Author: Game Infliction

The developer of Days Gone has said it still plans to create “cool s**t” after parent company Sony canceled its unannounced live-service game.

Last week, Sony canceled two unannounced live-service games that were in development at Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. The Bluepoint game was reportedly a live-service God of War game, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Bend Studio’s live-service game remains unknown.

A Sony spokesperson confirmed the cancellations to Bloomberg, adding that neither studio will be closed and that it will work with each to determine next projects.

Sony’s live-service push has struggled significantly. While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, Sony’s other live-service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches.

Indeed, Sony’s Concord is one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a couple of weeks before it was brought offline amid drastically low player numbers. Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and shut its developer. The Concord flop came after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game. Last week, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said he would have tried to resist Sony’s controversial live-service video game push, were he in the position of current Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst.

In a tweet, Bend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister issued a short message to the developer’s fans: “Thanks for the love and support everyone, especially to those that have reached out. P.S. We still plan on creating cool shit.”

As it stands, Bend Studio’s last release was 2019’s Days Gone on PlayStation 4. It launched on PC in 2021.

In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company had learned lessons from both the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2 earlier this year and Concord’s failure. On Concord specifically, Totoki said Sony should have run its development gates such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”

“Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”

The suggestion here from Totoki was that Sony should have noticed and reacted to Concord’s issues earlier in the development process, presumably so that it could have improved the game before launch — or canceled it.

Totoki then went on to point fingers at Sony’s “siloed organization” and Concord’s release window, which may have caused cannibalisation. Concord launched in August, not long after smash hit Black Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC.

“We have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother,” Totoki said.

“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.”

During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, saying lessons learned would be shared throughout the business.

“We launched two live-service games this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.

“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.

“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games — which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP — with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”

Looking to the future, a number of PlayStation live service games remain in the works, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online, and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle has outlined the difficulties behind its adaptation, which was originally announced as an animated series but now appears to be a film, headlined by the fact “the game has no plot.”

Poncle said it is “still working with Story Kitchen on a live action film” in a Steam post despite the adaptation being announced as an animated series in 2023. Regardless, Poncle has now acknowledged just how difficult it will be to get a film right, especially as Vampire Survivors is a mechanically simple action game about defeating hoards of enemies.

“As mentioned last year, rather than jumping the gun and make stuff for the sake of making it, we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn’t a video game out of Vampire Survivors requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game,” Poncle said.

“That is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right. Please remember the game has no plot — it doesn’t? — so nobody can really anticipate how a film about it is going to be. That is part of what makes it exciting.”

The irony of this wasn’t lost on Poncle upon the adaptation’s announcement, saying, sarcastically, “the most important thing in Vampire Survivors is the story.” It’s unclear how the game will be adapted, even to Poncle, so a release date hasn’t been announced as of yet.

Vampire Survivors is a fast-paced and over-the-top gothic horror game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. It became one of the biggest surprise hits of the last few years as what launched as a humble indie game on Steam blew up in popularity and snowballed itself.

Poncle soon added layers of new content to the game and the core experience now offers 50 playable characters and 80 weapons to play with. That’s before the two major expansions too, not to mention the Ode to Castlevania DLC.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “Need a game to play while listening to podcasts? This is it. Vampire Survivors is outwardly simple but turns out to be an incredibly deep hole to fall down — though it’s not without extended dull periods when you get ahead of its curve.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

As Monster Hunter Wilds‘ February 28 release date nears, developer Capcom has said it’s looking into lowering the recommended GPU requirements.

Confirmation comes from the official German Monster Hunter X/Twitter account, which issued a follow-up statement that revealed Capcom is also exploring the possibility of releasing a standalone PC benchmarking tool.

Capcom recommends an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super or AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT for 30 FPS at 1080p. This minimum requirement is also detailed as requiring an internal resolution of 720p, and upscaling the graphics using DLSS or FSR using the “lowest” graphics setting.

Monster Hunter Wilds’ recommended settings also target 1080p and 60 FPS with upscaling and Frame Generation technologies enabled, using the examples of an RTX 2070 Super, RTX 4060, or AMD RX 6700 XT. Out of the three, only the RTX 4060 supports Nvidia Frame Generation, with the 2070 Super and 6700 XT instead having to rely on FSR 3 (which had ghosting artifacts in the previous Monster Hunter Wilds beta).

Targeting 60 FPS with Frame Generation enabled isn’t the ideal use of the technology, with Digital Foundry recommending a baseline of 40 FPS in third-person titles. If a game runs at under 60 FPS with upscaling enabled, it may result in a much less responsive or tactile feeling due to latency.

During the Monster Hunter Wilds open beta test, PC players with lower-end hardware struggled, even with mid-range graphics cards like the RTX 3060. In particular, players experienced a low-LOD bug where the game did not load the fully detailed textures of characters or monsters.

Monster Hunter Wilds is built on the RE Engine, which first debuted in 2017’s Resident Evil 7. The engine was used in games like Devil May Cry 5, Monster Hunter Rise, and Street Fighter 6, with slick performance across all platforms.

But, all that glitters is not gold for the RE Engine, as bigger open-world titles with more NPCs and enemies like Dragon’s Dogma 2 have suffered from performance woes on consoles and PC, setting a worrying portent for Monster Hunter Wilds. With the clock ticking towards an early February open beta and late February launch, Capcom’s claim of attempting to reduce GPU requirements could be key for the title’s success on PC.

Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.

Daniel Vávra, co-founder of Warhorse Studios, has denied a recent rumor that Saudi Arabia had banned Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 over an unskippable gay cutscene.

2018’s Kingdom Come Deliverance is a story-driven action role-playing game set in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia. It pitches itself as an historically accurate representation of the setting, but its lack of people of color became a talking point in the months following release.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, due out February 4, 2025, once again leans on historical accuracy for its return to medieval Bohemia, but players can expect a slightly different experience. Warhorse has said that, because protagonist Henry is embarking on a journey from the countryside to a relatively cosmopolitan city that is besieged and occupied by an invading king, he will encounter a wide range of ethnicities and characters this time around.

The claim that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was banned in Saudi Arabia reportedly emerged from a tweet by a Saudi Arabian news outlet, and was picked up by western media and spread across social media and forums.

Now, Vávra has taken to social media to deny the claim and provide clarification on how Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 works. Vávra tweeted to say it does not have unskippable cutscenes and was not and is not banned in any country, “at least not that we know of.”

Vávra then pointed to the fact that the first Kingdom Come Deliverance had gay characters, and said players are responsible for their in-game decisions. “If you want Henry to try a same-sex adventure, feel free,” Vávra insisted. “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. All affairs are (and were in KCD1) purely optional. The characters are perfectly aware that it was a forbidden sin.”

Following the Saudi Arabia ban rumor, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 became the latest video game to be singled out for being “woke” or including “forced diversity” — a growing online trend that some developers and publishers have felt the need to counter in recent months.

In September 2024, Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot responded to a backlash against Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Black samurai protagonist to address “an important problem of perception that has been affecting the company’s performance.”

“I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda,” Guillemot continued. “We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”

As part of his response to the online backlash against Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Vávra made it clear that he doesn’t like “forced diversity,” insisting “nobody was forcing us to do anything, and we are not forcing anyone to do certain things.” He then reiterated comments Warhorse had already made about why the sequel is more diverse than its predecessor.

“The game takes place in one of the richest cities in Europe which was besieged by a massive foreign army,” he said. “That´s the reason why the life in such a city is more diverse than the life in villages which were featured in the first game.

“Musa came to Bohemia with an invading army as a member of the royal court of King Sigismund, whom he met thanks to his engagement at the court of Sultan Bayezid. He’s an educated noble and renaissance man from the Kingdom of Mali.

“At the same time, Musa is a very unusual figure for the local Bohemian folk, and many of the situations around him in the game stem from this. So his presence makes sense and creates lots of interesting situations in the game. The way he talks and behaves has a reason.

“Everything displayed corresponds to the morals and social norms of 1403 Bohemia and is only there to make an interesting story, and not at all to appeal to a ‘modern audience.’”

“Modern audience” is a now common phrase used online to deride games that are perceived to be appealing to a diverse audience. In the ongoing culture war, “modern audience” has become a meme, and is referenced in the downfall of everything from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to Concord.

Vávra concluded his response by hitting back at the anti-woke brigade whose fears he had worked to assuage. “Some of them sadly turned into exactly the same narrative they pretend to be fighting against,” he said. “The amount of hateful behavior is really sad and it will damage any cause associated with it.”

When contacted by IGN, Warhorse and publisher Plaion pointed to Vávra X/Twitter thread.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Palworld released in Early Access one year ago today and, to celebrate, developer Pocketpair has revealed its 2025 roadmap includes crossplay, a final boss, and more.

An X/Twitter post revealed the “future roadmap” and then asked fans to continue supporting Palworld in its second year, suggesting all of this will arrive in 2025 (and perhaps the first three weeks of 2026). “We’ve been updating the game since the start of Early Access, and we’ll continue to update Palworld as we prepare for the official release,” Pocketpair said.

Alongside cooperative crossplay and a final boss and “ending scenario,” Pocketpair revealed “world transfers for Pals,” further ways to strengthen and improve Pals, “various new content such as new Pals and technologies,” and game collaborations such as the one with Terraria.

Also coming are improvements to world object placements, improvements to base Pals, improvements to optimization, and improvements to the user experience.

Pocketpair obviously didn’t mention what could be its biggest event of 2025 — the conclusion of its legal battle with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo.

Palworld, an open-world, multiplayer survival game dubbed “Pokémon with guns” by some, gained a staggering 25 million players in one month when it launched last year. Many drew further comparisons between it and Pokémon upon release, claiming various Pal designs were practically direct copies of official pocket monsters.

The Pokémon Company said in January 2024 that it intended “to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights” but went quiet for months after. Finally, however, in September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced it had launched a patent lawsuit against Pocketpair.

The developer didn’t appear particularly deterred by the lawsuit, initially saying “we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon” before going on to release Palworld on different platforms afterwords, and even release one of its older games on Nintendo Switch.

It later revealed the lawsuit was directed at patents that involve a catching mechanic: Pokémon are famously captured with Pokéballs, and Palworld are caught with a spherical object called a Pal Sphere.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.