Oh, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Mere weeks from release after years of delays, plopped in front of me at a cramped, lightly vibrating Gamescom booth, and you still won’t reveal your secrets. I did get to play a brief whizz through GSC Game World’s eerie FPS – enough to feel encouraged, even – but be it time constraints or the darkness of my nighttime raid into the radioactive Zone, I would have liked to have quite literally seen more.
Then again, keeping the mystery intact may have been the point all along. “As a game director, I want to hide everything from the player”, GSC’s CEO Ievgen Grygorovych had told me minutes earlier. “I’m fighting with the marketing team because they want to show as much as possible!”
Hollowbody’s introduction is masterful, and not just for a sallow skyline that captures the life-sapping dreariness of British coastlines. The horror nous required to impart unease in the middle of the day are somewhat eased up on when you’ve got all that serotonin-begone drizzle to work with, sure. But this feels more poignant than that. There’s a soulful drearines and utterly heartbreaking inevitability to the vibe here, as your character and rubber suited activist pals try to get the bottom of a horrific incident. It’s got best British indie horror film of the year written all over it.
Tony Hawk has said he’s talking to Activision again and is working on something Pro Skater-related with the company.
In an interview with Mythical Kitchen (via VGC), the world famous skater teased plans to celebrate Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’s 25th anniversary later this year.
“I wish I could tell you more, but I can tell you that I have been talking to Activision again, which is insanely exciting. We’re working on something,” Hawk said. “That is the first time I’ve said that publicly.
“It will be something the fans will truly appreciate.”
Speaking in 2022, Hawk said a follow-up remake collection was planned (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4) before Vicarious Visions merged with Blizzard, but the dream died when Activision failed to find a video game pitch from other developers it was happy with.
“[Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4] was the plan, even up until the release date of [1 and 2],” Hawk said. “We were doing 3 and 4, and then Vicarious got kind of absorbed, and then they were looking for other developers, and then it was over.
“The truth of it is [Activision] were trying to find somebody to do 3 and 4 but they just didn’t really trust anyone the way they did Vicarious.
“So they took other pitches from other studios, like, ‘what would you do with the THPS title?’ And they didn’t like anything they heard, and then that was it.
“Who knows? Maybe when the dust settles, we’ll figure it out. You never know. I never would’ve thought we were going to do 1+2, 20 years later.”
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater released on PSone on September 29, 1999, and went on to sell millions of copies and spawn subsequent sequels. As well as working with Activision on something new video game related, Tony Hawk is making a kids-focused animated TV show called Skatebirds, a title inspired by Hawk’s ‘Birdman’ nickname.
Photo by Sean M. Haffey/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.
Development studio Odyssey Interactive has announced that it is working on a prototype combining Smash Bros-style platform fighting with 40-player battle royale gameplay. What’s more, it is releasing this prototype to the public (thanks, Eurogamer).
Byte Breakers, as the dev is currently calling it, initially looks a lot like Smash when it first appears in the above reveal trailer. But, as the screen gets bigger, you’ll see that this is a fair amount larger than anything we’ve seen in Nintendo’s beloved fighting series to date. Forget a brawl, this is an all-out battle.
Helldivers, when you’re on the warfront, emptying magazines into hordes of Terminids, do you ever feel like you’re a space bug exterminator? I know I do and that’s why I’m really excited to tell you about our next Warbond*: Chemical Agents! This one has some seriously deadly toys.
I’ll start with everyone’s favorite part of a Warbond: the offensive gear. The first thing a Terminid exterminator needs is a good, high-pressure sprayer. The TX-41 Sterilizer is the tool of the trade, ready to spray down the threat with chemical gas.
A literal spray and pray with the TX-41 Sterilizer.
And in case the bugs got behind you, don’t worry–your gassy little pal the AX/TX-13 “Guard Dog” Dog Breath won’t let them get the drop on you before it hoses them down with its corrosive gas sprayer. If there’s still some standing after the stratagems are done, hit ‘em with the G-4 Gas grenade. Cover the whole area in a cloud of noxious fumes, Helldiver!
The AX/TX-13 “Guard Dog” Dog Breath gassed up and ready to go.
Adding stratagem variants to Warbonds is new with Chemical Agents, but our designers felt that since gas is a crowd control tool, it made more sense to release stratagems and let Helldivers choose the primary weapons they love the most. Not only that, but this is bringing some serious variety to Chemical Agents that we hope players will enjoy.
Breathe easy in the AF-02 Haz-Master armor.
Now let’s talk drip. The exterminators of Super Earth have access to some killer threads in Chemical Agents. Firstly, these armors have the Advanced Filtration passive, which gives the player resistance to the gas clouds they’ll be generating with their new toys, including the toxic cloud put off by the Orbital Gas Strike stratagem. The AF-50 Noxious Ranger is a lightweight armor, best paired with the Standard of Safe Distance cape. If you really want to go full on with your protective gear, you’ve got the medium AF-02 Haz-Master and the matching Patient Zero’s Remembrance cape. Each set also has a coordinating player card to match the capes.
The AF-50 Noxious Ranger can survive in the fumes.
Our players have been asking for more emotes, and the ones included with Chemical Agents are some of our best yet. Want to know how to tell a joke in Helldivers 2 with your microphone off? Use the co-emote Natural Gas Extraction of course. See if you can convince your whole squad to pull your finger. And once you all get back to your ship, they can express their disgust with the Ew victory pose.
I said pull my finger, Helldiver!
We’re adding another set of patterns for your Hellpods, Pelican-1, and exosuit in Mustard–not the kind that goes on a hot dog either–this is the deadly kind. If at any point your squad wanders into your toxic cloud, you can use the new utility P-11 Stim Pistol to give them a minor heal from a safe distance.
The friendliest of friendly fire: the P-11 Stim Pistol.
Finally, if you want to really lean into the role, Chemical Agents includes a new player title–Expert Exterminator.
That’s everything, Helldivers. This could be a whole new theme for your squad as the galaxy’s elite peacekeepers and pest destroyers. Gas up for Chemical Agents, releasing September 19.
Download the image
*Requires base game, paid purchase of Super Credits, and game progression to unlock.
Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt has finally added AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 with Frame Generation to the PC version of the game.
Patch 2.13 for Cyberpunk 2077 and expansion Phantom Liberty is being rolled out now on PC only (patch notes are below), but despite the version mismatch between PC and console, cross-progression will still function properly.
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) combines image upscaling with frame generation technologies to generate high resolution frames at fast frame-rates. You can enable it in Settings → Graphics in the Quick Preset section, CD Projekt explained in a post on its website.
There’s also a separate setting to enable FSR Frame Generation. Note that FSR Frame Generation can only be used when AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 upscaling is enabled.
Fans were left questioning whether the promised update would ever arrive after the developer told investors its Cyberpunk 2077 team had migrated elsewhere following the release of what was assumed to be the final update in version 2.12.
“We’ve decided to keep support for both FSR 2.1 and FSR 3 to give players the flexibility to choose their preferred setting for visual quality and performance,” CD Projekt explained. “This allows them to experiment and find what fits their gaming style best.”
Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty update 2.13 patch notes:
Added support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 with Frame Generation. More information can be found in this article on the Support website.
Added support for Intel Xe Super Sampling 1.3.
It will now be possible to enable both DLAA and DLSS Ray Reconstruction at the same time.
Added a new “Utilities” tab in Settings and moved HDD Mode, Hybrid CPU Utilization and AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) options there.
Other stability and visual fixes.
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.
Not enough Microsoft jobs have been splayed and flayed atop the Altar of Growth, so High Priest Spencer must once again perform the Rite of Strategic Repositioning. According to a leaked memo, Microsoft are laying off around 650 people “to organize our business for long term success”. This is the same Microsoft that parted with around 1900 employees in January, and the same Microsoft that washed their hands of around 10,000 staff in January 2023, all in the name of shoring up the business for future prosperity. That “long term success” is certainly taking its sweet time. Or at least, it is if you’re one of the poor saps in the trenches of, in this case, “corporate and supporting functions”.
Thieves are once again targeting the Pokémon Trading Card Game, with a duo in Japan allegedly making off with $70,000 worth after asking staff which ones were valuable.
As reported by NHK and translated by ComicBook, a Pokémon TCG store in Osaka was allegedly broken into at 3:30am while a pair of employees were closing up. The perpetrators tied the workers up and demanded not the Pokémon cards themselves, but insight into which ones were worth taking.
Pokémon card thefts are on the rise given how valuable some cards are (the rarest sold in 2022 for more than $5 million), but as tens of thousands of individual cards exist, not to mention countless copies of most of them, it can be hard to differentiate between the good cardboard and the bad cardboard.
Sometimes we play video games to plunder the silty depths of our emotions, sometimes we play them to sharpen our wits and try the alchemy of engrossing systems, sometimes we play them to mud-wrestle with questions of power and responsibility, and sometimes we just want to wear cool sunglasses, have big arms, and fly around hitting stuff very hard.
Payday 3 director Miodrag Kovačević is stepping down following a disastrous first year for the live service heist shooter.
Developer Starbreeze Entertainment posted on X/Twitter to announce the change in management, saying Kovačević will work as a designer on Payday 3 instead. Lead producer Andreas Penninger and global brand director Almir Listo will act as the “creative force” behind the game “in the interim,” though the long term future of Payday 3’s leadership remains hazy.
“Going into year two, [Kovačević] will be stepping away from his role as game director and focusing his efforts as a designer elsewhere in the project,” the post said.
“In the interim, while researching and planning year two, [Penninger] and [Listo] will be the creative force behind the upcoming updates we hope you keep enjoying and playing. Thank you for your continued support. We salute you.”
Payday 3 launched in September 2023 to strong player numbers that quickly withered away, due to server issues that forced then Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren to apologize. “We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario — we should be able to do better,” he said before leaving the company.
