Activision has detailed Call of Duty’s Fallout crossover and confirmed a release date of June 20, 2024.
The fusion of both Microsoft-owned franchises sees Price, Ghost, Soap, and Gaz of Task Force 141 dressed in Vault Dweller skins. There are Vault-Tec-themed weapon blueprints and other Fallout-themed items for use in Modern Warfare 3, Warzone, and Warzone Mobile.
The in-game Fallout: Vault Dwellers event goes live at 10am PT on June 20 through to 8am PT June 26. The Tracer Pack: Fallout Vault Dweller Bundle includes two Fallout-themed weapon blueprints featuring Vault-Tec Tracers and a V.A.T.S. Death Effect.
Equip the “Vault-Tec Approved” M16 Weapon Blueprint with two Aftermarket Parts: the JAK Cutthroat Stock offering an unrivaled combination of speed and stability while aiming down sights, plus the JAK Patriot Conversion Kit which transforms the M16 into a fully automatic rifle with superior recoil control and firing aim stability.
Accompanied by a 45 Round Mag plus two attachments improving handling and recoil control, this is the ideal weapon for lasering down foes from a distance.
For closer fights, opt for the “Atomic Disintegrator” HRM-9 Weapon Blueprint geared for sustained combat in close quarters. With a 50 Round Drum Magazine plus thermal target identification, improved accuracy and recoil control, and extended range, this SMG configuration is ideal for aiming down sights with the ability to compete out to the mid-range.
The Fallout Bundle also features a “Vault 141” Operator Skin for Price, Ghost, Soap, and Gaz plus six loading screens and more. The full list of included content is as follows:
Four “Vault 141” Operator Skins
“Atomic Disintegrator” HRM-9 Weapon Blueprin
“Vault-Tec Approved” M16 Weapon Blueprint
“Let’s Do This!” and “Fatman” Charms
“Wasteland Workshop” Calling Card
“You’re Special” Large Decal
“Vault-Tec Engineer” Emblem
“Nuka-Cola Spacer” Sticker
Six Loading Screens including “Nuka-Cola,” “Please Stand By,” “Survivors’ Journey,” “Sanctuary Hills,” “Vault 141,” and “Restoring Democracy”
The Fallout: Vault Dwellers Event, meanwhile, features challenges across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone. Here are the details:
Use any of the Vault Dweller Skins during the Vault Dwellers Event for an additional XP boost. Earn additional Fallout-themed cosmetic items like the “New California Republic” Large Decal, “Nuka-Cola Caps” Emblem, “Slocum’s Joe” Sticker, “Nuka-Cola” Charm, and the “Nuka-Cola Quantum” Weapon Camo.
Activision has gone big on crossover events in Call of Duty in recent years, with everything from Warhammer 40,000 to Gundam seeing in-game skins and weapons. The Fallout bundle comes hot on the heels of the breakout success of Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV show, which has boosted interest in everything related to the post-apocalyptic setting.
Modern Warfare 3 continues to receive updates as Activision prepares to launch Black Ops 6 in October. Activision is expected to move on from last year’s shooter to focus on new seasons for Black Ops 6 and Warzone later this year.
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.
Tales Of The Shire unfolds in a world without shadow. There are shadows, technically, but they’re so mellow and fuzzy they might as well be stray pools of sunlight that have forgotten to glow. In this latest chunk of Lord Of The Rings memorabilia from developers Wētā Workshop and publisher Private Division, you are a custom-created hobbit who has just taken up residence in the charming Tellytubby town of Bywater, there to spend your days foraging, fishing, feasting and fraternizing with your fellow halfings, all of whom wear expressions of rosy-cheeked humour so intense in their winsome affability that your own face soon forms a merry rictus in response – like that terrible smile from Disco Elysium, but cosy. Oh god, no. Oh god, get it off me.
Gematsu spotted a rating for TimeSplitters on PS5 and PS4 in Taiwan, indicating Free Radical Design’s much-loved shooter is coming to the Classics Catalog soon.
TimeSplitters has been rated for PS5 and PS4 in Taiwan. 99 percent likely it’s the PS2 version for the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog, considering the platforms. Search “TimeSplitters” here to see the rating yourself: https://t.co/kSQ7a9X1P4pic.twitter.com/InFED7ihTx
TimeSplitters first released in 2000 as a launch game for the PlayStation 2 and a spiritual successor to Rare’s GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. Indeed TimeSplitters was made by some of the people who worked on those iconic N64 shooters. It took place across multiple different time periods with 18 separate characters battling against the titular foe, creatures who can travel through time and wreck history using special crystals.
It got a sequel in TimeSplitters 2 in 2002, and a further entry in 2005 called TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. After Free Radical struggled to find a publisher for a fourth game, the rights languished at Crysis developer Crytek for years before Deep Silver parent Koch Media bought them up in 2018. Eventually, as with so much video game intellectual property, TimeSplitters ended up in Embracer’s vault.
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 official Elden Ring manga has been put on hiatus as its creator has taken time off work to play expansion Shadow of the Erdtree.
As reported by Automaton, Nikiichi Tobita, the author of comedy manga Elden Ring: The Road to the Erdtree, announced on X/Twitter he’s skipping the July 19, 2024 release of the series so he can spend time playing Shadow of the Erdtree upon its June 21 release.
Tobita shared a drawing of himself sleeping alongside the announcement, showing him dreaming of the “glowy worm boy” — a new beastie in the expansion that became an instant hit upon its reveal by developer FromSoftware.
He’s likely not the only Elden Ring fan taking time off work to play the expansion, which has been more than two years in the making.
“Like the base game did before it, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree raises the bar for single player expansions,” we said. “It takes everything that made the base game such a landmark RPG, condenses it into a relatively compact 20-25 hour campaign, and provides fantastic new challenges for heavily invested fans to chew on.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
When I wrote our Still Wakes The Deep review I mentioned the true-to-life Scottish slang used by the oil rig workers of this North Sea horror. It was wonderful, but all these slang terms were being translated in the subtitles for some reason. “Gobshite” became “bastard”. The “polis” were localised as the “police”. And every “yersel” sneering out of the machismo-ridden workers became “yourself”. Well, turns out that’s the result of the game defaulting to “International English” for its captions. But if you want to immerse yourself in Scottish vernacular as deeply as protagonist Caz McCleary immerses himself in hazardous chemical spills, good news. There’s another option, says one of the game’s developers.
The Roll and Write genre has exploded in recent years. This accessible style of games is derived from the classic board game Yahtzee. Players roll dice or flip cards, and then use the revealed numbers or symbols to mark up a private sheet. It’s a simple concept, but it’s a genre that’s ripe for exploration, and more surprisingly, sophisticated gameplay.
This type of game is highly appealing as it’s straightforward and immediately rewarding. You are afforded creativity in personalizing your own sheet or board, but the accompanying rules structure is typically straightforward. With this winning combination, Roll and Writes find a great deal of success across a wide range of players as the barriers to entry are relatively miniscule. The following group represents the best this genre has to offer.
The most unique title on this list, Twilight Inscription combines the huge excess of board game giant Twilight Imperium with the Roll & Write format. This sprawling experience seeks to emulate the 4X genre of video games, where players establish their space empires through exploration, exploitation, expansion, and extermination. It accomplishes this in roughly 90 minutes, which is brief in comparison to its forefather’s epic playtime of several hours.
Each aspect is represented with a separate sheet. Each of these sheets forms an entire sub-section of the game, one that can be explored and mastered over many plays. The challenge here is in focus, as each turn you must choose one sheet to perform actions upon. This creates a significant series of tradeoffs and opens up the game to many different approaches. The resulting experience is relatively large in scope, and in this way Twilight Inscription feels more akin to a full-fledged strategic board game than the typical breezy Roll and Write.
Lost Cities: Roll & Write
Another adaptation of an existing game, this one translates the enticing card play of Lost Cities to the Roll and Write genre. Here, players are attempting to explore the jungle by heading down separate colored paths. There is a core strategic aspect where you must optimize your expedition and carefully decide which dice to select from a larger pool.
One of the more delightful qualities is the bridge bonus. The first player to make it to the seventh space on a particular color receives a boost of 20 points. This establishes a race element to the game which works hand in hand with the pulp adventure setting to provide some character and personality to play. This is a lighter experience, one that’s easily internalized, but it’s a satisfying endeavor that is absolutely worth the brief time commitment.
Super Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up
Most roll and write games don’t do much in the way of conjuring up a theme, but Super Skill Pinball replicates a pinball table with nothing more than a pen and some dice. You choose one of four supplied tables to play, enter at the top, and then drop down by choosing to hit various bumpers and targets depending on your roll. It’s the same deal when it drops to the flippers but the kicker is that you can’t re-use a box twice, so your ball will eventually run out of targets and drop. It’s up to you to use the specific combo and special play rules of your table to maximize your score, making for a puzzle that’s fascinating and thrilling in equal measure. There are a number of sets available including a Star Trek–themed one, but Ramp It Up is the pick of the bunch and even includes a cooperative table.
Welcome To
Welcome To isn’t strictly a roll and write game: it belongs to a closely related genre called flip and write, which replaces the dice with cards. This gives you a lot more options to work with. Here, they’re pressed into the service of town planning as you choose pairs of house numbers and building effect cards to create three suburban streets. It’s a tricky ask as you have to get houses in number order while balancing your score across various bonuses such as pools, parks and racing to be the first to meet city plans that require specific layouts. It’s super satisfying when you pull it off and there’s a surprising amount of strategy, but gamers who want even more could choose its more complex sci-fi cousin Welcome To The Moon.
My City: Roll & Build
Based on the popular board game My City from famed designer Reiner Knizia (see on Amazon), this dice game employs a similar structure of campaign play that is wholly rewarding. Play takes place across multiple episodes, with each 30 minute session adding a small amount of new rules and wrinkles to play. This layered approach allows for a gradual increase of complexity without being overwhelming, and it succeeds admirably in this method.
Thankfully, the game is also quite flexible and allows you to play each of these episodes as a one-off session if you desire. It works well in this format, particularly once you’ve completed the campaign and are somewhat familiar with what each chapter has to offer. Either way, this is an entertaining little gem that will stand up to many plays.
Rather than filling in a score sheet, Railroad Ink asks you to draw a transport network on a grid, based on tracks and junctions thrown up by its custom dice. You’re rewarded by linking as many exits as possible to the same network which rapidly becomes a tricky task as you balance the need to minimise dead ends with the desire to leave things open in the hope of linking them later. Combining risk versus reward gameplay with spatial thinking makes this roll and write quite unusual, but there are various editions to add to the variety. Deep Blue, which allows you to add rivers and lakes to your map along with potential ferry routes, is the pick of the bunch but you can go for volcanos with Blazing Red, forests in Lush Green or deserts in Shining Yellow.
Next Station: London
Another train-based game but this time a flip and write, Next Station: London offers the novel twist of making pencil colors a key part of the game. Each color ties into a starting station on the player’s map, which is where you begin to draw your network based on the station symbol of the drawn card. You can extend in either direction and even branch your line as you try to cross as many districts as possible, taking in tourist sites, joining other lines and crossing the river on the way. But beware as you can’t cross lines except as stations, meaning that a sprawling, high-scoring first turn may box in your expansion for later lines. Then all the players swap pencils and start anew. It’s a simple concept that reveals surprising nuance over repeat plays, giving it an edge of additive puzzling while resulting in fun multicoloured maps.
Dinosaur Island: Rawr N Write
Part of the appeal of roll and write games is their speed and simplicity, but Rawr N Write was the first of a new breed in the genre that uses the concept as a springboard to more complexity and depth. The dice roll gives players a choice of resources such as money and DNA that they need to build their own Jurassic World style dinosaur theme park. You’ll need to sketch out your park with both attractions and concessions stands on a mini-grid, while also bringing in staff, special buildings and taking care of security. Then, at the end of each of the three turns, you run an actual tour route through your facility to score points while hoping no-one gets eaten. With so many different aspects to juggle, planning your park is a rich, brain-burning challenge while running the tour brings the numbers to life with a thematic kick. Read our Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write review for more details.
Games in this genre often play well with large groups because there’s a central roll or flip and everyone tries to make the best use of the results. That means a lack of player interaction, which Cartographers came along to challenge. This is a flip and write where the idea is to use the cards to map out the terrain of a fantasy kingdom, trying to fulfil some variable scoring challenges. The fun twist is that every so often there’s a monster card, at which point you pass your map to your neighbour and they have to figure out the most annoying place to draw the negative monster icons in your kingdom. Not only does this make Cartographers feel much more personal, but the maps you’re left with at the end have an engaging sense of world-building about them, conjuring up some theme. The sequel, Cartographers: Heroes, added more dynamic monsters and new hero cards to ride in and save your kingdom from their depredations.
Long Shot: The Dice Game
Horse racing game Long Shot was fine, but this derivation into a roll and write has proved a smash hit with players. Unusually for the genre, there’s an actual board for the track around which the horses race, based on a dice roll, but some horses are more likely to move than others. Your job is to watch the unfolding race and bet sensibly on the odds as proceedings come to a head. However, you can also use your cash to buy horses to access a special power and a hefty bonus if it wins, as well as take various options to fiddle the odds in favour of your chosen steeds. Since everyone is free to bet on any horse, this creates a fascinating web of dependencies between players as the race progresses, since horses you’ve backed may pay out better for your opponents. With interaction, excitement and a hefty dose of theme, Long Shot: The Dice Game satisfies in areas other roll and writes cannot.
Vengeance: Roll and Fight
Most games in this genre fit a certain, relatively staid, pattern of having a random seed to offer all the players a choice, which they mark on their sheet. In trying to recreate the hectic pace of a martial arts movie, Vengeance: Roll and Fight turns these expectations upside down. This is a frantic real-time game where players generate actions for their turn by trying to grab dice and roll combos faster than the other players. Once the pool of dice is empty you can use your actions to draw a route through a warehouse full of goons, moving, fighting and looting your way to a showdown with the boss. With variable characters, each with a unique roster of abilities and items, plus lots of maps to work through, the fast play time and variety mean you can keep rolling and fighting over and over into the small hours.
Three Sisters
It’s common for roll and write games to reward players who achieve particular combination of rolls or scores, but Three Sisters takes this concept to the extreme. Your score sheet here is a garden in which you grow a variety of crops and flowers and purchase various tools based on the results of dice rolls making a rondel of actions available. However, when you complete certain actions the reward is often a bonus action which you can then, in turn, use to gain another bonus action and so on. Indeed, the action chaining gets so intense that the score sheet has a special space to record and rub out your bonuses as you accrue and use them during a turn. Making full use of these chains requires more strategic planning than most games in this genre offer, making this a tactical treat. See our Three Sisters board game review for more info.
Fleet: The Dice Game
This is another combo-tastic game which tries to snare players more with a plethora of interconnected options. As the owner of a fishing fleet, you’ll need to decide whether to use the dice to buy licences for the depicted type of seafood or to launch a boat to catch it. The further you go down each tree, the bigger the rewards. Boats will later return to the harbor where you can sell your catch and construct buildings that offer additional benefits over the 10 rounds of play. It’s all about using the dice as random seeds and working out the best set of interconnected benefits you can glean from each tree of potential options. Fast, fun and with a thematic set of mock mother of peal dice, Fleet: The Dice Game is a lot less dangerous and a lot less smelly than real high-seas fishing.
Bargain Basement Bathysphere
While roll and write games can often accommodate large numbers of players, they’re also fast and fun to play solo. So the logical next design step for the genre is a solo-only game: enter the delightfully named Bargain Basement Bathysphere, originally conceived as a fan project to print and play, but which proved popular enough to get picked up by a major publisher. Over the course of a multi-challenge campaign, you’ll pilot your makeshift craft into the deep and back, trying to use your dice pool to hit the spaces you need to achieve your goals before you run out of oxygen or structural integrity. Things start simple but build rapidly into a real challenge with lots of long-term mini-games to balance and jokes to enjoy.
Sagrada Artisans
The original Sagrada was quite a chill game of arranging gem dice to mimic stained-glass windows. This version takes it a step further in multiple ways. From a roll-and-write perspective, you now get to actually colour in your window as you build, and to maintain that sense of calm there’s even additional decorative colouring in to complete for fun while you wait for slower players to finish their turns. The other fresh aspect is that it’s now a campaign game in which you complete your beautiful windows over a series of ten sessions, each adding fresh tools and challenges to the mix without compromising the game’s simplicity or Zen-like feel, making for a smooth ride up to an exciting finish.
Motor City
Coming from the same designers responsible for two previous entries on this list, Three Sisters and Fleet, this is the culmination of their roll-and-write experience. It turns the genre into a mirror for car production lines, where you’re controlling four different aspects of vehicle design, engineering, testing, production and sales. So you’ll need to use its dice-drafting mechanic, supported by the novel blueprint board that offers potential bonuses alongside the dice itself, to try and coordinate the actions you need to take your muscle car all the way to market. Eschewing the explosive combos that typified their previous games and aiming instead for a more joined-up strategic challenge, this is the most innovative offering of the three.
Japanese role-playing game enthusiasts are eating good this week, as Square Enix announce a 3D remake for 1993’s Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven. It’s a high fantasy RPG in which you must shore up an empire and defend it from generation to generation against a group of legendary adventurers, who were trapped in another dimension many moons ago and are positively livid that people don’t talk about their sacrifices enough. It’s out 24th October 2024, and springs from the turbulent brains of the team behind 2020’s Trials of Mana remake, which was well-received. I’ve got a trailer’s worth of rabble-rousing orchestral music and sparkly tag-team finishers below.
We’ve been lapping up every detail of the new Zelda game, and now to top it off, Nintendo has shared a first look at the box art of this new outing which puts Princess Zelda in the spotlight instead of Link.
It seems to link back to a previously announced deal.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is returning for a third time early next year and it seems we might already know who is behind the latest HD iteration. According to some official documentation which has already been spotted by many fans online, the Polish team Forever Entertainment SA (Panzer Dragoon: Remake) is helping out with the upcoming Switch release – with today marking the “launch of the marketing campaign for the game”.
While the original developer Retro Studios currently has its hands full with Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (due out at some point in 2025), Forever Entertainment has been busy visually enhancing the original Wii release and also adding in some other extra bonuses like the extra levels from the Nintendo 3DS outing.
Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail studio HoYoverse’s newest upcoming title, Zenless Zone Zero, is a fusion of what you’d expect from HoYoverse games with totally new ideas. The game studio’s development processes are largely a mystery, but in an interview with Zenless Zone Zero producer Zhenyu Li at a media event, IGN learned a little more about what goes into kicking off an entirely new game at HoYoverse, Zenless Zone Zero’s future, and at least this particular team’s position on generative AI.
Zenless Zone Zero (also known as ZZZ) is an action game with a heavy emphasis on its flashy urban landscape set in an apocalyptic world. Players take their team of three into monster-infested roguelike zones, then bounce back to the city landscape to complete side quests, get to know characters better, and maybe grab a cup of coffee or bowl of ramen.
Like the other HoYoverse games, its variety of stylish characters with combat specializations is arguably its biggest focal point. As the entertainment landscape has been in a tumultwith the rush in the development of generative AI, we couldn’t help but ask: is the Zenless Zone Zero team using generative AI in development, or is it planning to?
“I think that the human touch is more meaningful right now and this is what our team is pursuing.
“Today, no,” Li said. “For the art part, we have not tried it, but we have tried a part of it to touch on the programming. As for the art aspect, I think that the human touch is more meaningful right now and this is what our team is pursuing.”
Li also explained that when developing ZZZ’s characters, the aesthetics came first early on. However, that changed as development progressed. The planning team responsible for character mechanics and the art team now work closely together to create new characters.
The Zenless Zone Zero Team and Collaboration
The development team behind HoYoverse’s massive games has largely been a mystery, though Li offered some context on how the ZZZ team behind that handmade art came to be. Li said it began with only 12 people in its initial demo stages in 2020 before growing to around 60 people during its first closed beta. Now, it’s ballooned to more than 400 team members.
“Zenless Zone Zero’s development team is very young and a lot of us come from different backgrounds,” Li said. “We have veterans from the gaming industry but also young talents who share the same values and are all passionate about getting involved in the creation of an interesting product. Indeed, some team members including myself had experiences working on HoYoverse’s other projects before. Take me for instance: I used to take care of the CG, animation, and video for Honkai Impact 3rd.”
Li clarified that the ZZZ team only works on their project rather than swapping between other HoYoverse properties and that collaboration between the different game teams is “quite rare.”
“Not that it doesn’t exist,” Li said. “I’ll check with the teams for an advisor such as [for] the technical aspects.”
Zenless Zone Zero Inspirations
Li acknowledged that the ZZZ team received many comparisons to Persona 5 with both sharing a stylish city setting, though he said they’re hoping to create something unique. And though there may be some visual and musical similarities, the heart of the game doesn’t have its roots in Persona.
Aside from the urban setting, one element that reminds Persona players like myself of Atlus’ series is ZZZ’s time system. Similar to Persona 5, ZZZ has four points in the day with different activities available as time passes with mission completion and other triggers. Li explained his inspiration for ZZZ’s time mechanic was actually instead from a much older game important to his childhood: Digimon World. The 1999 game also features a clock with specific events that happen at particular times throughout the day.
The other major inspiration was, surprisingly, Street Fighter 6. Though ZZZ is an action game more akin to DMC and not a fighting game, you can see the inspirations in its fast combat, emphasis on stunning enemies, and chaining combos.
“Zenless Zone Zero’s development team is very young and a lot of us come from different backgrounds.
Li mentioned he’s spent thousands of hours in the Street Fighter series and learned a lot about the feedback of its action with “how [each] punch really feels that it’s on the flesh of only your own flesh.” Li said the ZZZ team is trying to draw inspiration from their own combat and make each animation frame matter.
Another major lesson Li took from Street Fighter 6 was how to pace tutorials for newcomers to action games. Pacing of all ZZZ’s mechanics has changed quite a lot between each of its closed betas, and Li said the planning team has tried to make sure all important tutorials are more spread out to not be overwhelming.
Potential Future of Zenless Zone Zero
When ZZZ launches on July 4, it’ll be available on PlayStation 5, mobile devices, and PC, but Li said they’re not stopping development there. They’re working to bring ZZZ to Nintendo Switch and Xbox too, though Li framed ZZZ’s arrival on these platforms as a hope and not something quite set in stone.
As a live service game, though, it is set in stone that ZZZ will get content updates. Li confirmed this will include things like expansions to the city with new neighborhoods, shops, and of course, characters.
“We have a basic framework for the story timeline, but we’re also a very flexible team,” Li said when asked about how far they’ve planned ZZZ’s story. “We constantly review what we’ve created in the past to see if we can continue to utilize it or if we have better ideas and solutions.”
“When designing these characters, we would always consider what players haven’t seen before.
One international HoYoverse fan request has been for better representation in characters, especially in the HoYoverse games that feature real-life inspirations of diverse cultures yet neglect to reflect the people who live there. Steps to reflect these international audiences have been taken to varying degrees, and ZZZ’s amalgamation city provides fresh opportunity to do more.
“In Zenless Zone Zero, we have created a wide range of characters. When designing these characters, we would always consider what players haven’t seen before. We want to ensure characters of various types are included, so players can look forward to more imaginative designs that will surprise them in the future.”
“I think our team has added almost everything we wanted for the launch and the game is ready for players,” Li said. “However, of course, we have plenty of interesting ideas and plans for the game in the future which we will share more at the right time. One thing that I particularly want to share is that the multiplayer battle mode is already under development. I hope players can look forward to this mode in future version updates.”
Miranda Sanchez is the Executive Editor of Guides at IGN. Her favorite Genshin Impact characters are Shenhe, Yae Miko, Albedo, and Kokomi. When she’s not playing Genshin, she’s probably journaling about it. Catch her on Twitter/X and Twitch.
