I may have winced a bit, initially, at Alice Bee’s choice of RPS Game Club game for this month. Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands looked funny and all, but it’s a turn-based RPG, a subgenre that usually elicits the same amount of enthusiasm from me as the phrase “by Ernest Cline” does from Alice. Deathbulge, however, is a clever little sod of a game, managing to devise not only a turn-based combat system that avoids the usual waiting-around tedium but one that’s outright good fun in itself.
MultiVersus has a new cinematic launch trailer that has revealed two new playable characters: Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th and Agent Smith from The Matrix.
MultiVersus, which launches on May 28, is a free-to-play platform fighter similar in vein to Nintendo’s Smash Bros. series, but with characters from across Warner Bros.-owned properties.
Jason Voorhees and Agent Smith join the MultiVersus roster alongside DC Super-Villain The Joker (voiced by Mark Hamill) as part of Season 1: Puns & Villainy. Jason Voorhees will be available at launch, while Agent Smith will release later in the season.
Other characters we see in the trailer include Wonder Woman and The Joker (DC), Velma (Scooby-Doo), Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian (Looney Tunes), Iron Giant (The Iron Giant), Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty), Stripe (Gremlins), and Finn the Human and Cake the Cat, a variant of Jake the Dog (Adventure Time).
Developed by Player First Games, MultiVersus will be available on May 28 as a free download for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One consoles, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), with full cross-play and cross-progression support.
Announced characters currently include Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Black Adam, and The Joker (DC); Shaggy and Velma (Scooby-Doo); Bugs Bunny, Tasmanian Devil a.k.a. Taz, and Marvin the Martian (Looney Tunes); Arya Stark (Game of Thrones); Tom & Jerry (Tom and Jerry); Finn the Human, Jake the Dog, and Banana Guard (Adventure Time); Steven Universe and Garnet (Steven Universe); Iron Giant (The Iron Giant), LeBron James (Space Jam: A New Legacy); Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith (Rick and Morty); Gizmo and Stripe (Gremlins); Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th); Agent Smith (The Matrix); and an “extraordinary original creature” named Reindog.
In March, Warner Bros. re-announced MultiVersus with a new release date after Player First Games rebuilt the game from the ground up to improve online play and, with a move to Unreal Engine 5, improve visuals. MultiVersus officially shut down in June last year after launching with a battle pass, microtransactions, and DLC characters. This release was considered an open beta, but some expressed frustration at MultiVersus going dark after spending real money on it.
In our 8/10 review of the open beta, IGN said: “MultiVersus may not be a must-play at social gatherings, but its refreshing team-based battles make it a great platform fighter online.”
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.
There are management games and there are micro-management games. Prison Architect 2 is the latter. I don’t mean this as an annoying thing, like when Harold from corporate starts commenting all over your document at 4.30pm on a Friday. I mean it as a distinction between those games that let you plop down a house, and others that need you to stack the bricks, install the plumbing, fit the lights, and select the wallpaper. The first Prison Architect allowed you to finesse every detail of a secure correctional facility, down to each cell and dog kennel. Unsurprisingly for a sim about prison, it encouraged obsessive control. The 3D-ified sequel isn’t finished yet, but it’s taking a similar approach. Maybe a little too similar.
Step up to the podium.
Atari has announced that NeoSprint, the first ‘Sprint’ entry since 1987’s Championship Sprint (well, technically 1989’s Badlands), will be racing onto the Switch eShop next month on 27th June, 2024.
As detailed in the newly released trailer, the game will feature modernised visuals with an updated isometric view of the action. You’ll also be able to build and completely customise your own tracks, adding in ramps, jumps, and decorative items across four biomes: forest, desert, winter, and city.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was an exceedingly special game. A bold, brash direction for Ninja Theory, the decision to craft a short, narrative experience revolving around mental health was a brave leap, but one that ultimately paid off. Now, seven years later, the studio is gearing up to reveal a sequel to Senua’s story, built with the same love and care, but expanding on the debut in every conceivable way.
In the run up to launch, we’ll be bringing you the story of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II from inside the studio itself, as well as stories and lessons from Hellblade’s creative leads. This is Ninja Theory’s ultimate form, filled with industry-leading talent, groundbreaking technology, and one of the most unique approaches to game development you’ve ever seen to fulfil the ultimate goal – the pursuit of true immersion.
When it comes to the environments showcased in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, breathtaking doesn’t quite cover it. Despite its linear story, the game showcases a sense of scale that adventures like this don’t often offer, and everything you see is rooted in a familiar realism. Where most games of this kind would confine you to corridors, valleys, and other means of obscuring your view, Hellblade II’s vistas often stretch to the horizon, giving you a sense of the sheer size of Senua’s journey ahead. The idea is clear – this is literal worldbuilding, rooting your journey in a much, much, bigger story.
During our visit to Ninja Theory, we had the opportunity to speak to key creative leads about how the studio achieved this sense of place through location scouting and research, to bring an ethereal, yet believable recreation of medieval Iceland into Hellblade II.
While the first game culminates in Helheim, Hellblade II takes us to Midgard, known in Norse Mythology as the realm of men. The team moved through a process of elimination between several locations before settling on Iceland, which brings unique and encapsulating landscapes – somehow familiar and otherworldly all at once.
One chapter in Hellblade II takes us on a scenic route across the brisk and beautiful beaches of Reykjanestá, situated on the southwest coast of Iceland. This area is characterized by sprawling cliffs and rocky beaches, as well as an abundance of submarine volcanoes. It is, to all intents and purposes, a desolate wasteland, but an utterly phenomenal scene to witness as Senua. Another captures a fictionalized settlement located in Freyslaug, surrounded by rolling verdant hills and inspired by the real, picturesque hot-spring laden scenes of Fosslaug in Northern Iceland.
“The geography in Iceland is better than what we could have imagined,” says Dom Matthews, Ninja Theory Studio Head. “It’s grounded in nature, but it almost feels alien. But because it’s real, as humans it feels right to us – like a real place, even if you’ve never been there.”
“The geography in Iceland is better than what we could have imagined, it’s grounded in nature, but it almost feels alien.”
Dom Matthews
The team crafting Hellblade II‘s environments share an ethos – to stay grounded in this element of naturalness by scanning existing, physical objects into the game. According to Dan Attwell, Environmental Art Director on Hellblade 2, there are over 370 pieces of photogrammetry in the sequel, compared to just one in the first Hellblade.
As I travel around the studio itself, I see chunks of real Icelandic rock scattered around, still being used as reference. It’s a hefty amount of work to get out there and collect the materials, but it’s worth it in the end, as it means less resources are spent on hand-crafting assets to feel realistic – and, as Attwell comments: “You get a level of realism that you can’t get by doing it by hand.”
Mark Slater-Turnstill, VFX Director on Hellblade II, also speaks to another dimension of worldbuilding. He adds that nature is chaotic and unpredictable by design, and that is often hard to replicate organically. Sometimes a rock or a tree might come out a little too perfect if a human is being asked to conjure it up:
“As humans, when you think about an object, you’ve got a vision in your mind that might actually be quite different to the reality,” he adds.
Speaking of bending reality, Senua’s experience with psychosis means that the spaces around you are not always as they appear to be. The environmental and visual effects are, for the most part, grounded in reality, but Ninja Theory has the ability to veer into the magical with what Senua will experience as a result of her condition. The visions she experiences will manipulate her surroundings, tying into other gameplay mechanics in a consistently clever way.
“There’s a distinction between realism and believability – you can have fantastical elements that are also entirely believable,” Matthews says. “You’re in Senua’s shoes, trying to understand the world through her eyes, but the really powerful thing is that this isn’t beyond the realms of possibility for people that have experienced psychosis.”
It’s a delicate balance to strike though; Senua’s perspective must be authentic and real to her, but disarming to the player. Slater-Turnstill demonstrates this to me in action at his workstation, leading Senua towards an unassuming rock, which then morphs effortlessly into a stony, human head, before seamlessly opening a new path that was never there before. He must have seen this particular transition dozens of times, but he still smiles at the extremely impressive reveal as it happens.
“We’ve considered what we can use from the existing environment to create an authentic experience of lived psychosis. A lot of it is taking recognizable objects and displaying them in an unnatural way,” Slater-Turnstill explains. “It could be seen as ‘unrealistic’, but it’s not, because in her world, that’s what she’s seeing.”
These blips in reality are of course, a way to display the world through Senua’s lens, but they’re also extremely helpful guidance from a gameplay perspective. In Hellblade II, there’s no map or interface guiding the way, and Attwell chuckles as he adds that they’ve made life quite hard for themselves by not having an in-game HUD.
It means all of the clues on how to proceed have to be shown with audio or visual cues, and this is done so incredibly intuitively; it’s rarely unclear where you need to go, and the narrative paths through these landscapes are crafted so well that it’s impossible to predict what you’re coming up against. There’s no walking into a big clearing that indicates you’re about to get into a brawl loading screen transitions – this is one smooth, seamless adventure where transitions between locations, be it the grounded external world or Senua’s supernatural inner mindscapes – are entirely intentional.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is a masterclass in environmental design; it’s clear that the team has absorbed the very essence of the landscape its building, but cleverly infused with the perfect amount of mythological magic to make for a truly mesmerizing adventure, and a photo mode enthusiast’s dream.
If you want to dive further into the design of Hellblade II, check out our feature on the evolution of Senua’s character, as she prepares for the next step of her journey.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II will be released on May 21, 2024 for Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Steam and Cloud – and will be available with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass day one.
The post The Wanderers – The Team Behind Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II’s Incredible Landscapes appeared first on Xbox Wire.
15 minutes into Prey, the 2017 sci-fi thriller crafted by Arkane Austin, protagonist Morgan Yu shatters their apartment window with a wrench. As hundreds of glass shards fall away, a newly revealed truth changes Morgan’s life forever. This genuinely shocking, perspective-pivoting opening is one of the most incredible introductions to a game world ever made.
Seven days into May 2024, Microsoft took up its own metaphorical wrench and shattered Arkane Austin. A veteran of immersive sims – those first-person, highly interactive games where RPG, simulation, and action systems interlock – it was one of the casualties of Xbox’s brutal dismemberment of Bethesda Softworks.
This is a heartbreaking situation. Staff laid off from Arkane Austin have been thrown into the toughest conditions the games industry has ever seen. But, if you’ll permit me to search for the light in this darkness, the soul of the studio has already proven itself incredibly resilient. This is not the first time that financials and parent companies have dictated the course of the immersive sim in Austin, Texas. Despite multiple hardships, the genre always finds a way to survive in this city.
First, let’s reflect on what has been taken. The messy and misguided co-op shooter Redfall may be Arkane Austin’s most recent release, but the studio is built on a rich history of single-player innovation. It crafted two timeless classics: the eldritch stealth sim Dishonored (built cooperatively with Arkane’s surviving Lyon studio) and Prey, a modern day reinterpretation of the brilliant System Shock. And according to Bloomberg, before Microsoft’s guillotine fell, Arkane Austin was already drawing up the blueprints for a new single-player game that drew on the team’s proven skills.
It’s impossible to know what that game would be, but if Dishonored and Prey are evidence of anything, then we’ve lost something with incredible potential. Dishonored demonstrates Arkane Austin’s talent for deeply interactive game worlds that respect and reflect player experimentation. Prey’s sprawling space station, meanwhile, is testament to the team’s vision when it comes to environment and campaign structure. Its roguelike DLC Mooncrash, with its overlapping stories of five protagonists, allows for inspired use of a single space depending on both who you play as and the order that you play their stories in. Both games also showcase Arkane’s unrivalled art design and fierce, anti-injustice narrative prowess – strengths even Redfall benefits from.
Arkane Austin’s approach to game design was genuinely beautiful – an elegance matched by few other studios. And, in a drive for soulless corporate number counting, Microsoft has destroyed it.
In Microsoft’s own multi-part documentary Power On: The Story of Xbox, a segment discussing the company’s woeful mistreatment of Lionhead Studios saw Phil Spencer say “You acquire a studio for what they’re great at now, and your job is to help them accelerate how they do what they do, not them accelerate what you do.”
You’d assume, then, that Xbox would want to foster Arkane Austin. To help it overcome the failure of Redfall and resume – to quote Xbox’s own Matt Booty – “making impactful and innovative games”. But if a highly profitable corporation worth over $3 trillion has no interest in absorbing one mistake and finding a way to shepherd its artists to success, then one thing is clear: that promise to help studios “accelerate” what they’re good at is empty.
Arkane Austin may be gone, but the people still remain. And that brings me back to the studio’s soul. That soul is a community; a growing collective of immersive sim designers that have endured success and hardship in the city of Austin for close to three decades.
The city’s link to immersive sims began in 1995. Looking Glass Studios, the East coast-based creator of the genre’s formative trio – Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief – tasked System Shock producer Warren Spector with opening a new office in Austin, Texas. But while Looking Glass’ games proved critical hits, financial difficulties eventually saw the company collapse in 2000. The design language it established proved indestructible, though, and had already fled the nest.
Spector had been coaxed away by John Romero, the rockstar designer of Doom. Recently fired by id Software, Romero had set up his own studio, Ion Storm, and he wanted Spector to take charge of the Austin office to make, well, pretty much whatever he wanted. That project was the landmark immersive sim Deus Ex. Hired to help Spector craft this conspiracy thriller were designers Harvey Smith, Steve Powers, Monte Martinez, and Ricardo Bare.
This new Austin studio didn’t just keep the immersive sim recipe alive. When Looking Glass collapsed, Ion Storm’s parent company, Eidos Interactive, secured the rights to Thief and helped Spector relocate many former Looking Glass staff to his Austin studio to continue work on the franchise. But this second home for the immersive sim wasn’t to last. In 2005, financial struggles at Eidos doomed Ion Storm to the same fate as its spiritual predecessor.
The demise of Ion Storm could have been the end of the road for the immersive sim community in Austin. Even worse, the genre was endangered. Few other studios were interested in making this style of game. One that was, however, was Arkane. A French studio founded by Raphaël Colantonio, its first title, Arx Fatalis, was a love letter to Ultima Underworld. And in 2006 Arkane expanded into the US. Austin was an obvious choice.
Arkane Austin became a rally point to reunite key members of the Ion Storm team. Colantonio hired Harvey Smith as co-creative director, and he was soon followed by Powers, Martinez, and Bare. Once again, the city of Austin had another studio in which to foster and grow the creativity and ingenuity that began at Looking Glass Studios.
Thanks to Arkane’s two-studio system, the immersive sim mindset that made its home in Austin now extends across continents. Over at the thankfully unscathed Arkane Lyon, visionaries such as Dinga Bakaba, Sébastien Mitton, and Dana Nightingale are keeping the genre’s values alive, despite many of them not having direct ties back to Ion Storm or Looking Glass. Meanwhile, Raphaël Colantonio’s new company, WolfEye Studios (set up in 2019 following his departure from Arkane after directing Prey) is staffed by a variety of immersive sim veterans, including Monte Martinez, as well as enthusiastic newcomers. And beyond these headline developers, a multitude of indie games inspired by Arkane’s lineage, such as Gloomwood and Ctrl Alt Ego, are adding new voices to the fold. The genre endures because good art transcends board room statistics.
Arkane Austin 2017 pic.twitter.com/zDCB2vUitI
— Raphael Colantonio (@rafcolantonio) May 19, 2024
But what of Austin and its long-surviving immersive sim community? Harvey Smith, Steve Powers, and Ricardo Bare, creatives who have seen the city’s studios live and die, were all at Arkane Austin the day that Microsoft’s destruction order came through. Things are, admittedly, different this time. Arkane Austin’s shuttering wasn’t because of the so-called “immersive sim curse” of the genre being doomed to commercial failure. When a $3 trillion corporation won’t even support a studio whose game is a success “in all key measurements and expectations”, then it’s not about money. It’s sadly just cultural vandalism by capitalism, which is something of a new hurdle for immersive sims to navigate.
But, as I said earlier, good art transcends board room statistics. And against all odds, the immersive sim has always found a way to bloom in Austin. In a thread of thoughts on X/Twitter, Harvey Smith wrote “part of me is also wondering about team size, the role of certain types of creative groups, the role of bigger companies, etc. Maybe there is a sweet spot for the types of games I am driven to make in terms of team size?” Finding that sweet spot might be the first step to whatever comes next.
We can’t ignore that 2024 is the worst time for video game creatives in history, and Arkane Austin’s former staff face an uphill battle that can’t be solved with simple faith in the genre’s resilience. Nonetheless, the soul of Arkane Austin has roots that have been proven to be seemingly indestructible. And history does have a knack of repeating itself.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
Header art: Fred Augis, Arkane Studios / Bethesda
You remember the ending of 2011’s first-person bullethoser Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, right? Everyone does! A big man kills another big man with a gun but then – then! – a third big man kills that first big man with a rope. It’s dramatic stuff. Well, a data-diving enthusiast of the CoDwars has discovered a cut ending from the original trilogy’s closing chapter. It’s a more downbeat and mysterious finale, featuring a shadowy figure whose identity is never revealed. Also, Captain Price, the hero of the franchise and aforementioned big man number three, drops his cigar with possibly mortal implications.
Activision has confirmed a Gundam crossover is coming to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone with the launch of Season 4.
Season 4, due to start on May 29, will feature Bandai Namco’s famous sci-fi franchise in some shape or form, as confirmed by the Call of Duty teaser tweet below.
It’s time for the shadows to rise up ⚔️
Gundam comes to Call of Duty in Season 4 🤖 @GundamInfoNA pic.twitter.com/ebZTGoQL3v
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 19, 2024
The Gundam crossover comes as no surprise given dataminers found reference to it while digging into Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3’s Season 3 Reloaded update. But Gundam wasn’t the only eye-catching crossover suggested in the files — dataminers also found reference to Fallout and The Crow crossovers for Season 4.
The Fallout crossover is clearly timed to coincide with the breakout Prime Video TV show, which itself has boosted interest in all things Fallout in recent weeks. Indeed, Fortnite is set for a Fallout crossover of its own.
Meanwhile, The Crow crossover is clearly designed to coincide with the upcoming The Crow movie, starring Bill Skarsgard. This is a reboot and a remake of the cult classic 1994 original, and is set to hit theaters in August.
Time’s running out ⏳
Season 4. May 29 🦠 pic.twitter.com/Xx76YgPX5J
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 16, 2024
Activision is yet to fully unveil Season 4, but we do know it’s bringing back the popular Kar98k bolt-action rifle. There are also rumors of yet another crossover event with Prime Video’s The Boys, this time to coincide with Season 4.
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin developers Larian today announced the opening of a new studio in Warsaw, Poland. This is RPG outfit Larian’s seventh studio worldwide, and the latest to contribute to their “24-hour development cycle” model. That’s even more hands on deck to a) keep Swen Vincke’s armour polished to a fine sheen and b) ensure smooth sailing for the two new games that Larian currently have in the works.
Win Splatfest – Check.
Update #2 : Well, the world itself might not have ended (phew), but Splatoon 3’s apocalypse-themed Splatfest certainly has, as we have a new winner.
It was Frye’s Team Bucket List that walked away with the win this time, pulling in an impressive 415p. Team Same Ol’ narrowly missed out on the gold with 395p, while Save the Day brought up the rear with 60p.
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