Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 won’t be an “open sim” like the 2004 original game, according to Paradox Interactive. Now in development at The Chinese Room, it’ll be an action-RPG with a relatively linear story set in the World Of Darkness universe. This obviously plays to The Chinese Room’s strengths – they’re better known for melancholy or horrifying strolls through broken spaces than the Dishonorable massaging of intricate systems. But it also reflects Paradox’s view that the original Bloodlines has been “mythologised” a bit: people love the memory of it more than the reality, and there are aspects of the 2004 game, according to Paradox’s deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja, that simply “wouldn’t fly today”.
The CEO of the developer behind Spectre Divide, a new free-to-play competitive multiplayer shooter fronted by streamer Shroud, has insisted the game isn’t dead despite low player concurrent numbers.
Spectre Divide launched early September on PC via Steam, where it saw an encouraging 30,971 peak concurrent players. But that concurrent figure has fallen steadily since on Valve’s platform where it has a ‘mixed’ user review rating. Yesterday, October 8, Spectre Divide had a peak of 2,769 concurrent players.
Now, a month on from launch, Mountaintop Studios CEO, Nate Mitchell acknowledged the discourse around Spectre Divide low player numbers, but vowed to stick with the game.
It’s true that Spectre’s concurrent player count is lower than we’d all like.
“Some folks out there have declared Spectre ‘dead,’ mostly as a result of low concurrency,” Mitchell said. “It’s true that Spectre’s concurrent player count is lower than we’d all like.”
Mitchell admitted that a PvP game like Spectre Divide needs lots of players for healthy matchmaking, and that without them, players will experience longer queues and less fair matches.
“With that said, I can assure you that Spectre isn’t going anywhere,” he added. “The servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop.
“If player count drops from here, we have strategies for bringing players together, like combining the matchmaking queues. And we’ll continue working toward bringing new players in. We love this game – we’ve poured our heart and soul into it these past four years – and we’re just getting started.”
Mitchell explained that Mountaintop is an independent studio with a small team, but “we have the funds to support Spectre for a long time. And I promise: We’re going to make Spectre awesome together.”
As for the future, Mitchell said the developers need some time “to go heads-down, improve the game, and tackle some of your bigger asks,” with Season 1 set to kick off in December or January. Priorities include client performance, ping and server regions, anti-cheat, and game stability.
Last month, shortly after Spectre Divide launched, Mountaintop cut 13 staff, with Mitchell saying at the time that the layoffs “make sure we’re set up to support Spectre and its community for the long term.”
Expanding on the reasoning now, Mitchell said: “We made the difficult decision to reduce our monthly spend to make sure we were set up to support Spectre for the long term. In the run up to launch, the studio grew from more than 85 devs to support a bigger live service roadmap. We’re now back to around 75 full-time devs, but we have plenty of firepower to bring our plans to life.”
As for Shroud’s ongoing involvement, Mitchell said Mountaintop is still working with the streamer on future design iterations, “and he’s been helping us think through ways to make Spectre as compelling as possible for both community members and streamers.”
But, Mitchell stressed, Spectre Divide does not belong to Shroud, as some had assumed. “The reality is that Mountaintop has been bringing Spectre to life since 2020, and the game belongs to Mountaintop,” he said.
Spectre Divide launched amid a tumultuous time for the video game market and in particular live service games. 2024 has seen a number of high-profile live service missteps, including the failure of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.
Photo by Robert Reiners/Getty Images.
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.
A new PlayStation blog (thanks cheery fanzine PCGamer for the spot) has provided some illuminating info on the upcoming Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, and in many ways, the LAD series as a whole. The biggest takeaway: the fact pirate Yakuza was, at one point, going to be a fishing game called Like A Dragon: Tuna.
Splatoon 3‘s “regular updates” might have come to an end, but the seasonal events are still alive and kicking — and one of them is right around the corner.
Yes, ‘Splatoween’ is returning to the Splatlands this year and it has a spooky Splatfest to boot. This time, we’ll be picking sides for “What would you be in a fantasy world?” with Team Wizard, Knight and Ninja all up for grabs.
Firaxis is working with the Shawnee tribal nation to ensure “an authentic, sincere recreation” in the upcoming Civilization 7.
In Civilization 7, Shawnee are an Exploration Age civilization, which means they will have to become another civ in the Modern Age (presumed to be the Lakota or Iroquois).
Here’s Firaxis’ official description:
An Algonquian-speaking people originally from what is now the eastern United States, the Shawnee fought hard to keep their land and traditions. Their fiercest battles were with the United States, as the new nation pushed westward. Seeking to build a coalition of indigenous people to form a united front, the Shawnee established a settlement at Prophetstown, but the U.S. Army loomed on the horizon.
Speaking to the Associated Press, producer Andrew Frederiksen revealed that developers from Firaxis had asked the Shawnee to imagine a Shawnee university or library of the future and to create new Shawnee words to describe futuristic concepts for use in the hotly anticipated 4X game.
Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes, already a fan of 1999’s Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, jumped at the chance to be involved with Civilization 7 after Firaxis said it wanted to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh.
“Firaxis was asking questions about language we never would have thought to ask,” Barnes said. The partnership also involves a donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in language revitalization programs and facilities.
According to Firaxis, Tecumseh, “the one who leaps across the great expanse,” was a Shawnee chief “who challenged the westward expansion of the early United States. Together with his brother Tenskwatawa, he spread a message of unity and resistance among indigenous people. Although Tecumseh was killed during the War of 1812, his vision of cultural persistence lives on.”
Firaxis historian Andrew Johnson revealed that academics had warned the studio against including Tecumseh as a playable leader, but got in touch with Shawnee leaders directly to find out what they thought. “I think so often you get people assuming that representation in Civ is a reward of some sort. It’s not,” Johnson said.
“This is a company and we’re selling a product and we’re using an image and likeness to make a profit. And getting your ‘civ’ in Civilization doesn’t really help you very much if you’re struggling to preserve your culture.”
AP said the partnership comes after an acknowledgement from Civilization creator Sid Meier and other Firaxis executives of “past missteps in the Civilization franchise’s casual treatment of history, including how it incorporated Indigenous groups and colonization more broadly.”
The report mentions that Firaxis ditched its plan to add a historical Pueblo leader in 2010 after tribal leaders objected, and that the studio faced public criticism in Canada for including a Cree leader in Civilization 6.
In 2018, a prominent Cree leader complaining that it “perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and world view.”
We always kind of felt, ‘Here’s a way that you can change history.’ Maybe we can make Stalin a good guy. But that might have been stretching things a little too far.
Meier talked about the early Civilization games’ inclusion of Indigenous leaders such as Montezuma of the Aztecs, as well as the likes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. “We never realized people would take it as seriously as they do,” Meier said. “We always kind of felt, ‘Here’s a way that you can change history.’ Maybe we can make Stalin a good guy. But that might have been stretching things a little too far.
“We learned a lot as time went on. It is now a badge of honor for a nation to be included in Civilization. We’ve been lobbied by different countries, et cetera.”
In Civilization 7, Tecumseh specializes in diplomacy and defense. His unique ability, Nicaakiyakoolaakwe, increases food, production, and combat strength based on the number of allied city-states. Shawnee as a civ excel at utilizing natural resources. Their unique ability, Nepekifaki, gives more food for settlements built on river tiles but slightly reduces food for any cities not built on rivers. Its associated wonder is the Serpent Mound.
The Shawnee civilization is part of the Tecumseh and Shawnee Pack DLC, which is included in the Deluxe and Founders Editions of Civilization 7. It is not included in the Standard Edition of Civilization 7, but is available as a bonus offer for pre-orders of the Standard Edition until February 11, 2025, and will be available for separate purchase thereafter.
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.
For the record, I still think it’s easier and safer to go with a microSD for your Steam Deck storage needs, and with good Prime Big Deal Days savings on two of the best – the Samsung Pro Plus and the SanDisk Ultra – that opinion remains unbudged. Still, you know what they say: when you’re holding a tiny screwdriver, everything starts to look like a tiny screw. So I understand if the call to replace the Deck’s internal SSD, or indeed that of your Asus ROG Ally, proves too strong.
In which case, have a look at the Crucial P310, which I added to our best SSDs list just last week, and is currently joining in the Prime sale frivolities. Specifically, the 1TB model has been slashed from £128 to £70 on Amazon UK, while it’s the 2TB version that gets a US discount, dropping from $265 to $168.
Amazon’s latest Prime Big Deal Days has entered its final day – of deals – so capacity-deprived gaming handheld owners still have a few hours to grab themselves a cheap microSD card upgrade. And if space is the sole concern, it’s hard to get more substantial than the 1.5TB SanDisk Ultra. Never mind how the header pic shows a 64GB card, the much more desirable 1.5TB version is down from £149 to £100 on Amazon UK and from $150 to $89 on Amazon US. Both of those are very fine bargains indeed, for a card that dwarfs even the biggest SSD options of the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally families.
Why, Hawthorne, must you put in me a position where I have to balance my love of woodland fantasy against my complete exhaustion with chopping things down to build other things? There are two scurrying mammals wearing robes inside of me, and they both love Redwall, Mice And Mystics, and Mouse Guard, but might spontaneously combust if they have to craft another hatchet. A trailer, eh? Is…is that a mouse and an otter dancing on top of a table, each grasping a mug of ale of their tiny paws and dancing to fiddle music? Fine! Fine! I’m not happy about this, but Fine!
Not all video game remakes are recreated equally. For every genuinely game-changing Final Fantasy VII Remake or Metroid: Zero Mission, you have comparatively more surface-level restorations like 2018’s Shadows of the Colossus or 2020’s Destroy All Humans! that transplant most of the original material into a new game engine that looks nicer but doesn’t really change how it works. Until Dawn fits firmly into that latter camp. Its colourful cast of horny teenagers and spooky snowy mountain setting have never looked better, but its gripping, life-or-death decision-based gameplay is more or less identical to how I remember it from the 2015 original. The general lack of gameplay improvements and noticeable performance problems are a poor trade-off for what it offers, and that makes it tough to recommend, particularly since its premium price makes Until Dawn seem less like a must-have bit of moonlit murder and something closer to a case of daylight robbery.
Here’s what our reviewer said in her review of the 2015 original:
That sentiment still largely rings true – it’s basically the same game, after all. While Supermassive’s subsequent choose-your-own-misadventure horror stories, like 2021’s The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes and 2022’s The Quarry, have come close to matching it, Until Dawn still remains the most well-rounded execution of the choice-and-consequence-heavy formula that the developer has made its own. Its schlock horror story is crammed with entertainingly gory scenarios inspired by the likes of Saw, The Descent, and Poltergeist, and its cast is headlined by strong performances from Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare, and Rami Malek, whose characters remain just as engaging today as they were nine years ago – even in spite of the occasionally cringe-inducing dialogue.
Back in Blackwood
While the cast and remote Blackwood Pines setting remain the same, everything has been rebuilt on an entirely new engine (Unreal 5) for this remake, and it shows in ways both good and bad. There’s no question that the higher-quality textures and dramatically improved lighting combine to give this interactive slasher film a considerably more realistic edge, and there are a number of welcome environmental touches, like snow that visibly crumples underfoot and the rays of a setting sun reflected in the window glass of a gondola.
However, these enhancements come at the cost of a frame rate that’s often every bit as shaky as the freaked-out teens onscreen, and at its worst this rebuilt Until Dawn is also prone to coming apart completely like a serial killer’s victim on the sharp end of a saw blade. I managed to make it through my full playthrough without ever being unceremoniously bumped out to the PlayStation 5’s home screen, but another member of IGN’s staff reported no fewer than six crashes within the eight-hour story’s opening half. Until Dawn is supposed to be about preventing its cast of characters from meeting a sudden end at the hands of an unspeakably evil presence, not an indecipherable Sony error code.
These enhancements come at the cost of a frame rate that’s often every bit as shaky as the freaked-out teens onscreen.
Whereas the original Until Dawn is experienced mostly from fixed camera perspectives, the 2024 version – for the most part – favours an over-the-shoulder, third-person view not unlike the recently released Silent Hill 2 remake. There are definite benefits to this manual camera control system, both in the sense that it allows you to better observe the heightened detail in the creepy environments around you, and also swivel your viewpoint around to identify the small number of new areas to explore off the beaten path. For instance, you’ll find a car park outside the ski lift station in the story’s opening hours that wasn’t there before. However, there’s not much of interest to find in this handful of new locations, and I can’t help but feel that the new camera system works against the overall cinematic presentation. Until Dawn’s consistent close-up chase cam meant it felt less like I was puppeteering the characters in an interactive slasher movie and more like I was sauntering my way through a survival-horror shooter, minus the actual combat.
It’s also a strange choice that developer Ballistic Moon has scrapped the ability to walk faster in this remake. Characters will automatically break into a sprint during quick-time event-heavy chase sequences, but otherwise there’s no longer the option of speeding the exploration of environments up a bit with the press of a button like you could previously. Combine that with a distinctly drunken sluggishness to character movement that sees them stumble a few steps too many in one direction after you’ve changed to another, and Until Dawn is now slower and clumsier to control than it used to be, which is not exactly ideal when you’re trying to herd a group of hapless teenagers towards surviving the many horrors of the night.
Teenage Future Injure Totems
The sloppier movement also makes it more of a chore to scour your surroundings for totems. Collecting these scattered Native American artifacts once again gives you brief glimpses at potential character fates, which provide some foresight into your decision-making, only this time their placements have been reshuffled – presumably to make finding them more of a challenge for returning players. That’s all well and good, but I wish that actually triggering the premonitions hadn’t been turned into such a fiddly process.
In the original Until Dawn you found a totem, flipped it over to see a character’s potential death, then moved on. Now you have to pick the totem up, then slowly shift it up and down and swivel it left and right before a tiny glimmer of light appears somewhere on its surface and the vision is finally revealed. It just feels annoyingly unwieldy, like trying to retrieve a pick from an acoustic guitar after you’ve accidentally dropped it into the soundhole, and really only serves to needlessly drag out what was previously a fairly immediate and straightforward process.
This token totem twist is pretty much the only new gameplay mechanic of note. Aside from a slightly lengthened prologue and a new post-credits scene that hints at the possibility of a sequel, Until Dawn otherwise features all the same choices, quick-time events, and potential character fates that it did previously, and the crowd-friendly, pass-the-controller co-op gameplay introduced in later Supermassive Games adventures sadly hasn’t been retrofitted in here. It is slightly more tailorable to personal preferences, though, so if you find that your hands are too shaky for the ‘Don’t Move’ sequences that instruct you to keep the controller as still as possible, you can just go ahead and disable them from the pause menu, for example.
Overall, however, this Until Dawn remake remains a pretty hard sell given that right next to its listing on the PlayStation Store is the PlayStation 4 version, which still looks sharp and runs at a smooth 60fps on the PlayStation 5 at only a fraction of the cost. The new Until Dawn costs over four times as much as the original (at least, here in Australia), and there’s no upgrade path for existing owners of the PS4 version like there has been previously with other first-party Sony games like the PS5 ports of Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us Part II. To be fair, those were technically remasters rather than remakes (The Last of Us Part I is a remake that also had no upgrade path from the PS3 or PS4 remastered versions), but I’d argue that the improvements to Until Dawn are so superficial that it feels much closer to a remaster than a remake anyway.
Idea Factory has confirmed its “motorcycle combat action game” Neptunia Riders Vs Dogoos will be launching for Switch on 28th January 2025.
In this upcoming release, you’ll be tasked with helping Uzume and the Goddesses escape a dimension filled with Dogoos. Here’s a bit more about it, courtesy of the PR: