2017, the user numbers were catapulted into the stratosphere, and it hit 50 million registered users following the release of the huge Fortuna update. Props to the fantastic dev team, Digital Extremes, who hosts regular events and livestreams to keep in touch with its community.

Why do I keep coming back to it? Warframe just has the magic a game needs. Yes, it’s grindy as hell, often crushingly difficult, and the learning curve is more like a learning cliff. But there’s a moment when it clicks—you take control of the complex movement system, and fly through the air to slash an enemy soldier in two, before spinning around and unleashing a hail of bullets and magical projectiles. It does a flawless job of making you feel powerful but rarely overpowered. Do I recommend it? Sure. Just don’t be afraid to ask for help in the chat.

Free, www.warframe.com

ATOMIC HEART TECH DEMO

I’ve been rocking an Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti since the start of the year, and I’ve really enjoyed not having to worry about the settings for pretty much any game I throw at it. Even though I’m connected to a 4K screen, everything just works, and looks awesome. There are always exceptions, of course, and bizarrely the only time I have to dial things back is with ray-tracing titles—I simply can’t set everything as high as they will go and expect smooth frame rates in MetroExodus,ShadowoftheTombRaider, or BattlefieldV. Which is slightly galling given that each one only demonstrates one aspect of the ray-tracing arsenal—global illumination, shadows, and reflections.

The tech demo for AtomicHeart dropped into this environment, and reignited my interest in ray tracing. Not only does it show off the full range of effects in its spin around a fictional laboratory-cummuseum, but it also hints at a game that may genuinely benefit from such effects. It is just a tech demo, of course—the final game may be some way off, and it may not live up to its full potential—but I can’t help but hope that real-time ray tracing has more to offer than we’ve seen so far.

Free, https://mundfish.com