The rumours were true! Until Dawn, Supermassive Games’ breakthrough horror game previously exclusive to PlayStation 4, is coming to PC in a remastered re-release later this year.
Witness my true power!
SEGA has announced that Sonic X Shadow Generations will be heading to Nintendo Switch in Autumn 2024.
The game will feature a full remaster of the original 2011 Sonic Generations along with a brand-new campaign featuring Shadow the Hedgehog. Sorry, no guns here though. Sonic Generations features 2.5D levels in the style of the original games while also incorporating 3D levels popularised by Sonic Adventure.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
If you missed the live broadcast of the latest State of Play, you can find the full show, all the individual trailers and the announcements collected in one handy list below. Enjoy.
Dave the Diver
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Foamstars
Helldivers 2
Judas
Legendary Tales
Metro Awakening
Rise of the Ronin
Silent Hill: The Short Message
Silent Hill 2
Sonic X Shadow Generations
Stellar Blade
Until Dawn
V Rising
Zenless Zone Zero
Sony wasted no time telling fans when the next State of Play is as the company is set to host another digital event presentation focusing entirely on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
At the end of the January 2024 State of Play presentation, Sony revealed that on February 6, it will hold a presentation dedicated to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. This is not the first time Sony has held a State of Play dedicated entirely to just one game, as the studio has held similar presentations for PlayStation exclusives, including Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part II, and Horizon: Forbidden West.
This will likely be the last deep dive look at Final Fantasy VII Rebirth before any reviews are published and before it releases to the public on February 29. Rebirth is part two of a planned trilogy remaking Square Enix’s influential 1997 JRPG Final Fantasy VII.
Picking up after the events of Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth follows Cloud and his friends as they leave Midgar and venture off into the wider world. Locations such as the Mythril Mine and Kalm are confirmed to be in Rebirth while party memebers Vincent and Cait Sith are confirmed to make their debut.
In our first hands-on preview of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, my colleague Bo Moore said: “Story-wise, Rebirth again feels very familiar, and yet also different. This is due in part to the tremendous difference in scale and presentation – here, like with Remake, areas that were previously sparse or bare are expanded out into lush zones to explore. But there are also little changes that are mostly inconsequential, but they still play out in different ways than fans of the original FF7 are used to.”
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
Sony and Hideo Kojima have released a new Death Stranding 2 trailer alongside the game’s full title – Death Stranding 2 On The Beach. It’s out in 2025 on PS5, with a PC release date still to be revealed, and appears to be as free-wheeling and self-serious yet whimsical as you’d expect from a Kojima joint. I got as far as the pet anime dragon before my brain squirmed out through my ear.
At the first State of Play of 2024, Stunlock Studios announced that its fantasy survival game V Rising is coming to PS5 sometime this year.
V Rising was released in Early Access in May 2022 on Steam. Set in an open world, V Rising has players controlling a vampire who recently woke up and tasked with venturing across the world and defeating bosses, feeding on the blood of enemy NPCs, and avoiding hazards that will kill your character, such as direct sunlight.
Following its release into Early Access, Stunlock Studios announced V Rising was close to hitting 50,000 players a day after its release.
In our review of V Rising, we said: “While its time-consuming crafting aspects can take the bite out of the vampire fantasy, V Rising really does rise to the occasion with its excellent boss design and respectable ARPG combat.”
Developing...
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
Do you want to build a PC? Not ready to give up your older Ryzen motherboard but still want great gaming performance? Previously your only option was the (superb) 5800X3D, which uses a 3D V-Cache to massively boost gaming performance, but now the cheaper 5700X3D is also available.
Made from silicon that wasn’t quite good enough to turn into the 5800X3D, these processors boost slightly lower but come with the same complement of extra L3 cache, making them still head and shoulders above models like the 5600X, 5800X, 5900X and even 5950X – not to mention older Ryzen 1000, 2000 and 3000 models.
Following its launch this month, the brand new Ryzen 7 5700X3D is now available from B&H Photo and Amazon in the US for $249 or Amazon UK for £233, a great price that undercuts the $308 5800X3D significantly. Here’s some links:
With games like Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 last year having players wax poetic about which of their video game besties they most want to smooch, it can sometimes feel like romance systems are becoming a staple of AAA party-based RPGs. But that’s not going to be the case with Avowed, which is opting to forego a dedicated romance system for a focus on “building thoughtful relationships” with companions instead.
This comes from an interview IGN did with Avowed game director Carrie Patel, where she confirmed Avowed would not feature romance options, and why:
“We are building thoughtful relationships with our companion characters,” she said. “Ultimately, I personally am a fan of making that an option, but I feel like if you’re going to do it, you really, really have to commit and make sure that you’re giving all to fulfilling that in a way that feels both true to the character, but also creates an engaging player experience. So not something we’re doing for Avowed, but I wouldn’t say never.”
Patel points out that having a dedicated romance system in a story-focused game is a ton of work: you need options for both a fulfilling romance as well as a regular friendship for those who don’t want to go down that path. In addition, players generally expect multiple romance options, and expectations around the depth of such relationships only seem to be climbing higher and higher with each new Karlach and Shadowheart video games introduce. It’s a big ask, and also not a necessary one if the story of the game doesn’t lend itself to romance in the first place.
Later in our interview, Patel further hinted at the ways in which Avowed’s non-romantic companion relationships could possibly manifest. Thus far, the studio has given multiple nods to how player choices will impact the world around them, most notably showing this off during a quest in the latest Xbox Developer Direct. Patel and I chatted a bit about this in the context of games like Avowed letting players shape their character’s moral compass via character actions and reactions. Avowed is not a game with a morality meter, she said, but characters will certainly have feelings about the actions you take, and won’t be shy about expressing them.
“One of the fun challenges with design, particularly around consequences or even sometimes around player options that are reactive to either the kind of character you’ve built or choices you’ve made earlier in the game is over the years I’ve learned that that stuff is always a lot less obvious to the player than to the designer,” Patel said. “And so I think sometimes you have to be a bit more direct in tying those options and those consequences to content that’s come before, because if it feels too natural and too understated, it feels like a thing that’s happening, not a thing that’s happening because of what you did.”
In short: prepare for characters, possibly including your companions, to let you know if you’re behaving like a little jerkwad.
Avowed is steadily nearing its 2024 release, having first been revealed back in 2020 at the Xbox Games Showcase and getting a deeper look at a 2023 Xbox showcase. It’s set in Eora, the world of Pillars of Eternity, which incidentally just got an update earlier this month despite the game being nine years old.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong! Tomb Raider! Slave Zero X!
The shortest month of the year is here… but it also might be one of the most-packed.
February 2024 sees Nintendo’s next big remake land on the Switch, but this is the month of the retro throwback, and the eShop (and our shelves) will be bursting with new titles to pick up and download.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Hello there! I’m Tomas Sala – solo developer of Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles.
Way back in 2020, I launched my first game on Xbox in the form of The Falconeer, an Xbox Series S|X launch title that combined a hostile, flooded open world full of political intrigue, with supernatural and spiritual overtones all seen from the vantage point of Falconeers, skilled riders of giant building sized warbirds that fought each other with lances that charged from the stormy skies.
Four years later I’m asking you to return to the Great Ursee with the next entry in the series, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles – set 40 years after the events of The Falconeer within the same flooded open world. But whilst The Falconeer focused on tight aerial combat and moment to moment thrills, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is an open world builder with freedom and expression at its core. Build sprawling towns, spires, and fortresses as hubs for trade, or rallying grounds for conquests.
The demo for Bulwark has just landed on Xbox consoles – here’s some useful tips that will help you make the most of your time with it as you reforge a shattered world.
Experiment in Freebuild Mode
The included opening tutorial gets you to grips with how you’ll grow from simple wooden outposts to sprawling cityscapes in the hostile world of The Great Ursee. There is also a freebuild mode, which allows you to build without the need to locate resources, and upgrade any of your towers at will. This mode is perfect for experimenting with how you build, or simply enjoying the art of painting the landscape and embracing chaotic creativity!
Keep an Eye on Your Resources
Bulwark treats resources a little differently than other builders, instead of collecting X amount of a resource to build a specific unit or building, you must locate each resource type and link its extractors to the buildings you want to upgrade. The number floating above an extractor will tell you exactly how many ‘building jumps’ that resource is effective for, so optimising the routes your resources take to get to your towers is important for creating huge sprawling citadels.
Use the Right Captains
Some resource nodes will be far from your initial settlement, scattered across the restless waters of the Ursee. You’ll need to set a pair of harbours (indicated by an anchor icon on your surveyor’s target reticule) for pick up and delivery of your resources.
You’ll need to hire captains to transport these goods for you You’ll start with a set amount, unlock more in the soul tree or via random events. Each captain has vessels designed to carry certain types of cargo. Don’t forget to bring workers out to the resources to upgrade the extractors and increase their efficiency!
Keep an Eye on Your Trade Routes
Speaking of trade routes, you can see the path that each ship will take as it ferries your precious cargo across the Ursee, though be sure to install defences along the routes where possible and pay attention to updates from your advisor – there are opportunities that would rather raid your supply lines than scavenge for their own.
Unlock and Use Commanders
Commanders are powerful units that live within fully upgraded towers – converting them to their faction’s aesthetic and providing useful boosts to your economy, defences to your creations and trade routes, or units to escort your surveyor and act as a war band.
More commanders can be recruited through random events (question marks in the world map) or by simply expanding your settlement and increasing your population (progress can be checked in the soul tree)
Use the Photo Mode
With Bulwark’s super flexible photo mode you can control the time of day, apply depth of field and camera positioning completely detached from any unit.
Want to turn it from night to day and soar across the Ursee to capture a whale breaking the waters by your port whilst in the middle of a raid – go for it! You can also choose to pause the action when in photo mode, or allow events and time to play out, perfect for video capture or time lapse photography as you manipulate the time of day.
Finally, Bulwark stores every single brick you build and commits the action to memory – just click the stick while in photo mode and watch your creation build itself brick by brick from where you started to really show off the scale of your achievement and progress!
I hope you enjoy the Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles demo, whether you’re a fan of The Falconeer returning to try your hand at creation rather than destruction, or this is your first adventure in the Great Ursee – there’s a restless world out there waiting to be tamed and built upon – and I can’t wait to see what you create.
Thank you!
Wired Productions
AN OPEN WORLD OF WAVES AND LORE
Extend your empire across many islands in this open world through a network of trading ships, discover new locations to build or conquer, and learn about the ancient history of the Ursee and its people in this continuation of the Falconer Saga.
A DIVIDED WORLD
Who you invite into your home determines your political alignment, unlocking new commanders and their flying units, war or trade-ship captains, new building options and architecture.
DEFEND YOUR BULWARK
Some in this world will eye your progress with envy, and violence and conflict will come for your settlements, and it will do so from the air. Your defences need to be strong, your towers mighty and your commanders with their warbirds, dragons and mighty airships need to be ready!
The post How to Build Your Bulwark – Demo out Now appeared first on Xbox Wire.
