Author: Game Infliction

EA Sports continues its week-long push to provide new information on College Football 25, with today’s deep dive revealing how the development team incorporates sights and sounds to give the game an authentic and immersive experience.

EA revealed five key features highlighting how it captured the traditions, unique details, sights, and sounds across all 134 Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision schools. These include Authentic Gameday Experiences, Detailed Traditions, Motion Capture Efforts, Mascots, and Turnover Traditions.

To capture the spirit of a college football game, EA Sports said it provided pre-game atmospheres with crowd chants and team runouts. A few notable examples include Clemson University’s run down The Hill before the start of the game or Notre Dame’s tradition of tapping the “Play Like a Champion Today” sign before running out the tunnel.

With those authentic experiences, EA Sports revealed that it even built props and sets to provide accurate motion capture for some of these traditions, using real people and stunt actors to get the most realistic movement possible.

EA Sports said it didn’t neglect the unique turnover traditions at some schools either. These include Pitt’s turnover hoop, Oregon State’s Chainsaw, and the Alabama Ball Out Belt. Some of these traditions are briefly seen in the official reveal trailer for College Football 25.

Of course, mascots are also a big component of college football atmospheres, traditions, and spirit. College Football 25 will feature 50 mascots in the game, 40 of them being costumed mascots such as Wake Forest’s Demon Deacon and Ohio State’s Brutus Buckeye. There will also be 10 real mascots, like Texas’ Bevo, the longhorn steer, or Uga, the bulldog from the University of Georgia.

College Football 25 will be released on July 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more, check out our hands-on preview, how Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals will be incorporated into the game, and yesterday’s news story where EA revealed the top 25 toughest stadiums to play in College Football 25.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt has defended FromSoftware for the difficulty of Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree.

As reported by PC Gamer, Pilestedt responded to someone on X/Twitter who complained about the intense difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree, which has been a heavily discussed topic since its launch on June 21, 2024.

Pilestedt initially shared another post saying FromSoftware doesn’t make bosses hard for the sake of it, but for the feeling overcoming them gives players. “Indeed, this 1,000%,” Pilestedt said. “Good game design is evoking emotion more than anything.”

A game for everyone is a game for no one.

Always cater to a select audience.

— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) June 24, 2024

X/Twitter user @Indoor_Carrot responded, saying “the problem with this design philosophy is it only caters to a select audience. I tried Dark Souls 1. After defeating the first couple of bosses, I realized it wasn’t fun or rewarding. I only felt relief, not accomplished. I stopped playing Dark Souls because of this.”

Pilestedt disagreed. “A game for everyone is a game for no one,” he said, which is essentially the motto of his developer Arrowhead Game Studios. “Always cater to a select audience.”

FromSoftware games like Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice are famously difficult but have been praised across the board for their overall game design, challenge included.

IGN’s Shadow of the Erdtree review awarded it a 10/10, for example. “Like the base game did before it, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree raises the bar for single player expansions,” we said. “It takes everything that made the base game such a landmark role-playing game, condenses it into a relatively compact 20 to 25 hour campaign, and provides fantastic new challenges for heavily invested fans to chew on.”

But some who’ve purchased the expansion have expressed frustration at the difficulty, even review bombing it on Steam because of it and performance issues. Regardless, FromSoftware boss and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki has remained true to his vision, saying making things easier would “break the game.”

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

Developer Castle Pixel and publisher Playtonic Friends have announced Cattle Country, a new “cozy cowboy life-sim adventure” in the works for PC (via Steam). It promises pixel-art graphics, 18 romanceable characters, cattle to raise, bandits to fend off, and buried treasure to dig up, among other gameplay elements. Watch the announcement trailer above or check out the first screenshots in the gallery below.

Fishing, hunting, and farming will make up the core of the gameplay in what Castle Pixel and Playtonic Friends bill as a game that aims to be “Red Dead Redemption meets Stardew Valley.”

Playtonic Friends is the publishing arm of Yooka-Laylee developer Playtonic, while Castle Pixel previously developed Blossom Tales and Rex Rocket.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

A former Halo and Destiny executive producer at Bungie has said the live service model is “so much better for developers and players” than the one-off $60 or $70 purchase model.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Theorycraft Games CEO and former Halo: Reach and Destiny executive producer Joe Tung said the traditional method of buying video games, meaning to make a single payment of around $60 or $70, causes developers to make decisions which were not “in the best interest” of players.

“I always felt like, in the $60 boxed product model, I was having to make decisions that were not in the best interest of players,” Tung said.

“It was in the best interest of: ‘How do we sell as many copies in the first 48 hours as we can?’ One of the huge strengths of the games as a service model is you can be long term, you can think long term in terms of what is best for the player, and how does that overlap with what is best for the company. I think it allows you to make much, much, much better decisions overall.”

Tung referenced the now defunct E3 and the trailers and gameplay clips which premiered there, promising what he called “bulls**t vaporware” that players would never actually get to experience, because all developers had to do was convince them to spend $60.

“I would wager that any developer who has ever worked in the $60 box product model, up until the point where E3 was cancelled, has a story about the E3 build,” he said. “It’s like, let’s jam as much bulls**t vaporware into the build as we can in the next three months because we have to have a huge showing at E3, because it’s our one opportunity to talk to our audience before we launch the game.”

“I would have to wager that some hugely significant percentage of those E3 efforts ended up on the cutting room floor because they were half-baked and caused people to crunch and really make huge sacrifices to get it in,” Tung added. “That’s my favorite example of hugely impactful decisions that were not about what is best for the player.”

Live service, on the other hand, allows developers to continue working on games after launch, communicate with their audience to see what players actually want, and so on. Tung therefore believes “the games as a service model is so much better for developers and players.”

The topic has proved controversial amongst gamers, with many frustrated that even single player games now have microtransactions, preorder bonuses, early access periods, and so on, and as a result the $60 purchase, which is more commonly $70 in 2024, no longer grants everything a game has to offer.

Ubisoft titles Star Wars: Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows have both faced criticism for this recently, as both have missions locked behind more expensive editions and can’t be played on their true launch date unless players spend upwards of $100.

Some developers have seemingly managed to thread the needle between one-off purchase and live service, however, with PlayStation and PC hit Helldivers 2 being the best recent example of a successful game balancing both models.

It launched for a lesser $40 and still features microtransactions, but its live service components feature incredible depth as the game’s story is weaved around them and changes depending on what players can and can’t accomplish in timed events.

This combination appears to have worked as Helldivers 2 wasn’t just received well by critics but had sold more than 12 million copies by May 14, 2024.

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