Watch out. There’s a musician mystery afoot. They’ve gone missing, mysteriously. So says Silver Pines, a Twin Peaks-inspired survival horror puzzler that’s set to arrive next year, according to an announcement trailer that’s just barged into my house in a trench coat, waving a gun about and demanding to know whether I did it.
No, I respond calmly, there are no missing musicians around here. For a moment, I fear he might notice the outline of a guitar’s headstock buried under the carpet. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, he says, as all detective-ish types do. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
The Anniversary Edition includes the base game and all six official add-ons — Automatron, Far Harbor, Nuka-World, and the three Workshop expansions. Plus there’s over 150 pieces of Creation Club content to discover. New weapons, different breeds of Dogmeat (that’s your dog companion in-game, in case you’ve never heard of this good boy), new quests… it’s a big ol’ package, let’s just say.
Buckle Up, Xbox – Pacific Drive Launches Today with Game Pass
Blake Dove, Communications and Marketing Specialist, Ironwood Studios
Summary
Pacific Drive is now available on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC, with the base game included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium and PC Game Pass.
The new Whispers in the Woods expansion launches alongside the Xbox release.
Explore eerie forests, uncover strange anomalies, and survive the Zone in your trusty station wagon.
Attention, Breachers: Pacific Drive is now available on Xbox, and the base game is included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass from day one.
We’re also thrilled to announce that the Whispers in the Woods expansion is launching today — bringing even more mystery, danger and anomalies to discover in the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
Welcome to the Olympic Exclusion Zone!
In a quarantined region, deep within the Pacific Northwest, surreal dangers lurk — surrounding mysteries that might have been better left alone.
Pacific Drive is a first-person driving survival adventure where your car is your only companion. Keeping your trusty wood-paneled wagon running is the key to your survival in an unforgiving, unpredictable and hostile environment. Each excursion out into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base. You’ll gather precious resources, craft blueprints and investigate what’s been left behind in the Zone to unravel a long-forgotten mystery, and hopefully live to tell the tale.
What’s so Exciting About Pacific Drive on Xbox?
Ever since Pacific Drive first hit the road on PlayStation and PC, one question has echoed through our community: “When is it coming to Xbox?”
From social media comments to forum threads and fan messages, the enthusiasm from Xbox players has never let up — and the team at Ironwood Studios heard every one of those requests.
Today’s launch is such a special moment. Bringing Pacific Drive to Xbox was a long-standing mission for the team here at Ironwood — a chance to open the gates of the Olympic Exclusion Zone to an entirely new group of drivers. The team couldn’t be happier to finally make that dream a reality.
With the base game available with Game Pass, there’s never been an easier way to start your journey. Whether you’re stepping into the Zone for the first time or returning to see what’s new, Ironwood can’t wait to welcome you to the driver’s seat.
What to Expect in Whispers in the Woods
Within this expansion, Xbox players will uncover a new chapter in the Zone’s story. Whispers in the Woods adds a ton of new content and several new features to the game, including:
A new narrative arc that you can explore alongside your main campaign, revealing an Anomaly-obsessed cult lurking in the forests.
New Anomalies and environmental twists shake up what you thought you knew about the Zone.
Artifacts — objects with strange, unpredictable effects (some helpful, some perilous) that force you to constantly adapt your driving and strategies.
A whole new explorable map with a new forest region roughly one-third the size of the base world — plus hours of additional content for veterans and newcomers alike.
This expansion is our most ambitious update so far, and we’re so excited Xbox players get their hands on it at the same time as everyone else.
Ready to Drive?
If you’ve got Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium or PC Game Pass, Pacific Drive is already yours. Fire up your Xbox, hop into the driver’s seat, and see what the Olympic Exclusion Zone has in store for you.
Xbox players — thank you for joining us on this surreal journey. We can’t wait to see what you uncover out there.
With its unsettling backdrops and detailed worldbuilding, Tormented Souls 2 may look like a contemporary horror game, but don’t let that modern dressing fool you. At its core beats the blackened heart of stone-cold classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with all the treats — and tricks — that both endeared me to and enraged me about these formulaic survival horror games when they first gained popularity. Fixed camera angles? Check. Tank controls? Check. Insanely complex puzzles and an even more bizarre story, complete with cheesy dialogue and a manual save system? Check, check, check, and check. It makes Tormented Souls 2 a surprisingly faithful homage, bringing back all the stuff I loved about old survival horror games… as well as many of the things I loved to hate.
Tormented Souls 2 picks up right after the events of its 2021 predecessor, but you don’t have to have met the Walker sisters before to make sense of this sequel. That’s partly because it tells a standalone story, and partly because it’s so fantastical that nothing makes sense anyway. Sure, you may have questions about Caroline’s fetching eyepatch, but all you really need to know is she’s searching for answers about her little sister Anna’s terrifying visions and reality-bending drawings. For reasons that seem to exist exclusively in schlocky horror tales, that answer apparently sits somewhere in the depths of a creepy convent nestled in a far-flung location.
Before Caroline even gets the chance to shrug off her (exceedingly 90s) leather jacket, though, Anna goes missing, and it’s up to the older sibling to both find her sister and figure out what the hell is going on before it’s too late… with an emphasis on the “hell” bit, naturally. As stories go, it’s not unique, no, but the twists and turns of Tormented Souls 2’s roughly 20-hour campaign are delightfully over-the-top in the same way the original Resident Evil games are. It’s packed with cheesy dialogue, curious flavor text, and some truly bizarre encounters I couldn’t help but smile at. Caroline’s stay in the remote town of Villa Hess will take you to a number of wonderfully grim places, including a processing plant, spooky school, abandoned mall, bunker, and the sprawling convent you start off in, keeping the creepy environments feeling fresh.
And those environments are so detailed! Stuffed with interest and plenty of lore, Villa Hess and its surroundings are such fascinating, atmospheric places to explore. You never know when a key item or a helpful tool may be secreted away in a hidden room somewhere, so it’s always best to keep your curiosity piqued. While your investigation is sometimes interrupted by a bladed demon or shambling zombie, you’ll find that enemies have a tendency to stay dead in Tormented Souls 2 — once you’ve cleared out an area, you’re usually left to explore at your leisure. With little more than a flickering candle to guide the way, though, it’s a little too easy to miss things; I’ve been caught out a couple of times by overlooking a key clue or item, even in areas I thought I’d examined pretty closely.
As is seemingly the law for old-school survival horror, the more you play, the more you’ll find yourself opening up new routes to old places, providing access to rooms and entire areas that were previously blocked off. I suspect the backtracking will irk some — there’s a lot of it, particularly early on — but as the levels and fetch-quests are well-designed and usually rewarding, I couldn’t begrudge it. That said, there’s a reason fixed camera angles and tank controls are considered relics of the past. I grew up playing the games Tormented Souls 2 pays homage to (Resident Evil, Silent Hill 3, Parasite Eve, Alone in the Dark), but moving around Villa Hess is frustrating even when there isn’t a demon on your tail, with tight corridors and dead ends that make getting from one side of a building to the other unduly long-winded.
Add in Caroline’s fear of the dark: she’ll freeze and start to hyperventilate if plunged into darkness for even a split second, dying completely if you leave her there too long. You can’t even put away your lighter to shatter a porcelain pot or smash open a wooden crate unless there’s an ambient light source nearby… which there very often isn’t. The lighter sure does add to the atmosphere, though, which is almost continually tense and unnerving. As the primary source of light quite often, you’ll have to proactively step into a room to illuminate what, if anything, is hiding in the shadows, which inevitably means unwittingly getting up close and personal with the denizens skulking around the place.
It all falls apart a bit when there is something hiding in the dark, though. Tormented Souls 2’s combat isn’t clumsy as much as it is enraging. The reliance on Caroline’s lighter means you’re often unarmed when something lunges at you, and the fixed camera angles and stiff character movement make it harder than it should be to retreat or create a little distance. Caroline protects herself with a range of acquired and improvised weapons, from a shotgun to a nail gun. Some of them can be upgraded to improve their rate of fire or reload speed, but they’re still slow to use and difficult to wield accurately in a panic. I know it’s kind of a genre convention to ensure we feel weak and underpowered, but this could’ve been achieved through scarcer ammo or by throwing more enemies at us; inefficient weapons and fixed cameras don’t ramp up the tension as much as snap the immersion entirely.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that jankiness follows you into boss fights. One of the first you’ll encounter, a giant nun, stomps around the room trying to batter you with a gigantic steel cross. But in that one single room, there are at least three different fixed camera angles, which means you may find yourself inadvertently sprinting towards your foe if the camera shifts while trying to put distance between you. This wouldn’t be so bad if your shotgun held more than two shots at a time or if the nun flinched with each hit, but she’ll keep galloping like an aggravated rhino, which made the camera feel like the real boss I was fighting.
Thankfully, for every underwhelming boss fight you’re forced to endure, you’ll happen across a good half-dozen puzzles which confuse and delight in equal measure. I never felt closer to an old Resident Evil or Silent Hill game than trying to figure out how to open a door, or decode a cipher, or prise open the jaws of a dead shark for reasons I still don’t quite understand. Often deeply cryptic, maddeningly illogical, or completely unsolvable because I stupidly missed a clue somewhere, these puzzles were exactly what I want from a game like this, all the way down to the mini-puzzles that ask you to combine specific items in your inventory. Yes, I’ll admit one or two (or five) brain teasers truly stumped me for an embarrassing amount of time, but if that isn’t old-school survival horror, then what is?
Bethesda has used Fallout Day to announce the Fallout: New Vegas 15th Anniversary Bundle, which celebrates Obsidian’s much-loved post-apocalyptic role-playing game turning 15 years old.
This edition will be available for pre-order on October 23 via the Bethesda Gear Store, and includes:
Fallout: New Vegas: Ultimate Edition PC Code
Victor Statue (8″ PVC): The friendly Securitron stands tall and is ready to roll
Doc Mitchell’s Evaluation Cards (8×8 cardstock set): Straight from your first moments in Goodsprings, a true piece of New Vegas history
Vault Boy Enamel Pin (1.5″): Vault Boy stacks the odds with poker chips in hand
Mojave Express Patch (3.5″ × 1.9″): Woven, iron-on, and full of wasteland charm
NCR Recon Patch (3.25″ × 3.5″): Woven, iron-on insignia of the New California Republic’s finest
Collector’s Big Box: A throwback-style display box created exclusively for the anniversary
2010’s Fallout: New Vegas still lives long in the memory, and interest in it is surging as a result of Fallout Season 2, which will head to New Vegas for Season 2 in December. Indeed, there are all sorts of rumors floating around about potential Fallout remakes now that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is out the door (Fallout 3 Remastered was leaked back in 2023, but those plans may have changed). And we know Bethesda wants to eventually get to Fallout 5, albeit after The Elder Scrolls 6.
“For other Fallout games in the future, you know, obviously I can’t talk about those right now, but I would say, sort of rushing through them, or we kind of need to get stuff out that is different than the work we’re doing in 76… we don’t feel like we need to rush any of that,” he said. “The Fallout TV show fills a certain niche in terms of the franchise and storytelling.”
The last mainline Fallout game was Fallout 4, which was released in 2015. DLC content for the entry was steadily released for PC and consoles over the next year, and in 2018, Bethesda launched its multiplayer-centered offshoot, Fallout 76. While fans slowly flocked to the West Virginia-set open-world RPG, it wasn’t until the premiere of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show that the Bethesda series leveled up in terms of attention.
Still, Howard wouldn’t budge when it came to desires for a substantial video game release. For him, it comes down to wanting to treat Bethesda’s franchises with care.
“Totally get the desire for a new kind of mainline single-player game,” he said. “And look, those things take time. I don’t think it’s bad for people to miss things. We just want to get it right and make sure that everything we’re doing in a franchise, whether it’s Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or now Starfield, that those become meaningful moments for everybody who loved these franchises as much as we do.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, The Pokémon Company has lifted the lid on a brand new expansion that will be arriving in the app next week.
The “Mega Rising’ expansion bursts onto the scene one week today, on 30th October, and, as the name suggests, it’ll bring a Mega Evolution twist to proceedings. Mega Gyarados, Mega Blaziken and Mega Altaria take to the covers of this new set, and all users will receive one of each on launch day for free.
PowerWash Simulator 2 arrives on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Game Pass today, the anticipated sequel to the extremely satisfying PowerWash Simulator.
The first game tickled a very specific part of our brains, giving free reign to blitz a wealth of dirt and grime from colorful environments, while an odd, endearing narrative unfurled across each level. The sequel promises more of what we loved, plus some extra surprises along the way.
Ahead of launch, we sat down with the team at Futurlab to learn what’s new, and uncover what makes PowerWash Simulator 2 is bigger, wetter, and better.
The first PowerWash Simulator game is a tough act to follow, and the team at Futurlab knew it had to pull out the big supersoakers, so to speak. PowerWash Simulator 2 has made a host of improvements to the cleaning mechanics, adding Soap and a new Surface Cleaner for new ways to tackle the toughest dirt, and a more intuitive experience.
“We’ve authored an entirely new set of dirt-types with an increased emphasis on realism, supported by the ambient occlusion to give their appearance more depth,” explains Nick McCarthy, Lead Game Designer. “While blasting the dirt away players will see a range of dirt particles that correspond with that dirt’s texture/ colour – this really helps with the washing gameplay to give feedback on whether dirt still remains on the surface currently being washed.
“We also have more flexibility with our dirt application on the backend so we’re able to stack and apply tough/easy layers of dirt in ways not previously possible in the first game to produce even better (or worse depending on how you look at it) looking levels. As always, our Design team works closely with the Art team to make sure the perfect dirts are placed for the most satisfying contrast dirty to clean while also accounting for context, lore and story telling.”
All of this can be tried and tested inside 38 new Career Job missions, complete with new buildings to hose, environments to explore, and a brand-new story to unravel, according McCarthy.
“This is where I think players will feel the biggest improvements,” McCarthy adds. “With a range of visual upgrades, added details and complexities with the dirt, design considerations into curating a selection of unique vehicles, buildings and locations to go to that expand on our world while also ensuring they make use of our new and improved features. The jobs really are the heart of the game and I can’t wait to for everyone to experience them!”
Traversal is another element that the FuturLab team wanted to iterate upon – with bigger spaces to explore, it was crucial to give players all the tools they need to reach every area with ease.
Adding these tools also allowed the team to design new Jobs and environments that expand upon the levels in the first game, and really make use of the traversl mechanics. With the new Scissor Lift and abseiling mechanics, you’ll be able to reach even the most inconveniently placed ledges and scale large walls with ease.
Another big feature in PowerWash Simulator 2 is the Home Base – a central hub that you can decorate with furniture and items discovered during main missions, and use to assemble friends before setting out on a co-op cleaning adventure. It’ll also become your hall of achievement, where you’ll be able to showcase collectibles earned from completing Jobs.
“The Home Base is like an onion – it has layers,” McCarthy adds. “Firstly, the base is what it seems on the tin. A place to gather with your friends and decorate to show off. But, it is also a great way to level-up the lore/world building, with trinkets, map and clues style pinboard in the back. The other big thing is allowing us to add a lot of smaller cleanable items in the form of furniture, which gives players a growing library of mini-jobs to clean. We also see it evolving and being added to post launch.”
PowerWash Simulator 2 also introduces couch co-op to the series for the first time – you’ll be able to enjoy side-by-side two player cleaning action, as well as online play that supports up to four players.
“The experience of power washing and chatting together is a great chilled out experience online, and we felt the sequel was a brilliant opportunity allow the same in a local setting,” adds Dan Chequer, Game Director. “As players can only ever help and never hinder, split screen is a perfect way to let anyone of any age or experience level to drop in and contribute to the clean as much or little as they can in a fun and collaborative way.”
PowerWash Simulator 2 launches October 23, and will be available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and via Xbox Game Pass.
PowerWash Simulator is back, satisfaction is a spray away!
Dust off your power washer and relax into pure feel-good fun. Blast away every last speck, smear and splatter of filth to restore Muckingham (and beyond ) to gleaming glory.
Craving more to Clean?
The jobs and water keep flowing in PowerWash Simulator 2. Play through a fresh new campaign, uncovering more of Muckingham’s mysteries. Plus, venture even further out to brand-new grime-coated locations like Sponge Valley, Power Falls and Lubri City.
Alongside new locations and jobs, you’ll also find a new job type. Multi-stage jobs will unlock different areas of a job – from vehicle interiors to entirely different rooms, your to-do list keeps growing.
Tools of the Trade
Reach new heights of power washing professionalism with a range of new tools to help you achieve a spectacular sparkle, high and low. Realise even your loftiest cleaning ambitions with the help of an all-new abseiling rig and cherry picker or stay grounded with a grime busting surface cleaner for large areas.
No Place like your Home-base
Kick back and relax in your home-base after a hard-days-cleaning. Make the place yours by collecting furniture and trinkets to spruce it up along the way, then invite your power wash pals over to check out your pad.
You didn’t think we’d leave your furry friends in the van, did you? Your pretty kitties are the purr-fect distraction for when you’ve pressed paws on work for the day.
Soap-erior Washing
Watch your worries melt away with each swipe of your power washer. Cleaning feels even better in PowerWash Simulator 2, with enhanced soap that clings to stubborn stains and annihilates dirt.
Clean in Split-screen!
Satisfaction on the double! Share campaign progression online together for the first time. In addition to online play, split-screen co-op has entered the chat. Team up and take on the dirt with twice the wash-power, from the convenience of one screen.
There’s Lots More to Come…
Watch this space as we dish the dirt on new content and features coming in PowerWash Simulator 2!
Ghost of Yōtei has been a labor of love for Sucker Punch, and we’re happy to have it out in the world for everyone to play. Now that players have gotten a taste of the game, we thought this was a good opportunity to talk a little bit about the technology that helped get us here.
Coming off of what we achieved with Ghost of Tsushima, the project vision for Ghost of Yōtei put a stronger emphasis on a player’s sense of freedom in an untamed wilderness. This meant striving for less intrusive ways to guide players, beautiful environments with longer sightlines, more flexible weapon combat, memorable characters with personality, and emotional story moments. Trying to do all this while maintaining a good frame rate is clearly a challenge.
So, let’s dig into a few aspects of the technology we used to create Ghost of Yōtei!
Wandering a wild world
In prototyping our vision for free exploration, we found it most effective if players could gaze across a beautiful landscape and follow their curiosity to find the game. From a technical perspective, landing that feeling required longer sight lines, meaning better rendering for grass, terrain and mountains into the distance.
We improved the appearance of distant mountains by baking models and detailed terrain materials into textures that we could display at higher detail. We also doubled the amount of grass and renderable items our GPU compute renderer is allowed to produce. In this shot, the distant mountains with over one million trees, rocks, and bushes are culled down to about sixty thousand individual items that we render to generate our G-buffers to build the final image.
We use procedural assisted authoring techniques and lean heavily on GPU compute to process all of these instances efficiently without CPU involvement. This involves sequences of compute jobs to perform occlusion culling, memory allocation, fill out draw records before we readback that information on the CPU to stitch into the final command lists for the frame. Here’s an animation of a similar shot with all GPU drawn geometry animating into place to give you a sense of the scale involved. We use these techniques for runtime generated data as well like our broad fields of flowers, and even occasionally for things like ropes and chains.
To give each area of the world a unique flavor, we built interaction systems that help emphasize their themes. Much of the world has grass or small plants, and in addition to deforming with wind and character motion, we added a system that renders weapon sweeps into a “cut buffer.” This buffer is then sampled by cuttable geometry and is used to spawn particles with the geometry above the cut. This allows Atsu to cut most grass, flowers and small plants in the game.
Hokkaido has Japan’s most extreme winters, so we wanted to realistically portray the interaction of characters with deep snow. To support that, we built a terrain tessellation system that both increases the amount of detail that can be represented by the terrain, and which can be dynamically deformed at runtime. To achieve this, particles and geometry are rendered to a displacement buffer as characters walk, roll and fight through it. This was flexible enough that we extended it to allow characters to knock snow off of trees and bushes, spawning snow particles in the process. When we combine that with a new snow sparkle effect using stable screen-space noise, it ends up looking like this.
Tall mountains like Mt. Yōtei are often covered by clouds, so we had to come up with a way of rendering clouds in front of world geometry, which wasn’t possible in Ghost of Tsushima’s engine. We also wanted to give the impression of stormy, unsettled weather by increasing the speed at which clouds could move. To enable faster cloud motion without objectionable artifacts, we store the average visible depth of each texel in the cloud map (measured from the camera), which allows us to use parallax mapping techniques while scrolling each cloud frame. (We also blend three cloud frames instead of just two, which results in even smoother motion.) By also storing the average visible squared depth in the cloud map, we are able to reconstruct a simple statistical distribution of the cloud opacity along each ray, and this lets us compute how much the clouds should obscure world geometry like mountains.
Fog and atmospheric scattering was an important focus when establishing the art style of Ghost of Tsushima, and for Ghost of Yōtei we wanted to build on that by adding support for local fog volumes. These are computed efficiently by using the PS5’s expanded 16-bit floating point GPU instructions. As a side effect of our cloud optimizations, we compute a light-space cloud shadow map, and this enables crepuscular rays (“god rays”) to be visible in our volumetric fog, even far from the camera. We also let artists place “god ray targets” in the world so that they are more frequently lit by a hole in the clouds.
Character and movement
One of our primary goals was to make the world of Ghost of Yōtei feel alive. We want everything on the screen to move with the wind, including all the clothing characters wear, the tassels on weapons, and all of the hanging cloth in settlements. When you roll around and fight, we want to kick up dust and leaves while leaving you muddy and bloody, to really anchor you in the world.
Atsu’s complex costumes can only move realistically thanks to the new layering support we built into our high-performance GPU compute cloth system. In addition to adding support for multiple layers of simulated cloth (seen below), we support cloth collisions, and use a set of carefully tuned heuristics to simulate large numbers of individual cloth simulations efficiently. Here is an example of Atsu in one of her more complex costumes, surrounded by moving cloth.
GPU particles have been a strong suit for Sucker Punch since Infamous Second Son. In Ghost of Yōtei we continue to add to our bag of tricks, allowing particles to sample terrain material, deformation and water flow. For example, this shot shows particles landing on and flowing down river.
In addition to affecting the world, we anchor characters by having the world punch back. We do this by splatting information into a directional grid deformed around the character which we then use to layer in texture effects to make the character wet, bloody, muddy or snowy.
We also leverage our particle systems to allow the player to swap to the past to explore Atsu’s family history. To swap between past and present, we change the skeleton and geometry of Atsu while keeping her character state and animation consistent. Elements of the background and lighting are also changed instantly thanks to the speed of the SSD with some carefully chosen prefetching. This is done behind a curtain of animating particles which sample a copy of the frame buffer from just before the transition.
Ray Tracing and PS5 Pro enhancements
As a native PS5 game, we knew we wanted to improve image quality by leveraging some of the platform’s newer technology. With the release of the PS5 Pro, we also wanted to push in a direction that would help us with future games. Based on the solid support from the PlayStation central technology teams, we invested in two big areas: ray tracing, and image upsampling with PSSR.
Since Ghost of Yōtei takes place in the wilderness of 17th century Hokkaido, there are few mirror-like surfaces that lend themselves to ray-traced reflections. Instead, we decided to use ray tracing to improve the fidelity of our global illumination solution. We attacked this from two directions: first with a more automated, improved baked lighting model, which we could then augment with short-range ray-traced global illumination (RTGI). This required significant changes to our mesh streaming format, allowing us to dynamically decompress the acceleration structures used by the ray tracing hardware. By using the PS5 Pro’s more efficient ray tracing hardware, players can enable RTGI targeting 60 frames per second on Pro consoles.
For Ghost of Yōtei we rebuilt our frame to use a more general dynamic resolution algorithm, with upsampling, partly so we could take advantage of PSSR. PSSR works very well for us with only a few tweaks, including running conservative rasterization for small particles. By comparison, our standard upsampling algorithm requires significantly more hinting and authoring help to achieve good results. Here’s a side-by-side look. If you zoom in very close (16x before gif compression), you can see that PSSR does a better job reconstructing fine details on architecture and foliage. It is also more stable under motion.
Loading speed
For a long time, Sucker Punch has prided itself on getting players into our games as quickly as possible. In Ghost of Yōtei we continued this tradition by doubling down on fast load times.
We optimize loading by preprocessing data so that it requires only a handful of SSD reads and patching operations per location or terrain tile to load gameplay-relevant data. We then compute and load only the texture mips and mesh LODs needed to render the first frame, with one read per element. Here’s what loading from the far south to the far north looks like without the screen faded out. (Note that this is somewhat slower than it would be if we didn’t have to render the world the whole time.)
Throughout development we “dog food” these systems rather than using a different loading model for shipping builds. Dog fooding is programmer-speak for every programmer, artist and designer testing what we ship to improve its quality.
Conclusion
This is a small peek into some of the technical work we do at Sucker Punch. Making games is more than that though — it’s a huge team effort with art informing technology and technology informing art throughout.
When we began this project five years ago, our goal was to build a game world that players would love getting lost in. Many of our technical decisions were anchored around the core fantasy of Ghost of Yōtei — that of a wandering warrior coming to terms with events from her past. We’re thrilled to see this vision coming to life with players sharing their experiences and posting incredible in-game screenshots and videos using Photo Mode.
We’re certainly proud of the result and we hope everyone enjoys wandering the wilderness in Ghost of Yōtei.
If you’re interested in more info on Sucker Punch’s technology and development process, take a look at our past presentations at conferences like GDC and SIGGRAPH. We expect to share more in 2026.
Special thanks to Jasmin Patry, Doug Davis, and Eric Wohllaib who helped me edit and prepare content for this post, as well as all the Sucker Punch folks whose work I am representing here.
Gearbox has released the big Borderlands 4 Day 30 patch, which makes a number of key balance changes to the game.
This update, released October 23, includes widespread stability improvements, multiplayer fixes, UI polish, and a suite of quality-of-life upgrades across visuals, audio, and accessibility. It also addresses various reported issues for Vault Hunters including major balance tuning, loot systems, gear, and achievements — further refining late-game, mission flow, and overall player experience.
“We will monitor the community closely for feedback and respond after the changes have settled,” Gearbox said. “This measured approach to your input will provide a consistent and better experience. As a reminder, our primary goal with balance adjustments is to provide you the greatest number of viable builds.”
The update launches alongside the free Horrors of Kairos Seasonal Mini-Event. From today, October 23 to November 6, players will experience “a terror-inducing blood rain during all world boss encounters, with the added chance to loot the all-new legendary ‘Murmur’ Tediore Assault Rifle and ‘Skully’ Order Grenade.
Borderlands 4 Day 30 October 23 update patch notes:
Change List:
Horrors of Kairos!
Added support for the Horrors of Kairos! This free mini-event will be live from October 23 to November 6.
Added the “Murmur” Legendary Tediore Assault Rifle and “Skully” Legendary Order Grenade to the rewards for world bosses across Kairos! These special drops will only be available during Horrors of Kairos, and delivered to the Reward Center. These do not change the rates on any other gear for that boss.
Read the official announcement article for Horrors of Kairos for more information on the event and a spooky SHiFT code to shoot fear into your enemies!
Progression, Loot, & Rewards
Reduced Specialization Respec Machine cost from 5000 Eridium to 1500
Added drops to a certain boss fight that was not dropping loot
[PC] Ultimate Vault Hunter Level 5 Rank Up mission now correctly increases rank on Steam
Granted missing cosmetic rewards for players who completed Kairos Speaks with 155 Echo Logs prior to a previous update
Improved equipment handling when opening Rewards while driving
Lost Loot Machine logic updated to better prioritize higher-quality loot in overflow situations
Lost Loot Machine SDU upgrades now properly expand slots in multiplayer sessions
Addressed a reported issue with the Lost Loot Machine that could cause duplications in multiplayer
Loot enemies now drop more cash
Golden Chests can now consistently be opened after joining a session and redeeming SHiFT keys
Reward Center behavior adjusted after claiming the Gilded Glory Pack, to prevent it from losing function
Break Free reward bundle redemption standardized, will now correctly apply account-wide as intended
Adjusted unlock conditions so Rift Incompatible achievement now correctly completes for all players in multiplayer
Cut That Out achievement now unlocks when viewing the board from a further distance.
Level-based progression updated so Crimson Rising achievement unlocks at character level 10 as designed
Timing adjustments made so Catch a Ride! achievement unlocks only at the intended progression point
Challenge tracking updated so Jakobs Throwing Knives no longer count as gun kills
Ensured that Bobblehead collectibles in Pester’s Grotto and Motherbird Node were accessible.
Discovered locations now stay discovered when returning to single-player after multiplayer
Various Fast Travel stations have been adjusted to unlock when they’re intended to, including concerns seen in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode
Vault Key animations now play correctly during ECHO-4 sequences
ECHO Log pickup in Unpaid Tab now counts properly
Amara’s Escort to Core objective now consistently advances when replayed
Improved various instances of mission waypoints not showing up accurately
Gameplay & Missions
Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine is able to be interacted with reliably in multiplayer
Legendary Vending Machine no longer closes unexpectedly during Vend of the Line
Made general improvements to prevent enemies from getting stuck when spawning, and addressed various reported spawn point issues
Addressed bounties Beatloaf, Grip, and Shagriculture not reliably spawning
Addressed reported instances of Terminus Range Vault enemies getting stuck on ledges during encounters
Addressed a reported issue in co-op during the Splashzone boss fight, leading to more consistent behavior
The Howl Capture Station no longer reactivates after safehouse capture
One Fell Swoop has been updated to prevent players from being left floating in the air. Bio-Bulkhead now shows the correct elemental icon and movement has been smoothed to eliminate jitter after certain attacks
Warden Scathe no longer clips through arena walls in his boss fight
Improved Echo Location guidance across several missions
Patched collision gaps, holes, clipping, and invisible walls
Corrected Order drop pod events to consistently reach that ground and no longer appear stuck in the air
NPCs should no longer cause players or vehicles to get stuck when the player runs them over
Pangolin enemies can now be damaged by grenades while in ball mode
Chain Master trait now tethers to all allies in range when multiple enemies have the ability
Mangler enemies no longer desync their position when dodging in multiplayer
Vault Hunter Changes
Harlowe the Gravitar
Addressed some Gravitar builds that reportedly caused performance slowdowns; they should no longer prevent UI elements from updating or Fight For Your Life sequences from completing
Gravitar passive and Augment bonuses to Gun Damage now correctly apply to Ripper Heavy Weapon barrels and the Ripper Legendary Heavy Weapon Steamer; Entanglement interactions also function as designed
Gravitar class mods have been adjusted to no longer roll +5 Pencils Down and push passives past their intended cap
Creative Bursts
Balance Adjustments:
Neutron Capture now converts all Gun Damage into radiation, and now only applies to Gun Shots, and not all instances of Gun Damage.
Dev Note: Neutron Capture is one of the best damage scalars in the entire game, but during testing, we found that this was erroneously applying to all instances of Gun Damage and was able to scale in unanticipated ways as a result. This new change will still see Neutron Capture being one of the best (if not the best) damage scalars in the game, but the power level will be much more in line with our expectations. Additionally, since all damage from the Gun is converted into Radiation, it should have more scaling vectors for clever build crafters, and allow for meaningful boosts from Gun Damage.
Cosmic Brilliance – Passive
Flux Generator + Annihilation interaction updated so spawned grenades now scale correctly with character level
Amon the Forgeknight
Shield visuals adjusted for improved clarity in combat situations
Trait – Forgeskill
Adjusted interaction with Forge Master class mod so Forgeskill now respects its cooldown in multiplayer
Onslaughter – Calamity
Camera behavior stabilized when combining Onslaughter with Order Legendary Pistol Noisy Cricket
Attack frequency of Rocket Punch is now consistent in multiplayer
Balance Adjustments
Seeing Red Duration restored no longer increases per point invested, and is now 4 seconds for all ranks.
Dev Note: Seeing Red was always meant to have huge damage scaling potential, but was always meant to be hard to maintain. We didn’t want to nerf this passive’s power, but we’re making the effect harder to maintain.
Scourge – Vengeance
Scorched Kairos passive now displays consistent magazine size values for the Ordnance gadget
The Forgewave no longer fires unintentionally during Glacial Rapture
Projectiles no longer get stuck in the air when Forgemaster Firewall is active during the Fortress Indomita boss fight
Blackout Shock Damage now properly scales with points invested
Blackout is now 15% per point, down from 21% per point
Dev Note: After fixing the scaling of the DoT (damage over time), we found that Blackout was overperforming a bit, so we gave it a slight re-adjustment. This will still be an overall buff, now that the DoT properly scales.
Crucible – Cybernetics
Visuals corrected so Forgeknight Forgeaxe no longer disappears when activating Crucible at the same time as throwing with Double-Edge
Corrected animation of Crucible while climbing
Raging Inferno Incendiary Damage now properly scales with points invested
Vex the Siren
Challenge “Me, Myself, Myself, and I.” now tracks correctly in multiplayer, independent of clone duration on other players
Dead Ringer – The Fourth Seal
Specter’s copied weapon now displays proper visual effects when firing with a Maliwan Element Switcher
Incarnate – Vexcalation
Bleed from Bloodletter has been updated so it no longer recursively triggers itself, preventing unintended damage loops
Phase Phamiliar – Here Comes Trouble
Balance Adjustments
Double Trouble Illusion Damage Multiplier is now 75%, up from 50%
Double Trouble Illusion’s Duration is now 8 seconds, up from 5 seconds
Apex Beast Damage Dealt increase increased to 15% from 10% per stack of Unsealed
Rafa the Exo-Soldier
Free Grenade from Filantropo class mod now deals appropriate damage even when no grenade is equipped
People Person skill tree
Action Skills – APOPHIS Lance
APOPHIS Lance changed to penalize Gun Accuracy instead of Gun Handling, resulting in projectile speed being unaffected.
APOPHIS Lance now benefits from cooldown reduction effects
Gear
Skills that boost Gun Handling now properly increase Projectile Speed
Addressed reports that swapping weapons with the Free Loader Enhancement on an Order weapon with a Ripper magazine would cause all weapons to not consume the accurate amount of ammo
Health restoration from Legendary Repkit Adrenaline Pump now works correctly when combined with Legendary Shield Guardian Angel
Reduced critical chance on Jakobs crit knife to 30%
Dev Note: It had to happen, you knew it was going to happen!
Jakobs Legendary Pistol San Saba Songbird no longer stacks infinitely when swapping weapons
Using a Jakobs Shotgun with Torgue sticky projectiles and the Knife Launcher underbarrel no longer deals knife damage after switching fire modes
Jakobs weapon parts updated so ricochet effects only trigger from intended damage sources
Ripper Legendary Shotgun Golden God overheating effect now clears correctly when switching weapons
Corrected behavior on Maliwan Legendary SMG Ohm I Got so the first three shots no longer consume ammo without dealing damage during continuous fire
Maliwan Legendary Heavy Gun Gamma Void corrected to apply proper increased Radiation damage to enemies inside the Singularity
Weapons with COV magazines now function correctly if a repair animation is interrupted with a Repkit in multiplayer
Daedalus Legendary SMG Frangible removed from chest loot tables
Daedalus Legendary AR First Impression reduced the critical damage multiplier
Recoil behavior improved while charging and firing Order ARs and Torgue Heavy with Triple Barrel parts with Gun Handling passives
Vladof Flamethrower underbarrel no longer deals infinite damage or bypasses Bio Armor
Torgue Grenades with Spring and Apex Augments now always explode on its first apex
Grenades with Spring Augment and Divider Payload now have the intended three additional bounces when paired
Gadgets no longer reset to maximum uses after gaining Second Wind
Healing Orbs spawned from Legendary Repkit Kill Spring can no longer heal enemies
Order Legendary Shield Cindershelly combat voice lines now trigger at the intended frequency, less often to be less distracting
Tediore underbarrel names now match correctly across item cards and ammo widgets
Maliwan Lingering Payload and Splat Pack Augment projectiles no longer persist when thrown at vending machines
Gear Balance: Assault Rifles:
Star Helix fire rate increased by 33%
Bonnie and Clyde base damage increased by 40%; Pair of Thieves: Bonus damage granted increased to 150% from 100%
Bugbear base damage increased by 40%; Rotary Gun: Max Damage increased to 200% from 100%
Rowan’s Charge base fire rate increased by 100%
Rowan’s Charge recoil reduced slightly
Lucian’s Flank base damage increased by 50%
Lucian’s Flank recoil reduced slightly
Aegon’s Dream base damage increased by 35%
Heavy Weapon Ordnance:
Gamma Void base damage increased by 450%; Singularity Duration decreased to 6s from 10s, Radiation damage amp increased to 50% from 40%, Gamma Void Cooldown increased by 100%
Ravenfire base damage increased by 25%
Class Mods:Dev Notes: Class Mods relating to Melee Damage, Action Skill Damage, and specific one-off stats on Legendaries have been buffed to make them more desirable.
All Class Mods:
Melee Damage Action Skill Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 60%
Skill Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 45%
Siren Class Mods:
Avatar’s Attunement Skill Duration on level 50 class mods has increased to 45%
Kindread Spirits’ Command Skill Cooldown rate on level 50 class mods has increased to 45%
Forgeknight Class Mods:
Blacksmith’s Forgedrone Duration on level 50 class mods has increased to 45%
Blacksmith’s Legendary Effect now also increases all Forgedrone Damage by 20% per active Forgedrone
Viking’s Detonation Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 60%
Forge Master’s Forgeskill Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 60%
Elementalist’s Legendary Effect now also increases all Damage Dealt by Amon by 2% per active Affinity Stack
Gravitar Class Mods:
Bio-Robot’s Hazard Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 60%
Skeptic’s Stasis Damage on level 50 class mods has increased to 60%
Other Gear:
Dev Notes: Gear effects that are related to Melee and Action Skill Damage have increased effectiveness. We want these builds to be pushed up a bit, but wanted to distribute the power among the various pieces of gear to make them more desirable.
Rep Kits:
Hard Hitter now grants 50% Melee Damage Dealt, up from 40%
Firm Ware:
Reel Big Fist now grants 25% Melee Damage at rank 1 and 2, up from 15%/25%
Action Fist now grants 25% Melee Damage at rank 1, up from 15%
Action Fist now grants 30% Action Skill Damage at rank 2, up from 30%
Action Fist now grants 30% Action Skill Damage on Melee Kill, up from 25%
Shields:
Boxer Armor Shields now grant 20%/30%/50% Melee Damage depending on parts rolled, up from 15%/25%/40%
Berserker Energy Shields now grant 20%/30%/50% Melee Damage depending on parts rolled, up from 20%/27.5%/35%
Specializations
Groundbreaker:
Groundbreaker now only stores Gun, Action Skill, and Ordnance damage.
Dev Note: Groundbreaker was causing recursive loops that could lead to infinite damage by storing “Bonus Damage” across the board. We still want this skill to be effective, but it should not be able to scale infinitely. We’ll be monitoring Melee builds after this change to make sure they are meeting expectations, and will further adjust if necessary. This ultimately had to be fixed so we can establish a baseline before we investigate further buffs/changes.
UI & UX & Text
Sorting settings in menus now persist when switching tabs or leaving the menu
“Toggle Junk” behavior has been corrected to target the desired item in Bank menus and Backpack
Weapon wheel no longer sticks when opened near Guns vending machines
Combat Radar now features a dedicated Legendary Loot Indicator, making high-value drops easier to spot in the heat of combat
Press/Hold input now cancels correctly without triggering unintended actions
“Apply Settings” prompt only appears when changes are made
[PS5 and Xbox] Splitscreen updates, including number text scaling, Equipment/Backpack improvements, scrollbar behaviors, Party list layout, and “Flip Card” functionality
Restored Fullscreen resolution controls and switching behavior
Weekly Activities now populate after campaign completion
Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine timer updates to show correct cooldown
Firmware 3-Piece bonuses (Ahoy, Oscar Mike, Daed-dy O’) now show cooldown icons; Deadeye Tier-3 stacks now appear in the passive bar
Boss Bar spacing corrected when Combat Radar is active
Transfer Machine naming has been standardized across the game
Travel notification now displays the initiating player’s name
ECHO Location path remains readable over time; made improvements to pathfinding
Updated various UI visuals and icons for alignment, consistency, and clarity
Updated localization and various text descriptions across the game
Standardized/updated terminology across gear, menus, customization, and manufacturers
Visuals
Updated various character and NPC animations
Corrected various reported instances of VFX not rendering correctly
Grapple Vault points now show proper models instead of placeholders
Reduced reported instances of visual pops at cinematic starts
Audio
Audio and VO now remain active when returning to menus after level traveling in multiplayer
Adjusted audio mix for improved balance across gameplay and VO
SFX volume slider now correctly applies to high HDR-value sounds
Addressed several reported instances of VO not playing as intended across multiple missions and scenarios
Vault Hunter battle voiceover frequency has been tuned so lines repeat less often
Missing pain reaction audio restored for several named NPCs
Improved various subtitle timing and text
Background music now continues as expected during the Idolator Sol boss fight
Unique audio cue restored for Phosphene (shiny) gear spawns
Settings & Accessibility
Personal Cross-play settings can now be adjusted immediately after switching Party Privacy from Local Only to Public in Session Settings
Air Dash is now fully usable on controller when Toggle Crouch is set to Off under Accessibility → Gameplay
Individual graphics options now reset properly after making changes and then selecting Run Auto-Detect in Options
[PS5 and Xbox] Field of View resets consistently to Default on consoles without showing mismatched values
Player Experience
Improvements to stability
We are continuing to investigate and will make further improvements to stability and performance.
Addressed multiple reported issues across multiplayer, missions, menus, and engine systems.
Improved matchmaking and session stability.
Addressed performance in multiplayer when there were large numbers of homing projectiles
Refined graphics settings and shader handling
Improvements made to patch reliability and automation processes
Ocean could occasionally fail to load
Miscellaneous
[Epic] Rich Presence now displays correctly in non-English languages on Epic
[PS5] Friend list now loads properly after logging out and back in during patch checks on the title screen
Joystick input now behaves consistently when lowering deadzones
[PS5 and Xbox] SHiFT account linking verification codes now auto-copy and apply correctly on console
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
I have come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to play the demo for cyber horror game Oneway.exe on my lunch break. I’m not going to tell you what I had for lunch – I think if I describe it in full, I will throw up. But I will say that it featured red peppers and purple onions, and I now wish never to see those colours ever again.
Also, it’s possible that I’m still playing the demo for Oneway.exe, because the game takes place inside an off-brand mock-up of a desktop operating system. Yes, we are in Everything Is Going To Be OK territory. Hypnospace Outlaw-ville. Pony Island, er, land. But you never saw quite such… sights in either of those games, as far as I can remember. You never saw such reds and purples. You never saw such delightful little piggies.
) to gleaming glory.
