Category: Video Gaming

AMD recently announced that certain Ryzen 5000 processors come with free copies of Company of Heroes 3, so if you’re looking forward to the rather promising WW2 RTS, due to debut on February 23rd, this is a sneaky way of getting the game (normally £50) and a ~£100 processor for less than £100.

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M3GAN has already taken the world by storm, with the film raking in huge box office returns and the title character becoming a breakout gay icon in the making. So it’s no surprise that we’re already getting official confirmation on a M3GAN sequel. The new movie, M3GAN 2.0, will bring back the same cast, and is set for release on Jan. 17, 2025, with Malignant screenwriter Akela Cooper back to once again write the script.

Thankfully, if you don’t want to wait two years for more M3GAN, screenwriter Akela Cooper told the Los Angeles Times that an unrated version of the movie may be on the way, and it’s “way gorier” than the PG-13 theatrical cut.

Cooper didn’t say just how much the unrated version would change, but she did reveal a few details, including the fact that it should include a lot more murder.

“[M3GAN’s] body count in the script was a lot higher than in the movie. It wasn’t a Gabriel [in Malignant]-scale massacre, but she did kill a bunch more people,” Cooper said.

It stands to reason that a version with a much higher body count might also considerably increase the gore content in the PG-13 movie, putting it more on the same level as Malignant.

No concrete plans or details are available about the unrated version yet. Cooper told the LA Times that she’s heard it’s “on the books,” but Universal itself hasn’t said anything about new versions of the movie. Thankfully, M3GAN having one of the best January box office openings in recent memory will probably go a long way toward convincing Universal that it should release another version of the film for a double dip. For those who haven’t seen it yet, M3GAN will hit VOD on Jan. 24. Details on when M3GAN will be on streaming services are still to come.

Update (Jan. 18): This story has been updated to reflect the announcement of a M3GAN sequel and the VOD release date.

News

2023 is off to a rough start.

In a surprising move, Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it would be cutting 10,000 jobs across the company as it seeks to reduce costs amid a broader economic concern. More specifically, a portion of the job cuts will be in its video game division. This includes the developers of popular titles Starfield and Halo.

According to Jason Schreier in a report by Bloomberg, some staff affected by these layoffs have been with the company for over ten years. The exact extent of the cuts remains unclear, but Microsoft has simultaneously stated they will continue to look to hire in their AI department.

In an email to staff, 343 Industries studio head Pierre Hintze said the company had “made the difficult decision to restructure elements of our team, which means some roles are being eliminated.” It was made clear, however, that Halo Infinite’s multiplayer and other elements will remain completely supported for the player base.

This news comes just one year after Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc. for $69 billion, a deal currently pending regulatory approval, having been challenged by the US Federal Trade Commission. Microsoft also cut jobs across some of ZeniMax Media’s divisions after it purchased the parent company of Bethesda for $7.5 billion in 2021. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment on the gaming layoffs and referred to the company’s blog post.

Clippy, Microsoft Word’s perpetually upbeat ’90s paperclip, is a joke. An embarrassment. A mercifully discarded relic of the distant past. An ugly sweater.

I know that, and I’m sure you know that too. And I’m also sure it’s no accident this worthless retro irritant’s most visible recent comeback is as a little weapon charm in Halo Infinite, just so everyone can ruthlessly rocket launcher him into splattered Spartan oblivion over and over again. Everybody hates Clippy, the useless failure of a “virtual assistant” who was rightfully dragged into life’s recycle bin years ago.

Hi! This is Nils from Daedalic Entertainment, publisher of Children of Silentown, I’m here today to tell the tale of how this idea evolved into today’s game – as a full-fledged title by a small group of people in their off-hours from their full-time software development  and YouTube content creation jobs. Originally developed as an animated short, Elf Games and Francesca from Luna2 Studio collaborated to bring the Children of Silentown into the interactive medium. The passion this team exudes is infectious, poured into the project slowly but steadily over the years. Take a look at the Making Of video below to hear directly from the team. Even Jack, the punk, cannot wait to share it with everyone! Meet him and the team in the Making Of video embedded at the top this post.

Piero, the programmer of the team, shares that “we at Elf Games used four years of our free time to make Children of Silentown. It is a game that some say is a hauntingly beautiful point-and-click adventure game, but see for yourselves. We are very proud of it. But we are not full-time developers: Elf Games instead develops video games after business hours, as their members are already busy with their software development company.”

Children of Silentown is certainly a point-and-click adventure, however the team wouldn’t say it’s a conventional one. Most traditional point-and-clicks focus on finding items and combining them at the right time. Elf Games took these elements of course, but also combined them with elements from other classic adventure games. For example, they took inspiration from OneShot and A Bird Story, specifically, the camera view that allows more exploration and the quest-like structure in some parts. Moreover, the game features song-based mechanics that link directly to the story. By using songs, the player unlocks situations and puzzles. Each of these songs is linked to a thematic minigame that creates variety in the gameplay.

The short version of how Children of Silentown came to be goes like this: In late 2018 Francesca, known as Fraffrog on YouTube, showed Fabiola and Piero an original short movie she created for her channel but never published. She asked them what they thought about it and delighted, they told her that it would be perfect for a video game.

Children of Silentown is a game about Lucy, a girl living in a town surrounded by a forest inhabited by monsters. From a concept as simple as that, the team tried to create a story that could live on many levels. They wanted to create a story where every bit could be an additional piece to the puzzle the player has, to help them unveil how the town and the forest came to be.

“Video games are a strong passion in which we feel we can bring together our skills and creativity. We have spent the past four years creating this project in our spare time, mostly on weekends, so development has been slow, but steady. It is not easy to dedicate yourself to such a long project, but we really believed we could make it real”, Francesca recollects.

This is how it started, and, like many projects, the original plan was to make a small, simple project. But things changed very quickly. After releasing a short demo, and being amazed by how well-received it was, we decided it was worthwhile to make it a bigger project, enough to truly bring to light the characters and the story of the world of Silentown.

It makes sense that the development of Children of Silentown would also be a bit unusual, as was its original conception. The team has worked diligently to not only meet our vision for the story, but grow the game into something bigger than we originally planned. Many people today have multiple jobs or hobbies they pour themselves into, this is the case with Children of Silentown, which we are so excited to share with the world. We hope you can all see what a labour of love it was and you all enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Children of Silentown is available now for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S!

Everyone has something they loved spending time with in the past – a restaurant, a daily-play video game, a group of friends – only to one day unknowingly enjoy doing so for the final time. It’s a poignant and often heartbreaking truth of how places evolve, tastes change, and priorities divert as we all grow older. For the eponymous hero in Lil Gator Game, that activity is live-action role-playing with his big sis. With his sister home from college, Gator assembles a master plan to pry her away from her coursework for one more game. The resulting adventure is a short, cute, Zelda-inspired romp that conjures our own bittersweet nostalgia for the activities, places, and people we once spent our days with but no longer do for one reason or another.

Like the play session the protagonist wants to enjoy with his sister, Lil Gator Game draws heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda franchise. Though Gator’s plan boils down to recruiting friends to decorate and role-play at the playground, it unfolds like a grand adventure. Cardboard cut-outs of fantasy mainstays like slimes, bats, and carnivorous plants populate every corner of the islands, giving you “enemies” to slash down and collect loot from. Though they take on the appearance of these fantasy-adventure baddies, they are inanimate and essentially sword fodder and window dressing. Still, taking them out is satisfying and rewarding as they crumble enjoyably and drop the primary currency for mostly cosmetic items.

 

Exploration is the primary focus of Lil Gator Game, as Gator scours the islands for friends to help him renovate the playground. Gator can climb any surface (complete with an upgradeable stamina bar), swim, jump, and paraglide in search of his fellow anthropomorphic island dwellers. Exploration is often intuitive, boiling down to climbing to the highest area to find the nearest friend, then navigating to them. However, with several places in the picturesque main island appearing similar and no access to a minimap, it’s easy to get turned around.

Once you find other animals, they often have a small quest for you to complete before joining your cause. I’m typically not the biggest fetch-quest fan, but these are wholesome and quick enough that I didn’t mind them. Quests range from sledding down hills on your shield to helping the other animals play their games; one thematically consistent quest required me to interrupt a mom’s work call so she could attend a tea party with her daughter. Each mission you complete adds friends to your playground, paving the way for the next upgrade. Lil Gator Game’s handful of main quests require you to recruit high-value animals like a theater troupe or “the cool kids” to join your game, and consist of multiple parts. Though most of the quests are uneventful and repetitive, I loved checking them off my to-do list and adding the NPCs to my playground; I even went back after I rolled credits to recruit the remaining friends.

As you navigate the islands, you also uncover memories from Gator’s younger days playing with his sister. These are nothing more than quick monologue drops as Gator stumbles upon areas, but they went a long way to making me feel more invested in the modern-day story. I don’t want to spoil the narrative, but it culminates in several endearing meditations on the importance of being present, even as your life changes and your priorities shift. As we get older, the world sets expectations for us, and achieving those expectations often comes at the cost of things we once enjoyed. Nothing lasts forever, and Lil Gator Game reminds us that while it’s good to be responsible, we should always maintain that childlike sense of wonder, imagination, and fun. 

Lil Gator Game is as short as it is sweet, with the main story lasting just under five hours, but that’s all it needs to be. I loved exploring each nook and cranny of the world during that time for new friends, loot, and memories. By the time the story wrapped up, the game had delivered a poignant and touching message about balancing the important parts of our lives. Lil Gator Game isn’t the best Zelda-like I’ve played, but it’s probably the one that will stick with me for the longest.

Hey washers, Jess here from FuturLab!  

Since we announced that PowerWash Simulator would be coming to PlayStation (via our good friends Kenny Washmore and Jerry Cleansburg), we’ve seen such a buzz from the community. So, as you can imagine, we are thrilled to be putting the power of relaxation into the hands of players when PowerWash Simulator lands on PS5 and PS4 on January 31st, 2023. 

Alongside this launch, we are also releasing our first free Special Pack, where you can explore and clean iconic locations and vehicles from the totemic Tomb Raider series!  

Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect from both PowerWash Simulator and the Tomb Raider expansion pack… 

Everything isn’t as it seems in the town of Muckingham: an active volcano smoulders nearby, the mayor’s cat is missing, and things are extremely dirty. You’ll be commissioned to clean an array of dirty destinations, from hosing down humble homes to unmasking ancient architecture. With such a diverse range of locations, you may find your mind wandering as you clean… “what gives with this town?!” 

But for all its oddities, Muckingham scrubs up quite nicely… thanks to you! The residents have noticed too. As you blast away every speck of grime that covers Muckingham, you’ll uncover secrets hidden in the dirt and objects of each level, as well as receive messages from clients that reveal the untold tales of the places you visit. You know what they say, it all comes out in the wash! 

Once you get going, word of your power washing prowess will spread quickly, and business will be booming in no time. Earn cash by completing jobs and reinvest in more powerful washers, nifty nozzles, and cool outfits to help you clean more efficiently (and in style 😎). No dirt is too tough for you to handle! 

The whole aim of PowerWash Simulator is for players to wash away their worries and take a clean break from the real world; getting all the satisfaction of washing to a sparkling finish without having to work up a sweat or even leave the sofa! 

Tomb Raider Special Pack 

Once you’ve finished cleaning up Muckingham, you might be tempted to put your feet up, BUT WAIT… you’re not done yet! We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Crystal Dynamics to bring players five new levels from the time-honored Tomb Raider series.  

For the Tomb Raider Special Pack, we focused on the illustrious Croft Manor, including its grounds and some of Lara’s trusty vehicles that have been muddied out on (and off!) the road.  

“Creating the Tomb Raider Special Pack has been an honour and a fantastic experience,” said Dan Chequer, our Lead Designer at FuturLab. “We can’t wait for players to get up close and personal with Croft Manor and explore its many secrets!” 

In the Special Pack, we’ve left the perilous plots to Lara whilst challenging our players to undertake the most hazardous escapade yet… cleaning her stately home! Only the very best will do when it comes to the Croft residence; so unwind and blast away every speck of dirt you can track down, whilst Lara regales you with tales of past adventures. 

“What Tomb Raider fan hasn’t explored Croft Manor and thought ‘Winston could really use some help with these grounds! I would love to power wash this place!’?” asked Dallas Dickinson, Franchise General Manager for Tomb Raider at Crystal Dynamics. “Now, with the help of Square Enix Collective and FuturLab that’s not only possible, but immensely satisfying as well.”  

“We know the community wants more to clean, and I’m delighted we’re able to kick off our post-release plans in style with this Tomb Raider collaboration,” added Phil Elliott, studio head at Square Enix Collective. “We’ve had so much great support from players, press and content creators, and we wanted to do something special to say thank you!” 

We hope that you have good clean fun discovering the secrets of Muckingham and Croft Manor alike when PowerWash Simulator washes up on PlayStation next week! 

PowerWash Simulator launches on PS4 & PS5 on January 31 alongside the free Tomb Raider Special Pack.

2022 was a great year for Roblox. We are optimistically driving our vision to reimagine the way people come together, and we’re realizing it by enabling deeper forms of expression, communication, and immersion.   

The investments we are making to expand the engagement of Roblox across geographies and age groups are paying off. Our community grew by 23% this year to more than 56 million daily global users. And our users spent over 49.3 billion hours coming together to create, play, explore, learn, and connect. Today, more than half of the people on Roblox are 13 and older, demonstrating our platform’s appeal to a broad range of audiences. 

Innovation and improvements across every aspect of Roblox played a key role in driving our growth. Here are some of our major accomplishments from 2022.

Enabling Self-Expression and Connection

With the launch of Layered Clothing, we continued to empower people to express themselves and their identity creatively. This feature enables clothing and accessories to fit any avatar body type. Items like shirts, dresses, sweaters, jackets, and pants are now worn in layers and copy the way apparel fits and drapes on individuals in the real world. This provides our community with the power to create never-before-seen clothing and accessory types. Users can mix and match an incredible range of body styles and outfits, taking avatar customization possibilities to the next level. Since launch, we have seen over 115 million people own a layered clothing item.

We also continued to expand the quality and immersion of social interactions on Roblox. Now, people verified as ages 13 and older can use Chat with their voice to speak aloud with one another.  This functionality is built to mimic in-person conversations, and is based on avatars’ proximity to each other – meaning you might whisper to a friend nearby or raise your voice to carry across the room. Almost a million Roblox experiences have already enabled voice communications. 

At the end of the year, we rolled out Contact Importer, a safe and secure way for people to find and connect with real-life friends. Contact Importer uses the same contact names saved on a user’s device, so they can quickly recognize their friends on the Roblox platform. We also released Friend Recommendations, so people ages 13 and older can easily review and add friends directly. These two features are important steps in making it easier for people to connect while continuing to uphold the privacy and safety of our community.

Expanding Creator Opportunities

Other important innovations were focused on accelerating our vision of making creation accessible to everyone on Roblox. We’re building tools so anyone from new creators to big development studios can bring their creations to fruition. 

In 2022, our community visited more than 15 million experiences on the platform, and developers and creators published more than 15,000 experiences every single day. To support this creation flywheel, we made advancements to Roblox Studio, our free development software for building and publishing 3D content. Roblox Studio now has a refreshed look and new features — like support for high-resolution displays and redesigned icons for better navigation — that allow creators to customize their workspaces and collaborate with teammates seamlessly. 

In July 2022, we rolled out a number of advancements to our material system to enhance the visual quality of the full library of existing materials and make them look and feel even more realistic than before. Materials on Roblox are akin to materials in the real world. They’re used to not only define the surface appearance of a 3D object but also its physical properties, which in turn influences how the object behaves. Our material system will help our creators more easily realize their aesthetic vision. 

We’ve also added several new features to Roblox Cloud, our developer ecosystem, to streamline experience development and enhance productivity. Developers can now access all their Roblox resources via APIs that enable a rich ecosystem of tools for improving creator workflows and customization. 

At the end of the year, we began rolling out our new Creator Hub, a resource that brings all of our online tools and documentation for developers into a unified platform. Creator Hub makes creation easier, faster, and more streamlined by providing operational and management support in one place. The technology we’re building for Creator Hub will also bring greater fidelity and capabilities to developer creations. 

Evolving our Virtual Economy 

In 2022, our Economy team achieved an important milestone: more than 90% of items published in Marketplace are now made by creators, getting us even closer to the point where all content within Roblox is fully user-generated. We’re continuing to improve user discovery in Marketplace, so people can find items they want in a way that will redefine the user journey. We envision a future where select items are offered on a limited basis, and other items are more widely available, so people can find a breadth of items they love.

This September, at our biggest Roblox Developers Conference ever, we announced Immersive Ads. This innovative 3D advertising experience is designed to give brands and developers alike the ability to reach their audiences in new ways.

Investing in Safety and Civility

As the Roblox community continues to grow, we are deeply focused on ensuring a safe and civil environment for our users. Over the last year, we increased our investments in AI and machine learning for autonomously detecting and preventing attempts by bad actors to engage in harmful communications or upload harmful content.

 We continued to improve sophistication in our content and chat moderation efforts. Using natural language processing models, we’ve evolved our systems to not just flag prohibited language but to understand context and act accordingly. In 2022, we used these models to power automated moderation features in English, as well as in Spanish, German, Portuguese and more, and we will continue to roll them out globally in 2023.  

Thanks to our investments around AI and machine learning, we’ve been able to safely channel more of our first-line moderation to automated systems. Roblox has made meaningful improvements to the time to action on content identified as problematic. The upshot: while speed in moderation has long been a strength for Roblox, we’re now even faster and more accurate. 

Creating Opportunities for Brands 

Brands of all types, from Alo Yoga and Spotify to the NFL, continued to use Roblox to connect and engage with millions of people. Every day, Roblox makes entirely new online connections possible by giving companies the ability to create exciting activations and virtual products. There were over 100 brand activations launched in 2022.

By giving people the tools to express themselves in any way they want, we’ve seen some amazing creativity and interesting trends from the community. These were captured in our 2022 Metaverse Fashion Trends report, published in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design. The report dives into the new trends and opportunities in digital fashion, and how apparel in the virtual world can inspire people to express themselves in new ways on Roblox.

We also continued to focus on supporting educational developers, providers, and educators in bringing high-quality content to the platform across a broad range of subjects, grade levels, and experience genres. We made progress in the education category by partnering with our first Roblox Community Fund recipient, the Museum of Science, Boston, on the launch of their Mission: Mars experience on the platform.

As companies continue to establish themselves on Roblox with the help of our community, the opportunities for creators increase. And the growth of our community expands the opportunities for organizations to connect with their audiences on Roblox. We’re excited to see this momentum continue.

Investing in Our People

None of this would be possible without our talented employees. To support the ongoing growth of our platform, we continued to invest in developing our talent and leadership. Nick Tornow joined us to lead the Creator Engineering group, and most recently John Stauffer joined us as our new VP of Engineering on the Engine group.

In the spirit of collaboration driving innovation, we held our first all-employee in-person Roblox Week at our San Mateo headquarters in July. Teams gathered for a week of activities that fostered connections, strengthened our community, and celebrated the technical innovations we’re building to shape the future. And at the end of the year, we returned to an in-person Hack Week, with more than 225 teams pursuing self-directed projects that pushed boundaries and accelerated the future of our platform.

Finally, we were honored to rank third on Fast Company’s Top 100 Workplaces for Innovators in 2022. This award reflects our innovation-first culture that empowers our technical teams to be responsible, take the long view, and get stuff done, all while respecting our global community of millions of creators. 

The Journey Ahead

Looking ahead, I’m excited to see how creativity and invention continue to fuel growth at Roblox. At every level, we’re seeing new opportunities to connect a billion people with optimism and civility. 

I’d like to thank our employees, our Roblox board, and the entire Roblox community for all the things they’ve achieved and made possible this year. We have an exciting year ahead. 

David Baszucki, a.k.a Builderman 

Founder and CEO, Roblox

Hi, this is Craig D Adams from Superbrothers A/V, creative director for the game Jett: The Far Shore, co-created by Pine Scented and featuring music composed by scntfc.

Since Jett: The Far Shore was released in late 2021, we’ve been hard at work on the Given Time expansion, and we’re excited to announce that it will be available from January 31 as a free update on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Also as of yesterday, Jett: The Far Shore has joined the PlayStation Plus Extra catalog.

If you’ve been curious to check out the game, this is a good moment to go hands-on and experience Jett’s memorable prologue and original campaign, and how it all feels with the DualSense controller, where haptics feel great and even provide useable gameplay-relevant data, like how when the Jett’s scramjet instability is spiking, the surge triggers stiffens.

As for the free Given Time campaign expansion due later this month, here’s a showcase.

Play Video

You’ll be able to start the Given Time campaign separately in the main menu, whether you’ve played the original game or not. Progress in the campaigns are saved separately, so you can start one and switch to the other, and back again, although Jett is probably best enjoyed chronologically.

The new Given Time campaign takes place three years following the end of the events of The Far Shore. Note: some very light plot spoilers ahead in this paragraph. As the player character Mei, you’ll awaken to find yourself in an emptier and quieter Ground Control. With only one other scout awake and a weathered Jett waiting outside for you, this solo journey offers more freedom and less dialogue as you investigate new and mysterious phenomena. Given Time’s gameplay revolves around finding rainbow resonances and hatching brine wisps, which are hidden in unique locations and offer interesting problems to solve.

You will have to use your Jett scout knowledge and skills to survive in this rich and distinctive ecosystem, proving yourself as an aviator and a scientist, before finally revealing the secrets of the hymnwave and discerning the nature of the wyld, the eons-old entity at the heart of Tor.

The expansion offers a more open-world experience, this is a player-driven adventure where you’ll be able to explore and discover the game world at your own pace. There is much to uncover and explore, and the story will tie up some of the threads left dangling at the close of The Far Shore campaign. Meanwhile, composer scntfc’s slow-cooked musical score reveals profound new moods, from the effervescent to the sublime.

With the release of Given Time, Jett’s vision is fully realized. The expansion is a generally relaxing and open-world action-puzzle survival experience set in a rich and unique science fiction world that is best experienced… Given Time.

Take a peek at New Atlantis, the crown jewel of Starfield’s space-age cities, and you’ll find the usual utopian futurist sights. A spotless landing strip to welcome new arrivals, gleaming cream-coloured buildings interspersed with lush trees, and a sparkling central high-rise that curves upwards to the stars. Look a little closer and you’ll notice sitting slap bang in the middle of them is a bank, crammed within the otherwise idyllic scene.

At least, it’s probably a bank. Emblazoned on the outside of the building, and spotted elsewhere on another unknown planet, is the half-completed word “GalB-“. The rest of the lettering is hidden from view, but a character creation preview video released last October all but completes the missing signage: “You own a luxurious, customizable house on a peaceful planet!” reads the Dream Home character trait. “Unfortunately it comes with a 50,000 credit mortgage with GalBank that has to be paid weekly”.

Of everything we’ve seen in Starfield over the past few months, it’s that mention of GalBank and its accompanying mortgage system that’s stuck most firmly in my mind. It hints at a vastly more substantial in-game economy than what’s appeared in previous Bethesda releases – one that potentially includes an entire loan system and visitable bank branches spread across Starfield’s many worlds. It’s a dose of financial reality, and one I hope the team at Bethesda is given room to expand on so they can fully explore the crushing weight of our spacefaring future.

At first glance, though, it all appears a little peculiar. In a world that looks to take as many cues from the pulpy adventures of Buck Rogers as the clean aesthetics of SpaceX, the literal towering presence of banking seems like an odd fit – an unexpected and unwelcome mark on the freedom of the final frontier. Starfield looks ready to sell you into the world of finance before you’ve even given your character a name or strapped on a single space boot to explore its utopian worlds – something that Hardspace: Shipbreaker has done before, and to great effect. But in whose utopia do banks exist, let alone sell stingy weekly repayment plans at undisclosed fees?

In Starfield’s “NASA-punk” universe, apparently. Bethesda’s vision of the future is wide-eyed and grounded in the here-and-now. It’s supposed to be “relatable”; an extrapolation from our own world and the renewed interest in space travel that’s emerged over the past couple of decades. Bethesda says it wants the game’s 1000-planet-wide universe to feel “believable and, while maybe not always the most welcoming, at least familiar”.

As grim as it sounds, an overbearing financial system might be just the thing to create those pockets of familiarity in an alien universe. The space industry of today has morphed into the plaything of billionaires. No longer the site of ideological struggle it was last century, humans’ flight to the stars is a means for the richest men of the world to fulfil their boyhood fantasies, or sell those fantasies to the slightly less wealthy mega-rich through tourist trips.

With private enterprise now leading rocket launches, it’s not much of an imaginative leap to a future where cosmic life is entangled with the financial institutions that bankroll the billionaire space race of today. And while Starfield certainly won’t be the kind of game to simulate the intricacies of commercial finance, you don’t need to look far across the field of RPGs to see how classics of the genre have used even basic in-game economies to effectively realise their worlds.

BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, for instance, sells the danger of the Sword Coast through shrewdly distributing stashes of gold behind tough enemies and remote encounters. In the early hours of your adventure, a handful of the precious resource can mean the difference between a night spent sleeping safely in an inn, or a risky long rest on the roadside, leaving you open to a midnight ambush. Squander your funds too soon, and you’ll quickly find out why few travellers are seen on the road at night.

Then there’s the macro-level empire building of Mount & Blade that charts your journey from wayward vagabond to upstart vassal, and eventually ruler of your own domain. When the hardiest mercenaries and most loyal companions can be bought for the right price, the game is as much a challenge of astute financial management as a test of combat. Waste your gold on ineffective soldiers or flashy items for your characters, and you’ll get a taste of just how merciless Calradia’s feudal food chain can be.

Even Bethesda’s very own The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall has a surprisingly robust financial system. Wander to one of the many banks scattered across the world, and you can open an account to store your heavy gold between adventures, or take out a letter of credit to transfer your coffers from one region to another. And in what now looks like a precursor to Starfield’s financial system, Daggerfall’s banks can loan gold to cover the cost of a house at a 10% interest rate. Default on the payments though, and your reputation in the city will gradually degrade until you pay up.

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Taken in isolation, the money-making ideas of these games are not what makes them special, and some are severely lacking. Counting your pennies is crucial in the first chapter or two of Baldur’s Gate, but it’s not long before you’re drowning in gold or bypassing vendors for quest loot. And although Daggerfall’s banking has surprising depth, you can happily ignore the entire system if you’d rather not entangle yourself with debt repayments and credit systems.

But even under-developed, the slim financial systems of these RPGs instil a strong sense of the worlds that exist outside of the player’s view. Beyond the edge of your screen are more characters than you’ve yet encountered waiting to ply you their wares, sell you their services, or demand payment on your debts. Something as cold and faceless as a financial calculation can breathe life into the fictional place that surrounds you. Especially when practically everything you need to do to facilitate those big, step-out moments is likely to cost you… something.

It will be fascinating to see if Starfield wields its banking system in a more intentional way than the RPGs that have come before. In creating a world that touches on the cosmic by drawing on the familiar, Bethesda can’t possibly register all the facets of current-day space technology that will chart our path to the stars. But if it lends a special focus to just one, I hope it’s the systems of money that will underpin it. The thousand worlds of Starfield would feel all the stronger for it.

In the mid-1980s, in Kyoto, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and their team were working on two game designs in parallel that were intended to be two sides of the same coin. One would be linear, an obstacle course, a headlong rush toward a goal. The other would be nonlinear, a mysterious maze, an unpredictable world of exploration. As opposed to the arcade games that defined the medium at that point, both would deemphasize the player’s skill in favor of an immersive experience with a beginning and an end. Miyamoto would carefully consider each new gameplay idea from the team and assign it to one game or the other, probably unaware that he was defining not just two legendary series, but some of the foundational precepts of video game design. The first game was Super Mario Bros. The second game was The Legend of Zelda.

Super Mario Bros. was a phenomenon and remains one of the best-selling games of all time. The Legend of Zelda was a hit, but sold a fraction as many copies. Perhaps it was inevitable that Zelda would later become a little more like its more popular twin. Sequels kept the spirit of adventure alive, but used meticulous gear-gating systems — essentially a series of locks and keys — to enforce order on the player’s progress through their labyrinthine worlds. They were probably better games for it, and certainly easier to enjoy.

2017’s Breath of the Wild was a shock to that system: an incredibly free-form reinvention of role-playing and open-world conventions, and a return to Zelda’s original nonlinear philosophy. Ironically, it would outsell all of its predecessors by a huge margin, and also become the first Zelda to outsell a contemporary Mario game. The world was finally ready for the kind of adventure Miyamoto and Tezuka had imagined 31 years prior.

Even knowing all this context as I do — and having written about Zelda games for 20 years, and played them for even longer — it has been an equivalent shock to properly play The Legend of Zelda for the first time. It’s a very old game now: difficult, inscrutable, and minimalist by modern standards. Honestly, it’s nowhere near as much fun to play as 1991’s A Link to the Past, never mind later entries. But it’s also game design genius in the raw. The Legend of Zelda is a stunningly brave and unencumbered vision of what a playable adventure could be. It’s both deeply familiar as the father of all Zelda games, and almost alien in its distance from what they went on to become — until Breath of the Wild, that is.

The first thing you notice is that, while most Zelda games (Breath of the Wild included) consciously locate themselves in a tradition — a place with a history, usually one that repeats itself — The Legend of Zelda strips away all context. There’s a perfunctory setup: Princess Zelda has hidden the eight parts of the Triforce of Wisdom in a series of dungeons, and she needs a hero to gather them and defeat her captor, Ganon. Enter Link, who in this game is just a guy, standing in a clearing, figuring out what to do next. He doesn’t even have a sword.

On this first adventure, nothing has been foretold or forgotten yet, and everything is new. There’s a cave over there: What’s in it? An old man, with a wooden sword and a warning: “It’s dangerous to go alone.” But there’s no choice, so alone Link must go. Monsters are everywhere, skittering about in treacherous patterns as personalized as they are unpredictable. Which way to the next piece of Triforce? Into the thorn bushes, among the bare rocks, along the beach with its murmuring tides? This is a world without waypoints, signposts, or even names. It’s a mysterious iconography, a living map of which you can only ever see a tiny portion.

In The Legend of Zelda, the first dungeon you discover won’t necessarily be the game’s first “level.” You might have jumped ahead to the third or fourth. Equally, if you set off and explore, and take great care, you might find your way to powerful items, intended for use much later in the game, within your first hour. There are riches scattered around, if you know where to look. Buy a candle and burn the right bush, and you can climb underground to meet a secretive Moblin who’ll bestow you with an amount of Rupees that would take hours to grind out. Now you can buy potions, arrows for a bow you don’t have yet, a blue ring that cuts the damage you take by half.

Even by most modern standards, this is daringly open design. You can’t wander straight into the end boss’s lair, but you can tumble into great danger or power up Link to the extent the game feels almost broken. The few gates that Nintendo did place in the game’s structure feel like genuine mysteries, arising organically from the landscape — a feeling that Zelda’s designers would become expert at re-creating, but in a way that, over time, became expected and almost ceremonial. Few Zelda fans, I imagine, wanted to let the ceremonies of that more linear evolution go, but diminishing returns were in effect, and Breath of the Wild’s developers were right to choose to move past them. What they sought to recapture (and did) was something that even the very best Zelda games had missed in the intervening decades: The Legend of Zelda’s Hyrule feels like an actual, unexplored wilderness, or like the countryside that Miyamoto used to explore in his youth, without a map, discovering landmarks as if he were the first to ever go there.

In contrast to its untamed overworld, the first game’s dungeons, which would later become the Zelda series’ most intricate and exacting puzzles, feel a little more contained and more surmountable, even when they’re at their most difficult. That probably wasn’t true at the time of its release. These are the first words in a language that has since been greatly elaborated on, and solving their riddles will come as second nature to any seasoned Zelda player. The first game’s basic, ferocious 8-bit combat presents a challenge, but as technically rudimentary as the game is, it’s never less than razor-sharp, responsive, and fair — as slickly playable as you would expect from the team that had shipped Super Mario Bros. just months previously. (I had to spam the snapshot and rewind features of the Nintendo Switch Online version to beat it, though.)

The Legend of Zelda is so sparing with its clues, so gnomic in its design, so jealous of its secrets, that a new player attempting to solve it without help will probably get stumped. If you do look for assistance, don’t feel bad: Miyamoto may not have foreseen online walkthroughs, but he always intended players of the game to talk to one another, share secrets, and collaborate, getting to the end through communal effort.

Unless you’re playing The Legend of Zelda in some kind of cultural vacuum, it’s no longer possible to experience the game in all the formidable mystery it possessed in 1986. It’s a known quantity now, and has passed into a modern version of folk memory: a tale already told, a map already drawn. In some ways, that’s a fitting end for this early masterpiece. And we can still look down on this teeming, savage little microcosm and wonder at it: a game so free and so far ahead of its time that it took its own makers 30 years to catch up.

You may have seen I was dead excited about The Pale Beyond in our most anticipated games list the other week, and now we finally know when it’s coming out. Publisher Fellow Traveller have announced this Arctic naval expedition gone wrong will be setting sail on February 24th, so ready your blankets and hot cuppas, folks. This icy, story-driven survival ’em up will chill you the bone.

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In one horrific night, Joel’s life is changed forever. As the player’s introduction to the world of The Last of Us, the evening spent with Joel, Sarah, and Tommy as the cordyceps outbreak changes everything cements the tone, style, and stakes of the franchise’s world. Whether you experienced that opening nearly a decade ago, or just recently via The Last of Us Part I on the PlayStation 5 console or The Last of Us on HBO, Joel’s harrowing night is an effective and necessary introduction to fully understanding Joel and Ellie’s journey throughout the rest of the game. 

To help us understand how that sequence came to be, and how its legacy lives on today, members of the Naughty Dog team and HBO show spoke about the work undertaken originally to create such an evocative opening, and how The Last of Us Part I brings these moments to fresh life. 

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Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played or watched The Last of Us!

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The End Is the Beginning

While the introduction is also The Last of Us’ first chance to leave an impression on the player, the Naughty Dog team obviously iterated and adjusted this sequence throughout development. One of the most significant among those? Players would have, originally, had control of Joel much earlier. 

“The beginning of the game was one of the last things we got finalized when we were making The Last of Us,” Naughty Dog President and The Last of Us Co-Director Neil Druckmann said. “For a long time, the plan was to play as Joel, not to play as Sarah, and you as Joel would hear commotion over at your neighbor’s house, you would walk over there, you’d see they’re infected. Then you’d head back and grab your daughter…and then everything else [in the final game] was how it was planned.” 

But starting the adventure and experiencing all that through Joel’s perspective felt… familiar to the team. In wanting to differentiate the story from others in its genre, the idea of playing as Sarah came up during a design brainstorm.  With that, “everything kind of fell into place” according to Druckmann. 

“That felt like a really unique take on [this story]. The fact that you’re seeing it through a very innocent child made everything creepier, scarier, and that became the north star,” he continued. Having that defined perspective affected the entire team’s approach to bringing that introduction to life. 

“There always had to be a reason for what you heard, and there always had to be an emotion tied to it,” SIE Sound Director and Lead Audio on the original The Last of Us Phil Kovats said, noting Sarah’s perspective allowed the devs to evoke that authentic emotion as Sarah wakes up on a dark, mysterious night. 

“She didn’t know anything bad was happening, but she couldn’t find her dad,” Kovats explained. “That feeling of disconnection and worry had to be portrayed, [so we had] stark, quiet sounds mixed with, say, the TV that was loud, [or] the explosion that shook the room. …Everything was there to create this uneasy tension that was palpable at that moment.” 

That’s also true of the immensely important art direction for a sequence like this. Before Sarah awakens in confusion late into the night, she gets to spend a bit of time with her dad, and we see her and Joel bond. It’s a moment paramount to conveying the emotions the developers hope players feel as the entire sequence plays out. 

“In the beginning of that game, it was very important to build the relationship of Joel and Sarah,” Art Director Erick Pangilinan said. “During that [sequence], we wanted to keep the lighting very warm, to keep them looking closer and to build that relationship together. Our lighting is very soft, with a more homey feel, and then when things go bad, we move the lighting a little further. When you do that, you create tension, you create longer shadows, you create more contrast in the scene, you put the player in darkness, and you push the player toward the light.” 

Pushing the player toward that light pushes Sarah to any shred of hope in a world quickly descending into chaos. Joel eventually comes home, and the gravity of the night begins to creep its way into Sarah’s life, as he, Sarah, and Joel’s brother Tommy hit the road in search of safety. In such an economical sequence, every minute is essential to conveying story, character, and plot to the player, but in a way that feels earned and honest to the moment. As Tommy and Joel debate what to do and discuss the panicked state of the world, the player controls Sarah, with a 360-degree view as the trio drives…anywhere. 

“Once you get into the car, you have the tension being raised by police cars going through with all their lights spinning around. You see all these vignettes, like the burning house, the headlights that shine on the family that’s being left, but the view is very claustrophobic,” Pangilinan noted of how the developers crafted the emotions of the scene. 

“One of the most important things to show in that drive was the family that’s asking for help, and Joel saying, ‘Don’t stop. We don’t know if they’re sick or not.’ And it’s at that moment, Joel shows you who he is,” Druckmann explained. 

The drive culminates into a desperate run through town, in which Joel’s car is T-boned by another driver, and the severity of the moment ratchets up, while also providing the developers a chance to adjust the perspective of the scene.  

“It’s in that commotion, all of a sudden, you come to, and you’re a different character, you’re breaking the window, and now you’re grabbing Sarah. Now you are the father instead of the daughter,” Druckmann said. 

“[Because this level was completed near the end of development], the chaos of trying to finish the game made its way into the chaos of what was happening, and we felt that that really was the emotion, was confusion, chaos, being disjointed, not knowing what was going to happen,” Kovats explained. 

The chaos heightens to a fever pitch as Joel carries an injured Sarah away from shouting civilians, growling infected, and raging fires. But just when he thinks he’s fleeing away from the scene, he’s held at gunpoint, with a soldier clearly receiving instructions to kill him. In a bid to protect his daughter, Joel turns just as the soldier fires, but, it’s not enough. Joel loses his world in a stark, brutal moment. 

“The simplicity of Sarah’s death was actually really hard to get to,” Druckmann explained. “I had made the mistake of hyping up that scene to Troy [Baker], and just talking about how impactful it is because it sets the stage for the rest of the story. And then when we went to capture it, it always felt really big to me, like overly dramatic.” 

While the performance was moving enough to cause some crew members to even need to walk off the set that day, while in the edit for the game, Druckmann realized the original take of the sequence wasn’t quite capturing what he wanted to. Thankfully, the team had another go at filming the sequence on the motion capture stage. 

“I felt there was more to mine there. It could be even better. I had to swallow my pride because I feel my job as a director is to say when we got it, when we don’t got it, and I was like, ‘I made a mistake. We should’ve kept going,’” Druckmann said.  

And with a better understanding of what he wanted the sequence to convey, the team was able to find the honesty of the scene in this second go-round. 

“When we were shooting it the second time, I was like, ‘I don’t want you to focus on the tragedy of it. Really focus on the mechanics of what you’re going to do next. She’s hurt, where are you going to take her? First, you have to lift her. She’s in pain, okay, help her with the pain.’ And I just wanted to be as pragmatic as possible because the scene is already so sad, we don’t have to sell the sadness or the drama of it, just sell the mechanics of it. Everything else will happen naturally.” 

Revisiting an Iconic Moment

Naughty Dog revisited this iconic opening, and the entirety of the first game, with The Last of Us Part I, currently available for PlayStation 5 and available for prepurchase on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store ahead of its March 3 launch. With such an important sequence, as with the entire remake, the team sought to honor the original story being told and the gameplay experience being delivered, enhancing it with modern technology to bring out the emotion of the sequence as much as possible. 

“The [original game] holds up very well emotionally, but with what we’re able to do with the new rigs, with the new facial set up, [the team] could really push it to the absolute limits that we’ve done,” Bryant Wilson said. 

“Now, you can see the intensity on Joel’s face when he’s telling Tommy to keep them safe. He can see Tommy pleading with them to just run as he’s holding the door back from a bunch of infected. There’s a deeper emotional connection you get just watching these smaller animations that you maybe didn’t quite feel quite as significantly the first time around.” 

All the work done on Part I comes back to bringing forth that emotional honesty in the sequence, but in greater detail and nuance than ever before. That can mean everything from the vignettes Joel, Tommy, and Sarah pass by in their car to the cacophony that greets them in town and the way non-player characters react to the horror around them. 

“They’re reacting to their environment in a way that’s much more realistic than what we had in the original,” Wilson explained. 

And, of course, bringing forth the emotion of those final moments even further while preserving the work that had been originally done was key for the team. 

“We wanted to keep everything backlit, and we wanted that light to focus on you and have stronger silhouettes,” Pangilinan explained. “And we wanted that soldier to be far away from you to create that distance and coldness so that you can’t read what he’s going to do, but you know that there’s that danger. That intensity of those harsh shadows keep that final moment very intense.” 

And this whole sequence is one that, 10 years later, Druckmann, along with executive producer Craig Mazin, has revisited in an entirely new way with The Last of Us TV show. While viewers will know by now (though, spoiler alert if you haven’t yet watched!) that many of the familiar beats longtime fans would expect are there, the first episode of the HBO series spends more time outside of this night, and finds new ways of evoking the tension and horrors of this sequence. 

“I think Neil and I were both excited by the idea that we could actually add a little bit more context to Joel and Sarah’s relationship and explore just a little bit more with Sarah,” Mazin said. “What we couldn’t do was give the audience the feeling that I had, and every player I assume had, when they first started playing the game, where you are Sarah, and you wake up, and you can’t find your dad, and you go downstairs, and that, we couldn’t give them that, not in the same way.” 

We see more of Joel and Sarah, and their relationship, leading up to those fateful moments. 

“Let’s show them waking up, let’s show them having breakfast, let’s show Sarah going to school, Sarah going to get her dad’s watch fixed, more hints of the outbreak,” Druckmann explained of their approach.

“But more important than that was to build these characters out even further, specifically Sarah and specifically her bond with Joel.” 

Another difference the show delivers is more time spent with Tommy and coming to better understand him pre-outbreak. Some of those elements weren’t there originally, but came about when Druckmann and executive producer Craig Mazin and their team had reshoots for the pilot. 

“That breakfast scene [in the premiere] is one of those scenes that initially when we shot it, Tommy wasn’t there, and we had a budget to reshoot some of the stuff in the pilot, and that’s one of those ideas that we came up with,” Druckmann said. “We got him into that breakfast scene, and that phone call where Joel has to bail him out of jail, that was part of the reshoot as well.” 

“You see pretty quickly that Tommy’s more than capable of taking care of himself, in fact, it’s Tommy who saves Joel’s life [in the premiere],” Mazin said. “And that interesting concept of who needs saving and who’s going to do the saving is a theme that we will bring up over and over and over.” 

Those additions were essential for the actors too, who saw solidifying this family bond from the get-go as a major factor of the show and, in particular, Joel and Tommy’s relationship. 

“I wanted to put into the balance of what Joel isn’t that Tommy is. This family we meet very early in the show, and, of course, we meet in the game, you want to give them life, you want to give them the realistic sense of family and love and what these guys are to each other,” Gabriel Luna, who plays Tommy on The Last of Us, said. “I’m the younger brother that’s always needling him and keeping him on his toes, but I’ll also be the guy that is always there. No matter how much crap we give each other, he can always call on me, and I can always call on him when I get in a pinch.” 

And for the actor behind Joel, Pedro Pascal, understanding the heart and emotion behind this entire opening is essential to his, and the audience’s, understanding of who Joel is.  

“Joel’s loss is, I think, the centerpiece of his existence as a character because I think he dies with his daughter, and, as he sees it, staying alive is really an empty function,” Pascal said. “And I don’t think that he sees himself, which makes him capable of really dark things because I don’t think that he sees himself as human without being in the light of the love of his daughter, meaning something to somebody.”

Both the ways in which the show follows the blueprint of the game, while also finding space to find new pathways to explore the world further solidifies what is at the heart of The Last of Us, no matter the medium – its characters.  

“I could really relate to this guy that doesn’t really feel like celebrating his own birthday, and the idea of his whole world is it’s a small one. It’s his daughter and his brother, and we don’t really know anything else outside of this small family that is everything to him until the world at large completely starts to come apart,” Pascal said. 

One of the premiere’s most harrowing moments is, of course like the game, Sarah’s death. And though Druckmann came to the show with an understanding of what did and didn’t work for the game’s version, Mazin, who directed the debut episode, explained how the TV version came with its own unique challenges. 

“We were shooting it in the summer. It was early on, and we’re far north in Calgary. That means the nights are short. So, the second the sun goes down, you’re working really hard to make sure that you get what you need,” Mazin said. “We also had a blood rig and things [you] don’t have to worry about when you’re making video games… All of this stuff is going on, plus fighting wind and everything [else]. And in the center of all that chaos, you have just two people trying to perform a moment.” 

Mazin praised the work actors Pedro Pascal and Nico Parker did to bring this essential scene to life. 

“There’s something about Nico, particularly when it was pain, fear, all these negative emotions that I think a lot of people find hard to portray, she just accessed them instantly, and it was remarkable to watch,” Mazin said. [And] Pedro did this beautiful thing where he just lets his denial coast until it’s no longer tenable, and then he just goes somewhere. My favorite little moment of that is the very last one…he’s holding her, and then his eyes just go really big, like he just, in that second, realized, ‘Oh, no,’ and then, boom.” 

Watching the sequence unfold in a new way through the TV show offers new and old fans a chance to gain a new perspective on the events that change Joel’s life forever. For longtime players and potential new ones interested in experiencing this sequence, and the full story, firsthand, The Last of Us Part I’s improvements honor the weight and emotion of Joel, Sarah, and Tommy’s stories while bringing this classic story to new life, offering the most immersive and technically advanced way to play. 

The Last of Us Part I is currently available on PlayStation 5, and available for pre-purchase on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store until it’s release on March 3. The Last of Us airs on HBO and streams on HBO Max. 

It’s a new year and we are that much closer to the PC release of Returnal – we’re thrilled to reveal that PC players can join Selene on Atropos on February 15, 2023!

So far, not many details have been released on any specific features that will add to the experience and immersion on PC, so let’s get to the good stuff.

NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR have been added, allowing you to dial up your framerate without compromising on resolution. NVIDIA NIS has also been added for those players who also want to see an increase in performance, but don’t have the hardware to support DLSS or FSR.*

Returnal also supports ray-traced shadows as before, but now our friends at Climax Studios have added the support for RT reflections as well. This will make the contrast of a dark setting and neon bullets pop out even more than before.* All of this can be now seen in two new wide resolution formats, Ultrawide at 21:9 and Super Ultrawide 32:9.** Think of all of that screen real estate that you will be able to take in when you’re not in the middle of a giant boss fight.

Returnal PC SPECS

	MINIMUM	MEDIUM	RECOMMENDED	EPIC	RAY TRACING
AVG Performance	720P @ 60FPS	1080P @ 60FPS	1080P @ 60FPS	4K @ 60FPS	4K @ 60FPS*
Graphics Settings	Low	Medium	High	Epic	Epic
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB)	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB) AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (6 GB)	NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super (8 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12 GB)	NVIDIA RTX 3080 (10 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16 GB)	NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT (16 GB)
CPU	Intel Core i5-6400 (4 core 2.7GHz) AMD Ryzen 5 1500X (4 core 3.5GHz)	Intel Core i5-8400 (6 core 2.8GHz) AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (6 core 3.4GHZ)	Intel i7-8700 (6 core 3.7 GHz) AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core 3.7 GHz)	Intel i7-9700K (8 core 3.7 GHz) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 core 3.6 GHz)	Intel i9-11900K (8 core 3.5 GHz) AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12 core 3.7 GHz)
RAM	16 GB DDR4	16 GB DDR4	16 GB DDR4	32 GB DDR4	32 GB DDR4
OS	Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903)	Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903)	Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903)	Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903)	Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903)
STORAGE	60 GB HDD (SSD Recommended)	60 GB SSD	60 GB SSD	60 GB SSD	60 GB SSD

*Use of performance enhancing upscaling like NVIDIA DLSS is recommended when using both ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows.

Grab your favourite pair of headphones to experience the 3D sound of Returnal on PC! Enjoy the award-winning audio and music through Dolby Atmos, two 3D audio solutions, or 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. And with custom ray-traced audio, you can fully immerse yourself in Returnal’s atmosphere.***

All of this is best experienced on a DualSense controller in its full haptic feedback and adaptive trigger glory.**** Experience each encounter with nudges and rumbling cues coming directly to your fingertips, adding an extra layer of communication as an advantage to the player. Support for Keyboard & Mouse is also available, along with a wide range of customisation options to tailor the controls to whatever suits you.

We here at Housemarque are beyond excited to see Returnal come to PC and expand our beautiful, dark, and mysterious experience to brand new players!

* Compatible PC and graphics card required for enhanced graphics.
** Compatible PC and display device required.
*** 3D Audio modes require stereo headphones or compatible speakers.
**** Wired connection required to experience the full range of in-game controller features.

Elden Ring won all sorts of accolades in 2022, including GameSpot’s Game of the Year Award. If you haven’t picked up the open-world epic, now’s your chance to grab it for cheap. The Xbox version of Elden Ring is on sale for only $35 at Amazon. This matches the best Black Friday 2022 deal, which sold out rather quickly the first time around. If you’re interested in Elden Ring at this price, we’d recommend snagging it as soon as possible.

Elden Ring is arguably the best game From Software has ever created. It takes the challenging combat mantra of Dark Souls and deftly merges it with an open world, letting you tackle its many obstacles as you see fit. Our Elden Ring review called it a “triumph in design” and awarded it a rare 10/10.

“In a genre that has become wrought with bloated and over-designed games, Elden Ring is defiantly contrarian in almost every way,” wrote critic Tamoor Hussain. “Elden Ring takes the shards of what came before and forges them into something that will go down in history as one of the all-time greats: a triumph in design and creativity, and an open-world game that distinguishes itself for what it doesn’t do as much as what it does.”

For more great gaming deals, make sure to check out Fanatical’s Lunar New Year Sale, which features discounts on thousands of games.

Developer Avalanche and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive have released a new cinematic trailer for Hogwarts Legacy, giving viewers a bird’s eye view, literally, of the titular school and the surrounding castle grounds. 

With Hogwarts Legacy due out on current-get consoles and PC in just a few weeks, on February 10, it’s no surprise we’re getting a trailer like this today. It’s a great look at what to expect in the game, including beasts and creatures, characters like Professor Weasley and Nearly Headless Nick, and more. There’s even some Avada Kadavra-casting foes to be seen, as well as dragons and spiders to fights. And all of it is shown through the view of an owl delivering a Hogwarts acceptance letter to a soon-to-be wizard. 

Check out the 4K version of this Hogwarts Legacy cinematic trailer below: 

For more about Hogwarts Legacy, check out everything we learned in the second gameplay showcase, which aired last month, and then read about the latest details revealed during a Sony State of Play last year. Check out Hogwarts Legacy’s PlayStation 5 DualSense features after that. Read about how controversial Harry Potter creator JK Rowling is not involved with the making of Hogwarts Legacy (although she will almost certainly be getting money as a direct result of this game) and then check out this trailer showcasing common rooms, easter eggs, and more. 

Hogwarts Legacy hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on February 10. It launches on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on April 4, and finally, the Switch version will be released on July 25. 

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Are you picking up Hogwarts Legacy next month? Let us know in the comments below!

Blizzard’s latest event for Overwatch 2 has arrived, just in time to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The event has been detailed in a blog post from Blizzard, and has introduced new skins, made festive changes to maps, and brought back Arcade Brawls.

In addition, there are going to be some rewards dished out to those playing the game, and via Twitch Drops. You’ll be able to jump into the fun from now, up until February 6.

Players who head on over to Lijiang Tower can witness fireworks illuminate the skies, and, if they choose, can engage in a number of Arcade Brawls.

These Arcade Brawls are Capture the Flag, Capture the Flag Blitz, and Bounty Hunter. Capture the Flag is what you might already expect, and is a frantic rush to capture your opponent’s flag while protecting your own. Capture the Flag Blitz is a faster-paced version of Capture the Flag, with the bases of flags placed in the centre of the map.

Last, but not least, is the free-for-all Arcade Brawl known as Bounty Hunter. The way it works is that the first hero to land a kill will have a bounty placed on them; while under the bounty, they’ll earn even more points for their kills. You’ll want to acquire the bounty, rack up kills, and try to come out on top.

You’ll need to be careful, however, as the player with the bounty can also be seen through floors and walls…

When it comes to rewards being dished out during the event, the first that you can collect is acquired by logging in: a 2023 Year of the Rabbit Player Icon. There are also new event challenges which can reward you with additional cosmetics and Battle Pass XP, one of such cosmetics being the Kkachi Echo Legendary Skin.

For those who like to keep an eye on Twitch Drops, you’re also in luck. If you watch two hours of a participating stream on Twitch, you can bag yourself the Lion’s Roar Victory Pose for Moira, and after four hours, you can unlock the Masked Dancer Legendary Skin for Moira.