Category: Video Gaming

With every new region released in Genshin Impact, there’s new puzzle mechanics and things to discover in that area. It makes sense to add something new for players that enjoy exploration, but after a few expansions, it’s starting to feel like too much. I’ve been playing Genshin since it was in beta, and trying to change the puzzle mechanics frequently is getting too gimmicky. 

Sumeru’s Newest Exploration Mechanic

The 3.6 Update is getting a brand-new area in Sumeru, and of course, there’s a new exploration mechanic to go along with it. In order to fully explore the area, you’ll need to travel around as Sorush. Sorush is a creature called Pari that can fly, which you’ll need to use in order to get around the new area.

Sorush will also be able to use other mechanics from past exploration, like Khvarena. It can even move objects and change some of the teleporting Four-Leaf Sigils found around Sumeru (not everywhere, just the new area where Sorush can explore). 

While that may sound cool to some, it seems like Hoyoverse is going too far with adding nonsensical “content” into the game. This feels like yet another exploration gimmick to master while waiting for actual content to come to the game. 

Puzzles Are Ramping Up In Complexity

Genshin Impact was originally likened to The Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild when it was first released. It was for good reason too since Genshin seemingly mimicked many of the looks and mechanics in the Zelda title. However, it grew past that and has since become the open-world PC/mobile title that took the world by storm.

Unfortunately, it feels more and more like a Zelda game than it did before. Zelda’s puzzles are difficult, but that’s a large part of why people love the Zelda games in general. Genshin Impact has always had puzzles, but they’re getting gimmicky.

Genshin Impact’s Puzzle History

Take Monstadt’s puzzles for example. Most of these can be completed pretty easily, and they’re incredibly straightforward. As far as puzzles go, they’re not very complex and they don’t take up too much time.

Liyue’s are similar, although some are much grander in scale. However, Inazuma’s became significantly more intricate, and Sumeru’s puzzles continue that trend. Sorush’s new gimmick adds another layer on top of an issue that was already becoming a problem for some players. The puzzles aren’t really getting harder, they’re just becoming complex in a way that takes up more time.

Now, Genshin Impact has great things about it, and the puzzles don’t necessarily have to be done. However, a lot of the free rewards in the game are locked behind these puzzles. Some things like Domains and certain World Quests are only available after completing the puzzles.

Here’s a quick example of some of the differences in puzzles. The picture on the left with Xiao is of a Monstadt puzzle in Stormterror’s Lair. It’s simple — just run off the cliff and float through the rings.

Th picture on the right is of the Sumeru Dune of Magma in the Hypostyle Desert. To even get access to this Dune, you have to direct light in a specific way and complete quests to get “clearance”. The best (read: most frustrating) part is that it’s only one part of a much larger puzzle in the entire area.

For players who don’t like puzzles, new content feels like busywork because of all the gimmicks behind exploration. While the puzzles aren’t always more difficult, it’s going to require a lot of players to look up a guide to even remember all the equipable items that actually interact with the world. 

What do you think? Are the puzzles becoming too complex or adding in too many gimmicks or do you like having to figure things out while exploring Teyvat?

Ari Aster is a very strange director. Not just for his eccentric, fantastic popcorn-art horror movies, but also for the way those strange movies become incredibly popular. Both of his previous movies, Midsommar and Hereditary, are excellent, scary, contemplative horror movies about trauma and grief. They’re both funny, in their own twisted, dark ways. And they’ve both created a lasting footprint with teens and 20-somethings online, thanks to idiosyncratic marketing, intense shocks and imagery, and general meme-ability.

Now, production company A24 (which was behind both of Aster’s previous movies) is hoping to manufacture that same kind of enthusiasm for Aster’s newest, weirdest movie, Beau Is Afraid, by giving it an extremely odd release schedule that’s primarily designed to woo fans and take over social media.

Beau Is Afraid follows Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), less of a regular guy and more like a tightly wound ball of anxiety in every moment of his life, as he travels to visit his mother. Along the way, he encounters all kinds of oddities, like an apocalyptic city, a traveling theater group, slightly deranged children, and Nathan Lane. Unlike Aster’s other two films, Beau Is Afraid is more obviously a comedy, though it’s passed through a filter of absurdist tragedy with a bit of horror mixed in for good measure.

It’s also a singularly bizarre film, in the most complimentary possible way. While it has bits and pieces of familiar movies, it combines them so aggressively and constantly that it defies comparison to any one other thing at a time. Instead, Beau is more like a hodgepodge of dozens of directors, movies, books, plays, and writers that have influenced Aster through his life. And with a movie this strange and disparate, it’s only fitting that its theatrical rollout should be just as odd.

To make that happen, A24 started with a surprise, simultaneous screening of the movie’s world premiere in Alamo Drafthouse theaters in several different cities around the United States. The attendees thought they were showing up for a screening of the Midsommar director’s cut (still Aster’s best movie), with a live Q&A from the director at the end. Instead, once they were seated, they were informed that they were attending the premiere of Beau Is Afraid — though the live Q&A still happened, hosted by Emma Stone and simulcast to theaters across the country.

This kind of early screening sometimes comes with a strict social media embargo, but in this case, attendees were allowed to post their reactions to the film the minute it ended. Which means the movie instantly generated positive word-of-mouth from some of Aster’s biggest fans — critics and general audiences alike.

Photo: Takashi Seida/A24

The actual review embargo for Beau was set for 10 p.m. EDT on the night of Monday, April 10 — an unusual hour for an embargo, since they’re usually set for morning or afternoon. That embargo also lands a few days before the movie is released for a limited run in just a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles. In most cities, critics won’t even be able to see the movie until its public IMAX preview on April 18. After that, the movie will finally have a more conventional release, rolling out to theaters across the country on April 21.

This strange schedule, and the recurring and escalating social media blips A24 obviously hopes each new release wave will cause, are meant to kick off a slow build of anticipation and momentum for the film. If things work out in the studio’s favor, then movie fans will have been hearing good things about Beau Is Afraid for more than three weeks before they have the chance to see the movie themselves. This strategy reads like an artificial attempt to create the kind of hit that Aster’s Hereditary became. After a solid theatrical run (coming in at $44 million domestically), Hereditary really took off when it hit Netflix, and people showed it to their friends for the thrill of bringing someone else a solid shock.

Photo: Takashi Seida/A24

But it isn’t just the impressive buildup of Aster’s previous movies that might have A24 hoping it can create a sleeper hit with Beau; it’s also the recent history of theatrical releases. The 2022 horror movies Smile, Barbarian, and Terrifier 2 all saw their box-office returns slowly reach impressive heights over the course of weeks, rather than experiencing the first-weekend boom common to bigger releases. Even blockbuster animated movies like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish took a while to find an audience in today’s movie environment. Meanwhile, this year, Skinamarink leaked online, generating a good bit of TikTok buzz before its theatrical release, convincing people to show up in droves for a very specific kind of slow-burn horror movie.

There’s no guarantee that Beau Is Afraid will necessarily find an equally large and dedicated audience, or that it will actually grow into a word-of-mouth success. But at the very least, it’s hard to fault A24 for experimenting with the release pattern on such a strange movie. I was at the movie’s first screening in Brooklyn, the one where Aster actually appeared live and in the flesh. His new film is entertaining, fun, weird, and messy, even if it doesn’t entirely gel in the end. Fans of horror, cinematic oddities, and Aster’s other work should go see it once that becomes an option. For all those reasons, it’s also a difficult movie to sell, so why wouldn’t A24 err on the side of building it up slowly, with Aster’s most ardent fans leading the way?

The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, is constructing a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet that’s big enough for King Kong to try out.

Announced on Twitter, the museum’s upcoming Donkey Kong arcade game will stand at nearly 20 feet tall, making it the largest playable Donkey Kong arcade game in the world. The Strong Museum also said that Nintendo of America provided input on the project.

What’s even better is that this gargantuan version of Donkey Kong will be available for guests to play via a smaller, human-sized control panel located at the base of the machine. We can only wonder if the bigger buttons on the machine itself also work to control the game. Donkey Kong is coming to the museum on June 30, and you can check out what the machine will look like for yourself below.

As part of our June 30 expansion, The Strong will create the world’s largest, playable Donkey Kong arcade game. The game will stand nearly 20-feet tall and will be available for guests to play! Thank you @NintendoAmerica for providing input on the project.#DonkeyKong #Arcade pic.twitter.com/xQhsRVvCib

— The Strong Museum (@museumofplay) April 10, 2023

Donkey Kong will be a part of the museum’s 90,000 square-foot expansion dedicated to the history of video games, the museum announced. It’s about 370% bigger than the original, and it will run on a motherboard from an original Donkey Kong cabinet.

Along with the reveal of this big arcade cabinet, Donkey Kong is currently co-starring in the biggest movie in the world: The Super Mario Bros. Movie. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll notice Donkey Kong got a redesign from the version of the character we’re used to seeing in Donkey Kong Country and Super Smash Bros. Shigeru Miyamoto said the redesign actually was supposed to give DK “a comical personality and design reminiscent of the original character” seen in this very arcade game.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

Classified US Military documents remained leaked on a Minecraft Discord server for a month before someone noticed them.

According to a report by CNN, the leaked documents were posted on the Discord server early last month and contained information on Russian casualties and weapon systems available to Ukraine. “This sh*t was sitting in a Minecraft Discord server for a month, and no one noticed,” Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, said.

The documents began to pick up some traction after a user posted parts of the documents to 4chan. On April 7, some of the Discord members began to worry that they’d be in trouble for reposting the documents. The user who posted the documents on March 1 deleted their Twitter and Discord accounts shortly after.

According to CNN, US officials believe that the documents have been changed to make the Ukraine casualty higher than it is.

Thomas Rid, an expert on state-backed information, said it’s unlikely that a foreign country such as Russia isn’t behind this because “The fact that unedited and edited–doctored–versions of some files are available online makes me skeptical.”

Although who was responsible for the leak is still unknown, the information from the documents could have serious ramifications, as they provide Russia with Ukrainian military strategies.

In 2012, Double Fine Productions launched a Kickstarter campaign to make an adventure game.

At the time, the idea was that the adventure genre was dead – at least in the eyes of major publishers. However, as Double Fine founder Tim Schafer, who made his name working on point-and-click adventure games for LucasArts, seemed to think, there was still a sizable enough audience out there that someone should make a new one. Why not Double Fine? And why not go directly to the source – the fans – for the game’s funding?

In Double Fine’s pitch, it theorized the then-unnamed project as a smaller game. The company asked for $400,000 from fans – specifically $300,000 to make the game and $100,000 to allow documentary crew 2 Player Productions to film the development. On that last point, Double Fine would also publish a documentary allowing for transparency in how the company used fan money. 

On February 8, 2012, the Kickstarter was launched. Within a few hours, it passed its original goal. Within the first day, over $1 million. And by the time the campaign closed a month later, it had raised, in total, $3,336,371. 

The successful Kickstarter proved at least two things: One, the adventure genre still had some life. And more importantly, crowdfunding was – to some degree – a completely viable option for game developers to use for project funding, bypassing the standard process of pitching projects to publishers and trying to raise funds. 

This all resulted in the game Broken Age, a two-part coming-of-age adventure game telling the dual stories of Vella and Shay. The once modest project ballooned into a massive lift for Double Fine, taking numerous years to see through and, controversially, more money than initially asked for in the Kickstarter. 

It also resulted in 2 Player’s 20-part, 12-hour-long Double Fine Adventure documentary, one of the most complete and transparent looks we’d ever had into how games get made – at least until it did it again in early in 2023 with PsychOdyssey, showing the making of Psychonauts 2. 

It wasn’t always pretty. Game development never is. It’s a long, hard road, and Double Fine Adventure allowed people at home to see intimate details of the making of Broken Age. It gave Kickstarter backers an inside look at how their money was spent. It allowed them to have, sometimes hurtful, opinions over how the company handled business. They were often very vocal about their thoughts. It certainly didn’t help that Gamergate, a harassment campaign targeting women and minorities in the game industry, happened then. And while there is a lot of joy, passion, and beauty in Broken Age and its documentary, there is an undeniable amount of struggle and pain. 

More than a decade later, revisiting Double Fine Adventure feels like watching the origins of the Double Fine we have today. It revisited crowdfunding many times after, including with Psychonauts 2, its biggest project, and still films just about everything within its walls. But, as of 2019, Microsoft owns Double Fine, meaning it doesn’t have to pitch fans or publishers anymore. 2 Player has since been folded into the company, serving as an in-house documentary crew, and is arguably making projects far more in-depth now than it was ten years ago.  

With so much the same and so much different for the company, on a sunny day in San Francisco, Calif., where Double Fine is based, we gathered a group of current and former Broken Age leads and folks from 2 Player to reflect on the whole process. Over many hours and drinks, they had a frank, honest, and personal chat about what went right, wrong, and everything in between. They also talk about their feelings now a decade removed and how the entire process affected them as professionals and people. And lastly, what the whole thing meant to Double Fine at large. 

Special thanks to James Spafford.

You could potentially win a Redfall-themed Xbox Series X and controller by playing an interactive game on the Bethesda website.

The news comes from the official Redfall Twitter account, and it reads:

“Explore the island and hunt down The Night Manager in the new Take Back Redfall: Interactive Adventure. Complete the journey and share your experience for a chance to win a custom Xbox Series X!”

To be eligible to win the Xbox Series X and controller, you must be at least 18 years old, have a valid ID, and be a legal resident in the United States or the District of Columbia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom.

To enter the sweepstakes, you must first play through the interactive game. Once you reach the game’s final screen, you’ll need to click on the Share Button, then post your results on either Twitter or Facebook with the hashtags #Sweepstakes and #TakeBackRedfall.

Two winners will then be selected on May 3, 2023. Both winners will receive one prize alongside two additional prizes from a random sponsor draw. For information on the rules, be sure to read the official PDF.

For more Redfall news, check out our story on Microsoft, stating that they didn’t pull any games from PlayStation and how a series of events affected the game’s development.

Tokyo is about to look a whole lot different.

With the release of Ghostwire: Tokyo on the Xbox’s Game Pass platform on April 12, Tango Gameworks is also bringing an all-new update to the game filled with new features. Here’s everything to know going into the Spider’s Thread update for Ghostwire: Tokyo.

New Areas and Locations to Explore

One of the main additions coming to the game is going to be an expansion on the story through extended cutscenes, new missions and new locations to explore. One of the new locations that has been teased is the Middle School which has an eerie reminiscence to the school in Phasmophobia, sure to unease and terrify players. If things do get to be a bit too much, Tango Gameworks has also added a “Reduced Horror Effects” setting to the game that will replace some of the scarier effects with SHIIBUYA HACHI stickers instead.

Ghostwire: Tokyo will be getting two new side missions to encourage exploration of this new area, “Fear for the Children” and “Spirits in the Modern Age.” These will serve as all-new ghostly mysteries to solve while trying to keep calm and explore what there is to see in this new, creepy location.

A New Game Mode

Tango Gameworks added a brand-new game mode to Ghostwire: Tokyo, sharing the name with the update itself. The Spider’s Thread will act as a roguelite challenge mode, where players must fight through a 30-stage course that sends them all the way back to the beginning upon losing. These 30 stages are randomly selected out of 120 new challenges designed just for the update so that the mode doesn’t become repetitive after a few runs. This game mode will be separate from the main story of the game, and will serve as an opportunity to hone the new abilities and master combat.

New Skills and Abilities

Also coming to the game are new abilities in combat that should prove useful while fighting ghostly enemies. The Perfect Guard Counter Attack will make it easier to strike back at foes after a successful block, and the Quick dodge should make for simple, fast escapes from combat situations that might be getting a little dicey. There will also be new elemental attacks called Charged Rush, which will be most helpful in close-combat encounters.

New Enemy Ghost Types

Arriving with the goal of testing those fancy new skills and abilities, there will also be some new enemy types coming in the Spider’s Thread update. There will be the “Retribution,” that will swim through the floor and make it very difficult to hit, the “Silent Gaze,” which will be invisible and the “Sanguine Dancer,” which appears to have more arms than it knows what to do with. These fresh enemies, mixed with the new areas and expanded story content should bring a solid refresh to Ghostwire: Tokyo’s gameplay.

Updated Photo Mode

The photo mode in the game will also be getting a remodel in the new update, adding not only changes that will affect photos, but that will affect gameplay as well. There will be graffiti throughout the city that, when found, will unlock stamps to put in photos and figures to use in the new “Capsule Machines” activity. This should allow players to take full advantage of the city and get a little more creative with some of the pictures they take.

With all the new and exciting features coming with the update, Tango Gameworks is set up for success when the game releases on Xbox Game Pass on April 12. For now, those are all the main changes coming to Ghostwire: Tokyo with the Spider’s Thread update.

After three years of being online-only because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bethesda Softworks has announced that QuakeCon will return to in-person action in 2023.

“QuakeCon is our favorite event of the year, and we can’t wait to finally see our incredible QuakeCon community in-person again, celebrate games, and frag all weekend with thousands of friends,” id Software boss Marty Stratton said. “For our first year back, QuakeCon 2023 is focusing on the fan favorite BYOC and the players that made QuakeCon the best gaming gathering for more than 25 years.”

It looks like some footage from a potential Persona 3 remake and Jet Set Radio reboot have leaked online.

Right off the bat I should say that like with any leak or rumour, it’s always good to take things with a pinch of salt. But if a leak is to be believed, then some footage for a Persona 3 remake, and a new iteration of Jet Set Radio, has appeared courtesy of Twitter user akiaangelica. The user first shared footage of just Yukari from Persona 3 firing an attack at an enemy on April 4 last week, before later claiming that it came from an internal meeting at Sega Japan held in 2021.

This tweet showed off some other footage, like an earlier look at Sonic Frontiers which shows off enemies that look slightly different from those seen in the game, and a small bit of footage showing Beat from Jet Set Radio dancing. Some have noticed how Sonic Frontiers looks better from that footage compared to now, though it’s very likely this was just a target render. The Jet Set Radio footage wouldn’t be entirely unsurprising considering a report last year claimed a reboot is on the way. As noted by SegaBits, this footage lines up with some images that leaked last year, making it look like the footage is more of a test than anything concrete if real.

While Gematsu wasn’t able to verify the footage of the possible Persona 3 remake, it did share that it understands that a remake has been in development at Atlus for a number of years. It is also worth noting that a Persona 5 mobile spin-off has been announced, which does feature gacha mechanics, so it’s possible it can factor into that somehow, though it would be odd to show off a Persona 3 character specifically in the reel.

Persona 3 Portable released on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox consoles earlier this year alongside Persona 4 Golden. But the former originally released on the PSP, and didn’t let you explore environments other than in dungeons, making the idea of a remake not that surprising.

Each year, the workshops and activities from Girls Make Games (GMG) leave me feeling more proud, surprised and excited about the gaming industry than the last. Last year, women accounted for 48% of gamers in the United States, and at every level of the industry, women are accounting for more and more of the gaming workforce. Whether in development, publishing, marketing, competitive esports, journalism, or any other area of the gaming sphere, women are making their collective presence known and their individual voices heard.

Girls Make Games was founded to help cultivate the voices of the next generation of women in games, giving them a platform and the resources to pursue their passions. For this year’s iteration, and in celebration of Women’s History Month, Sony Interactive Entertainment provided participants with an unprecedented opportunity to visit with one of three development studios—Sucker Punch Productions, Insomniac Games, and Bend Studio—to learn, listen and connect with other young creatives in a welcoming and instructive environment.

Let’s take a closer look at how each event went:

Sucker Punch Productions

This event invited attendees to participate in interactive workshops hosted by GMG instructors, allowing them to learn the nuts and bolts of game design, like art, sound and coding. Every GMG event is open to girls of all skill levels, but in this case, many attendees had already begun developing their craft.

“I was surprised by how many of our participants were so experienced already,” said Brian Fleming, founder of Sucker Punch Productions. “For [some], it was perhaps their second or third event with GMG, and they were pushing well beyond the curriculum for the day. It was awesome to see!”

At its core, GMG is about engagement at the grassroots level, as part of a wider push throughout the industry to challenge an outdated culture of homogeneity. “I see GMG and similar efforts as the most impactful solution to the profound gender imbalance in our business,” Fleming said. “It requires patience and a long-term view, but to my mind it’s [a] real solution.”

The workshops held at Sucker Punch’s studio in Bellevue, Washington were broken into two groups, accounting for the different experience levels of each participant. Within those groups, each attendee was able to practice their skills and make their own individual contributions to a collaborative project.

Joanna Wang, Production Art Director for Sucker Punch Productions, highlighted the importance of encouraging each girl’s specific interests. “They may like art, they may like coding—a little piece of how to make a game. And what we can do is give them the big picture view, explaining how those pieces fit together.”

She continued: “We’re showing them some of the tools needed to make a video game, and they can see what part of that process interests them. So hopefully, they can identify a personal strength, and start thinking about how they can apply that to their future.”

Sucker Punch is known for many hit PlayStation titles, like the beloved Sly Cooper series and their most recent success, Ghost of Tsushima. But they still retain a tight-knit work environment. “We’re big enough to have some exciting facilities: mocap, our foley studio—and of course snack bins in the kitchen,” Fleming laughed. “But we’re also small enough that I don’t think it was overwhelming for them.”

The welcoming environment helped encourage a creative mindset for each participant. “We really valued the fresh perspectives they brought, the questions they’d ask,” Wang said. “One girl was into traditional painting, but wanted to translate that skill to video games. That motivated me in turn to bring that same creative energy to our own games—she wanted to be one of us, right? And that made me proud of what I do, but also proud of what she’ll bring to the industry in the future.”

She added: “Another girl asked me about what internships Sucker Punch offers! She was so ready, so into it. In moments like that, I can feel the passing of the torch to the next generation.”

Insomniac Games

Located in sunny Burbank, California, Insomniac Games was founded in 1994, and their offices provided the perfect environment for the GMG workshops. “We had around twelve eager kids come through, from our local community here in Burbank to as far out as New Mexico,” said Aaron Jason Espinoza, Sr. Community Manager at Insomniac Games. “We wanted them to learn not just about making games, but how games can affect players’ emotions, and the importance of thinking about the player’s experience.” 

After a brief tour of the studio and some photos with Ratchet’s Omni-wrench and Rivet’s hammer, participants sat down to meet with several key employees—or Insomniacs—to ask questions and learn about the many hands involved in making games. Animators, writers, audio designers, programmers, community managers; all of these and more shared their experiences with the group, and highlighted their contributions to the team’s projects.

“It was a brilliant look at how game dev is a collaborative effort,” Espinoza explained. “The kids were amazed at all the avenues they could take to pursue a life and career as a game developer.” Participants then were given a chance to apply what they’d learned by developing their own side-scrolling platformer, and Espinoza was impressed by the results. “They were thinking about platform placement, enemy locations, and what worked best for the player’s experience.”

“The experience was awesome, and our team was delighted to host it,” said Espinoza. “We can’t wait to see what these kids do with the knowledge they’ll develop as they grow into game developers themselves!” 

Bend Studio

This workshop marked the first time that Bend Studio had ever hosted a Girls Make Games workshop, inviting thirteen participants from the local community to their offices in central Oregon. Like the other two events, this day of activities centered around the hands-on workshops that provided real experience in the basics of game development, as well as the opportunity to pick the brains of the women of Bend Studios.

“We started the workshop with a tour, showing the kids around the multiple floors of the building where our different departments sit and collaborate,” said Kevin McAllister, Community Manager at Bend Studio. “Of course, the big Rager Bear statue received a lot of attention,” he added with a laugh. After the tour’s completion, participants settled in to start creating their own side-scrolling platformer, with the goal of realizing a finished product by the end of the day.

“They were so excited to see their work come to fruition and how their creativity turned into something they were truly proud of,” McAllister said. “From cute little foxes to a blinking frog, the characters they created to implement in their level even had our own developers impressed by what they achieved in such a short amount of time.”

As with the workshops held at the Insomniac and Sucker Punch offices, the developers encouraged each individual participant to identify a personal strength as it relates to game design and development, and sharpen that skill through the workshop’s exercises. Following a lunch break, members of the Bend team from various disciplines within the studio hosted a dev panel to talk about their journeys into the gaming industry, share their roles and responsibilities, and answer questions from the attentive group.

Between the creative activities and the conversational discussions about finding a career in the gaming industry, the Bend team worked hard to deliver a well-rounded, informative, and fun experience for every attendee. “It was an absolute privilege for our team to host this incredible experience,” McAllister said. “We had a lot of fun talking about games with the next generation of game developers. Maybe one day, we’ll even see them working on a future project at Bend Studio!”

It’s time to see which top downloads for PS5, PS4, PS VR2, PSVR, and F2P brought in the new season. The US and EU PS5 and PS VR 2 charts saw a lot of horror titles in the top three, while the US and EU PS4 charts were deep in sports action. Heavy hitters like MLB The Show 23, Resident Evil 4, and WWE 2K23 all crack the top ten.

Check out the full listings below. What titles are you playing this month?

PS5 Games

*Naming of products may differ between regions
*Upgrades not included

PS4 Games

*Naming of products may differ between regions

PS VR 2 Games*

 *PS Store purchases only. Game upgrades or games bundled with hardware not included

PS VR Games

Free to Play (PS5 + PS4)

It’s been a minute since we last heard about Star Wars: Visions. The second season of the anthology series of animated shorts set in the Star Wars universe was first announced back in February. As was revealed back then, the series will no longer consist primarily of anime shorts. Instead, Star Wars: Visions season 2 will feature contributions from an assortment of animation studios across the world, including (though not limited to) Aardham (Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run) and Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers).

Since that initial announcement, we haven’t heard much about the new season that’s slated to premiere on Disney Plus on May 4 (*whisper* That’s Star Wars Day). That is, until now: Disney shared the first trailer for the upcoming anthology series on Monday during this year’s Star Wars Celebration fan convention held in London, and the footage looks spectacular, hopeful, and diverse.

The trailer shows how the second volume of Star Wars: Visions will differentiate itself from the first, with a variety of animation styles, from more traditional cel-based anime to CGI treatments to Aardham’s familiar stop-motion clay character aesthetic. Joining Cartoon Saloon and Aardman in season 2 are studios El Guiri from Spain; 88 Pictures from India; Punkrobot from Chili; Triggerfish from South Africa; Studio Mir, the South Korean studio behind The Legend of Korra; Studio La Cachette, a French studio who animated Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal; and D’art Shtajio, an American-owned Japanese animation studio.

Star Wars: Visions season 2 premieres May 4 on Disney Plus.

Obi-Wan Kenobi star Ewan McGregor is reportedly ready and eager for a second season as the Jedi master, but Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has said that a follow-up to the Disney+ series “is not an active development” currently.

Speaking to Variety during Star Wars Celebration, Kennedy said that while Obi-Wan Kenobi season two isn’t in development, that idea isn’t off the table entirely. “That is not an active development,” Kennedy explained. “But I never say never, because there’s always the possibility. That show was so well-received and [director] Deborah Chow did such a spectacular job. Ewan McGregor really wants to do another. Everybody’s all hands on deck with what we’re doing right now, as you can see by what we showed everybody [at Celebration]. We’ll turn our attention to that again maybe down the road.”

The future of Star Wars includes several series for Disney’s streaming platform, as well as several live-action films that’ll take place during different eras of the franchise. On the TV side alone, the Ahsoka solo series is reuniting plenty of characters from Star Wars Rebels and teasing the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn, the Heir to the Empire who represents a major threat to the New Republic.

Beyond that show, there’s also a new season of The Mandalorian coming soon, season two of Andor is aiming to arrive in August 2024, The Acolyte is set in the High Republic era, and Skeleton Crew is set to arrive later in 2023.

Back at Celebrity Fest last year, McGregor still sounded hopeful that Obi-Wan would get another season after the first one was well-received. “I’m totally up for it, guys,” said McGregor. “I want to do it. I’m absolutely honest, there’s no plans made yet. But I think, I’m pretty sure they’re just biding their time. But nobody has approach me as of yet.”

No more getting trapped with the enemy after they cap the point.

Overwatch 2’s upcoming Season 4 marks the arrival of many new features, including the arrival of the brand new Support Hero, Lifeweaver, a fan-made map, Talantis, and many gameplay tweaks and new features to help enhance the Quick Play and Competitive Play experience for players.

One of the most notable changes recently announced by the Overwatch 2 team is a massive change to how the spawn rooms will work in-game. Starting from the launch of Season 4 on April 11, 2023, spawn rooms will remain partially active for seven more seconds after an enemy team captures the point.

During these seven seconds, the health regeneration feature will remain active in the spawn room, the doors to the room will be locked to the enemy team, and you will be able to teleport yourself to the next spawn room with the interact key for an easy regrouping with your team. Here’s the official summary posted by the popular Overwatch 2 news and leaks channel, OWCavalry: