Category: IGN

The future of the planet may lie with a fusion of technology and biology, and mechs may one day roam our mega-cities. If you want to explore themes like this and explore a third-person shooter from the late 90’s, you are in luck! You can embrace the past by grabbing a key for Slave Zero, which we are giving out as part of the IGN Plus promotion for the prequel; Slave Zero X.

IGN Plus Monthly Game: Slave Zero

The upcoming Slave Zero X is a prequel to the Sega Dreamcast and PC game, Slave Zero, which originally came out in 1999. While the original had the player flying through cities in full 3D, third-person action, the prequel occupies a 2D left-to-right plane with 3D backgrounds bending left and right. The original Slave Zero had the player occupying a massive mech roughly 10 stories tall.

Slave Zero X takes place decades before the events of the original, but developer Poppy Works opted to go for a completely different genre. Slave Zero X is a sidescrolling beat ’em up focused on combos that juggle enemies until they are just chunks. The brutal futuristic, trans-humanist biopunk game draws inspiration from Guilty Gear (Justice much?), Strider, and Devil May Cry, and if that doesn’t get you excited, perhaps my recommendation will. There is a free demo available now on Steam, and I had a blast playing through it, all the way up to S-ranking the boss fight that caps it off.

Slave Zero X Developer Interview – Francine Bridge (Art Director) & Miles Luna (Writer)

Francine Bridge is an excellent artist who draws very evocative pieces from all kinds of franchises, as well as original pieces (you can check out her fantastic art here on ArtStation). She did much of the worldbuilding for Slave Zero X in addition to creating art for it, pulling inspiration from a wide variety of sources (including Guilty Gear’s ‘Justice’ for the main character).

Miles Luna has a history in machinima and animation, working at Rooster Teeth on major shows like Red VS Blue, RWBY, and more. He co-created and played David in Camp Camp and now works in the games industry as a writer, creating at Bad Robot Games and writing the story and dialogue for Slave Zero X.

I hope you enjoy the games, and this excerpt from our interview. Cheers!

Francine Bridge: My name is Francine Bridge. I’m also known online as a WitnessTheAbsurd. That’s probably where most people might know me from, if anyone knows me. I didn’t have an enormous profile before the game happened. But right now people probably best know me as the art director of Slave Zero X. I work as a freelance illustrator, concept artist, character designer, etc. I’ve published a couple of art books. I’ve worked on a couple of odd little things. I generally do work for freelance clients, Slave Zero X was one of my first large, long term projects like this, where I was able to be in a senior role and oversee development from beginning to end. And that was really gratifying. I like to summarize my entire career as ‘satisfying my desire and my lifelong dream to paint monsters for money.’ So that’s kind of me.

Miles Luna: That’s amazing. That’s so hard to follow. My name is Miles Luna. Most people probably know me from my years working at RoosterTeeth. I worked on shows like Red VS Blue… was kind of where I got my start. And then worked with my friends Kerry and Monty on a show called Rwby, which is spelled in a very silly way… as well as other shows, like Camp Camp and things. I also do voice acting, directing, and then yeah, primarily writing. And then in 2020, I made the decision to leave that company. Really interesting time to make that choice, by the way. And I had always had a fascination and an adoration for video games. And I had a chance to work with RoosterTeeth’s game studio for a little bit and that really continued to pique that curiosity. This is too long of an answer. [laughs] Now I work in the games industry. I’ve done some indies such as Slave Zero X and Kill It With Fire 2.

Brian Barnett: Oh, the spider game!

Miles: Yeah, Casey Donnellan is a good friend of mine. I’ve also worked with Gearbox and I am currently a writer at BadRobot games.

Brian: What’s one thing about game development, publishing, or whatever, that you wish players knew?

Miles: Oh, wow, that’s such a good question. Because the answer is so so SO much. Man… There’s too much to say there, so I’ll try and just keep it confined to the narrative point of view. Narrative is so much more than dialogue. It’s so much more than the things characters say to one another. It is working with the design team and asking, ‘how can we tell stories or how can we convey emotions through gameplay… through feel?’ Working with level designers on ‘how can we create moments of claustrophobia or unease.’ Sometimes intensity is throwing a lot of enemies at a player at one time. Sometimes it’s getting rid of all the enemies and forcing the player to ask the question, ‘Wait, what’s going on here? This isn’t normal.’ I think, like Francine said, everybody touches everything in video games. It is constant, constant collaboration. Making sure that something that you’re working on isn’t going to break somebody else’s thing, that they’re working on. Because both of these things are equally important to the success of the game. So I guess that’d be one thing I wish people understood is… it’s not just [combat] barks, or dialogue, or characters. It’s everything. Everything touches everything.

Francine: I think if there was any one thing that I would want people to know, especially since this was my first time being in development from beginning to end… I think it’s easy for someone to say, ‘I wish people understood just how much work is involved in even the simplest stuff.’ That feels like the obvious one. Implementing something that seems incredibly intuitive and basic, like a lift/elevator goes up and down, or whatever… depending on what the engine you’re using, and how we’re building this, it can actually prove to be immensely difficult. And then you have to answer all these other questions, and so forth.

Imagine a stage with a beautiful colored painting, and characters that mechanically move in front of it. Then behind the stage, there isn’t just like an engine that’s moving the characters, there’s an engine that’s like several miles long in that direction, and a million other engines are working on that one. And it’s the most incredibly complicated machinery to show something that seems like it should be very simple and intuitive. I think the more people are capable of appreciating that… that doesn’t mean that people should excuse any given flaw that they find in a game, or something that they find dissatisfying… the audience has to be capable of critiquing and examining something, but I think it would do the current dialogue around game critique a great deal of service, if people were capable of understanding or made a greater attempt to understand the enormous effort that’s involved in stuff that seems really simple and intuitive.

That’s the obvious one. The slightly less obvious one is… people often find cut content and stuff like that after the fact. They come across something like ‘oh, there’s this whole other boss that we found in the files!’ FromSoftware often has this, where there’s this dissection of stuff. People don’t often understand how much of a game exists beforehand, and then gets whittled down to this really pure, essential core. You have to cut away so much chaff. You have to get something that’s efficient, you have to get something that satisfies your technical goals, your creative goals, your narrative goals… losing something is not always bad. Sometimes you lose whole chunks of stuff that you would have loved to have in there. But it serves the game and it makes it better. I think a shorter, more efficient, higher quality game really trumps something that is overflowing to the seams with every single idea, not implemented as well. I don’t know… these both seem like very obvious things to say that I wish people knew about game development. But I loved working on the game. I loved working with the team. I loved the camaraderie that we had. I love the common jokes and memories and working in games is something that’s really special. And I don’t think there’s anything that’s quite like it.

Miles: If there are any readers out there that want a peek at what the machinery behind that ‘beautiful painting’ Francine described is like, just from a graphical level; there’s a wonderful 16-minute video on YouTube called ‘The Strange Graphics Of Lethal Company’ by Acerola. Watch it on a lunch break, and it will break down just how complex just making the pictures on the screen is, for games. I also think it’s a genuinely fascinating video, and he’s a great YouTuber.

Brian: You two occupied two major roles in development. Why make Slave Zero X? And not only ‘what inspired the team to make this game’ but why make it a prequel to a game that came out on PC in 1999?

Francine: The main answer to ‘why Slave Zero X’ is because we were able to pitch it and it was actually picked up by Ziggurat, but I’d say the reason that Slave Zero attracted us, and I talked about this before in another interview, so I’m sorry if I’m running over familiar territory here, but Slave Zero was part of this first wave of response in the West to the first huge influx of Japanese pop culture, stuff like anime OVA’s by Kawajiri Yoshiaki, and the arrival of Akira and Eva and all these other things that came over and were suddenly like… I kind of think of it as an algal bloom, when you dump enormous amount of nutrients and stuff into the ocean, and suddenly, organisms proliferate at a massive rate. Everyone wanted to respond. And there was this huge outpouring of creative fervor designed to echo and build on and represent the influence that they were feeling from Japanese pop culture at the time… the first anime boom and stuff like that.

I think for a lot of us in development, we grew up either seeing the very tail end of that first explosion, or we grew up watching anime and stuff ourselves. So it’s been 20 years of time between those two things. And working on Slave Zero X was an opportunity to echo that same sort of response, to share what has been special to us about growing up being able to see all these weird old super bloody 90s OVAs, and this particular flavor of really grimy, fascinating, weird, sometimes surreal cyberpunk that you get out of Japanese media, tokusatsu, all that stuff.

It was an opportunity for us to extend that conversation. To say ‘hey, 20 years on, here’s another part of that ongoing conversation between Western creators and Japanese creators.’ We’re doing the same kind of things, we’re drawing from the same influences, but we’re adding more stuff that has come over, even more niche influences. I had an opportunity to talk recently with Ken Capelli, who was the art director on the original Slave Zero. And I was really fascinated to learn that both of us were directly inspired by a garage kit, a specific garage kit, a model they made by a designer from Japan named Yasushi Nirasawa. There’s a particular kit he made, ‘Phancure’ (short for Phantom Core)… this huge, hulking, bio-mutant type of whatever with this massive upper torso and long arms with talons on the end. And you can see the ghost of Slave Zero (the original design) in there. And I spent ages thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if that inspired this.’

Then I had the opportunity to talk to Ken, and he started independently saying, ‘and you know, we were really inspired by this one kit called Phancure made by the designer…’ and both of us said at the same time; ‘Yasushi Nirasawa!’ And we were laughing and talking, and I was thinking, ‘This is a big part of what it’s about.’ It feels like we’re almost able to connect with that original moment. Because so much of what is special about that moment that raw, sudden interaction that ‘we’ve never seen something like this before…’ being able to respond to it and carry that enthusiasm forth. This is a very long, rambling, kind of abstract answer, I guess. But I think Slave Zero X is an outpouring of enthusiasm for the same kind of things that created Slave Zero. And it makes a great point for us to jump off and explore that particular kind of childlike wonder, seeing stuff like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust…

Brian: I literally almost mentioned Vampire Hunter D, or Hellsing, or something like that, yeah.

Francine: Yeah! Later stuff that they wouldn’t have seen, but which I grew up with that’s from the same stable, like Takeshi Koyike made the movie Red Line.

Miles: One of the best, one of the BEST!

Brian: I’ve gotta get a running list of all this stuff I gotta check out.

Francine: That and so many other different things… manga and anime… Japanese artists have had a colossal influence on me. They weren’t the only ones who went into it. There was stuff there from other artists like Wayne Barlow, and even like a little bit of Mike Mignola, and stuff like that. But I think for us, it was, ‘hey, remember how cool it was when you saw EVA for the first time when you were a kid? And how brain-melting this experience was?’ It was about recapturing that moment, in part.

Miles: By the time I came on board, Francine and the team… they’d already had a lot of these conversations. And it was very apparent in the pitch that was made to me… I was given kind of a briefing of what the story was kind of going to be like, what the gameplay was going to be like, as well as some in-progress clips of the game in action, as well as a bunch of stills and concept art. Selfishly, I came on board this game because it looked tasty, man. It was this hyper-violent, melodramatic revenge tale in a biopunk setting. These are just words that got me so excited as someone who’s done a lot of comedy and young adult action/comedy, but who has like a love for things like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. And when I was told, ‘Hey, that’s a huge influence for this game,’ as well as Vampire Hunter D, Kamen Rider, all of this stuff… Things that I really, really enjoy and admire, and the opportunity to be a part of something like that was… I couldn’t say no. I saw what this game looked like, and it was like nothing I’d ever really seen before. And I was hooked. I just I couldn’t refuse after I saw it and heard about it. I was just excited to get in there and play.

Brian: Konami is not doing anything with Raiden right now. So Slave Zero X looks like ‘we have Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance at home,’ but in a good way. It looks I could go into a mall and find an old Alladin’s Castle that hadn’t closed yet and there was an arcade cabinet in the back corner that had this running on it or something.

Miles: Yeah, if Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is your ‘modern day, mass media Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ which is great… Slave Zero X is ‘the original two dudes, inking TMNT comics in their spare room’ version of it. It’s like the grunge, zine version of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Brian: And they’re murdering everyone.

Francine: They all have the angry scowl on their face, and the same red bandana, and everyone’s getting murdered and there’s a lot more Casey Jones doing weird sh** and stuff like that.

Brian Barnett: I have a bonus question that I ask people that I talk to. What’s one game you have played lately that really captured you?

Miles Luna: Knuckle Sandwich. I don’t know if any of you guys heard of Knuckle Sandwich. It came out last year, a year of so many great games, so I kind of understand why it flew under the radar. But oh my god, that game has a free demo. It’s like two hours long. That kind of sets up the story. That is so laugh out loud funny. I would describe it as Earthbound and Undertale. But the turn-based combat is settled through WarioWare minigames. The writing is phenomenal. The animation is fantastic. The music slaps. Please, please, please go play Knuckle Sandwich. I can’t shout it out enough.

Francine Bridge: I am very glad that I have an answer for this because I’ve actually had very little time to play video games over the last year. As it turns out, when you’re making video games, you suddenly get the play way less video games. But I want to shout out Angel At Dusk, which is available on Steam. It’s published by Henteko Doujin. And it’s by a developer… a single guy named Akiragoya, who’s done a lot of shmups, like bullet-hell style games, like Tohou. But this game was sent to me a bunch by friends who were all collectively saying ‘this looks like something you designed! Did you work on this? Did this guy steal your brain?’ Etc., although he’s been doing this a lot longer than I have.

And it is a shmup game in which you play as an angel, millions of years in the future, murdering millions of other angels, and all the angels look like they are made out of like a million human body parts, taken apart and put back together in weird ways. And the storyline is about the value of sentience versus non-sentience and the nature of time as an observable concept, and whether an observation of time makes the universe exist, and two factions of angels fighting it out to decide whether everyone should just let the sun consume them or whether they should leave the planet. It’s a real mess, but I’ve been kind of obsessed with it. And I’ve never played shmups before, they’re normally very brutally difficult. And this one is much more parseable and has a huge number of weird bio-ships and stuff to play as, so I highly recommend Angel at Dusk.

Miles: Listening to that description was like listening to the tastiest jazz solo. That was just like ‘Yes, say more, say more!’

Brian: This is like the Evangelion movie, but a conversation.

What Is IGN Plus?

IGN Plus is IGN’s membership program for IGN fans and gamers. You can try it for just $1 for 30 days to see if it’s for you. As an IGN Plus member you get:

• No third party ads across all of IGN
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• Access to free game codes and DLC each month (Recent titles include: American Hero, Enclave HD, Antonball Deluxe, KarmaZoo, & more)
• Grants 15% off most items at the IGN Store
• Huge giveaways (Tekken 8 figures, custom Steam Decks, etc.)
• And much more!

Brian Barnett writes reviews, guides, features, & more for IGN & GameSpot. You can get your fix of his antics on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Bluesky, & Backloggd, & check out his fantastic video game talk show, The Platformers, on Backloggd & Apple Podcasts.

If you’re a Baldur’s Gate 3 modder who’s been frustrated with having to uninstall, reinstall, update, and re-juggle your mods every time a new patch is released, fear not: it sounds like developer Larian Studios has your back, and official mod support is on its way.

We generally don’t talk about things til they’re ready, but as you may have read, we’re making an exception. We’ve been working on a robust, cross-platform plan for mod support to be released later in year. We love our modding community and we want to support them. It’s coming. https://t.co/54GsxNshlQ

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) February 22, 2024

A tweet from Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse acknowledges that patches such as the most recent Hotfix #19 frequently break installed mods and force users to wait for updates, uninstall, or otherwise play without desired mods for a time in order to run the most recent version of the game. However, he adds that the team has “been working on a robust, cross-platform plan for mod support to be released later in year.”

“We have a system but it needs to be tested and still requires work,” reads a follow-up tweet. “We’re excited about it. I understand that it suck’s when the game is updated and mods break. Our community teams will start talking with and looping in modding community. For now, work continues :)”

More information was provided in a post from Larian senior community strategist WombatMedic on Discord. In a lengthy post, Wombat similarly acknowledged the player experience of patches being incompatible with popular mods, and spoke further on the company’s plans to move toward official support in the future:

We are working on official mod support, and have been for a while. We want the very best for you, which includes establishing a pipeline that lets mod authors release their mods across different platforms. Together with the platform holders, we are working on making this a reality, and are forming a team to support mod curation. We’re aiming to offer modding support for things like classes, UI, customisation, spells, and certain assets and game mechanics. As this is no small task, we hope to introduce the initial stages of modding support in our next big patch, which is still several months away. Frustrated as you might be now, we’re keen to work with you on this – and have plans to reach out to popular mod authors to talk further and work together to avoid issues in the future.

Despite the current lack of official support, Baldur’s Gate 3 players are using mods for all kinds of things, such as adding new spells, character races and backgrounds, UI adjustments, carrying more items, new character customization features, control and camera tweaks, removing the party size limit, giving Astarion a gun, and tons of other things. It’s good news that Larian is actively working on ensuring all those mods and more will be compatible with future updates, especially given a long Larian community history of actively and ambitiously modding its past games, like Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2. And the possibility of console support in particular is an incredible touch.

We at IGN love Baldur’s Gate 3 with or without mods, giving it a coveted 10/10 at launch for its “crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Last Epoch developer Eleventh Hour Games is giving players an in-game gift while it continues to address the online connectivity issues that have kept many from enjoying the experience.

Last Epoch brought its full hack-and-slash, action RPG gameplay to PC yesterday, February 21, after cooking in Early Access for nearly five years. Not everyone is having fun with the release of 1.0, however, as many who try to jump in online are finding that they are unable to connect. The gift they are receiving in return is The Autumnal Wrap back-slot item, which offers game owners an orange, leafy cape to wear.

“Thank you once again to those who continue to support us, sending us your positive messages, and continuing to spread that positivity while we continue the work on getting more servers up and running,” the Last Epoch team said in a Steam post.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has announced the ‘Pokémon with guns’ crafting and survival game has seen over 25 million players since going on sale last month.

Pocketpair said the Steam version has sold an incredible 15 million copies, whereas on Xbox it’s seen 10 million players.

There’s one good reason why the Steam version is perhaps more popular than the Xbox version: Palworld on Xbox doesn’t have dedicated servers. On Steam, Palworld players can create and join dedicated servers that enable up to 32 players to play in the same world and create guilds together. But on Xbox and Windows PC (so, everyone playing on Game Pass), Palworld players cannot create or join dedicated servers, which means online co-op is limited to two to four players. Crossplay between Xbox and Steam is currently unavailable.

Pocketpair has said it’s working to achieve parity across the Xbox and Steam versions, and indeed Microsoft is working closely with Pocketpair to enable faster updates.

Palworld’s explosive launch, which saw it break a number of Steam concurrent players records, has cooled somewhat. Last week, Pocketpair commented on the debate around the declining number of players, calling the discourse “lazy”. While the concurrent player count on Steam has fallen steadily since the peak, it’s worth pointing out Palworld remains one of the most-played games on Valve’s platform.

Last month, Pocketpair said Palworld will get PvP, raid bosses, and new islands in future updates, but it has targeted critical issues first. Crossplay between Steam and Xbox is also in the works (presumably this will up the co-op player count on Xbox at the same time), as well as improvements to the building system.

While Palworld is one of the biggest game launches ever, it’s also one of the most controversial. Pocketpair has said its staff have received death threats amid Pokémon “rip-off” claims, which it has denied. Soon after launch, Nintendo moved quickly to remove an eye-catching Pokémon mod, then The Pokemon Company issued a statement, saying: “We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to Pokémon.” IGN asked lawyers whether Nintendo could successfully sue.

If you’re playing, be sure to check out IGN’s interactive Palworld map.

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.

If Elden Ring and Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyzaki had to put a name to the genre of games FromSoftware has become synonymous with over the past decade-plus years, it’d be “Souls-ish.” But even then, he would much prefer to call them “those dark fantasy third-person action games with a higher focus on melee combat and sense of accomplishment.” That’s not quite as catchy as ‘Soulslike’, but it does capture the renowned creator’s specificity. And we got even more of that specificity in our recent interview with Miyazaki ahead of the premiere of the long-awaited trailer for the first Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree.

Along with answering all the questions IGN had about the trailer, Miyazaki looked back on the past two years since the release of Elden Ring, a defining achievement for FromSoftware given its tremendous critical and commercial success.

It’d be an understatement to say that the hype around Elden Ring prior to its launch was bigger than any FromSoftware game before it, with fans even creating their own lore for the game in between official news and trailer drops. When Elden Ring finally launched, fans were treated to something truly spectacular: a masterful, open-world version of the famed Soulslike formula FromSoft popularized, complete with beautiful, hidden narratives, intricate world and dungeon designs, and of course, incredibly challenging fights.

When asked if there was any concern within the studio about creating an open world RPG without helpful tools like quest markers which in turn might turn off the format’s traditional fans, Miyazaki admitted there was some hesitation. But ultimately it goes back to something Miyazaki has in both the players and his team: trust.

“It would be a lie to say there was no concern about that from any of the dev team,” Miyazaki says. “But what I want to stress is that we didn’t set out with the goal to make an open world game in the traditional sense.” Instead, the director says his approach to open world design is similar to his philosophy on difficulty: “We don’t set out to create a difficult game. We set out to create a challenging game. And in order to achieve that, we need there to be threats and dangers, and we need there to be unknowns.”

For Elden Ring, there needed to be another thing: adventure. A feeling of exploration which he says was the top priority “above everything else.”

“We need this breadth of freedom — this high degree of freedom in how you approach this adventure,” he explains. “And in order to have adventure, in order to have discoveries, again, you need to have some unknowns. And for it to be a discovery, it needs to feel like it’s an unknown, feel like it’s there to be discovered.”

Ultimately, while this philosophy is what guided the team in making Elden Ring an open-ended RPG, the follow-through was a result of having trust in the players. The same players who’ve played games like Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. “Our main idea is just to trust players,” says Miyazaki. “We trust that they’ll overcome these challenges and we trust that they’ll make these discoveries. And I think giving them trust just creates a healthy landscape for them to play and adventure.”

Miyazaki might be thinking a lot about trust these days. Since 2009, he has served as director on all but one Soulslike game. That was 2014’s Dark Souls 2, on which the director’s seat was given to Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura while Miyazaki somewhat sat back as Supervisor.

Incidentally, Dark Souls 2 probably bears the Souls series’ closest resemblance to Elden Ring. Design wise, both Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring stressed open-ended gameplay and ditched linear progression. Miyazaki agrees and in fact goes a step further. “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.”

Miyazaki adds that having different directors also helped the series as a whole. “We were able to have that different impetus and have those different ideas and make those different connections that we otherwise might not have had.” He goes so far as to say that “there’s really no way of telling how or if the series would have continued the way it did without Dark Souls 2.”

With several more games released by FromSoftware since Dark Souls 2, Miyazaki now seems more comfortable entrusting future games to other directors, saying there “is a high possibility that we would delegate responsibility of director to those other Souls-ish games going forward.” It’s an idea he doubles-down on: “Yes, I think it’s very likely that we’ll see new directors going forward. And I think if we do that, I’d like to step away from that supervisory role and give them full direction and full control over those projects. I think really this is the best way and the easiest way for them to flourish within that environment and with those new projects.”

While Miyazaki doesn’t elaborate too much, he tells IGN that how he managed the role of Supervisor during work on Dark Souls 2 is “one little area of regret” for him. Personally, he enjoys “a lot of projects where I am director, so I think a supervisor role for me is just something I’m not used to and just is maybe not quite a good fit.”

It helps that FromSoftware is a team that seemingly all pull in the same direction, and understand, together, what makes a great FromSoft game. Miyazaki alluded to this when asked how the studio is able to release massive AAA games in such a timely manner, whereas development time for similarly sized games elsewhere seem to stretch over several more years.

“I don’t know if it’s some great secret… but generally we are just blessed with a great staff who love to create these games and who are, I think you could say, efficient at creating games,” he says.

“I think one area is we’re able to understand quickly what we want to make and [are] able to make these decisions early on in development,” he adds. “We’re able to iterate and we’re able to leave things on the chopping board. We’re able to go ahead with ideas and a quick pace. We’re able to quickly change and quickly decide on the kind of game we want to make.” See? Trust.

As for the future, not much is written in stone aside from the upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree. Armored Core 6 was released last year and revived FromSoftware’s other pillar franchise. While Miyazaki says the studio has “no definite plans going forward… I think AC 6 was a success in the sense that it showed that there is still a place for Armored Core, at least for us.”

And what about the much asked about Bloodborne sequel? “Unfortunately, and I’ve said this in other interviews, it’s not in my place to talk about Bloodborne specifically. We simply don’t own the IP at FromSoftware. For me personally, it was a great project, and I have a lot of great memories for that game, but we’re not at liberty to speak to it. I’m very sorry about that.”

For now, fans will have to look forward to Shadow of the Erdtree, which finally arrives this summer after a two-year wait. If you’re so inclined, you can start a new game of Elden Ring to prepare yourself, though we asked Miyazaki if there were any remaining mysteries left for players to find in the current version of The Lands Between. While Miyazaki says he doesn’t think there’s anything that hasn’t been discovered by now, highlighting how he and the devs “are always surprised and delighted by how much the players do discover, and how much these communities work to uncover these secrets,” there might be one small thing he hasn’t seen yet.

“For me personally, there is a small element that I feel has not yet been discovered. So, whether that’s up to user interpretation or up to just further investigation and playing, that’s something I’m looking forward to.” But he adds, “I think it’s a question of when and not if, but there may be something small still missing.”

Of course, Miyazaki will trust you to figure out what that means.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Additional reporting by Mitchell Saltzman

While we have to wait until May for a full reveal of College Football 25, EA Sports shared some new details, including how much players will get compensated, what will and won’t be included in the game, and more.

In an article by ESPN, EA Sports revealed how much it will pay players opting to use their name, image, and likeness (NIL) in College Football 25. The article notes that over 11,000 college football players can opt-in to be featured in College Football 25.

Players who opt into College Football 25 will receive $600 and a copy of the game. The game itself is valued at $70, according to ESPN. ESPN further notes that student-athletes will remain in the game for all their collegiate football careers but can opt out of future installments.

Yet, the $600 and a copy of the game is not the only form of compensation players will receive; should a player remain in the game for multiple years, they will be compensated annually, even if they transfer with the only requirement for transfer students be that they remain on a roster for that school’s football program.

EA Sports VP of business development Sean O’Brien told ESPN that the studio looked at deals they completed for other sports video games, such as the Madden NFL series, and that the deal made for the college football series “comes with no expected services by the athlete and will be guaranteed no matter the game’s success.”

In a separate article, EA Sports confirmed to ESPN several things that will and will not be included in College Football 25. Reiterating once again, Dynasty Mode and Road to Glory will return in the next college football game. In addition to returning game modes, College Football 25 will run on the same engine as Madden (currently, the Madden series runs on the Frostbite engine), include every bowl game, and incorporate a 12-team College Football playoff system. NIL, the transfer portal, and some of the newer inclusions in collegiate sports will also be featured, though EA Sports did not go into detail as to how both will be implemented.

Although all 134 FBS schools have agreed to participate in College Football 25, with up to 85 players on each team, EA Sports revealed that real-life coaches, such as University of Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, won’t be featured. However, O’Brien did not rule out the inclusion of coaches in the future and said that EA Sports is exploring ways to “offer coaches the opportunity to opt in beyond Year 1.”

EA Sports College Football will get a full reveal sometime in May, with a release window set for this summer.

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

Helldivers 2’s latest patch has caused a “nasty” PlayStation 5 login bug that’s currently preventing people from playing the game.

Helldivers 2 patch 1.000.11 launched across PS5 and Steam today, February 22, and promised to kick AFK players and fix the defrosting bug.

But it appears to have caused a PS5 specific issue that is now making Helldivers 2 unplayable on Sony’s console. IGN has received multiple reports from players unable to login, and have verified the dreaded “servers at capacity” message is present on PS5.

Elden Ring sales have grown to hit 23 million, publisher Bandai Namco has announced.

As part of the reveal of the hotly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, due out this June, Bandai Namco issued a sales update for the base game, which, last we heard, had sold 20 million a year after launch.

This new 23 million sold figure is made up of shipped copies of the physical version as well as download sales, including those on Steam. So it provides a solid picture of Elden Ring’s breakout success. To put that into context, Hogwarts Legacy, 2023’s best-selling video game, has sold 24 million copies, generating well over $1 billion in sales.

Elden Ring is easily FromSoftware’s most successful game, with critical acclaim to go alongside its enormous sales success. It outsold each of the Dark Souls games, Demon’s Souls, Sekiro, as well as Bloodborne (don’t mention a remake!).

Will FromSoftware release Elden Ring 2 or more DLC for Elden Ring following the release of the Shadow of the Erdtree? In an exclusive interview with IGN, chief developer Hidetaka Miyazaki said both are possible, although he stopped short of making an announcement.

Earlier this month, a Genshin Impact-inspired Elden Ring mobile game was reported to be in development, but progress was described as “slow”.

The base version of Elden Ring returned a 10/10 in IGN’s review. “Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path,” we said.

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.

“Most companies die with a bad launch, this one actually came out stronger.”

That’s a line from New York University’s Stern School of Business professor Joost van Dreunen, quoted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. He was describing the transformation undergone by developer CD Projekt Red from the rocky launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 to the triumphant release of major DLC Phantom Liberty late last year. And it was with understandable pride that Phantom Liberty game director Gabe Amatangelo opened his talk at the 2024 DICE Summit, quoting that exact line.

Amatangelo went on to describe to DICE attendees just how CD Projekt had accomplished such a monumental task, focusing on the most difficult part: rallying a discouraged and frustrated team around a belief that such a thing could be done. When Cyberpunk 2077 launched, he said, it seemed everyone around them knew that something had gone wrong at his company. The woman who worked at the local coffee shop. His landlord. Everyone. The perceived failure was almost inescapable.

That left Amatangelo with the critical job of rebuilding internal morale. He led by focusing on positives, encouraging the team to celebrate the elements of the launch that had gone well. He worked to build trust, so that developers who needed help felt they could ask for it. And he worked with the team to come up with a handful of key drivers that would enable the production of the DLC to be a success. These included distributing ownership over decision-making and other checks so that the game director role wouldn’t be a bottleneck on production, integrating and empowering QA closely with the rest of the team even in early development, and just…setting aside time for developers to actually play the game. A lot.

To the Stars

After Amatangelo’s talk, I spoke with him about how the team is carrying these lessons forward into its next Cyberpunk project, currently dubbed Project Orion. In addition to what he shared in his DICE talk, Amatangelo expanded on a number of learnings he’s carrying forward into the new game. He emphasizes the importance of contingency planning and the need to share backup plans both up and down the chain of command – and to have multiple backup plans, just in case. He tells me about the importance of putting oneself in the player’s shoes when establishing a new story or world, and imagining what they might hope to see or do in that space so that you don’t let them down.

And he reiterates the importance of making sure studio environments are environments of trust. “One technique, and a lot of the guys and gals that work for me know that whenever I put an idea forward, because of my position, sometimes people might not want to challenge it. So if I see that vibe, I’ll then just play devil’s advocate and I’ll start to break apart my idea. Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘Wait, so do you want to do this or not want to do this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m not sure. Let’s talk about it.’ We established a good chemistry and trust in my circle, my direct report circle, and I think that was replicated a lot as well.”

I was especially curious about Amatangelo’s plans in light of the announcement that he’s heading up a new CD Projekt studio in Boston. Announced earlier this year, the Boston studio is CD Projekt’s first studio in the United States, and will primarily be focused on Project Orion.

I ask Amatangelo what it’s like starting a new studio at such a challenging time for the industry as a whole. Amatangelo isn’t responsible for the cuts last summer to 10% of CD Projekt Group’s workforce based largely in Poland, but he does now find himself in the position of trying to build up a new studio in North America at a time when a lot of developers are looking for work. Over 10,000 developers worldwide lost their jobs last year, and roughly 6000 have been impacted thus far in 2024. Amatangelo calls it “one of the most difficult things going on right now,” but he’s hopeful the industry will bounce back… and maybe learn some important lessons about planning in the process.

“I think maybe there’ll be a maturing of structuring of certain facilities and aspects,” he says. “We’re seeing that with the rumors around consoles and stuff. I think we’re trying to figure out how to restructure things in a meta sense a little bit. But the bottom line is that the bottom line isn’t going away. That’s not decreasing. More people are interested in being immersed and taking a breather from day to day, so to speak, and having an opportunity to expand their minds or blow off some steam, stuff like that. It’s not going away. So I think it’ll sort itself out, but, obviously, some turbulent times.”

Speaking of maturing and restructuring, I ask Amatangelo specifically how, as studio head, he plans to work to mitigate crunch at the new studio he’s leading, especially given the company’s history with the practice.

“Similar to the techniques used throughout Phantom Liberty, you plan as best you can,” he said. “It’s all about getting ahead of seeing what might come up in the future and scoping accordingly, resourcing accordingly, and also being flexible. If you put in some extra hours this week, take some hours off next week. Because, admittedly, even at a certain point, there was where [responsibility] landed on me and I was like a bottleneck, and I’m like, ‘All right, I’m going to have to do some double time this week. Otherwise, too many people are pulled out, and then next week I’m taking some time off.’ You do the best you can to mitigate that, but as long as there’s that kind of climate and understanding of helping each other. Then when I took some time off, some of my reports rise to the occasion and fill in the gaps while I’m out, and you just do that at all levels.”

The Fun Phase

That’s how Amatangelo is thinking about it now in the early stages of the studio. The real test, the months leading up to launch, is still several years off. Project Orion is still in its early stages. Amatangelo points out that there really aren’t clear lines determining when a game enters different phases of production, but Project Orion is currently in what he calls the “fun phase” of game development.

“In the perfect world, when you’re making a game, it’s all ideation and concepts and putting stuff in concept art and then moving to the next stage once you’re feeling solid about your ideas or maybe your story outline, and then you start prototyping things,” he says. “We’re in that stage, but it’s kind of blurred, like prototyping some things as well as concepting some stuff and working on the story. So, yeah, we got some prototypes going on. We’ve got some exploration, some pipeline setup, some story ideas being thrown at the wall, back and forth, concept art, that kind of phase, the fun phase.”

Amatangelo isn’t sharing much more about what Project Orion is at for now. I did ask him if game console tech is where he wants it to be to meet his ambitions for the game, especially given recent online discussions about new generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles. And sure, Amatangelo wishes tech was further along… but he admits he might always be wishing for that. “I wish there were Holodecks, you know what I mean?”

One relevant example is AI, which Amatangelo himself brought up to me when he asked if I had stayed to listen to a later DICE talk between Xbox’s Haiyan Zhang and the ESA’s Stanley Pierre-Louis on video games and AI. Amatangelo tells me he himself had been listening to an AI expert talk about large language models and generative AI recently, when they expressed how it would always be “unknowable” how these models arrive at their conclusions. While their comment was intended to be a positive one, Amatangelo says he finds that idea terrifying. He’d rather keep AI busy with menial tasks rather than content creation.

“My gut tells me that AI for pipelines, for tools for helping with, let’s call it, the busy work that no one really likes to do a lot of times, I think there’s a lot of promising stuff on that front,” he says. “It allows developers to have more satisfying jobs overall because they could spend more time on the creative elements. So that’s my optimistic take with AI and stuff like that.”

But as the game director of the next Cyberpunk, he admits the worst case scenarios, even if they terrify him, are useful fodder for storytelling at least. “On the other end, I got science fiction,” he says.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.