Category: IGN

Blizzard is preparing to add a new feature to World of Warcraft that might sound strange at first: an option to have the game tell you what spell you should optimally cast next in combat, with an additional option to simply let the game cast the ideal next spell for you.

Today, in a lengthy video interview between game director Ion Hazzikostas, Team Liquid raid leader Maximum, and content creator Dratnos, it was announced that the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 11.1.7 a new feature will be added called Rotation Assist. Rotation Assist, when turned on, will highlight in combat the recommended next ability for your character to use based on class, specialization, and the combat situation.

Additionally, the feature will come with an optional “one button” option that will allow a player to simply press one button to automatically cast whichever spell the game is recommending cast next. However, there’s a penalty for using the one-button option – it will add an additional small amount of time to the global cooldown, meaning players using the single button option will overall cast spells slower and deal less damage than someone playing manually.

In the video, Hazzikostas explains that the new feature is based on the popular add-on Hekili, which similarly recommends optional next spells to cast but does not provide a one-button rotation. As Hazzikostas explains:

“Add-ons are amazing. The things that the community has done over the last 20 years to allow people to experience different aesthetics, different functionality, have information available at their fingertips like that is a huge part of WoW’s success. And we don’t question or want to undermine that for a moment. At the same time, ideally…if you ask people you know, ‘hey, how can I get better? I’m really struggling at this.’ The first answer shouldn’t be, ‘Well download this add-on, this add-on, this add-on. Otherwise you’re doing it wrong.’ Because that’s starting to get into that mandatory place, whether we like it or not.”

Hazzikostas goes on to explain that long-term, Blizzard is thinking more deeply about the role of add-ons in World of Warcraft and how for players wanting to participate in competitive content, many of them have essentially become mandatory. The team, he says, wants to move away from that philosophy, and is thinking down the line about improvements that can be made to World of Warcraft’s class design, boss encounter design, and UI that will ensure the functions players feel are necessary from add-ons are built-in natively.

And though Hazzikostas says they’re never going to simply ban add-ons outright, once the team feels their objectives around reducing the necessity of add-ons are accomplished, he wants to “rein in” some of the functionality of add-ons around “real time in combat problem solving, specifically where like automating, coordination, communication, in ways that are always going to be better than anything the UI could natively provide you, as long as they remain possible.”

If you’re not sure what Hazzikostas is talking about, these changes likely won’t impact you. But as he, Maximum, and Dratnos discuss in the video, high-level raiders have frequently felt the need to rely on add-ons such as WeakAuras that allow players to essentially build custom tools to solve difficult raid encounters in real-time, such as telling them where exactly to stand or assigning them groups on the fly. And while this might feel like cheating if you’ve never experienced it firsthand, Hazzikostas is candid in the video that some of the team’s raid encounter design decisions may have pushed players in that direction by being a bit too difficult to figure out sans add-ons. “The way we design encounters has been influenced in significant ways, by the way players use add-ons,” he says. “I know you know the community sometimes speculates that [certain encounters were] built clearly to require an add on. I can’t say that’s never the case.”

Hazzikostas goes on to explain that while encounter designers are never specifically designing mechanics with the intent for players to create add-ons to solve them, when players inevitably do so in testing, they have historically seen feedback from playtesters using add-ons complaining that the fight was too easy. But instead of redesigning the encounter to make the add-ons unusable and reinstate the intended difficulty, they have simply added more mechanics. “I think that’s not a great place for things to land,” he says.

You can watch the full 45-minute video here, but we also spoke directly to Hazzikostas to ask him questions about both the upcoming new Rotation Helper feature and the developers’ intentions for future add-on restrictions and interactions. Our full interview is posted below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

IGN: I think you talked around this a little bit in the video. But is it your opinion that it’s essentially become mandatory to have add-ons to play WoW at anything above a basic questing level at this stage?

Ion Hazzikostas: I don’t know that I would go that far, but certainly it’s been something that’s been part of community trends over time, where players are clever. When you give them a very versatile toolbox, they will make more and more clever and more and more powerful things. And when it gets to competitive content, trying to defeat challenging raid bosses, trying to clear the highest Mythic+ keys that you can or PvP at a competitive level, every advantage helps. And while certainly people can and do play the game without using add-ons and succeed, I think most players at a high level, including Max[imum] and Dratnos, and I was talking to them in this , agree that you are at a disadvantage if you’re not using some of these tools.

And in social content, if you’re in a raid group, if you’re part of a group that’s running Mythic+, there’s an expectation that it doesn’t matter how you personally want to play. If everyone requires that you use this tool, then you feel like you have to. And on the one hand, while the legacy of add-ons over the course of 20 years of World of Warcraft is an amazing part of how the game has grown and evolved, I think looking at a world where someone is told that they need to use an external third-party tool if they want to play the game the way that they prefer, that’s not healthy, we think.

And so, that’s the question of, how do we tackle that really has begun with us trying to look at building up the native functionality of the game’s UI, of the game’s systems, of how we’re presenting information, not just through the user interface, but also things like visual effects and how we’re telegraphing the clarity of different boss mechanics or class mechanics or the like.

I know this is something you’ve probably thought about for a very long time, but was there any moment or any particular raid boss or something that made you go, “Okay, we actually need to address this.”?

Hazzikostas: Honestly, I don’t know that I can pick out a single thing. I mean, I think there have definitely been occasions over the years. This is not the first time that the World of Warcraft team has waded into this space. I mean, even before I worked on the team going way, way, way back, like 20 years ago, literally in vanilla World of Warcraft, add-ons could do very powerful things like automating targeting. People who raided in the early days of Molten Core, right? If you played back then, you probably had Decursive if you were a healer. And you would just push a button, and it would automatically, intelligently dispel someone in your group who needed dispelling.

And the team looked at this at the time and was like, “This feels like it’s actually kind of undermining some of the core gameplay of the game. Let’s restrict this functionality. But also, let’s continue to improve our built-in raid frames. Let’s continue to improve these things.” And so, I think there’s been an ebb and flow there over the years. But I think increasingly, when I’m just reading through community discussions on our official forums, on Reddit, wherever, and it’s very common to see people ask like, “Hey, I need help improving. I’m trying to play Mage really well. I’m trying to play Rogue well and it feels like I just can’t compete with other people.” The first question that they get asked is, “Well, what add-ons are you using? What’s your weak core configuration?” Not, “What is your rotation? What is your talent build? What decisions are you making?” It’s like, “What tools do you have?” That’s not healthy. It’s a barrier to approachability.

And so, again, the path here is not to… Really, just to try to narrow that gap by improving the baseline functionality that our game is providing, and really focus in any long-term efforts in terms of what we might limit or restrict on just that narrow sliver of combat functionality stuff.

And that’s why we’ve tried to make it super clear here. We have no intent of touching anyone’s RP add-ons, world informational helpers, accessibility tools, gathering assist. Any of that stuff is great. It really is just a question of like, how do we improve the information that our default UIs giving combat-wise? And then once we’ve gotten 90% of the way there, what do we do about that last mile or so that includes functionality that feels like it wouldn’t really make sense to come from our UI? Like things that are solving a raid mechanic for you and telling players where to run, that’s kind of the point of the gameplay itself.

We want to provide information, make it clear how you’re supposed to tackle the problem. But at the end of the day, it should be up to the raid group to figure that out for themselves.

Obviously you always want to improve your UI and improve your boss encounters. But as far as adding stuff like a WoW internal version of Hekili. You talked in the video a little bit about looking at maybe doing in-house damage meters at some point or other things like that that are currently solved by add-ons. Why not just continue letting the community handle that level of stuff? Is there any concern that if you try to start doing the job of modders, you’re going to need a lot more time and resources when currently you’ve got basically crowdsourced problem solving?

Hazzikostas: To some extent, so I think, yes, it’s taking on more responsibility for the team. But I’d argue that this is responsibility that we really should’ve been shouldering for a while now. And I think the community at times has said that add-ons are solving problems in our games design, and I think sometimes they’re right. Sometimes there are places where a class mechanic or a talent really is asking a player to do something that the game isn’t natively giving them the tools to do correctly, like tracking stacks of a buff and making decisions on the fly based on how many stacks you happen to have based on some proc that triggered.

That’s not a reasonable in-the-moment computation for a human, but add-ons streamline and simplify that. Similarly, when something isn’t clear in an encounter, when a visual effect is not clear, but someone has an air horn that’s telling them when they’re standing in something to make up for a lack of clarity in our VFX, that’s a completely reasonable criticism. And if some of this means that we need to do extra work to fix issues, honestly I think that’s in players’ interest and something we should’ve been doing all along.

And again, to be clear, we’re not looking to, in any way, marginalize or push aside our wonderful add-on author community. Step one here and step two and step three involve nothing about restricting any sort of add-on functionality. They’re just continuing to build up our alternative solutions, give players a chance to give us feedback on those, understand what more they would need to do, what more would need to change for those to feel like they’re sufficient.

And then when we get to the end of that road, eventually restrict some things. Because again, that part is required, I think, in order to solve the problem of joining a group and being told you have to download this or use this week or whatever. Again, when there’s an open-ended toolbox, players are always going to try to computationally solve the challenges we put in front of them. And of course, people are going to use every advantage that’s at their disposal. That’s just the nature of competitive players

…Another aspect is there are tons and tons of players, even setting aside accessibility concerns that may limit someone’s ability to do a mechanically intensive rotation. There are many people who, honestly, combat is not what they enjoy most about WoW. Mastering and optimizing how to use all 20 of their abilities in sequence to maximize their damage is not what’s fun. It’s immersion, exploring, collecting, doing all these other things. And the mechanics of the game are sometimes an obstacle to enjoying the parts that many players want to embrace. And so, I think offering just a baseline way of opting out of that complexity is something that, I think, will be welcome to many players. It’s the same way, when we changed our talent system in Dragon Flight. We offered just a default starter spec.

If you didn’t want to deal with optimizing and placing all your points, you could just use our preset loadout for yourself and focus on the parts of the game you enjoy. At the end of the day, this is about giving players more options and more customization. It’s also an example of how, in some of our sort of built-in solutions, we can do things that add-ons couldn’t. Hekili obviously can highlight the next buttons for you, but it can’t actually automatically pick which ability to cast based on a single key bind, whereas our solution is able to do that.

Have you spoken to the Hekili folks at all? Do they have an opinion on this?

Hazzikostas: Personally, not yet. I know that our UI team, and particularly the engineers on our UI team, have close communications with our add-on author community. A lot of bug reports and updates and things go back and forth. They’re usually trying to keep them up-to-date on any changes we’re making to the APIs, so they’re not caught off guard. So I think that’s going to be part of this conversation going forward for sure. And I think we understand that when we offer a solution ourselves, it’s not going to be as deeply and fully customizable as add-ons for power users are.

And so, our goal is not to kind of subsume, like take over a space entirely, but rather offer a strong baseline solution to something while still leaving add-ons as a space for people who want cosmetic customization. They want to tweak the display of the information even more than what the base UI allows. And also, again, it’s a chance for us to get feedback on the nature of those gaps, so we can try to offer as much of what our players want as possible.

As far as the functionality of this thing goes, how reactive is it to different types of builds? When I play, I have set up builds for a single target spec, a single target with cleave, a multi-target Mythic dungeon, a Delve loadout. And with Undermine right now, there are a lot of fights where I’m using my single target rating build mainly, but there are also moments in the same fight where I have to switch to cleave damage or something like that. And so, I’m curious how adaptive this tool is going to be towards what sort of build you’re running and what sort of things you might want to do in the moment in a fight.

Hazzikostas: So I think that’s going to vary a little bit by specialization. I’d love to say that we have every possible permutation that someone might spec into accounted for, but we don’t. And we’re going to get feedback on that. Some of that will simply be a bug or something we overlooked. But the system itself is designed to be very versatile and something that our team can continue to update over time. It is looking at what talents you currently have, but it’s also making recommendations situationally based on your current available resources, whether there’s one enemy in front of you or four enemies in front of you, so you don’t need a separate preset loadout of dungeon versus raid.

It will recommend an AOE ability if it’s going to hit five targets or a single target ability if there’s only one boss in front of you. And again, the goal here is, not absolute perfection. There’s certainly all sorts of little sneaky min-max tricks that players have optimizing for movement and things that the system can’t know about. But the goal is really to be something that helps if you’re trying to learn a new spec or if you’re just trying to, like you’re trying to learn an encounter and you don’t want to put too much of your bandwidth into thinking about your rotation for a bit. The same way people use many of these add-ons, we think this will be a very helpful tool for just approachability of spec gameplay and just trying to raise the skill floor in the game.

Especially with the one button option, is there any worry that it might inadvertently have the opposite effect where you’ve got people joining up into a normal or heroic group through Group Finder, and then just sort of closing their eyes and hitting the button, and then pissing off a raid leader or something. I can hear the comments coming in now.

Hazzikostas: I mean, honestly, frankly, for some folks who may struggle with their rotations currently who haven’t really kind of grasped how they’re supposed to build, spend their resources, and use their different tools situationally, I think even the one-button rotation will be an improvement. Certainly, it will allow them to focus on mechanics and focus on other parts of something that they’re doing. I think we’ve crafted that. It has a small penalty that’s incurred to the global cooldown when you use it, to make sure that… It’s never the best way to play.

We definitely don’t want a world where a raid group is failing to meet some damage check, and the raid leader tells all other players, “Stop trying to play your class. Just turn on this one button thing and that’s going to be the right way.” But as just a simple baseline, that should be adequate for solo gameplay, for outdoor questing, for raid finder, things along those lines, this should be more than sufficient and allow people to just focus their attention on other parts of the game that they find more engaging.

Do you think that raiding has gotten harder over the years?

Hazzikostas: Yes. I think that it has gotten more involved, more complex. I think that our targets for how many attempts we wanted to take to defeat a certain raid boss at a certain difficulty haven’t changed, right? In that sense, we may think, “Okay. On heroic mode, the final boss should take 20 or 30 attempts. It should take a few hours for a group to beat for the first time.” That’s true today. That was true 10 years ago. Now the thing is, players on average have gotten better, as is the case in any game, right? Whether it’s a PvP game, otherwise. I mean, it’s easiest to see in PvP games where someone maybe has stepped away from their favorite MOBA, or Overwatch, or whatever and they used to be a platinum player. Then, they come back and they’re like, “Oh, wow. Everyone is so much better now.”

And that’s the same phenomenon that we’ve been working through in our dungeon and raid gameplay. We do have to offer novel looks at things. We have to throw a couple more mechanics in the mix to provide the same level of relative challenge that we used to be able to do with less, right? Going all the way back to Classic, you could see clearest-cut example of bosses that seemed impossible, that took groups literally months to defeat that now look simpler than a common dungeon boss, and that modern players without prior knowledge go in and steamroll in classic versions of the game. That’s just how the player base has evolved.

You’ve also designed things differently too in that regard, right? Raiding with 40 people was much harder just purely on a communications level. If you want to provide challenge when we have fewer people, you have to make things harder in different ways.

Hazzikostas: I think that’s certainly part of it. I think another factor is… I think this is something that was touched on in the conversation with Max and Dratnos. We never design things with the intent that add-ons are going to solve them, but we also can’t be ignorant of what add-ons are capable of doing. And if we have a fun idea for something that might be a fun mechanic, that might’ve been done years and years ago in terms of a raid-wide coordination challenge, the puzzle that you have to solve as part of your group, we know that someone’s just going to make a WeakAura that solves it for you. The raid leader’s going to pre-type everyone’s name into it before they’ve even pulled the boss once, and that mechanic is not going to play out the way we wanted it to.

And so we’re probably just not going to make that mechanic period. And so instead, I think we have probably over time skewed more and more towards testing skills in players that add-ons can’t trivialize, things like just reaction time, getting out of a lot of stuff that’s under your feet, rapid movement, twitch reactions, things on that level. And I think while that’s a niche that should exist in WoW encounters, I don’t think it’s healthy for the game. And I think players agree for all encounters to be like that. I think if you’re a raider in the World of Warcraft today, here’s a challenge. Try to count the number of bosses that aren’t at some point putting a swirly under your feet that you have a couple seconds to move out of. Good luck. It’s basically all of them. I would love for the game to just have more variety in the challenges that it’s posing to players. And I think that eventually when we get there, being able to restrict a couple of aspects of what add-ons can do today, I think will open up a very fertile design space and allow for encounters that are equally challenging in terms of how many hours they’re going to take your group to learn and to beat, but that put that challenge in different places that are, hopefully, a bit simpler and more engaging.

Is this something you have already been slowly trying to implement as far as Undermine goes? Are we already subtly seeing changes to encounters to move in the direction of that philosophy?

Hazzikostas: A bit. Yes. I think that we’ve gotten feedback from the community on Liberation of Undermine. But I think there are fewer fights in this tier than in previous tiers that feel like they were solved by an add-on, that they really almost required one. There were encounters in past tiers like Broodtwister or the like that made people feel like, “Okay, we don’t know how to do this without using an external tool.” And we are consciously trying to steer away from that. Another example of a way that we’ve continued to improve things in our Undermine update earlier this year, one of the changes we made was really revamping a lot of our spell visuals for increased clarity.

Ultimately, I think philosophically for years we had often said, “Okay, we want these things not to feel too gamey.” We want them to feel a little bit like chaotic fire or whatever. And ultimately, just kind of accepted that that’s not in the best interests of gameplay and readability. And let’s get some hard edges on things and let’s make it really clear cut when you are or aren’t standing in something. And even things like that can instantly help players to be able to just jump into an encounter and feel like they know what they should be doing as opposed to needing assistance to let them know what’s safe versus what isn’t.

Long-term, how soon should we expect some of these bigger changes to what types of add-ons you will and won’t allow? Is this a next raid tier kind of thing, a next expansion kind of thing?

Hazzikostas: Yeah, so I think there’s no specific date in mind. It’s more kind of kicking off a conversation and signaling a general trajectory, a heading. I think we know we have a bunch of work to do. I wanted to kind of put into context some of the changes that players have seen that feel like probably like a departure from past practice, like the cooldown manager that we added as a first iteration of helping to track your own abilities and cooldowns in our most recent 11.1.5 update.

Of course, this combat assist coming in 11.1.7, and more things that will follow. I think we know that before we reach an eventual endpoint of limiting the ability of add-ons specifically to parse real-time combat events, we’ll need to have our own solution for a customizable damage meter for things like encounter boss timers, letting you know when an ability is coming next and how far away it is. Things that players have relied on add-ons based on real-time combat information for a long time.

Our intent is not to suddenly just break things and leave players in the lurch. We want to build up a solid foundation. And then, when the community feels and we all collectively feel like we’re ready for that next step, we think it’s one that the community will hopefully embrace and be for the good of the game in the long run, making things more approachable while keeping the full array of informational and cosmetic customization that add-ons have always offered.

Do you expect that long-term, your changes to design are going to dramatically change the flavor of any classes or specs? I know you were talking in the video a little bit about Outlaw Rogue – I don’t play Rogue, but you suggested it was maybe perhaps a little too complex.

Hazzikostas: Honestly, I don’t think it will dramatically change the flavor. No. I think there are certain mechanics that will need to be revisited. Outlaw Rogue is a fun spec, but it’s one that I pick on for these purposes. Because if you go look up a guide for playing Outlaw Rogue, you’ll see that there’s some situations where it’s like, if you have more than 60 energy, and the cooldown of this ability is less than 12 seconds, then do this. And it’s like, “Come on.” There’s no way that anyone is going to parse that in real time without just having a way forward that pops up and tells you, “Okay, push this button now.” And those are the sorts of things where it’s like, “Is that fun? Is that part of the flavor of the spec really?” What could an alternative implementation of that sort of general vibe based around the idea of re-entering stealth and unleashing your attacks and combat as a rogue? How can we realize that without leaning on something so intricate and mechanically intensive?

Have you looked at all at what Final Fantasy 14 has done in terms of how much they restrict add-ons? They restrict them pretty heavily and always have. How do you look at what they’ve done and how it’s impacted the flavor and the type of game that they have over there?

Hazzikostas: I think it’s their decisions made at the start that inevitably affects how things evolve. There’s certainly a lot more control that you have as a designer of understanding exactly what information your players are going to have at their disposal, what tools they have at their disposal to overcome an encounter? And so, you can design in that world for everybody in a more level playing field, or as we have to accept that people will have a bunch of different ways of looking at or processing things.

But that’s part of how World of Warcraft has evolved. I think that we want to be very narrow and surgical in these restrictions, and they’re not terribly different from things we’ve done over the years in the past. Years ago, add-ons could draw things in the 3D game space, and that was something the team looked at and was like, “No, this is clearly too far.” That’s not a thing that add-ons should be able to do, and that functionality was restricted, and players evolved, and the game moved on. There’s an alternate world where if the team had never done that, if 15 years ago the team in Wrath had said, “Yeah, this seems fine.” Today, every encounter you go into would be full of these virtual 3D markers that are telling you exactly where to run and stand, and that would be how people played the game. And so, it’s like having this powerful ecosystem.

It’s tremendously empowering to players, but it also requires vigilance on our part as developers to ensure that we’re kind of preserving the integrity of the game and giving people a level playing field. Where if you just install World of Warcraft and you want to play the game and experience what it has to offer, it really it is our obligation that the out-of-the-box experience should be sufficient. And if it’s not, that’s a problem we need to work on solving.

Is there any concern that it’s sort of a one button rotation is going to lead to people doing annoying exploits? Going into LFR or basically AFKing or something like really causing issues with it?

Hazzikostas: I hope not. Honestly, you’ve been able to go in and try to fly under the radar and just auto attack. Those are situations that have happened in groups for a long time, whether it’s non-participation in Battlegrounds or just trying to coast and leech off a group. But I think most players when they’re sitting down to play World of Warcraft or looking to play World of Warcraft and accomplish some goals, and I think that’s always going to be, we want to design in the interest of the majority. And we have tools, whether it’s reporting or other measures to make sure that people aren’t disrupting other people’s gameplay or being toxic.

So you said that you’re not looking to mess around with people’s quest add-ons and stuff. But you’d also talked about wanting to build in-house tools like damage meters and stuff like that. Would you ever consider doing more internal stuff that is based off add-ons that people use for stuff that is outside of combat? Pet battling, auction house stuff, professions, anything like that?

Hazzikostas: I mean, I think absolutely and that’s stuff that we continue… We’re definitely inspired by the sorts of tools that the players turn to for outdoor world game plan for convenience as we look to continue to just make the game more approachable. I mean, things like, this has been several years now, but in the world of 3D navigational marker when you have a quest tracked or some objective tracked is something that in the past people would use an add-on to do for them to add kind of wayfinding support. That just felt like a more modern way of doing it than asking you to constantly pop open your 2D map to see where you were headed. So we added something like that. We’re going to continue improving all of that functionality. I don’t think there’s any world though where we’re going to restrict what add-ons can do in that space, because I think there’s a big difference between convenience and competitive advantage.

Someone might say, “Oh, having this gathering add-on or having this World Quest tracker or whatever, it’s convenient. Or someone with a Quest add-on maybe saves themselves a couple of alt tabs to look something up. But I don’t think anyone would seriously claim like, “Oh, no. You have to use that add-on if you want to succeed in World of Warcraft.” And that really is the difference. It’s us looking at add-ons where someone is pretty reasonably, incredibly able to say to a new player or to their group mates, “Really, you pretty much need to use this if you want to succeed.” And our goal is in this blue sky idealized world, that we can say that there isn’t a competitive advantage to using add-ons in World of Warcraft, that they’re a powerful tool for customizing your aesthetics, for customizing your information, and for kind of add an extra layer of self-expression in your game experience, but not a competitive advantage.

Is there any concern as you think about what sorts of things to add and how to add them, that the UI might become too heavy or too complex or actively work against the player in becoming unapproachable? Right now, opening World of Warcraft for the first time, there’s already a lot of things on screen. And we’ve all seen that sort of joke screenshot of someone’s UI with all the add-ons on it.

Hazzikostas: Always. I mean, I think we’re always mindful of trying to strike a balance between serving our engaged core players who’ve been with us for years and making sure that the game stays approachable to someone who’s coming back to it or picking it up for the first time. Because if we’re not hitting both of those, really, we’re not going to be able to continue to serve our audience and grow our audience. And so when we talk about these things, we have a lot of customization built into the UI. Some things are going to default off, some things are going to default on.

We’re talking about how we want to introduce some of these new elements to players in their new player experience, kind like if you’re level three on Exile’s Reach and you only have two abilities, do you need to know about a one button rotation? No. We’re actually like, “Press frostbolt. You’ll be fine.” At some point, maybe when you’re level 40 and you just spent your 30th talent point and you have a couple dozen abilities, might that be a great time to introduce something like this and make sure you were aware that exists? Yes. And so, I think that’s how we want to continue to think about and iterate on our onboarding experience as we add more customization built into the game.

Well, thank you so much, Ion. I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been really interesting. I’m very curious to see what my guild thinks of this announcement.

Hazzikostas: Me too. And truly, the goal here is really just to kick off a conversation. I know it’s a scary looking 45-minute video that’s really just announcing two minutes of new stuff at the start. Then, the rest is like, “Let’s talk philosophy and let’s get a sense of how open players are to us walking down this long path.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

There’s certainly been no shortage of games in the last month or so, and it’s easy for games to get lost in the proverbial avalanche. In a show of mutual admiration, though, two leads behind two RPGs, both of which launched in the same week, are promoting each others’ games to fans.

As spotted by GamesRadar, Kazutaka Kodaka — creator of Danganronpa and co-director behind the recently released The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy — shouted out players reaching a milestone in his own game. Then, he went on to shout out another current RPG in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. “Even after you finish Expedition 33, this Japanese cult game will still be here, waiting for you!” said Kodaka.

He went on to praise Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a follow-up post, drawing a comparison between the two games’ unique takes on their respective genres. “Expedition 33 is an amazing tribute to classic JRPG, while Hundred Line is a cult Japanese VN & SRPG,” said Kodaka. “Hundred Line has its own unique charm too, so why not play!!!”

Sandfall Interactive seemed to notice the shout-outs, and the official Expedition 33 account posted a message from creative director Guillaume Broche:

“After your Expedition, check out The Hundred Line, another great turn-based RPG that was also released last week, and made with love by an awesome team. There’s too many good RPGs coming out at the same time, these days!”

A note from Guillaume Broche, @SandfallGames Creative Director:

After your Expedition, check out The Hundred Line, another great turn-based RPG that was also released last week, and made with love by an awesome team.

There’s too many good RPGs coming out at the same time, these… https://t.co/AmGExVxXUp

— Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (@expedition33) April 30, 2025

Kodaka followed up, with more praise for Expedition 33:

“Thank you!!!! And for those of you who finished your school life first—it’s time to head out on an expedition! Expedition 33 is the future of RPGs. With unique RPGs like these coming out at the same time, now’s the perfect time to dive in and enjoy everything the genre has to offer”

There are, frankly, a lot of games coming out every year. Per SteamDB, over 6,000 games have hit Valve’s PC platform in 2025 as of this writing. Over 18,000 released on Steam last year alone. By any metric, that’s a baffling number, and even games with newsworthy creators may struggle to reach audiences in the massive flood of new things to play. Factor in ever-evolving live-service games and their content update schedules, and everything, everywhere is fighting for your time and attention.

In light of that, it’s heartwarming to not only see two creators acknowledging and promoting each others’ games, but encouraging fans to go play them afterwards. In the never-ending battle for eyes and attach rates, encouraging players to roll credits and move on to other experiences is noteworthy.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is also out now, for PC and Nintendo Switch. If you’re close to finishing one, it sounds like you might want to check out the other, too.

Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.

With your hands full of guns and a warrant for the Devil’s arrest in your pocket, Shotgun Cop Man sends you on a nonstop blitz of new ideas. This short and sweet action-platformer continually reinvents itself across 10 clever worlds, leaving little room for a good idea to get stale. Once I mastered its distinct style of projectile-based movement, barrelling through the circles of hell turned into a pure power fantasy. Even though it’s harder than it should be to chase high scores and better times, I still had a blast gunning for a more optimized run after the credits rolled.

Shotgun Cop Man’s goofy vibes, flashy acrobatics, and time attack setup transported me back to my middle school days of bypassing the browser security settings in the computer lab to sneak in runs of Flash games like Fancy Pants Adventures or Electricman 2. Granted, this would blow many of those study hall time killers out of the water, but I could still easily see myself racing to the end of its first world with a friend while we’re supposed to be working on a research paper or math homework. It shares the same tight scope and paired back tone, but here those mask a surprisingly deep platformer.

Shotgun Cop Man isn’t just a standard run-n-gun shoot-em-up. Instead, the recoil from your shotgun serves as the driving force behind most of the movement. Need to take out some demons to your right? Well, you better make sure the coast is clear to your left when you pull the trigger. This challenging, but ultimately rewarding, system of ballistic blowback fills in for genre-standards like jumping or dashing midair, while firing your sidearm — which ranges from a satisfyingly snappy but weak pistol to a powerful gatling gun — allows you to hover midair or make more precise hops.

You can’t just spray and pray you wind up on the next platform, though. Each weapon has limited ammo, keeping Shotgun Cop Man relatively grounded: the shotgun itself only holds three shells at a time, so he needs to touch terra firma to reload. That said, sidearms tend to have bigger magazines, allowing for a reliable second option to fall back on when you need to get to the ground and take another shot at a tough jump. This restrained approach brings a levelheaded balance to Shotgun Cop Man that encourages mayhem and speed without leaving precision and skill in the dust.

To make matters more difficult, Shotgun Cop Man also has to contend with the armies of Hell as he chases down their leader. Aside from a few combat-focused levels that blend each circle of Hell’s unique mechanics into an arena-style showdown, as well as the requisite boss that shows up at the end of each 17-level world, Shotgun Cop Man is all about movement. Because of that, enemies play second fiddle here, being treated as platforming obstacles masterfully woven into each level. They act like the bright-red explosive barrels of a 3D shooter, providing the satisfaction of popping them while offering direction on where and when to shoot. Shotgun Cop Man bets big on its platforming acumen rather than falling in-line with other action platformer successes like Katana Zero, and it pays off in spades.

Still, this unique movement takes quite some time to get used to, especially if you’re playing with a controller: Pointing in two different directions like a twin-stick shooter (left for walking, right for aiming) makes for an unnatural platformer control scheme. Wrapping my head around it felt like being asked to rub my belly and pat my head at the same time. Unfortunately, there’s really no better way to make this specific type of movement work on the sticks, though it is much more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse. Thankfully, Shotgun Cop Man’s accessibility features allow you to skip certain inputs, like making it so you pick up new sidearms automatically, so you can tweak things to be much more comfortable.

I was halfway through the roughly five hour campaign by the time I felt like I’d fully climbed its relatively steep learning curve, mastering this propulsion-based blend of combat and movement. Normally, this initial struggle would be a knock against it, but Shotgun Cop Man constantly introduces and innovates on new ideas while rewarding your growing mastery of them. It also sets up systems that successfully encouraged me to obsessively replay levels in an attempt to shave nanoseconds off my time. This potent blend dangles an appetizing carrot-on-a-stick to gnash at in bite-sized speedruns once you’ve found your footing.

When he inevitably takes a hit, Shotgun Cop Man’s heart comically pops out of his body. Running into it will pick it up and restore health, but he’ll die in one hit without it. When that happens, the camera zooms in on his oddly detailed face as he says, “I die,” in a goofy, computerized voice. This minimal, self-aware sense of humor sets the tone overall, as there’s otherwise not much of a premise to explain here (and developer Dead Toast Entertainment even pokes fun at this in the credits by putting quotes around the word “Story”). You’re a cop with a shotgun trying to arrest the Devil. Naturally, Old Scratch doesn’t play ball. Each time our hero catches up to him, Satan tells the boy in blue to shove it, and you continue on your chase once more. It’s thin, but it works, and is just amusing enough to keep things moving.

Unfortunately, that sense of humor eventually becomes Shotgun Cop Man’s Waterloo. Each time it zooms in on his face as he points out the obvious, it takes far too long to get back into the action. It takes as many as three button presses to respawn, and even longer to restart a level. I know how silly this sounds in the face of everything Shotgun Cop Man gets right, but in a game where you’ll be dying and trying again quite a bit, these add up to completely hamper any sense of momentum. That’s especially glaring when every level in Shotgun Cop Man grades your performance on whether or not you killed every enemy, beat the par time, took any damage, or did all three of those in the same run. In what feels like a big oversight, there’s no quick level restart button when you die, so to chase that perfect run, you need to resume the level after that death, pause, and then hit the retry option from there. Because Shotgun Cop Man trades in seconds and milliseconds (most levels took me less than a minute to complete), this otherwise small bump in the road became an outsized, unnecessary part of mastering each level.

That said, for a game that only took me about five hours to see from end to end, Shotgun Cop Man crams in a staggeringly impressive range of innovations and spins on its seemingly simple run-and-shoot formula. It ricochets from idea to idea, never allowing a mechanic to get old — in fact, there are quite a few I wish got some more time to shine, like reactive floors, which alternate between safe and deadly each time they’re shot, or clever box-moving puzzles that put your understanding of each weapon’s power to the test. Most mechanics get a chance to shine before being woven into more new mechanics later on, but there’s also an impressive level creator (exclusive to the PC version) that lets you toy with some of these ideas yourself if you feel like your favorite didn’t get its time in the sun.

I’m not much of a level designer myself, but the creation suite provides a robust toy chest for dedicated designers to mess around with. It doesn’t just feature tools that enable you to recreate or expand upon any clever idea found in the campaign, it even includes wholly unique mechanics that aren’t found there, like extra enemy and NPC types. I didn’t get to try any user-created levels during the pre-release period, but I’m really excited to see what people think up once Shotgun Cop Man is out in the wild.

I remember vividly when I first caught wind of The Outer Worlds back in 2018 – my managing editor at the time talked about his preview of what developer Obsidian was working on; an original first-person RPG with the makings of a Fallout game. As someone who still won’t shut up about Fallout: New Vegas to this day, that was music to my ears. It turned out to be one of my favorite games of 2019, but instead of expecting it to be the next coming of Fallout, I saw it more as a new foundation for Obsidian to work within.

There were certain limitations to what the first Outer Worlds could be in terms of size and scope, and that much was clear in the several conversations I’ve had with the development team when reflecting on it. But after seeing the sequel in action for the first time and interviewing key folks at Obsidian, The Outer Worlds 2 seems like that original vision fully realized. For all the details I’ve been able to dig up about the revamped gameplay systems and worldbuilding, the overarching idea was that The Outer Worlds 2 needed to be a deeper RPG where player choice has more of an impact in nearly all aspects of the experience. And from everything I’ve gathered from our month’s-worth of exclusive coverage, this sequel looks like it’s stepping in the right direction.

What I’ve seen thus far is based on an early build of the game, all of which has been through hands-off demos, and all the footage you’ve seen was provided by Obsidian. So while I haven’t played it yet, The Outer Worlds 2 is so far reminding me of some of the best parts of the studio’s long list of RPGs, where unconventional playstyles are viable and unpredictable choices and outcomes are intrinsic to the roleplaying aspect, asking you to roll with the punches regardless of whether or not it’s deemed “optimal,” and this manifests in several ways.

Attributes, which were stats that you invested in as you leveled up, have been set aside for a heavier focus on Skills – a total of 12 (including staples like Engineering, Explosives, Guns, Hacking, Leadership, and more) now dictate how your character functions. While this may seem like further streamlining, the goal is to make sure the points you put into various Skills have a more noticeable impact throughout the process of leveling up, as opposed to the minute effects you’d feel in the old Attributes system. Of course, I can’t speak to how this comes to fruition in a full playthrough, but there are other systems in place that feed into the idea that these mechanical decisions can affect your character in bigger ways.

That leads to Perks, of which there will be about 90 to choose from. There are specific Skill levels needed to gain access to certain Perks, but these are said to offer significant changes to what you can do in combat, conversations, exploration, and more. One example is a Perk that lets you aim, fire, and reload while sprinting and sliding for those who want to approach enemies with the mentality of a traditional shooter. Or the Serial Killer and Psychopath Perks that grant bonuses for those who try a much more violent playthrough. Or the Space Ranger Perk that lets you convert points in your Speech Skill into damage bonuses in battle. Dialogue branches may vary based on the Skills and Perks you have (more so than the original), or your character may pick up on things in the environment they wouldn’t be able to otherwise, so the results of your build aren’t just isolated in combat scenarios. Those are just a few examples of how these systems feed into specific playstyles with the intention of rewarding you for the way in which you’re specialized.

Then there are Traits that stack additional permanent effects that you wouldn’t necessarily get through Perks. The catch is that if you want to take more Positive Traits, you have to also select Negative Traits, and that’s where things can get interesting. I’m actually curious about how I’d play with something like “Dumb” where I’d have to lock myself out from ever putting points into five of the 12 Skills, or “Sickly” where I’d take lower health and toxic resistance. It seems like a trade-off that could be worth it, depending on how I want to build out my character.

But if you want to lean more into unconventional mechanics, accounting for things you usually wouldn’t in other RPGs – enter the new Flaws system. Like in the original, the game is watching your behavior and then offering permanent bonuses at the cost of a permanent detractor depending on how you play. However, The Outer Worlds 2 goes deeper on this idea – you’re not just offered a Perk point if you take a Flaw. Flaws now have bespoke status effects and conditions that can have major ramifications for how you’ll play the game, should you take a Flaw. I only got to see two of them, but they speak to the philosophy behind them. Sungazer offers regenerative health outdoors during the day at the cost of extreme visual lens flare and reduced accuracy, and that’s activated by staring into the sun multiple times. Or if you quickly skip through dialogue choices frequently, Foot-in-Mouth offers a permanent XP bonus while forcing you to make all future dialogue choices in a 15-second window – and if that timer runs out, the game will pick for you, which can lead to some unintended consequences. There’s another Flaw that’ll force you to accept all future Flaws no matter what, and Obsidian hinted at one that will account for those who save scum, but that remains to be seen – it’s bizarre ideas like these that can shake up playthroughs. Obsidian said there are around 30 Flaws in total, and my hope is that the incentives will be worth the trade-off, and that they’re built in a way that it won’t be easy to circumvent their effects, which could diminish their impact.

All that said, it’s clear that Obsidian put a lot of thought into how to rebuild its RPG mechanics with the intention of making something that is more reactive and impactful, or at least purposeful along the progression path. And with no respec beyond the intro mission, you’ll have to build out your character with a little more care. Hands-off demos can only tell me so much, so I’m expecting everything else around The Outer Worlds 2 to bring out the best in those systems and push me to engage with them beyond the surface level.

That sounds all well and good, and the brief gameplay sequences I saw were also promising. While the first game had approachability at the forefront, The Outer Worlds 2 looks like it’s offering more variability with a web of systems that come together for something a bit more sophisticated. For example, we now have actual stealth mechanics with a better detection system, proper stealth kills, and scenarios in which this approach would make sense – and features such as damage bar read-outs tell you whether or not a stealth attack will be worth it. The N-Ray Scanner is one of the new gadgets you’ll use, and this lets you see through walls and detect cloaked enemies or key objects hidden in the environment, but it’ll expend your mana-like energy – it’s a tool that’s conducive to this playstyle, and I’m looking for how this approach can be sustained throughout.

Judging from the brief run of the N-Ray Facility, for example, I saw snippets of that in action, which leans into this particular playstyle I prefer. This level was also ripe for playing it like an immersive sim, and it gave me hints of Deus Ex or Dishonored, especially with how you navigate the level and find different paths. I know the DNA of those games will always find their way into first-person RPGs, but it’s something that wasn’t quite as present in the first Outer Worlds, and very much apparent in this sequel.

And while I’m excited for stealth options and wielding the environment to create paths forward, the punched-up gunplay and addition of gadgets shows an improvement in combat approaches across the board. The aforementioned sprint-slide-firing Perk – along with the returning Tactical Time Dilation (TTD) – looks to be a deadly combo in a firefight, but some wild unique weapons like the crank-powered sniper rifle called the Planet Killer or the advertisement-blasting Pop Gun that’ll distract enemies, widen your toolset. When all hell breaks loose, the triple-barrel shotgun will probably be an old reliable in my playthrough. And I’m sure I’ll be saving those rare shots I’ll find for this game’s version of the BFG for the toughest fights.

But with Obsidian looking to games like Destiny in terms of reworking gunplay, I think it’s a net-positive for how the game feels on a moment-to-moment basis. There’s an emphasis on better mobility, smarter enemy behavior, and varied enemy types, along with that wider, more creative arsenal. But there’s also no more level scaling, and so there’s been more consideration in how difficulty works in The Outer Worlds 2 with tiered enemies and static levels for encounters across the game, letting encounters be designed with more intent, especially with where the designers will funnel players and create friction.

The more intimate details of level design excite me, and seeing interiors like the Zyranium Lab be noticeably bigger and intricate with multiple paths has me thinking about the gameplay possibilities. But its large open zones are also a key point in this sequel. I’ve said in previous coverage that bigger doesn’t always mean better, and Obsidian is aware of that. So, The Outer Worlds 2 has an emphasis on density and rewarding players who poke around its areas with more side stories and useful loot in a way that the first game didn’t. Points of interest out in the distance are built intentionally and are said to be placed for a reason and draw players to those locations and discover quests off the beaten path. This is all based on a brief walkthrough of Golden Ridge, which is the only open zone I saw, and it does seem like there’s a lot more going on at the ground level. And I hope that this design philosophy extends to the rest of The Outer Worlds 2’s open regions.

Finally, Obsidian wasn’t ready to share many details on story or companions, but game director Brandon Adler hinted at a world-changing event happening early on when landing on Golden Ridge, and that being indicative of the types of narrative swings they’re going for. Creative director Leonard Boyarsky, who was one of the original Fallout developers, spoke to how the team is thinking about The Outer Worlds 2’s story. He mentioned being sharper with its humorous tone while going deeper on its commentary about how corporations, and those in power, will exert and abuse their power on those seen below them. It seems a major factor in conveying these themes will be through factions – The Protectorate, The Order of the Ascendant, and Auntie’s Choice (a merger between Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice from the first game). While companions are optional, it appears they’ll be an important lens through which you navigate and understand the world. Boyarsky also emphasized the intention of making a story that can stand the test of time with its dissection of the human condition, rather than directly reflect the times in which it was made – and that’s largely been the philosophy that guided the old Fallout games, including New Vegas.

Overall, I get the impression that Obsidian is trying to avoid homogeneity in its gameplay systems, and build worlds with questlines and encounters that tease out the varied options you have this time around. You can have complex and creative systems to toy with, but ultimately, it’s a means for engaging with the captivating stories tucked within where we have a distinct role to play. If the original Outer Worlds was Obsidian building the framework, my hope is that this sequel is the series reaching its full potential. And that’s something we’ll have to see when The Outer Worlds 2 comes out later this year.

Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is set to leave early access and launch on May 21, Netmarble and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have announced.

The action-adventure role-playing game based on George R. R. Martin’s much-loved fantasy universe is set for release on all mobile platforms as well as on PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Windows.

Game of Thrones: Kingsroad launched in early access form in March, and has a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam. Most of the negative reviews revolve around its monetization, which some have called “greedy.” “It’s like a mobile game on steroids and kinda not in a good way,” reads the current ‘most helpful’ review on Valve’s platform.

In a release date FAQ posted to Steam, Netmarble addressed the expected gap between the progression of early access and new players. It said that Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is “fundamentally designed with a focus on single-player gameplay,” and that it had worked to “minimize any feelings of imbalance or unfairness that might arise from differences in progression.”

Testing was conducted to improve the game, the development team continued, “to improve the game and make it more enjoyable and accessible for everyone.”

“We encourage all players to focus on the inherent fun of progressing through the later stages and reaching the endgame content, rather than comparing progress with other characters,” Netmarble suggested.

Netmarble went on to apologize for its prior communication and patches, which it admitted were “somewhat lacking.”

“Moving forward, we are committed to more frequent and transparent communication through regular AMA sessions and Developer Notes,” it added. “We kindly ask for your continued anticipation and support as we approach the official launch.”

As you’d expect from a game like this, there’s a premium Founder’s Pack that offers Early Access and other exclusive in-game content. Mobile players can pre-register through the App Store and Google Play store on iOS and Android devices ahead of the grand launch.

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.

With The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered out and millions of players enjoying Bethesda’s much-loved open-world role-playing game, its army of fans are coming together to issue advice to those who might have missed out on the fun 20 years ago.

Oblivion remastered is a remaster, not a remake, Bethesda has stressed, and so many of the quirks of its ageing design remain. One of those quirks — or frustrations it might be better called — is Oblivion’s level scaling system.

Oblivion’s original designer recently called the game’s level scaling a “mistake,” but it made it into Oblivion Remastered anyway. It means loot acquired is tied to the level of your character at the point you acquire it. Similarly, enemies will still spawn according to your level.

It’s this latter point that has sparked a fresh round of advice from Oblivion veterans to newcomers, and it all revolves around Castle Kvatch.

Warning! Spoilers for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered follow.

Breaking the Siege of Kvatch is the fourth main quest, and tasks you with defending the city of Kvatch against the Daedric hordes. It involves going through an Oblivion gate where you’ll face off against multiple high level enemies. Once you’ve done that and closed the Oblivion gate, you have to clear out the Daedric invasion in the main plaza of Kvatch itself.

If you waited too long and leveled up a lot, you’ll find that all of your helping friends are quickly killed because the enemies you’re facing are extremely difficult. Due to Oblivion’s level scaling system, the higher level you are, the tougher those enemies will be. At higher levels, Kvatch will throw every variety of Daedra at you, rather than easy-to-kill Scamps. You might encounter a room full of Daedroth (strong crocodile-headed bipedal Daedra), Daedric Princes, or other monstrosities.

Breaking the Siege of Kvatch leads into The Battle for Castle Kvatch, should you take it on. Here you battle to retake the town’s castle, defeating the Daedra along the way. Like Breaking the Siege of Kvatch, level scaling can be a real problem here.

Enter helpful Oblivion veterans who are recommending players take on Kvatch before they hit level 10.

“I’m like panicking now…” said redditor IsThatHearsay. “First time playing Oblivion, didn’t even know you had to sleep to lvl up until just before I got to this mission.

“Closed the Kvatch Oblivion gate right before this mission still as lvl 1, then read online to sleep and I jumped from lvl 1 to 9 immediately with hour sleep increments. Met Martin there and decided to escort him to the Cloud place to take a break from fighting, followed by deciding to cheese some skills like Conjuration, Acrobatics, Sneak, and whatnot quickly and climbed to lvl 15.

“Now have to go back to do Kvatch at lvl 15+, when I’m hearing I probably should’ve just done it while still lvl 1…”

“I just tried it at level 20 and let me tell you, that shit is fucking rough,” said frontadmiral.

“Completed at lvl 21 on a mage, god it was tough,” said Ranaki_1967. “Had to in the field recharge my staff, drink potions escape down the ladder, have maximum shield armour, a Dremora champion.

“The framerate was bad.”

“Bro im doing it at 27 rn and im NOT having a good time, Xivali are EVERYWHERE,” Mother_Bid_4294 said.

Even Oblivion experts have been caught by taking on Kvatch at too high a level. “I’ve oblivioned extensively in the original but I still made the same mistake, went back to Kvatch level 13, just about manageable,” Various-Jellyfish132.

“Make use of sneak for bonus damage and retreat through loading doors to recover if needed, if you have a bit of space, their attacks are easily dodged. The daedroths don’t seem to follow you through the doors so you can pick them off one at a time.”

“Oblivion scaling is just wild though because you will level up once and suddenly Scamps transform into Daedroths and Clannfear Runts turn into Daedric Princes,” Groosin1 said.

“Because the scaling cap is only 17-18. And the way leveling works, at 17-20 you could be anywhere from a guy with middling combat skills for what you’re using and getting obliterated, to being God.”

Part of the issue here is that players are leveling up faster in Oblivion Remastered than they did in the original Oblivion. That’s because the developers changed the leveling system to modernize it, but kept the level scaling the same.

This has had the knock-on effect of causing some players to be a higher level than they would have been in the original when taking on tough quests such as Kvatch.

For the first time ever I decided to do Kvatch before level 10. It was cool to see it actually functioning as an even battle instead of a horde of overleveled demons one-shotting all the guards. Really makes you wonder if they ever tested it at higher levels. pic.twitter.com/VeQH3xst0b

— Entropy Phi (@entropy_phi) April 27, 2025

As you’d expect, modders have once again come to the rescue. Fresh from tackling PC performance issues in Oblivion Remastered, modders have also released balanced NPC level cap mods and balanced unleveled rewards mods, so if you’re on PC, you can change the way Oblivion Remastered works significantly. If you’re on console, however, you’re stuck with level scaling.

We’ve got plenty more on Oblivion Remastered, including a report on a player who managed to escape the confines of Cyrodiil to explore Valenwood, Skyrim, and even Hammerfell, the rumored setting of The Elder Scrolls VI.

We’ve also got a comprehensive guide to everything you’ll find in Oblivion Remastered, including an expansive Interactive Map, complete Walkthroughs for the Main Questline and every Guild Quest, How to Build the Perfect Character, Things to Do First, every PC Cheat Code, and much more.

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.

Lost Soul Aside is delayed three months, from May 30 to August 29, 2025, its developer has announced.

After roughly a decade in development, the PC and PlayStation 5 single-player action game was finally scheduled for llaunch next month, but a statement from developer Ultizero Games revealed the delay to late September to add polish.

“We are truly grateful for the positive response we’ve received from players all over the world since we announced Lost Soul Aside,” Ultizero Games said.

“We remain committed to delivering a high-quality game experience. To match the standards Ultizero Games have set for ourselves, we are going to take some additional time to polish the game. Lost Soul Aside will now release on August 29, 2025. We want to express our heartfelt thanks to our fans waiting for the launch.”

Originally the passion project of solo developer Yang Bing, Lost Soul Aside has grown to become a major Sony-published title under the company’s China Hero Project, with Bing now the founder and CEO of Shanghai-based studio Ultizero Games.

IGN recently had the opportunity to sit down with Yang Bing to discuss the long road to launch. So many years of development went into Lost Soul Aside, escalating from a solo creator’s vision to a trailer reveal at Sony’s State of Play broadcast. Through it all the hype has built up, with some calling Lost Soul Aside an exciting mix of Final Fantasy characters and Devil May Cry combat — even from the moment Yang Bing’s initial reveal video went viral in 2016.

The main character Kesar wields a shape-shifting weapon you can swap between, which changes your playstyle, and you have a dragon-like companion named Arena who can summon abilities to support Kesar.

Like its inspirations, Lost Soul Aside emphasizes aerial dodging, precision timing, combos, and countering along with large-scale boss fights. The game blends its sci-fi premise with a variety of contemporary aesthetics that fit into a campaign that takes you across multiple dimensions. Although it’s tough to glean where the story is going based on its trailers, Bing describes Kesar’s journey as one of “redemption and discovery.”

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.

Titanfall fans are reeling from the news EA has canceled another incubation project at Respawn Entertainment, and simultaneously laid off a number of individuals across its incubation, Apex Legends, Star Wars: Jedi, and EA Experience teams.

Bloomberg reported the canceled game, codenamed R7, was an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe. And while that is not the Titanfall 3 sequel fans have been clamoring for, some are devastated that the fan-favorite Titanfall 2 is still without a sequel almost a decade later.

“I just fell to my knees at Walmart,” said one player, while another simply wrote: “I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE.”

“How many more times will this happen before they finally give it up and leave us to our sorrow?” lamented another.

Not all fans are taking it as bad news, however, as some think an extraction shooter based in the Titanfall universe could have failed, killing the franchise for good.

“Best thing that could’ve happened as far as the continued existence of this franchise is concerned,” posited this redditor. “A Titanfall extraction shooter would probably flop and the c-suite executives would say ‘see, the people just don’t like Titanfall anymore,’ instead of the obvious reason being nobody asked for a Titanfall XTS.”

“I’m fine with this one being canceled,” responded someone else, followed by: “Extraction shooter lmao. Good riddance.”

“So sick and tired of ‘extraction shooters’. They’re so formulaic and boring. I don’t want to loot bunch of useless shit and camp in an attic or sit in a bush for 20 minutes or risk getting shot moving thru big open fields. Give me quick matches, wallrunning and titans blastin’,” suggested this fan.

“Got sad. Read extraction shooter. Was literally okay,” summarized someone else.

The roughly 100 jobs impacted at Respawn included individuals in development, publishing, and QA workers on Apex Legends, as well as smaller groups of individuals working on the Jedi team and two canceled incubation projects, one of which we reported on back in March, and the other thought to have been the aforementioned extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe.

These cuts follow a number of other layoffs over the last few years at EA. Earlier this year, it restructured BioWare, moving developers to other projects and laying off others. It also eliminated 50 jobs at BioWare in 2023 and an unknown number more at Codemasters, and in 2024 a larger restructuring that resulted in 670 workers laid off company-wide, including around two dozen workers at Respawn.

In 2023, it emerged that Respawn Entertainment worked on Titanfall 3 “in earnest” for 10 months before ditching it for Apex Legends.

Mohammad Alavi, who became narrative lead designer on Titanfall 3 before it was cut, told The Burnettwork that much work on the sequel had been done.

“Titanfall 2 came out, did what it did, and we were like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make Titanfall 3,’ and we worked on Titanfall 3 for about 10 months, right? In earnest, right?

“We had new tech for it, we had multiple missions going, we had a first playable, which was on par to be just as good if not better than whatever we had before, right? But I’ll make this clear: incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary. And that’s the key thing, right?

“And we were feeling pretty decent about it, but not the same feeling as Titanfall 2 where we were making something revolutionary, y’know what I mean?”

So, what happened? According to Alavi, it was a combination of the multiplayer team having issues making an experience that didn’t burn players out quickly, and the explosion of the Battle Royale genre with the release of PUBG in 2017.

“The multiplayer team was having a hell of a time trying to fix the multiplayer, because a lot of people love the multiplayer. People love Titanfall 2 multiplayer,” Alavi said.

“But the people who love Titanfall 2 multiplayer is a very small number of people. And most people play Titanfall 2 multiplayer and think it’s really good, but it’s just too much. It’s cranked up to 11, and they burn out a bit fast. And they’re like, ‘That was a great multiplayer, that’s not something I continually play a year, two years,’ right?

“So we were trying to fix that. We were trying to fix that from Titanfall 1 to 2, trying to fix it from Titanfall 2 to 3, the multiplayer team was just dying.

“And then PUBG came out.”

Respawn developers were seemingly more interested in playing a Battle Royale map with Titanfall 3 classes the team had put together, than any of the standard Titanfall multiplayer modes they were working on. This prompted a realisation: ditch Titanfall 3, which may or may not have ended up a better game than its predecessor, to create a Battle Royale that was wonderful.

“And at the time, I had just literally become [the] narrative lead designer on Titanfall 3. I had just pitched the story, the whole game, that me and Manny [Hagopian] had come up with. We made this big presentation and then we went off at break, and came back from break, and we talked about it and we were like, ‘Yeah, we need to pivot. And we need to go make this game.’

“We literally canceled Titanfall 3 ourselves ’cause we were like, ‘We can make this game, and it’s going to be Titanfall 2 plus a little bit better, or we can make this thing, which is clearly amazing.’

“And don’t get me wrong, I will always miss having another Titanfall. I love that game. Titanfall 2 is my most crowning achievement, but it was the right call. That is a crazy cut. Such a crazy cut that EA didn’t even know about it for another six months until we had a prototype up and running that we could show them!”

Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Diablo 4 has launched Season 8 and with it kicked off a series of free updates that will, eventually, lead into the action role-playing game’s second expansion, due out at some point in 2026.

But not all is well within Diablo 4’s ravenous core community. It is a player base hungry for significant new features, reworks, and fresh ways to play the near two-year-old game, and it’s not shy about letting Blizzard know how it feels. Yes, Diablo 4 is more than its core community, with a significant number of casual players who just like to blast monsters without too much thought on how they’re doing it. But the foundation of Diablo 4’s community is made up of veteran fans who play week in, week out, fuss over meta builds, and want Blizzard to give them much more to think about.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Diablo 4’s recently released 2025 roadmap — the first Blizzard has released for the game — suffered a backlash. In the wake of the roadmap’s release, Diablo 4’s community expressed concern about what’s coming up in 2025, including Season 8, and questioned whether there’s enough new content to keep them coming back.

Fans hoping to catch the first few episodes of Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld will have to drop into Fortnite if they want to watch the series before it comes to Disney+.

Epic Games unveiled how it will expand upon its existing Star Wars offerings today, revealing that the upcoming animated spinoff’s first two episodes will premiere exclusively through Fortnite. It’s part of the studio’s efforts to double down on Star Wars content for its upcoming Galactic Battle season, which focuses on delivering Star Wars-themed goodies.

You’ll be able to see Tales of the Underworld kick off with two episodes starring Asajj Ventress via the Star Wars Watch Party island starting at 10 a.m. ET on May 2 – two days before the show comes to Disney+ subscribers. Epic encourages fans to link their Epic Games and MyDisney accounts, too, with eligible players being gifted a First Order Stormtrooper outfit in return. It’s unclear how else connecting the accounts will benefit those who participate, though Epic teases that there are “more benefits to come.”

“Disney and Epic are pioneering the future of social entertainment together, and this expansive Star Wars collaboration offers a glimpse into the type of interactive experiences we envision,” Epic Games President Adam Sussman said in a statement. “We are reimagining what’s possible with immersive storytelling in Fortnite with one of the world’s most beloved franchises – stay tuned for a lot more to come.”

You’ll have until May 11 to watch both Tales of the Underworld episodes, at which point Star Wars Watch Party island will no longer be live. It will also feature a Battle Arena for players to duke it out as they use lightsabers to cut down waves of enemies. Those who watch both episodes will earn an Asajj Ventress loading screen.

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld is a six-episode series animated in the style of The Clone Wars that follows Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane. An official description for the show teases that the former will find herself face to face with a new chance at life and a new ally, while the latter is forced to confront his past.

Disney’s ties with Fortnite extend far past its upcoming Galactic Battle season. The House of Mouse acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic in March 2024, positioning itself to collaborate with the game developer for many years to come. It was a move that will see the two powerhouses working together in more ways than one while also resulting in the addition of more Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar outfits in the hit battle royale video game. Some highlights from its next season including Darth Jar Jar and Emperor Palpatine.

Fortnite has continued to dominate the space since its launch in 2017. Other recent collaborations have helped it maintain its status, including a Sabrina Carpenter crossover that had players putting down the pickaxes and putting on their dancing shoes.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).