If you’re not militant about meeting all the latest hardware standards, but do need an upgrade in the CPU department, the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D is close to perfect. Despite releasing this year, it’s designed to fit the last-gen AM4 motherboard socket – which sounds strange, because it is, but then the 5700X3D is also the cheapest Ryzen chip to feature AMD’s extremely game-friendly 3D V-Cache tech. The result is a very sprightly processor that’s available for relative chump change, especially now that Prime Big Deal Days has sliced it down to £161 in the UK.
Paradox Interactive seems ready to be done with Vampire: The Masquerade — and with RPGs in general — with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja telling PC Gamer that any potential Bloodlines 3 will be “done by someone else.”
Lilja opened up about Bloodlines 2’s development in the course of an unusually frank interview, itself part of a media tour seemingly designed to show how Paradox was being reset after a string of problematic releases and reports of a toxic work culture. Paradox’s overarching message? It’s sticking to what it’s good at, and what it’s good at is strategy games.
“It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game,” Lilja told PC Gamer. “So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us. I would say it’s the sort of strategic way this would work. So it’s still an outlier from what we’re supposed to do, we don’t know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it.”
In short, Lilja considers Bloodlines a “dead end” for the company regardless of how well it does, which is made more awkward by the fact that Paradox Interactive owns Vampire: The Masquerade creator White Wolf Publishing. Lilja didn’t talk about Paradox’s plans for White Wolf, but it seems as if any future Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines RPGs will be licensed out to other developers.
So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us
“I think some studios do strategic investments, long term things, because they feel that the cost of not doing it is too high. But, I mean, I think it’s fairly clear, at least to me, and I think to you, even in the best of cases, Bloodlines does not have a super long shelf life. That’s not the way these games behave. You have an influx of players, there’s a bit of word of mouth, and they have a high peak, and then they trail off. And it’s not the type of gameplay that develops over time that much. So I think that’s part of why these types of games are not really that attractive to us.”
“If we hadn’t found The Chinese Room,” deputy CEO Mattias Lilja said, “and seen what they’d done with the early work, [cancellation] would have been the next logical step, because we could not continue as we did.”
The Chinese Room is taking what looks like a very different direction from Hardsuit Labs, boiling it down into more of a straightforward action RPG. Fans have posted various comparisons between the two online, noting the differences between the melee combat among other things.
“Generally, it’s a continuation of the same vision but they had to make it theirs,” Lilja told GI.biz in a separate interview. “When a game has been going this long with a sizable team in Seattle for a number of years before we moved it… It might have commercial challenges, but we liked the direction.”
Lilja says that Paradox is targeting a first half of 2025 release for Bloodlines 2, and that development is currently on track after its suffered yet another delay in August.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
I noticed that an awful lot of you read last Monday’s spotlight on the Ugreen Docking Station for Steam Deck, by our new deals tsar Robert. An awful lot. Way more than anything I wrote that week. No, it’s fine. I’m FINE. I hope you’ll be very happy together. But not as happy as someone who needs a swanky new Steam Deck dock yet missed that sale, as now they have another chance, with Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days knocking it down to £26 / $30 once more.
Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok will indeed get a PS5 Pro Enhanced update after the first-party PlayStation Studios game skipped the announcement of the $700 mid-gen upgrade.
Push Square spotted the PlayStation Store listing for God of War Ragnarok now includes the ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ label. Neither Sony nor Sony Santa Monica have announced the game’s PS5 Pro support yet, and there’s no detail on what it will involve, but of course the hope is Ragnarok’s resolution will be boosted while maintaining 60 frames per second.
PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features.
At a recent PS5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us Part 2, to discuss the improvements we can expect to see now there’s a more powerful PS5 on the market.
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.
“Players should be able to enjoy the game on an equal footing”.
Remember earlier this year when SEGA announced the strangely Fall Guys-esque free-to-play mobile game Sonic Rumble? Yeah, we do too (unfortunately), but today, we’ve learnt a little more about the game, making it appear somewhat more attractive: namely, there will be no gacha or pay-to-win mechanics (thanks, VGC).
That is according to Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka and the game’s director Makoto Tase who, in a recent interview with Automaton, explained how the team opted against the mechanics due to how poorly received they tend to be in the West.
One of the games industry’s worst-kept secrets, the PC version of Red Dead Redemption, is a worst-kept secret no longer. After an unconscionable period of leakage, Rockstar have at last confirmed the open world port, together with a PC version of its Undead Nightmare expansion – they’re coming to Rockstar Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 29th 2024. Picture craggy old John Marston riding into town at sunset, whooping and firing six-shooters at the clouds. Actually, don’t picture anything – that’s what videos are for! Find the announcement trailer below.
A Cocktail of Fear – How Alien: Isolation Terrified Xbox Players
Summary
Alien: Isolation celebrates its 10th anniversary today, October 7.
Creative Director Al Hope, Technical Director Mike Bailey, and Animator Simon Ridge reflect on the development journey of Alien: Isolation.
Alien: Isolation is available to play on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S via Backward Compatibility.
Claustrophobia. Darkness. Ominous noises. Suddenly, a giant killing machine exploding from the shadows and giving chase. Ten years after its release, it’s fair to say that Alien: Isolation has terrified generations of Xbox players — but they weren’t the only ones showing bravery in the face of fear.
Developers Creative Assembly felt that the Alien license, with a single, unpredictable enemy that stalked you throughout the game, and an arsenal that extended no further than a few simple self-defence tools, would combine to create a memorable survival horror experience. Despite this chilling premise, there were only a handful of other games in the survival horror genre that could be looked to here for guidance.
“That was one of the challenges,” explains Creative Director Al Hope. “I felt like because there were so few guiding lights, it was a leap of faith that we’d get there in the end. In the meantime, there was a lot of soul searching on our team. It would have been so easy to say maybe we would be better off giving the player a gun and they can shoot the Alien, and we’ll take the path of least resistance.
“But I was adamant that we had committed ourselves to creating this Alien experience that I felt wasn’t available anywhere else. No one had ever made a game like this, so that was the promise. We had to deliver on that unpredictable game of cat and mouse which is at the heart of the Alien: Isolation experience.”
Cat and Mouse
That cat and mouse gameplay elevated Alien: Isolation to the peak of the survival horror genre, putting you in the shoes of Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter looking for closure with her search for the flight recorder buried deep within the labyrinth maze of the Sevastopol Station. The cat in this scenario? None other, of course, than the infamous, snarling monster itself – the iconic 1979 Alien.
“It’s a fearsome creature that you cannot defeat,” says Technical Director Mike Bailey. “You have to avoid it, get around it, distract it, whatever it might be. There are so many of those elements that kind of come together to really to give it that kind of enduring legacy, I think.”
It still has the power to surprise. Alien: Isolation earned immense praise for the artificial intelligence powering the alien upon its release and now, 10 years later, that same AI even catches the team who created it when they revisit the game.
“There are some areas where I’m very confident,” continues Bailey, talking about his Alien: Isolation playthroughs. “I know the level and think okay, I can duck behind that table, sneak around this bit and it was still catching me out. I was a bit too confident! It’s difficult to master. It’s unpredictable but not unfair. If I’d been a bit slower, if I’d used the motion tracker, I probably would have been able to handle the situation better. It wasn’t purely random.”
Animating the Alien
One key moment in development was the switch from making a third-person game to first-person, amplifying the intensity and horror at the heart of Alien: Isolation. That’s when Creative Assembly realised, they had something special on its hands but that shift to first-person also put a bigger spotlight on the alien itself, as you had to keep an eye on the menacing creature stalking you through the numerous corridors and vents. That added pressure to make the alien to look even more convincing.
“The first “Alien” film was the main point of reference, it was what we wanted to honour,” says Simon Ridge, the animator responsible for how the Alien moved. “There’s not much of the actual alien itself on screen, so it was about extracting the feeling you had when it was on screen, which was that it was quite odd. Quite eerie.
“I started looking around at different things that tapped into that very feeling of being eerie and odd. I looked at Nosferatu, the original old school Dracula. We looked at dinosaurs as well, looking at how the feet like went on the ground. I remember making quite an effort to make the feet feel really graceful. And then with the alien’s ability to go very, very fast at the same time, I thought that would play into these odd contrasts. It was creating a mixture of all sorts and then hoping that amalgamation would create that weirdness, that oddness.”
New Generation of Fans
Animation was just one ingredient in the dynamic cocktail of fear that Creative Assembly mixed together. They created a dynamic and reactive audio system because unlike most survival horror games, Alien: Isolation wasn’t choreographed or scripted. They replicated the Lo-Fi-Sci-Fi art direction that defined the movies, from the monitors with chunky buttons to the dirt and grime that caked the metallic walls.
It was that attention to detail that really brought the monstrous alien and its world to life, with the original Alien movie even playing on a loop in Creative Assembly’s office (“I must have watched it a few thousand times!” jokes Bailey).
And with Alien: Romulus bringing in a new generation of fans via the big screen, it also means a new generation of players are also discovering this standout survival horror experience for the very first time.
“It’s fantastic seeing people inspired by watching “Alien: Romulus” and playing Alien: Isolation for the first time and see how it still holds up,” concludes Hope. “The fact that people are still finding it today, picking it up, enjoying themselves… it’s just a great testament to the work that the team did. It’s incredible.”
You can play Alien: Isolation today on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S via Backward Compatibility. It’s available on the Microsoft Store in two versions: Alien: Isolation and Alien: Isolation – The Collection which contains the base game and seven packs of additional content. Keep up to date with Alien: Isolation news at AlienIsolation.com — and with a sequel confirmed to be in development after 10 years, there’s plenty more to come from the team.
Contains the full game and seven packs of additional content:
– Last Survivor and Crew Expendable (featuring the original AlienTM cast)
– All five Survivor mode packs, including Corporate Lockdown, Trauma, Safe Haven, Lost Contact and The Trigger
Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother’s disappearance.
As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien.
Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.
Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother’s disappearance.
As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien.
Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.
Scheduled for release on February 28, 2025, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a sequel to action adventure Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. This new title features the series’ fan-favorite, Goro Majima, as the sole protagonist. I recently had a conversation with Mr. Masayoshi Yokoyama, RGG Studio Director and the Like a Dragon Series Executive Producer, along with Mr. Hiroyuki Sakamoto, the Like a Dragon Series, RGG Studio Chief Producer, about the game’s highlights and the behind-the-scenes stories of its development.
PlayStation Blog: As a fan of the series, I’m most curious about why you chose Majima and pirates. How did this title come about in the first place?
Yokoyama: Around June or July 2023, long before the release of Infinite Wealth, the dev team was already mulling over the idea of an Infinite Wealth spin-off. Even if we were to make Like a Dragon 9, we knew that wouldn’t be enough to capture and tell the story. During the end of the Infinite Wealth development, we began percolating the idea of a spin-off that stars characters who are not Ichiban Kasuga. It was almost as if we were creating a blown-up sub-story for Infinite Wealth. For quite some time, I wanted to make a game called Like a Dragon: Tuna, where Kazuma Kiryu, as a tuna fisherman, sets off to sea to fight against fishing boats. Long story short, it never came to fruition, but keywords like “ship,” “sea,” and “fighting,” which had since then been engraved in my head, evolved into the concept of pirates.
PSB: The series is known for starring different characters as the protagonists. For instance, Kazuma Kiryu takes the lead in Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name while Majima steps into the spotlight in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I must say one of the perks of spin-offs is the freedom of starring new characters who are not just Ichiban Kasuga.
Yokoyama: I agree. As the protagonist changes in spin-offs, you can follow the same story from a different perspective. Also, spin-offs are perfect in size for adults. The Like a Dragon series is like an all-you-can-eat restaurant where you can choose from meat, seafood, and anything else you want and eat however much you like. But as you mature, you start to appreciate well-balanced, good-proportion meals. Spin-offs are like that.
PSB: Can you describe who Majima is?
Yokoyama: He masks his feelings and hides his true self. His past is mentioned throughout the series, yet the true Majima remains a puzzle. He feels the need to live up to the image that others have of him and adeptly go along with them. However, in this entry, he suffers from amnesia, exposing his true self as the story unfolds.
PSB: Does that mean we will finally find out who the true Majima is?
Yokoyama: You’ll understand who he is through his interactions with a boy called Noah. It turns out he’s just a tough dude who likes to fantasize a lot [laughs]. In Gaiden, while remembering his past, Majima looks at himself objectively and realizes who he really is. This is a novel story development.
However, Majima is not the most conventional choice for a protagonist. His unpredictability, while not the norm, is what sets him apart and makes him intriguing. When a character like Majima becomes the protagonist, it creates a discrepancy between actions and emotions; when you get frustrated in a scene, but Majima does not even look bothered, you may feel confused.
To avoid that, we would need a neutral character who could act the way players anticipate from a protagonist. But the downside is that we’d end up with a boring protagonist. We gave Kiryu and Kasuga additional personalities to build them into protagonists, but if we did that to Majima, he’d turn out to be a boring guy. To make him a protagonist, we only had two options: amnesia or travel back in time. Without amnesia, Majima wouldn’t have worked as a protagonist.
PSB: Next, I’d like to ask you about the battles. This time, Majima switches between two battle styles: Mad Dog and Sea Dog. Could you tell us about them?
Sakamoto: In Gaiden, Kiryu also uses two different battle styles. We thought two was the right amount in order to keep battles from being too complicated. Since Majima uses nimble moves, we wanted to simplify his battle moves. Players can execute exhilarating moves by merely pressing the buttons. The Mad Dog Style is based on Majima’s battle style that executes combos, jumps, and other responsive actions.
PSB:I played the demo version at the Tokyo Game Show 2024 and experienced some dynamic fights. What was the intention behind introducing jumping?
Yokoyama: Introducing jumping changes the gameplay drastically. In fighting games, for example, players jump even when there’s no need to. Also, you’re defenseless while jumping, so if you get hit, you’ll be blown away. For that reason, in action games, you’re often invincible while jumping, but that can cause problems. Simply introducing jumping changes the game design, so we’ve avoided it until now.
However, the team decided to incorporate jumping into the game because the character Majima looks good while jumping. This is the first time players can control the character’s ability to jump, rather than it just being a part of heated battles. It’s not a regular jump action but a form of jump incorporated into a combo.
Yokoyama: Incorporating two battle styles in a game is quite complicated. If one style becomes way more entertaining, players will stop using the other one. It’s easy to label the battle styles under different characteristics, but it’s difficult to make them both equally enjoyable. The Sea Dog style turned out to be more interesting in this case and everyone ended up choosing this style. To top it off, the Sea Dog style has some fun costumes.
Sakamoto: In the early stages of development, the Mad Dog style felt a bit plain, and no one was using it. So, we brainstormed ways to make this style more appealing, and we’re now in the fine-tuning stage to achieve the perfect balance between the two fighting styles.
Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare finally hit PC on October 29, 2024 — 14 years after Rockstar’s Wild West epic first launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2010.
“For the first time in its storied legacy, John Marston’s beloved journey can be experienced on PC in stunning, new detail, with both Red Dead Redemption and its iconic zombie-horror companion story, Undead Nightmare, arriving to PC on October 29,” Rockstar said.
The PC port, developed by Double Eleven (Double Eleven worked on the 2023 PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch ports of Red Dead Redemption), adds PC-specific enhancements including native 4K resolution at up to 144hz on compatible hardware, monitor support for both Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9), HDR10 support, and full keyboard and mouse functionality.
There’s also support for Nvidia DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.0 upscaling technologies, Nvidia DLSS Frame Generation, adjustable draw distances, shadow quality settings, and more, Rockstar added.
The PC trailer is below:
Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare launch on PC across Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Rockstar Store.
Rockstar has long neglected PC players, not even releasing Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC at the same time as consoles but a year later instead. It’s the same situation for Grand Theft Auto 6, which will likely be the biggest video game launch of all time despite no PC version being announced.
Now Red Dead Redemption is finally confirmed for PC, PC gamers are wondering whether Rockstar plans further upgrades for the game and its sequel on other platforms. Will Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, received a PS5 Pro Enhanced update, perhaps to add a 60fps and 4K resolution mode?
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.
Paradox Interactive have not had a rosy couple of years. While the company’s core business in grand strategy remains prosperous, their approach to games outside this niche has been mired by delays, cancelations, closures and layoffs. Let’s run through the big setbacks: The Lamplighters League, which we overall liked, was a $22 million financial flop – Paradox have now parted ways with creators Harebrained Studios. Cities Skylines 2 should have been a victory lap, after the success of the first game, but it launched with severe bugs and performance issues. Prison Architect 2, another follow-up to a hit game, has been delayed indefinitely, and Paradox have split from developers Double Eleven. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is borderline vapourware: originally announced in 2019 with Hardsuit Labs at the helm, it’s currently in the hands of The Chinese Room, and was recently delayed for the umpteenth time into 2025.
And then there’s the abrupt cancellation of Life By You, a life management sim designed to compete directly with The Sims 4, and the closure of its creators Paradox Tectonic. Writing-down the development of Life By You cost Paradox around 208 million krona, or $19.2 million. It was the primary contributor to a 90% decrease in the company’s operating profit for the second quarter of 2024, versus the same quarter in 2023.
, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother’s disappearance.
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