The developer of Hellblade 2 has explained why it prefers making shorter games, insisting digital distribution has opened the door “to games of all shapes and sizes.”

Microsoft-owned developer Ninja Theory will soon release Hellblade 2, which costs $50, is digital-only, and about eight hours long. It follows 2020’s multiplayer online game Bleeding Edge, and 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, itself a cheaper, shorter game that launched without a physical release.

In a recent interview with IGN (check out IGN’s Hellblade 2 preview for more), Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews said Hellblade 2 is “the right shape and size of experience” to tell the story the developers intended to make.

“I think what we always set out to do is to tell a story and for the game length to be appropriate for the story that we want to tell,” Matthews said. “So it’s not really a case of setting out to make shorter experiences. I think it is… There is a story that we want to tell here with a beginning, middle and end and what is the right shape and size of experience to tell that story? So that’s kind of where we start.”

Matthews said Ninja Theory has found an audience for shorter games where “every step of that journey is meaningful.”

“What I would say as well though is that I think that since digital distribution has become a thing, it has opened the industry up to games of all shapes and sizes, which I think is really great,” Matthews commented. “So I’m really pleased to see that there’s a lot of people that actually enjoy a shorter experience, something that they can sit down on a whatever Friday night, stick their headphones on, turn the lights off and kind of sink into an experience and players who don’t necessarily want something that is 50 hours long, a 100 hours long, so it’s as long as it needs to be. And I’m one of those people, I like shorter games.

“I think there’s a lot of pressure on people’s time these days and I think our fans, from what we hear from them, they enjoy a shorter game where our intention is that every step of that journey is meaningful… There’s an audience of people that want games that are focused.”

Nowadays, with more video games launching straight into subscription services and without physical versions, it has become increasingly difficult to measure success, at least from the outside looking in. As a first-party Xbox game, Hellblade 2 launches day-one on Game Pass on May 21, 2024. While it will also be available to buy standalone across PC via Steam and Xbox, Hellblade 2 seems unlikely to prove its value through sales alone.

For Ninja Theory, though, there are many measures of Hellblade 2’s success. “I think for us as a studio, well my focus as well as studio head is how can we empower the team here, the artists here to go and create an experience, and how do we get it out to the widest possible audience?” Matthews explained.

“I think success for us is, we would love for as many players to play our games as possible, but I think particularly with Hellblade we love and I love that magic that you can achieve by creating something that makes people think and feel. So if I think about the things that I want to achieve in Hellblade 2, once it’s released, the thing that will put the biggest smile on my face is to see fans of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and people who like those kind of game saying you’ve continued Senua’s journey in a way that is worthy of that character.”

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.

To say that Senua’s next story is an immersive one would be an understatement. During my recent hands-on preview, I was able to sample Hellblade 2’s practically palpable atmosphere, delivered via immersive visual and audio techniques. In fact, immersion is the word that powers each aspect of Ninja Theory’s sequel. Everything from its character-focused storytelling, high fidelity art design, and meatier, revamped combat is there to envelop you in Senua’s world. It’s a mantra instilled in the team by studio head Dom Matthews.

“The technology and the techniques that we push here are in pursuit of immersion,” he explains. “So the questions that we ask ourselves at all times in the game are, ‘What’s the story that we want to tell, and then how do we utilize the tools and the creativity that we have available to us to tell that story?’”

Those tools are used in a honed, focused way to ensure Hellblade 2 doesn’t lose sight of its goals. “We want to stick to that kind of very immersive narrative experience,” says VFX director Mark Slater-Tunstill. “We know our skill sets, we know the sort of people in the team, so let’s not go crazy and make a massive open-world game. Let’s keep it really kind of controlled, immersive, and true to what we’re trying to do as storytellers.”

While Hellblade 2 remains a ‘small’ game, at least in comparison to its first-party powerhouse peers, it has widened its scope over that of its predecessor. Senua’s journey will be a lot less isolated this time around, with other humans turning up along the way to share in her story. “One of the things that we really wanted to explore in Hellblade 2 was when you’ve got someone like Senua, who has a unique model of the world and a unique perspective of the world, what happens when that comes into contact with other people’s models of the world?”, Matthews explains.

It’s a new challenge that the actress who brings Senua to life, Melina Juergens, embraced. She credits the new studio space at Ninja Theory, which was built on the success of the first game, for aiding with that process.“I think having a new stage enabled us to just have more characters,” she says. “Before we were shooting in a little meeting room in our old office. It was just me on set as an actor, maybe three or four more people on set. So it was very intimate, very private. Now we’ve got this custom-built massive stage, so that allows us to have more actors in motion capture, have a stunt team, do our own builds, like hang stuff from the ceiling. There’s just so many more possibilities that we can do now.”

The addition of a wider roster of characters should make Hellblade’s world feel more populated and lived in, and as a result push that sense of immersion. Narrative elements like these new characters go hand-in-hand with more technological solutions, many of which have been made possible thanks to Ninja Theory’s transition to Unreal Engine 5. The software has enabled the team to both recreate real-world locations with extreme detail, and bring the wildest parts of their imagination to life.

“As a creator, UE5 is amazing,” Slater-Tunstill explains. “We can kind of dig in and use parts of the internal screen rendering to do some interesting effects. And yeah, obviously the real-time nature of all the lighting, and now a lot of our effects can be lit as well. It just beds everything in, and everything just fits together much more nicely.”

Nature has been a big influence for the studio, particularly the stunning vistas of Iceland, but the pursuit of immersion in AAA video games often looks to cinema as much as reality. The filmmaking techniques of director Robert Eggers are of particular inspiration to Dan Atwell, Ninja Theory’s environment art director. “We really like his idea of the methods that he used within [The Northman’s environment]” he says, going on to recount a tale of Eggers demanding the film’s prop department craft replicas of excavated historical swords rather than making blades based on mere historical theory. “Doing that research and making it as grounded in that sense as possible, we really like his ideology of that stuff.”

It will come as no surprise to learn, then, that Ninja Theory makes physical props of its own. On a tour of the developer’s studio, I was shown era-appropriate Celtic and Viking outfits, which had been woven on wooden looms using materials commonly used in the 9th century such as hemp. These were then scanned into the game to allow their digital counterparts to be rendered as realistic as possible – something further aided by the studio’s switch to Unreal Engine 5. Combined with many other artistic and technological approaches (including building rocks from hundreds of photographs taken on-location in Iceland), it all makes Hellblade 2 undeniably one of the most graphically impressive games I’ve ever played. Its character models and lighting effects in particular stand out from the crowd.

Juergens herself even made the trip out to Scandinavia to take in the harsh surroundings and store those memories for when it came time to reflect on them during her performance. “It’s very windy, it’s rainy, there’s sharp rocks everywhere”, she recalls. “It’s quite a daunting place to be. So I actually got quite frightened when I was out there in that stormy weather. And I try to remember that when I perform, so if there’s a scene with rain, I try to squint my eyes as if it’s raining or windy and just try to remember that trip to Iceland and how terrified I was feeling in that environment. I think the technology is so advanced now as well that I don’t need to overact. It picks up every little eye twitch or lip shake or finger movement.”

This very real grounding only serves to make the firmly other-worldly shine even brighter, though. Once again, we can see parallels between Ninja Theory and cinema; some of the reference footage the studio shot in Iceland is of the same locations used by Ridley Scott to craft the planet in Prometheus, which too used grounded reality to help pronounce its supernatural elements. Horrors of a completely different alien variety are no stranger to Senua, though, and some of her nightmarish visions will be familiar to those who played the original.

“Trying to come up with visual things based on people’s descriptions of hallucinations is a really interesting challenge”, says Slater-Tunstill. “That’s where you can lean on some of the new features of Unreal 5, and have all the geometry you want to replicate those things. Like in the Leap of Faith demo we did last year, with all the repeated rock patterns as the voice is speaking, that would’ve been trickier beforehand.”

A large offering of Hellblade 2’s horrors makes themselves apparent during combat, where hulking attackers throw axes and spit fire at you as hell encompasses the arena in shadows of death. It’s an area that the team knew they needed to focus on to make it as immersive as possible in Hellblade 2.

“The question was how do we utilise combat as a tool to tell the story, to enhance the story, to move the story forward”, explains Matthews. “I think games traditionally can at times be segmented from gameplay, story, gameplay, story, gameplay. For us, the approach has been ‘How do we have every step be meaningful for the story?’ It was starting with that mindset and thinking about what does that combat system look like when at the forefront of our minds is turning a narrative through it.”

Battles in Senua’s Saga are exclusively one-on-one affairs. But in the background, scenes are playing out with their own stories to tell, whether that be the untimely demise of a villager or the continuation of a horrific ritual. The trick is to not make these vignettes a distraction from the fight itself, and that’s achieved through engaging swordplay.

Every combat animation has been recorded through performance capture, meaning every swing of Senua’s sword is one of many skillfully executed by the talented stunt team. When visiting Ninja Theory’s motion capture stage I got to see some of this fight choreography in action, and let me tell you they don’t hold back. Things started steadily enough with a few sword-on-axe clashes but swiftly escalated as the stunt performer for Senua was lifted into the air by her neck and violently choke slammed into a cushioned mat. The real-life action was impressive, just as it was when minutes later I saw it translated into the game. There’s a real heft and flow to combat in Hellblade 2 that wasn’t quite there in its predecessor, and that’s largely thanks to this newfound approach.

It’s been a long time since 2017’s Senua’s Sacrifice, but Ninja Theory is a studio focused on getting the small details right, hoping they all add up to an impressive whole. Over the past seven years, they’ve increased the size of their team and upgraded the facilities and technology at their fingertips. All of the immersive techniques the improvements provide are in service of Senua’s story. Not only is the studio looking to create a fun game for players to enjoy, but it’s also seeking to use its platform to raise mental health awareness through Hellblade’s depiction of psychosis – the hallucinatory mental health condition that Senua experiences. It’s a cause close to Juergens’ heart, and one she’s very keen to share widely.

“Games can be more than just entertainment”, she states. “You can make a game that sparks conversations, tackles difficult subjects, and just raise awareness about certain conditions such as mental health. I’m proud of just having the honor of representing the mental health community, making sure that I do it in the best way possible, the most realistic way possible. Don’t let them down and make them proud as well.”

Simon Cardy is glad that this is one game he can’t smell. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.

You died. That much is obvious in the opening moments of Astra: Knights of Veda, which drops you straight into a war, clashing swords with strangers in suits of armor. Suddenly, just as it starts to seem like this will be another standard medieval hack-and-slash, the warriors around you fall to their knees and transform into grisly, undead versions of their former selves. The zombie-infested battlefield that eventually kills you does a good job of teasing the mystery about to unfold, setting the stage nicely for your resurrection into this tragedy-stricken kingdom. But while Knights of Veda’s detailed world, heart-racing drama, and challenging combat show promise, its overly aggressive grind and unnecessarily complex progression systems dampen the charm.

You play as the Master of the Book, a stereotypical “Chosen One” role given to you by the Goddess Veda, who asks for your help finding the missing pieces of her “heart” after reviving you. She also enlists help from a mini version of herself, a fairy-like companion named Belle, who might give any Genshin Impact fans some potentially traumatic Paimon flashbacks. However, Veda’s request sits oddly on the back burner for the majority of the story, instead giving way to the takedown of the corrupt King Magnus and a fight to stop the spread of the Undead. Most of the campaign focuses on uncovering the tantalizing pieces of your missing memories, as well as the truth behind the apocalyptic present, which is a more compelling goal than tracking down the goddess’ heart. I could have done with less of Belle screaming over my shoulder and stating the obvious, like that I’m low on HP, though.

Knights of Veda also weaves in stories about the allies you meet along the way, each with their own agendas, smartly tying them into the kingdom’s larger history. I appreciated the character-focused chapters that extended beyond Veda’s overarching fetch quest, and the story does its best to connect all those dots (even if it’s sometimes in convoluted, soap opera-ish ways). It’s the kind of story that needs a white board to piece together the web of connections, and one I enjoyed better once I embraced a certain suspension of disbelief.

This isn’t your typical cutesy anime RPG, either – Knights of Veda’s hauntingly detailed dark fantasy world shows in its grotesque enemies and corpse-filled landscapes. Instead of rescuing a hostage just in time, you’ll more likely watch a monster crush his head like a tomato. (His bulging eyes and crumpled skull are still stuck in my mind.) Corpses hang from light posts and ravens scatter from decaying bodies as you scamper past. Even at your headquarters, a potbellied villager can be seen solemnly downing a mug of who-knows-what through a doorway. These environments are perfectly crafted to reflect the troubled times of this world in a more graphic way than many games in the genre are willing to.

Knights of Veda isn’t always so bold, however, and it took me a bit to get over the hurdle of cliches at the beginning (including Belle’s constant whining during battle). A slow start veils a genuinely intriguing story about how this tragedy-struck nation came to be, the history of the corrupt King Magnus, and how your past self fits into it all. It’s also clever that it manages to subvert the “hero with amnesia” trope that kicks things off by having the memories from your past life actually be relevant to current events! Knights of Veda ends up feeling like the gaming equivalent of a “true crime” show, which was perfect for a fan of that genre like me once I was able to make it past the less thrilling start.

Even still, Knights of Veda focuses most of its complexity on its combat, with side-scrolling action reminiscent of arcade beat ‘em ups alongside the leveling systems and party management more typical of an RPG. You control a team of four characters that you can instantly swap between depending on your strategy. For example, you could deploy shields using a tank character and then swap a damage dealer in to attack enemies from behind that layer of armor. Managing these characters and optimizing their synergies balances nicely with the timely attacks and dodge rolls needed to survive powerful bosses. And while you can bulldoze through the more common baddies with button-mashing, enough enemy variety exists that you’ll still need to adjust battle strategies on the fly often.

Also similar to games like Genshin Impact, Knights of Veda has separate leveling systems for your individual characters, weapons, power-ups, and skills. Each of these requires enhancement materials that you can grind for by replaying chapters in the story. It’s a lot to juggle, but there are some helpful little touches like getting recommendations for which items to level up next if you ever lose a battle. All these upgrade systems helped it feel like I was constantly improving my characters, but they also made it seem like I was constantly running out of resources.

Knights of Veda is a live service game with more on the way. There are currently six chapters that take about 30 hours to complete, assuming you decide to focus on the story by mostly sticking with the same team to minimize the time it takes to level up new characters. This first arc of Knights of Veda tackles the truth behind your role in the current world war and why Magnus did what he did. It neatly wraps up one major mystery while leaving smaller threads and a cliffhanger ending that have me looking forward to coming back for the second arc.

About halfway through the current story, however, I started to feel the pain of the grind because of how often I needed to farm for character enhancement materials. Knights of Veda has “MMO-like” leveling, where anything above a three-level difference between you and your enemies is a noticeable challenge, with attacks that will eat significantly more of your HP. It isn’t like some other RPGs, where smart play might let you squeeze by a tough opponent with that kind of level difference. Grinding for materials to overcome those hurdles is typical for free-to-play RPGs and gacha games like this, but ideally they’ll also have systems to make that process less painful, such as an auto-battle option. Knights of Veda doesn’t – or, at least, it doesn’t implement them in a way that makes the grind any easier.

For example, Genshin Impact locks character and weapon enhancement materials behind quick challenges. Only when you start maxing out character skills at the highest levels will it demand you revisit the toughest bosses that take more brain power and reflexes to take down. Meanwhile, Knights of Veda will make you redo a brutal boss battle you only just survived right away in order to obtain basic leveling materials. You can fuse together Adventurer’s Shoes, a currency for collecting enhancement materials, into Hero’s Shoes, which rewards you with more than five times the average amount of drops to quicken the process – but doing so requires 80 out of the 120 maximum Adventurer’s Shoes you can hold. That meant I ended up trading many of the gems I could have used on gacha pulls to get new characters to instead replenish my Adventurer’s Shoes so I could gather more materials at once and not be forced to redo the same battles over and over.

And while there is an auto-battle option to initially speed things up, it becomes useless in later chapters. At first, I thought it could be a helpful tool for effortlessly running through repeated battles to farm materials – but in practice, it’s only good for auto-attacking. The AI powering it doesn’t know to step back when there are too many enemies or avoid environmental hazards, and will gleefully walk into poison without thinking about the damage over time it will cause. If auto-battle at least evaded lightning and similar dangers, it would help automate a larger part of the process, even if I still need to go hands-on for tougher enemies.

Because progression is so slow, I didn’t have the resources to properly experiment with a wider variety of characters. Knights of Veda has a rock-paper-scissors type elemental system that encourages you to consider who you are using when facing different enemies. Unfortunately, I largely had to ignore the elemental pentagons and triangles that balance strengths and weaknesses out of necessity. I would’ve loved to try out more characters, but that would’ve meant hours of grinding to fully level a single one that likely wouldn’t even become a mainstay of my team afterward. As a result, I generally kept three of my four party members the same throughout the campaign, and only swapped the fourth around when I wanted to experiment with those elements.

As a gacha game, your team could be heavily influenced by which characters you manage to randomly pull – for example, I forced my way through the campaign with a 5-star archer named Eliyor I lucked into, but I frequently used free units like Leon and Lucian for support. (Lucian in particular came in clutch with his healing abilities and serviceable Light-based damage.) I unlocked multiple characters as I progressed through the story and completed challenges, so I don’t think the gacha structure is a particular problem here. You get at least 10 pulls for free whenever you hit level 5, level 10, level 15, and so on. I’m not sure my life would have been as easy without Eliyor, of course, but most of my free units were helpful enough that I didn’t feel the need to pay real money for more pulls. Knights of Veda also guarantees you at least one 5-star character from its standard banner after 50 pulls, so that means a chance for everyone to pull their own powerhouse.

Gacha concerns or not, there is plenty to talk about in terms of overall jank. Small optimization issues and bugs weren’t very distracting individually, but Knights of Veda has enough of them that it feels sloppy all together. First off, controller support is only half-finished, so you will need to switch to using a keyboard and mouse for things like navigating between character menus if you play on PC like I did. I got used to that annoyance after a while, and the UI at least tells you when to switch most of the time… if it doesn’t crash first. NPCs in the main town would sometimes show me an unfinished menu before freezing, overlapping text is the norm throughout, and random Korean phrases will sometimes pop up in service messages, so the whole package comes across as unpolished.

This is definitely one of the more interesting power bank deals we’ve posted on IGN. Right now Amazon is offering a Baseus 10,000mAh Power Bank with up to 22.5W of Power Delivery, a digital display, and not one, but TWO retractable charging cables for only $17.99 after clipping the 30% off coupon on the product page and applying 10% off coupon code: “SK888222“. That’s a great price for any old 10,000mAh power bank, but even better for one that has so many great features.

Baseus 10,000mAh USB Type-C Power Bank for $17.99

A 10,000mAh capacity power bank is the perfect compromise between battery capacity and size for the Nintendo Switch. This Baseus model measures only 4.5″ long, 2.8″ wide, and 0.8″ thick, smaller than many smartphones. The 10,000mAh capacity can charge Nintendo Switch over two times, an iPhone 15 Pro over three times, and a full-sized iPad Pro 12.9″ almost one full time. In addition, the USB Type-C port supports Power Delivery with up to 22.5W of power. That’s enough to fully max out the charging speed on a Nintendo Switch. There is also a display that tells you how much charge is remaining.

Perhaps the most unique feature of this power bank are the two retractable cables integrated into the power bank. One is a 22.5W USB Type-C cable and the other is a 20W Apple Lightning cable. That means that even if you don’t have any spare cables lying around, you’ll still be able to charge your Android smartphone, iPhone, or Nintendo Switch console. In addition to the retractable cables, there are two more ports: a USB Type-C port that serves as both input and output as well as a USB Type-A port.

The Baseus power bank comes with built-in safety protections you’d expect from a decent quality power bank (although it’s not UL or ETL certified to save on costs). Baseus might not be as well known as Anker, but their power banks thus far have been pretty reliable, and they’ve been racking up plenty of favorable reviews and recommendations.

For more options, check out our picks for the best power banks of 2024. If you’re looking for more Nintendo Switch accessories that might be on sales check out the best Nintendo Switch deals today.

Nintendo has teamed up with Uniqlo to release a clothing line based on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

As reported by VGC, the collection of six t-shirts is so far only announced for Japan but will be released on April 26, 2024 and cost ¥1,500 (around $10) each as part of Uniqlo’s UT brand.

“This is an original collection only available at UT which expresses the [Tears of the Kingdom’s] magnificent world view, unique characters, and memorable scenes and lines as t-shirts and incorporates them into the design.”

One black t-shirt has silhouettes of Link and Zelda with the phrase “please lend him your power” between them, and the Tears of the Kingdom key art on the back. Another one, this time tan, features koroks hiding behind the pocket, and one sneaking away on the back too.

Tears of the Kingdom was one of the biggest games of 2023, both critically and commercially, as Nintendo announced the Breath of the Wild sequel sold 10 million copies within three days.

In our 10/10 review, IGN said: “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an unfathomable follow-up, expanding a world that already felt full beyond expectation and raising the bar ever higher into the clouds.”

And for help with everything Tears of the Kingdom, take a look at our Tears of the Kingdom Walkthrough and Guide about making your way through Hyrule.

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

When Homeworld 3 was first announced, I kept hoping for a VR mode announcement that never came. Wouldn’t it be great to see all of the iconic ships flying around, dogfighting and exploding all around your head? It’s a no-brainer! It turns out that the lack of VR support wasn’t because Homeworld 3’s developers at Blackbird didn’t see the potential; it was because there was another studio, FarBridge, working on a parallel Homeworld game that’s built for VR – specifically the Meta Quest 2 and 3 – from the ground up. It’s called Homeworld: Vast Reaches (see what they did there?) and, as coincidence would have it, after Homeworld 3’s delay to this coming May, both will launch very close together.

When I first put on the headset, the look and feel was immediately very, very Homeworld. It’s not quite up to the fidelity of Homeworld 3, naturally, but it’s a good representation of how these memorable ships were originally designed, and it’s a trip to have the old-school animatic cutscenes fill my entire field of view. The cherry on top, of course, is new music by Paul Ruskay, the composer of Homeworld 1, 2, Deserts of Kharak, and the upcoming Homeworld 3. So it’s certainly got authenticity on its side.

The 11-mission, single-player-only story campaign of Homeworld VR is set between the events of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 (as opposed to the further-future Homeworld 3) as Karen Sjet comes out of retirement to coach a new person learning to pilot the Mothership (you) and mop up the remnants of the Taiidan Empire. A new race shows up and, while initially promising to help the Hiigarans with new advanced tech, quickly turns on you. This sudden but inevitable betrayal comes in the middle of a training exercise where their ships were already conveniently labeled in red.

The controls certainly take a little getting used to (though I’m told they’re still being tuned) but things have been simplified a bit so it’s not hard to get up to speed if you’ve played a Homeworld game before. It’s certainly easier to judge distance and depth in VR, which is important in a game where ships can freely move up and down (to a point) in space, so there’s no need to manipulate the camera as much as in 2D to determine something’s location. The pointer-based controls are a little finicky when you’re trying to aim a resource harvester at a distant asteroid cluster when there’s anything else around it, unless you have a surgeon’s steady hand, but of course the obvious solution there is to pause the action with a tap of the Quest’s Y button, fly over to the asteroid, and issue commands up close before resuming time.

The radar and control group menus pop up on either side of your left wrist when you raise your arm and flip your hand to swap between them, which I quickly got the hang of for selecting and jumping to my ships (but I never did learn to stop trying to click on the Mothership to bring up a menu). The trickiest part to learn was the camera controls, which allow you to float or teleport through space once you figure out that moving up and down is controlled by which way you’re tilting the right controller as you move.

My early-game fleet was composed of the same Hiigaran scouts, fighters, bombers, corvettes, and resource harvesters that we played with in the original Homeworld. However, even more so than Homeworld 2 and 3, the way you interact with ships is control group-based, to the point where you can’t individually order a ship or even a squadron around – you have to build ships into one of the groups (during these early levels you’re limited to three, but that will expand as your tech upgrades) and give orders that apply to all the ships within it. There aren’t any pre-set formations, but you can literally pick up ships and place them in the formation you want within the group, or move them to a different group. There also aren’t any passive, neutral, or aggressive stances to tell the AI how you want the ships to behave in combat, but you can activate a boost to their firepower for a short time.

It may be simplified, but combat uses the same rock-paper-scissors style balancing we’re used to, where fighters kill bombers, bombers kill bigger ships, and bigger ships kill fighters. These early missions were mostly about defending the Mothership from waves of attackers while harvesting all of the available resources nearby before jumping away, which is very familiar for this series. Since this is the original Mothership it’s unarmed and stationary, but I noticed that here you don’t really interact with it much. Because ships are built directly into the control groups they don’t fly out of the hangar, and repairs are done with a support ship rather than by docking. But as ever, it’s there to serve as your avatar on the map, and it must be protected at all costs.

Homeworld VR’s weirdest trick, though, is the option on the Quest 3 to play in augmented reality mode. When you flip on this option in the menu, the backdrop of space is replaced by the real world around you, and your ships are just flying around the room. It’s bizarre, especially if there are other people nearby, and it can be a little difficult to spot ships in a cluttered area, but I was surprised at how quickly I got used to it and was back to playing as normal. I could see myself playing this way if my kids or cats were in the room and I wanted to be able to keep an eye on them without leaving my game, but all things considered I expect I’ll prefer to experience the full immersion in the Homeworld universe when Homeworld VR launches on Quest “soon.”

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Season 3 kicks off today, April 3, and Activision has released patch notes revealing what to expect.

The patch notes, by developers Sledgehammer Games and Treyarch, include detail on the six new 6v6 multiplayer maps for Modern Warfare 3. Three of these maps are brand-new locales and layouts, while the other three are fresh yet familiar experiences. The Emergency 24/7 Playlist launches with the start of the season.

New modes include Capture the Flag and One in the Chamber, while the battle pass unlocks four base weapons, including the MORS sniper rifle and BAL-27 assault rifle from 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. There are eight new aftermarket parts, two new equipment items, new perks, new operators, and new events with limited-time rewards.

Diablo 4 players impatiently waiting to try Season 4 can now do so thanks to Blizzard releasing the game’s first Public Test Realm (PTR).

Blizzard initially announced the PTR in late March, revealing that it would run for a limited time, starting on Tuesday, April 2, and concluding on Tuesday, April 9. However, a week-long PTR is not the only thing limiting this PTR, as Blizzard already confirmed in the same announcement that it would only be available to players with a PC Battle.net account.

Nevertheless, if you are eligible for the PTR, you will gain access to test updates and features before Season 4 officially launches. Alongside allowing certain players itching to try the new season, this PTR will also allow the development team some time to consider and implement any player feedback gained from this testing period, allowing them to incorporate it into the forthcoming season.

The release of the PTR was part of a bigger announcement from Blizzard, revealing that the team had to delay Season 4. The season was originally supposed to launch on April 16, but during the most recent episode in the Campfire Chat series, Diablo Community Lead Adam Fletcher revealed that it had to delay the fourth season until May 14.

Diablo 4 is already being touted as the biggest post-launch update for the game yet. While Season 3 introduced some things, most notably Class Changes, Blizzard pledged that the next season will rework itemization, changing the entire framework of how loot impacts the overall gameplay experience.

For who recently jumped in thanks to Blizzard bringing its most recent project to both Xbox Game Pass for consoles and PC Game Pass, there are a few caveats: there is no Xbox achievement support, and if you are playing the PC Game Pass version, you need to install Battle.net.

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

Atari has bought the RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 publishing rights from Frontier Developments for $7 million.

Atari, which has a long-term RollerCoaster Tycoon licensing agreement with franchise creator Chris Sawyer, said it is now the sole publisher of all major titles within the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise, including Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe, Rollercoaster Tycoon Joyride, Rollercoaster Tycoon World, Rollercoaster Tycoon Puzzle, and Rollercoaster Tycoon Touch.

The hugely successful Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was developed by Frontier Developments, the UK studio behind Elite: Dangerous and Zoo Tycoon, and released in 2004. It’s available now on PC, Mac, iOS, and Nintendo Switch, but Atari said it plans to expand digital and physical distribution, and “explore brand and merchandising collaborations as part of a long-term plan to bring the franchise to new heights.”

“As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Rollercoaster Tycoon with Chris Sawyer, I am really pleased that we can unite this important and successful title in the series with the rest of the franchise,” said Wade Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Atari. ”This is going to create new opportunities for Atari as we continue the great work done by Frontier, and bring benefits to the fans of games across the Rollercoaster Tycoon franchise.”