EA is bringing Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes to PC eight years after it launched on mobile.

Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is a free-to-download collectible role-playing game that launched on iOS and Android in November 2015.

EA announced Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes launches soon on PC, with registrations now live for a closed beta for mobile players via the EA App. There is no mention of a console port.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has released the biggest update to the game yet, adding its first raid boss, called Bellanoir, alongside a long list of new content.

Palworld update v.0.2.0.6, out now on Steam and coming soon to Xbox, lets players summon Raid Boss Pals by using slabs at the new Summoning Altar. Pocketpair warned that Raid Boss Pals summoned by slabs are “very powerful” and cannot be captured. The developer recommended players work alongside their base Pals to take on these powerful foes.

There’s even an “extreme” version of the Raid Boss that Pocketpair described as “incredibly powerful and difficult to defeat.” Pals Eggs can drop after defeating Raid Boss Pals.

Elsewhere, a number of new items are added to the game, including new Training Manual items that let you give experience points to Pals. New Recovery Meds items slowly recover your HP over time. And the new Homeward Thundercloud item instantly moves you to your nearest base.

There’s a lot more to the update (check out the patch notes below), such as changes to the Pals, improvements to the user interface, balance adjustments, bug fixes, and more cheat prevention measures. Changes to bases are also included. For example, you can now force a Pal to work and cancel their break by picking them up and throwing them towards a facility.

Palworld update v.0.2.0.6 Steam and Xbox patch notes:

▼New Content

・Implemented the first Raid Boss

⤷ You can summon Raid Boss Pals by using slabs at the new Summoning Altar

⤷ Raid Boss Pals summoned by slabs are very powerful and can not be captured. Work alongside your base Pals to take on these powerful foes.

⤷ Pals Eggs can drop after defeating Raid Boss Pals.

⤷ The “extreme” version of the Raid Boss is incredibly powerful and difficult to defeat

・New “Training Manual” items have been added. These manuals allow you to give experience points to Pals.

・New item “Ancient Technical Manual” has been added. This manual gives you ancient technology points and can be randomly found inside dungeon chests.

・New “Recovery Meds” items have been added. Using these meds will slowly recover your HP over time.

・New item “Homeward Thundercloud” has been added. When used, this item will instantly move you to your nearest base.

・New item “Ability Glasses” has been added. When equipped, you can see Pal’s stats.

・New stat boosting items have been added: “Power Fruit, Life Fruit, Stout Fruit”. These items will boost Pal’s stats when used.

・Added a new passive “Mercy Hit”. Pals with this passive cannot reduce enemy HP below 1 when attacking.

・New item “Ring of Mercy” has been added. When wearing this ring, you cannot reduce enemy HP below 1 when attacking.

・New armour “Multiclimate Undershirt” has been added. Protect yourself against both the heat and the cold with just one slot!

・New building “Electric Egg Incubator” has been added. This incubator consumes electricity to automatically adjust the temperature to the optimum temperature for each egg.

・New building “Ore Mining Site” has been added. This mining site allows you to produce ores from the comfort of your base!

▼Pals

・Kelpsea can now produce Pal Fluids at the ranch

・Dumud can now produce High-Quality Pal Oil at the ranch

・You can now reduce the weight of metal ore while riding Surfent Terra

・Increased the amount of ore dropped while riding Astegon

・You can now raise Pal’s rank to the maximum with a single synthesis using the Pal Essence Condenser.

(Condensation progress is now accumulated in the individual Pal)

・Negative Pal status will now be resolved after spending some time in the Pal Box

▼UI

・While aiming a sphere, it will now display how many of the target Pal has already been captured

・You can now check the cooldowns on partner skills for all your Pals on the main screen

・Equipment and item stats are now visible on the technology screen, even if you have not unlocked them first

・The tutorial has been improved and renamed to “Journey”

・You can now show/hide the “Journey” in the game options

・Damage number display size can be changed in the game options.

(In Raid Boss battles, the damage numbers tend to overlap a lot and it may be difficult to see, so we recommend adjusting the size)

▼Player

・Items dropped by players after death on a dedicated server can now be picked up by anyone after 24 hours of real-time have passed

・Added a new “sleeping” player emote (edited)

▼Base Related

・You can now allow/disallow certain work for base Pals at the Monitoring Stand

・Chest filters have been added. Select item types to allow or disallow inside chests

・Crafted items are now transported from crafting facilities. Selecting “allow transport” when crafting will result in Pals transporting those items to chests when finished

・You can now edit your character’s appearance at any time by using the “Antique Dresser”

・Building and building piece placement rules have been relaxed

⤷ You can now connect stairs facing upwards

⤷ Roof pieces can now directly connect to foundations

⤷ Triangular walls can now be connected to stairs

・You can now force a Pal to work and cancel their break by picking them up and throwing them towards a facility

(Pals recover their SAN while taking a break, so be careful!)

・Fixed assignments remain fixed, even after bad events occur. Previously, some assignments would change due to certain conditions, but now they will remain fixed unless the Pal is placed inside the Pal Box

▼Balance Adjustment

・Minimum heat and cold resistance have been added to various armour. You will no longer need to take off your heat-resistance armour when it is cold at night in the starting areas!

・Reduce the button press time in the egg incubator

・Change the pattern for Jormuntide Ignis to something more unique

・Added legendary blueprints for some firearms (Dropped from specific enemies)

・Corrected the selling price of diamonds

・In single-player, it is no longer possible to select the initial spawn point for multiplayer

・Blocked the back of the starting area with rocks to prevent players from getting lost or stuck

・The increased attack power multiplier of partner skills that increase the player’s attack power while riding has been uniformly reduced from 2.0 to 1.2

・Eggs now have a small chance to produce Alpha Pals

・Flying and floating Pals are now immune to falling damage

・Shop price adjustments

▼Bug Fixes

・Fixed a bug where treasure chests would become empty when dying in a dungeon, etc

・Fixed an issue where the effect that increases the player’s attack power while riding was duplicating and accumulating under certain conditions

・Fixed an issue where players were not receiving loot when capturing Pals while mounted

・Adjusted the HP of the Legendary Pal and fixed an issue where the difference in HP between the captured Legendary Pal and the bred Legendary Pal was too large

・Fixed an issue where Pal would eat while riding.

・Fixed an issue where spheres thrown close to wild pals would not hit and be lost

▼Others

・Improved various Pal models and textures

・Added and adjusted some sound effects

・Many other minor bug fixes

▼Dedicated Server

・Fixed an issue where sorting did not work in the server list

・Improved the server list to allow page transitions

・Dedicated servers now support various log outputs

・Implemented REST API

※ Please check the tech guide for details

https://tech.palworldgame.com/

▼Cheat Prevention

・Fixed a vulnerability that allowed Steam account spoofing

・Fixed 7 other critical vulnerabilities

===

▼Soundtrack

・One new song has been added to the soundtrack. If you have already purchased the soundtrack, please update and enjoy the new song!

※ Please note that the soundtrack may take a few days to update

While today’s update is the biggest yet for Palworld, Pocketpair said it’s planning “a larger, more content-packed update” for summer 2024. This includes never-before-seen scenery and “thrilling adventures on a new island, home to many new pals.” Pocketpair also plans to add new buildings, weapons, and tower bosses.

Palworld launched in January and overnight became one of the biggest games in the world, setting records not only on Steam but on Xbox Game Pass, where it is the biggest third-party game launch ever. So far, the $30 ‘Pokémon with guns’ game has seen an incredible 25 million players, with 15 million copies sold on Steam and 10 million players on Xbox. Last month, Pocketpair boss Takuro Mizobe said the company couldn’t handle the massive profits Palworld has generated.

While Palworld is one of the biggest game launches ever, it’s also one of the most controversial. Pocketpair has said its staff has 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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