It’s been about a year and a half since we first caught wind of Dune: Awakening, the massively multiplayer online survival game set on the planet of Arrakis. On Friday, Funcom released a story-focused trailer at Summer Game Fest, teasing that the game will focus on an alternate telling of the story of Paul Atreides — but we’ll have to wait until Gamescom in Aug. 2024 for a gameplay trailer.
The game drops players first-person into the world of Dune (well, at least, the world of Arrakis) where they’ll traverse the desert, using the land and relying on its other inhabitants to survive and thrive. Players will be able to join house Atreides or the Harkonnen, or live a quieter existence as a crafter or trader — but they won’t be able to kill or ride sandworms, unfortunately.
The game harnesses the simultaneously desolate and claustrophobic setting of the desert to push players to their survival game limits: You’ll have to avoid the sun, evade sandworms, craft tools, and find water wherever it exists (and yes, that includes enemies’ bodies). But it’s not all treacherous walks through Arrakis — vehicles include thopters, thumpers, and sand bikes, and the Voice is at your disposal should you need to sway your enemies one way or another.
While past Dune games have (very successfully, mind you) leaned on real-time strategy to encapsulate the vibe of the books and films, Dune: Awakening promises the most immersive experience yet. We’ll have to see if it delivers on that promise when it’s released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
Animal Well also comes at a turbulent time for the game industry. Outfits like Gastrow’s and developers like Basso are getting hit hard. Every month this year has included new headline-making layoffs at big game companies, while smaller studios without the name recognition have faded away quietly or gone on some kind of “hiatus.”
Even indies that have been acquired by major publishers are struggling. Two days before Animal Well’s release, Microsoft announced it would shutter several studios, including Tango Gameworks, best known for the beloved Hi-Fi Rush.
Animal Well has started its life as something of an endangered species. Perhaps that’s why efforts to protect the game and its secrets feel so urgent. It is, unfortunately, impossible to talk about what makes its post-game so good without ruining it, and every other post on its subreddit seems to be diligently marked with a spoiler tag as a result. Even as new gamers discover it, they’re implored to participate, and keep mum.
Sure, this is a lot to hoist onto one title. Hades II’s early-access release, for example, generated as much, if not more, excitement. But coming at a rough time for scrappy upstarts, its success—universal acclaim and a time as a top seller—looks like survival of the fittest.
Wildermyth is an incredible procedurally generated RPG that leads players through a series of narrative quests. As you build bases, battle foes, and learn more about the world, you’re able to build up your cast with new decisions and sacrifices. A hero might die, marry another party member and have children, or turn into an increasingly feral beast. It’s a tremendously cozy, satisfying RPG experience.
Wildermyth has a core campaign, and additional adventurers that introduce new stories and new enemy factions. The game’s first DLC pack was focused around new cosmetic skins and armors for heroes, whereas the upcoming Omenroad expansion includes a roguelike-style challenge mode and a new story campaign called Walk in the Unlight. While Omenroad brings lots of new bosses and challenging fights, it also represents an end to development for Wildermyth. Worldwalker Games announced the conclusion on May 29 on the game’s official X account.
“We will continue to support the game and fix critical bugs, but don’t expect new content going forward,” co-owner Nate Austin wrote. “We will be saying farewell to many of our team members. Worldwalker Games is going into hibernation for now.”
Austin clarifies that the team still intends to port Wildermyth to other platforms, and the hibernation does not affect that “in any way.” He also commits to continuing a Kickstarter that will record the game’s music live and integrate it into the game, French and Spanish translations for Omenroad, and to maintain the game’s Discord, wiki, support email, merch store, and social media.
“Wildermyth has been wonderful, but nothing goes on forever,” wrote Austin. “We wanted to ship Omenroad, and having done that, we’re ready to move on. This was the plan, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how well Omenroad is doing. (It’s doing well! We’re extremely proud of it.)”
He added, “I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually find something else to pour our passion into, and we’ll let you know about it when the time comes.”
It’s sad to see an end to Wildermyth, which has become one of my staples when I want to play a narrative RPG adventure. But it’s also a tremendous game, and it’s good to see the studio end on a high note and walk away from the project of their own choice. While we may never see another title from the Worldwalker team, I’ll treasure Wildermyth and the stories it effortlessly spins for years to come.
In the original, Mario and his friends are flat planes with black outlines, to give the impression they’re drawings rather than computer graphics. While that design is still present in the remake, you can also see a faint hint of a white highlight around the edges of the character model, much like you’d see on actual paper cutouts. It’s subtle but pervasive, and it contributes to the sense that these models really were cut out by hand.
Every piece of the world has this attention to detail. When you first enter Rogueport, there’s a platform in the main square with a noose on it. In the original, the wooden steps are straight and flat, and everything is at a right angle. It’s fine for a background element, and the flat noose cutout sways in the wind, so the effect works.
In the remake, however, the steps are a little crooked and janky. The side pieces of the steps look bent, like a child accidentally forced it too hard while slotting in the step pieces. It’s standing, but only barely. A mild gust of wind might blow the whole thing over. It might seem unimportant, but details like this make it easy to get drawn into Paper Mario’s world.
This is one situation where the improved graphics of a more modern console augmented the design choices from the original game. Switch graphics might mean Mario and his pals can look more realistic, but in this case that just means they look more handmade, like a paper craft model of the Mario from Super Mario 64.
The rich detail that the remake adds—with more complex models, better lighting and reflection systems, and higher resolution textures—makes the illusion so much more immersive and delightful. It’s apparent in every new setting how much effort was put into re-creating every aspect of the game.
Quality-of-Life Upgrades
Faithful re-creation isn’t always the most ideal way to approach a remake, and thankfully Nintendo agrees. This new version of The Thousand-Year Door comes with a few features that aren’t present in the original but would’ve been welcome additions.
The most useful of these, in my opinion, is the Partner Ring. In the original game, you had to open up a menu to swap between different members of your party. It wasn’t difficult per se, but it was tedious. In the remake, you can hold L and tilt the control stick to rapidly swap partners. It’s a shortcut that doesn’t fundamentally alter the game, but is a welcome convenience.
Similarly, there’s a new option when you fail a battle. Previously, if you lost a fight, you would have to reload from the last time you saved, which could sometimes be annoyingly far from where you were. In the remake, when you lose, you’ll see a new “Try again” option that will bring you back on the most recent section of the map, cutting down on huge amounts of tedious backtracking.
Red vs. Blue is officially over. On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery released Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final installment in the long-running saga that was once at the forefront of a whole new form of entertainment: web videos created from in-game footage. Machinima signaled a new world where that footage—of Halo, in Red vs. Blue’s case—could power viral clips. That was 2003. Now it seems as if Restoration might be machinima’s swan song.
“Machinima directors use game engines, which allow them to record a scene from any conceivable angle, like a Hollywood director uses a cinematographer,” WIRED wrote in a 2002 piece heralding the potential of this new filmmaking technique. When it launched a year later, Red vs. Blueexemplified those possibilities. The series was created by linking several Xboxes together and recording footage of a Halo multiplayer match, then adding voiceover. The absurdist, existential tone of the dialogue was a hilarious counterpoint to (and commentary on) the run-and-gun gameplay of the first-person shooter used to create it. The show’s creators founded a production company, Rooster Teeth, and made over a dozen more seasons worth of episodes.
Red vs. Blue would go on to develop a huge fan base and become a geek touchstone in the two decades that followed. Which is why Restoration’s release feels like an ignominious sendoff. In March, Rooster Teeth general manager Jordan Levin announced that Warner Bros. Discovery, now Rooster Teeth’s parent company, was shutting down the studio, and it soon became clear that the IP was being split up and sold off for parts. Today, the final installment of Red vs. Blue is being unceremoniously dumped onto streaming platforms with minimal fanfare or promotion.
It’s a sad moment for fans of Red vs. Blue and Rooster Teeth, but it’s a great moment to reflect on the impact the web series had. Machinima isn’t talked about much these days, but across the media landscape, you’ll find people using games to create everything from streams to clips to GIFs to art films, and doing it in ways that were unimaginable 21 years ago. “Machinima is not a word we use anymore, and it’s not really something we think of as like a medium or a genre anymore,” says Adam Bumas, a writer for the Internet culture newsletter Garbage Day. “But it’s still going strong. In fact, it’s everywhere.”
What hath machinima wrought? For starters, look at the phenomenon of Fortnite concerts. Over the last few years, major recording artists like Kid Laroi,Ariana Grande, and Travis Scott have performed sets for millions of people logged in to the game world. (Lil Nas X did a similar virtual event inside of Roblox.)
“The reason those concerts happened is because Epic realized that people were just hanging out in Fortnite and not even playing,” notes Bumas. “It’s like an evolution of a social space.” And since Fortnite’s gameplay is centered on building and creating things as well as shooting each other, it was only natural that Epic would also lean into developing tools that help people express themselves and entertain each other within the game world.
The game publisher has also developed tools that let filmmakers use the underlying game engine that Fortnite runs on in their production process. For instance, Industrial Light & Magic has employed Epic’s Unreal Engine in its StageCraft virtual on-set production process since the first season of The Mandalorian. For the most recent season, the company used Unreal to help actors and filmmakers visualize how a CG droid character would interact with flesh-and-blood actors.
“When you’re confronted with a sea of green and representations of characters on ping-pong balls or tennis balls, it becomes a pretty daunting experience for the actors and the director,” Epic Games’ chief technology officer, Kim Liberi, tells WIRED. “I think what we’ve been able to do here is give control back to the filmmakers.”
In a different galaxy far, far away, artist Tim Richardson recently collaborated with fashion designer Iris van Herpen on the CG short Neon Rapture, which was also made with Unreal. The tech allowed van Herpen to push her eye-popping concepts and designs further than she ever could have in the real world, and Richardson says that the game engine was his “sound stage” for the production. Where the Red vs. Blue creators had had to simply capture footage of themselves playing Halo, Richardson had a toolkit to work with that was specially designed for someone intending to render content rather than have a play experience. It allowed the filmmaking team and the fashion designer to prototype every aspect of the shoot from designs to lighting to costume to sets, and mix motion capture data with a digital environment on the fly to figure out their shots.
“It was the closest thing to shooting live-action I’ve experienced in VFX-based filmmaking,” Richardson says. “I was able to share ideas and collaborate with Iris on a time-scale impossible in linear VFX. I see game engines as an essential aspect of my future work.”
Supergiant Games is handing over the keys to the underworld early. Hades II, the sequel to the studios’ critically acclaimed roguelike, is now available to buy for $30 on PC via Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
Hades II follows Melinoë, underworld princess and sister to the first game’s hero, Zagreus, on her journey to kill the titan Chronos. The game features a rotating cast of Greek gods, from Aphrodite to Zeus, who assist Melinoë on her journey with powerups and special abilities. Although the version of the game that dropped Monday is not the full, finished title, Supergiant will allow players who purchase it to carry over their progress to the final game. The company expects development to continue “at least through the end of 2024,” with updates coming every few months.
On top of its stellar gameplay, the original Hades was also beloved for its hot gods and open sexuality; players could woo both female and male characters, together, for a threesome with the right attitude. The sequel is keeping up at least some of that tradition with more Greek gods whose beauty is on full display.
Hades II’s early release shouldn’t be a total surprise. Its predecessor was released before it was fully formed in late 2018; the completed version came out in 2020. “We designed the original Hades for Early Access from the ground up, and the same is true for Hades II, our first-ever sequel,” Supergiant wrote in its announcement. “We believe everything about this game benefits from ongoing feedback, from the balancing to the storytelling.”
Currently, the game has more levels, foes, and voiced characters than even the finished version of the original game, Supergiant says. Key areas, characters, story, and more are still being built.
The Early Access release follows a technical test by Supergiant last month, where members of the team played the game live on-stream. Interested players were allowed to sign up for the test. Hades II has already been in development for three years. Although there’s no word on when the final product will be ready, players who want the chance to help shape its development can do so through feedback. “We expect to make many changes and improvements inspired by our player community, and reflect these in our patch notes,” Supergiant wrote in a statement.
“The combination of our impressions as a development team, feedback we’re hearing from our player community, and gameplay data we’re collecting from players all should help us form a more complete picture of how we can make Hades II the best it can be.”
A new developer stream for Star Wars: The Old Republic showed a surprising feature on the way in Game Update 7.5. Players will be able to earn their own farmstead on the planet of Dantooine after completing a quest chain. The cozy feature will come with a Spring Abundance festival, which includes the surprisingly comfortable activities of “seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt,” according to a press release.
Broadsword is taking the game in an intriguing direction. Patch 7.4.1 included Date Night companion missions, which are exactly what you’d expect from the name. These missions become available if the companion has been romanced, and is available in a player’s story — some circumstances can cause your partner of choice to leave the party. Date Night missions will be released in batches, and they grant a unique title and decoration.
Update 7.5 also includes a new main story chapter where players wrangle with a Hutt, and new single-player Ventures that are meant to provide a challenging experience. Players train up their very own Basilisk Prototype B3-S1 (or Bessie) and prepare them for combat. Eventually, Bessie joins your team as a permanent companion. The release date for Update 7.5 will be announced soon.
When it came time to make Metaphor: ReFantazio, developer Atlus had a guiding principle: make a video game that was a culmination of all the beloved RPGs the company had made before it. “We decided to challenge the fantasy genre,” director Katsura Hashino said this week during an online demo of the game. Atlus has been making games for some 35 years, and it wanted to pull together an all-star team to commemorate the anniversary.
Hashino has been instrumental throughout the Persona series; following Persona 5’s release, he moved away from P-Studio—the team working on Persona games—to start Studio Zero, another internal Atlus group. For Metaphor, Studio Zero brought in Persona character artist Shigenori Soejima and longtime composer Shoji Meguro. They also brought in guest developers Koda Kazuma, concept artist for NieR:Automata, and Ikuto Yamashita, one of the artists behind the beloved anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Metaphor: ReFantazio, scheduled to hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on October 11, will combine many of the social elements of the Persona series with a faster combat system and new fantasy setting.
In Metaphor, a king’s assassination kicks off an election that will allow anyone to be the next sovereign, so long as they get enough backing. That means the protagonist, who is on a mission of his own, will need to form bonds with potential followers, earn monster-slaying bounties, explore dungeons, complete side jobs, and generally rally support.
Like the Persona games, there’s a social element at play, whether it’s building relationships with followers or hanging out with the game’s cast. There’s no fast-travel between destinations; instead, players get around on mobile bases equipped with everything from hang-out rooms to libraries to spots to cook or get your laundry done. It’s reminiscent of Persona’s incredibly satisfying, totally mundane tasks that make the game feel more alive.
Hashino says that Metaphor lets players build their squads using a job system based around powers called archetypes. “By confronting their anxiety, the protagonists acquire these archetypes, a special power,” he noted during Tuesday’s demo. “Their powers manifest in various forms throughout the game.” They may sound similar to Persona games’ eponymous enemies, but they’re more like traditional battle styles. A seeker is a well-rounded fighter, for example, whereas a mage fights with magic. Players can mix and match their parties however they want, including creating squads entirely of the same job.
Atlus is currently enjoying a renaissance thanks to the breakout popularity of games like Persona 5 in 2016 and Persona 3 Reload, released in March. Reload, a remake of a PS2 title, became the fastest-selling game in Atlus’ history within its first week. Metaphor retains much of the series’ eye-catching style and slick combat. It’s a massive game, Hashino says, one that “questions the power of fantasy, a power we all possess.”
Paizo, fresh off a highly-anticipated refresh of Pathfinder’s2nd edition ruleset, announced some big moves for the game’s ongoing narrative on Tuesday. The War of Immortals meta-event will kill a god, span multiple rulebooks, and restart the publisher’s line of hardcover novels. It will also introduce the first two original classes built following the company’s formal departure from the legacy Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and the OGL.
At the center of the new narrative arc will be Pathfinder War of Immortals, a 240-page hardcover rulebook expected in October that will introduce “mythic rules” for Pathfinder Second Edition. These rules should function similarly to past mythic-tier content, which represented ways to make your high-level characters stand out with powerful boons and abilities. According to a news release, the book will also include two new character classes — the animist and the exemplar — which are “the first original classes built on the remastered foundation of Pathfinder Player Core.”
Next, Pathfinder Lost Omens: Divine Mysteriesis a setting book with a smattering of character options — not unlike Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide detailed here at Polygon in March. Instead of a guide to an entire region, however, this 320-page hardcover will include a remastered pantheon of deities. It will also feature new deities, such as Aleph, god of darkness, and Nin, god of vampires. The $79.99 book is expected in November.
Several new adventures are included in the War of Immortals arc. Pathfinder Adventure: Prey for Death is a standalone 128-page adventure for high-level characters (level 14 and above). Expect the larger-than-usual, hardcover format to make a splash when it is released at Gen Con on Aug. 1, 2024.
Two even larger campaigns are also on the docket.
Pathfinder Adventure Path: Curtain Call — Pathfinder’s 40th since its launch in 2009 — will take characters from level 11 all the way to 20. The episodic release will begin at Gen Con with Pathfinder Adventure Path #204: Stage Frightand will conclude in September. Pathfinder Adventure Path: Triumph of the Tusk, which has players fighting alongside a band of orcs, will pick up in October with Pathfinder Adventure Path #207: The Resurrection Flood and continue into December.
Finally, a new novel titled Pathfinder: Godsrain, written by Liane Merciel, is also due out in November. Paizo said in its news release that the book will follow “four iconic heroes — the wizard Ezren, the barbarian Amiri, the cleric Kyra, and her wife, the rogue Merisiel — as they witness the calamity of the Godsrain and are faced with the opportunities — and consequences — of mythic power.”
Video game emulators are having a tough time. Back in March it was Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, which got shut down following a lawsuit from Nintendo. Pizza Emulators, another Nintendo emulator, disappeared around the same time. Then, over the weekend, after Apple updated its restrictions on retro game emulators to allow them in the App Store, a Game Boy Advance app called iGBA became a fast favorite. iGBA didn’t make it through Monday.
The emulator that iGBA resembled, though, is now available on the App Store: Delta, a free, upgraded version of an emulator designed specifically for iOS that supports games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and DS, making games created for those systems playable on iPhone screens. The emulator is “focused on providing a polished, easy-to-use emulation experience, with iOS-specific features like AirPlay,” says its creator, Riley Testut. It supports a variety of controllers, including Nintendo Switch Pro controllers, Joy-Cons, Nintendo Switch Online controllers, and PS5 and Xbox Series X.
Apple loosened its App Store restrictions to allow retro game emulators onto its store earlier this month. The main stipulation in its rule change was that the emulation apps comply with “all applicable laws.” (Nintendo has a history of cracking down on sites that traffic in ROMs, which are playable software versions of its hardware game cartridges.) Apple also expressly forbids “copycats” in its store. “Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own,” its guidelines read. In the case of iGBA, it itself was a version of another developer’s work.
Testut, a student at the University of Southern California and an app developer, tells WIRED he first learned of iGBA’s existence on Discord, where Patreon supporters were talking about it Saturday night. He quickly recognized his handiwork in the emulator listed on the App Store. “Not only were the controller skins and UI identical, but the app’s internal name was literally ‘GBA4iOS.app.’”
Online, Testut expressed shock and disappointment that iGBA had made it onto Apple’s platform before his own project. “I’m pissed that Apple took the time to change the App Store rules to allow emulators, and then approved a knock-off of my own app,” even though he’d been trying to launch an update of GBA4iOS called Delta ”since March 5,” he wrote on Threads,
Testut says that the developer responsible for iGBA emailed him “and personally apologized for the mess … They didn’t expect this all to happen so quickly,” Testut says.
Apple declined to comment.
As the game industry grapples with saving older titles at risk of disappearing forever, emulators like Testut’s are likely to be more in demand all the time. “We’ve seen repeatedly that IP owners are resistant to (consistently) porting old titles to newer hardware, preventing later generations from playing them,” Testut says. “Emulators ensure that old games can still be replayed decades later, similar to playing old audio recordings.”
Even industry leaders believe emulation could be the answer to the preservation problems in gaming. “My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we’d work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game,” Xbox head Phil Spencer told Axios in 2021. Microsoft has since set up an internal team focused on preservation of Xbox games.
Apple has already opened the door for emulators on its App Store; iGBA has proven that there’s a very eager market waiting. Delta—as long as it stays in Apple’s good graces—might finally be it.
Ben disappeared somewhere in the pitch black of the Old World. A handful of streamers gathered to investigate its monster-filled caverns and hallways, only to find their friend had gone missing. “Did Ben die?” one wondered aloud, just before another spotted him with relief in his voice. “I’m not even kidding, it took me,” Ben starts to say. “It carried me a mile underground.” One of his companions interrupts: “Wai-wai-wait, shut up, shut the fuck up, shut up! Tell that story on camera now.”
“Oh, OK OK,” Ben replies, getting into position. Someone shines a flashlight on him. The light hits a gelatinous monster behind him. It yanks him away, again, before he even can finish his sentence. Luckily, his kidnapping is all on camera this time, and content creator videogamedunkey has a potential viral hit on his hands—both in the game, Content Warning, and on his real-life YouTube channel.
In the week since its release, Content Warning—a co-op horror game about trying to film monsters (and survive) to get views on a faux YouTube—has been a runaway hit for developer Landfall Games. In the first 24 hours after it hit Steam, more than 6 million players downloaded it.
Built by a tiny team of five developers in just six weeks, Content Warning has quickly become gaming’s latest trending topic by being a send-up of the very players it was made for: game streamers aiming to go viral and the fans who love to watch them. A perfect meta commentary on how far some influencers will go for a win. Across YouTube and Twitch, where the game’s fans are most visible, everyone just knew what to do: film, film, film.
The team behindContent Warning sensed they had something special the first time they recorded a video of their expedition and watched it together. “It was instantly hilarious,” says developer Zorro Svärdendahl. It’s not that they’d done anything special—in fact, they’d mostly filmed each other walking behind trees and playing peek-a-boo—but the bones were there. They just had to make the game’s videos punchier.
In the game, players have three days to capture footage good enough to rack up views online, but every time they enter the game’s Old World they’re at risk. Monsters tend to appear suddenly out of the dark, sometimes with jarring screams.
A finished video, which surviving team members gather to watch at the end, typically has a The Blair Witch-ian found footage quality to it—shakey shots taken while running, a lot of screaming, and above all people barking things like “Get this on film.” The game’s goofy aesthetic for its SpookTubers, who have figures similar to arm-waving inflatables and faces that players create by typing emoticons, makes the whole thing all the more entertaining.
Content Warning is part of a long tradition at Landfall Games, which releases a small, silly game every year on April Fools’ Day. One year, it was a “horse-drifting-romance-roadtrip-battle-royale”; for another, it was a parody of battle royale. This year’s title is about the many players who have seamlessly adapted to being influencers. There’s a huge social element at work, where people are role-playing with their friends in the game. Sometimes it’s a YouTuber-type. Sometimes it’s as a news reporter trying to do a very tumultuous interview. People get creative.
A decade ago, Abubakar Salim lost his father. That grief lives within him. An actor by trade, with credits in Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon’s upcoming season, he searched for years for the right medium to work through the hurt. A film. A TV show. Nothing did it justice—until he tried to make a video game. “If you’re really depicting grief in a truthful and honest way, it is so open and chaotic that actually, you can kind of gamify it,” he says.
Salim is the CEO and creative director of Surgent Studios, the developer behind the upcoming Metroidvania game Tales of Kenzera: Zau. The game, set to launch April 23, follows a young shaman, Zau, who has made a deal with the god of death to bring his father back to life in exchange for three great spirits. Its story is a reflection of coping with loss—even its premise is built on bargaining, a common stage for someone dealing with death. The button-mashing, the mask-switching—these are all, Salim says, representative of the madness people can experience.
Games about grief reflect those feelings in many ways. Platformer Gris turns the stages of grief into literal ones as its heroine silently navigates a world that uses color and music to express emotion. What Remains of Edith Finch explores the death of a family by sifting through their things, alongside vignettes dedicated to those lost.
Kenzera has its own methods. Throughout the game, Zau takes time to pause and talk about his feelings. That’s the result of Salim and the game’s developers trying to figure out how the character would be able to restore his health. The solution wound up being quite literal: creating a space where Zau simply sits under a tree and reflects.
Each biome in the game’s world is a reflection of the journey through that anguish. Salim, who grew up playing games with his dad, reflects on something his father used to tell him as a child: “When you’re born, you’re alone, and when you die, you’re alone.” Kenzera’s developers infused that idea into the Woodlands setting, which is meant to evoke a sense of the questioning: “Will I be remembered? Will I be forgotten?”
Stories that Salim’s father told him heavily influenced the game, as did Bantu culture, which he says was done as a form of celebration rather than an effort to educate people. In recent years, games like God of War and Hades have brought new familiarity to Norse and Greek mythology. A game like Kenzera could do something similar for the culture of southern Africa. “It’s to inspire people to see these stories and lean into these stories,” Salim says.
Although Kenzera’s combat has evolved over time, it is influenced by Dambe, a form of Nigerian boxing. Zau swaps between masks to switch up his fighting style—sun and moon masks that represent life and death. In Bantu culture, Salim explains, the two balance each other. “That’s really where the inspiration for these two masks came from,” he says. The sun mask is heat, flame-heavy by nature, while the moon mask has an icier look and feel. Both masks are beautiful and infused with energy, an ode to how other cultures handle death. “Especially within African cultures, [death] is almost celebrated in a way,” he says. “It’s a passing into the new.”
Troubled gaming conglomerate Embracer announced Thursday that it has agreed to sell Gearbox Entertainment, the studio behind the Borderlands games, to Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two for $460 million.
The deal makes a lot of sense; Take-Two has been the publisher for Borderlands through its 2K Games label since long before Gearbox was acquired by Embracer in 2021. In its press release, 2K said the next Borderlands game was in active development at Gearbox.
As part of the deal, Take-Two acquires the Borderlands franchise and its spinoff series Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, as well as the Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem series. The studios acquired by Take-Two are the Gearbox Software mothership in Frisco, Texas, as well as Gearbox Montréal and Gearbox Studio Quebec.
“As a significant long-term Embracer Group shareholder, I believe in the strategy for the Embracer Group going forward and am completely convinced that this transaction is the best possible scenario and an obvious net positive arrangement for Embracer Group, for Take-Two and, of course, for Gearbox Entertainment,” said Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford. “My primary interest is always Gearbox, including our talent and our customers. I want to personally ensure fans of our games that this arrangement will ensure that the experiences we have in development at Gearbox will be the best it can possibly be.”
Embracer is hanging on to a few parts of the Gearbox empire: Gearbox Publishing San Francisco (which well be renamed), including the publishing rights to the Remnant games and Hyper Light Breaker; Cryptic Studios, the massively multiplayer specialist, with its games Neverwinter Online and Star Trek Online; and support studios Lost Boys Interactive and Captured Dimensions.
Though Gearbox Publishing San Francisco is still under Embracer, the company confirmed to Polygon that it has laid off an unspecified number of employees “not tied to the development” of Gearbox games. The layoffs appear to impact marketing, communications, and other portions of the company.
“The Embracer Group will continue to report on their restructuring program that impacted some parts of Gearbox today that are not tied to the development of Gearbox Software games,” a spokesperson told Polygon. “Thank you for granting us the space to remain focused on our people and in our handling of the situation with compassion and manage the process, balancing between our present duty and a commitment to our future.”
Embracer also announced Thursday that it had completed the sale of another of its biggest studio groups, Saber Interactive, which it acquired in 2020. Saber’s founder Matthew Karch bought back the main Saber Interactive studio and several subsidiaries for $247 million, while Embracer retained Metro developer 4A Games, Aspyr, and others. Saber has the right to acquire 4A and pinball specialist Zen Studios within a certain time period, although publishing rights for the Metro games will stay with Embracer’s subsidiary Plaion. Saber is reportedly still collaborating with Embracer on the troubled remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Update: This story has been updated to include news concerning layoffs at Gearbox Publishing, along with a statement from the company.
Bloom, a non-player character with a face like a potato and a black beanie pulled tight around his ears, wants to know about my strategy and how I fare in combat. “I follow a map and I punch hard,” I reply into the microphone. Text of our conversation flashes across the bottom of my screen. The NPC thinks I’m bragging. He continues to drone on about our place in the resistance and how we need to fight back, his AI-driven voice tinny enough to sound mechanical but not grating.
What Bloom doesn’t tell me, at least not directly, is that he’s a “neo NPC”—a generative AI creation from French video game publisher Ubisoft designed to enable players to hold conversations with characters. Bloom is still very much in his R&D era, but his creation represents one of the many ways that game companies are looking to integrate machine learning into their offerings.
At last week’s Game Developers Conference, where I got my chance to socialize with Bloom, the industry’s AI boom was in full swing. In addition to Ubisoft’s demo, there were panels on everything from bot basketball players to the “transformative applications” of gen AI. But there were also talks from the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union (SAG-AFTRA) about deepfakes and the impacts that AI could have on the careers of gamemakers. Prior to the event, a poll conducted by GDC organizers found that 49 percent of surveyed devs are using generative AI at their companies; four in five developers surveyed, however, said they’re concerned about the ethics of doing so.
Amid these talks, the notion of using AI for NPCs came to the fore. In addition to Ubisoft’s demo, Nvidia—the company behind many of the GPUs powering much of the AI revolution—brandished a suite of tools that enable “developers to build digital humans capable of AI-powered natural language interactions.” The company showed off those tools by releasing a clip of Covert Protocol, a tech demo it made with AI character company Inworld.
Ubisoft demonstrated its neo NPCs, which also use Nvidia tech, in three ways. First, I talked to Bloom to achieve a few game-given goals: Get closer to Bloom, find out about the megacorps ruling the world, learn about the resistance, and so on. Bloom is effortless to fire questions off to, and he’s generally good natured. He’s been designed to be easy to handle, Ubisoft senior data scientist Mélanie López Malet tells me, though there are other NPCs they’ve created that are more standoffish, if not downright aggressive. The team decided to add goals to his interactions, she explains, because in the company’s early testing they found players can get a little … shy.
“There are people that have a bit of social anxiety,” Malet says. They don’t want to bother NPCs who seem busy, or they’re taken aback by characters that appear angry. They don’t always know what to say. “[Players] were like, ‘It’s like I’m at party where I know nobody, oh my God,’” Malet says. But she sees this as a good thing: It means the NPCs are inspiring people to use their social instincts. Players are also far more likely to open up and get personal when it’s a text conversation. “There are some things you don’t say out loud, you know?” Malet says.
Capcom has released a list of fixes and updates it will make to Dragon’s Dogma 2 “in the near future” — including the much-requested option to start a new game when save data already exists.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 only offers a single save slot, and presently, players who want to start the game again — perhaps to try a different specialization — can only do so by manually deleting their save file at the system level first. This can be a fiddly process involving disabling cloud saving and, for Steam players, actually locating their game save on the hard drive.
Capcom said it would add “the option to start a new game when save data already exists” as part of the first wave of updates to Dragon’s Dogma 2. This doesn’t mean it will actually add a second save slot for a new character; the update will simply make it easy to overwrite your save from within the game itself.
To all Dragon’s Dogma 2 players!
We’re planning to release patches including the following updates and fixes in the near future, and will release them as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.
Capcom also said it would add a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game. As it is, the game runs with an uncapped frame rate, meaning it can sometimes run faster than 30 fps, but this can result in inconsistent and juddery performance (especially for players without variable refresh rate displays). A 30 fps cap should ensure a more consistent and stable feel to the game.
Capcom also said it would add options to switch off the motion blur and ray tracing graphical effects to console versions of Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it warned that doing so “will not affect the frame rate significantly.” Frame rate improvements will come in “future updates,” it said. PC players will now get better-quality results from the DLSS.
Another target for an early fix is the Art of Metamorphosis item that allows you to change the appearance of your character. Previously in very limited supply, the stock of this item is being increased to 99 at Pawn Guilds. This change appears to be targeted at criticism of the game’s microtransactions, which include the sale of Art of Metamorphosis at $1.99. With this change, it will only be inability to afford the in-game price that would push players toward paying real money to change the looks of their character or Main Pawn. (No changes were announced for other rare items available to buy as microtransactions, such as Wakestones or Portcrystals.)
Other changes coming soon will make it possible to acquire your own dwelling earlier in the game, as well as various text display and bug fixes.
Capcom said it would release the updates “as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.”
The popular farming sim and ultimate cozy game, Stardew Valley, dropped a major update on Tuesday after months of anticipation. Stardew’s 1.6 update has an insane amount of new content that touches every area of the game, from new menus and DIYs, to a new farm layout, new crops, and the ability to have multiple pets and play with seven friends at once. It’s enough updates to make the game feel fresh, but isn’t so new that you can’t ease back into a beloved farm and toil away.
It’s important to note here that the free update is currently only available for PC players. The update will come to mobile and consoles like the Nintendo Switch later on. If you’re not a PC player, the 1.6 news has not changed gameplay, and you’ll be able to play normally while you wait for it to show up. If you don’t have the game yet on PC, you can purchase it on Steam for $15, and it works on PC, Linus, and Mac computers.
As soon as the PC update arrived, I opened up Stardew Valley and started a file with the brand-new farm layout (which has me very broke) to dive right in. The update also works on your existing Stardew files, and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between my brand-new file and a later-game file to see what’s new in different seasons. Everywhere I look, I see something new. Moss to forage off trees! New reactionary dialog from NPCs! A prize machine in the mayor’s house!
If you hate spoilers, I’m honestly not sure why you read this far, but you should definitely stop reading. I’m about to tell you about some of the biggest changes I’ve spotted since playing the updated game.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Ranch Mode
The biggest change to see right away is the new farm layout. Stardew’s 1.6 update adds the Meadowlands Farm, a grass- and animal-focused design for my fellow animal ranchers. This farm grows a special blue grass that game creator Eric Barone says animals will love. It can raise animal’s hearts faster, improving the eggs and milk they give you. There’s less farming land available, and a few changes to initial quests. I’m enjoying the Meadowlands Farm so far—I immediately created one when the game dropped–even though starting with two chickens and no parsnip seeds is definitely a slower path to the infinite wealth I’m seeking. But even though I’m broke, it’s still been fun to have such a different start to the game.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Fresh Crops
The first question my sister asked me when I started playing: “Are there new crops?” At first, I told her no. I didn’t see anything new to purchase in the shop. But there are new crops with the update–you just won’t find them in any stores.
Instead, you find four new crops (one for each season!) in a few different ways—mainly, digging them up from the ground in the game’s well-known Artifact Spots, although spots with these new crops have a slightly different style you’ll be able to spot. You can also win them in the brand-new Prize Machine in the mayor’s house, once you get your hand on a prize ticket. The new crops are carrots for spring, summer squash for (shocker) summer, broccoli for fall, and powdermelon in winter. These new crops can be used in the game’s main quest, too. Just choose Remixed Bundles for the Community Center in your starting settings.
Burnt rubber and gunfire are not the most pleasing of smells, but for action games, they might be the most common. At least, that’s true for GameScent, a new device that aims to make gaming more immersive by adding smell to the equation.
GameScent, which dropped late last month to a bit of fanfare and some snickering, uses an adapter and an app on your phone to capture audio while you play. It then feeds those audio cues into the company’s “innovative AI,” which then triggers certain smells.
It’s a hexagonal device, compatible with most consoles, PCs, and virtual reality setups, built to hold six different aromas at a time. At launch, those smells are called Gunfire, Explosion, Forest, Storm, Racing Cars, and Clean Air—perhaps the most important, as it’s intended to neutralize whatever odors may linger.
“We feel like we are adding the missing link, if you will, to gaming, which is the use of olfaction,” says GameScent president Casey Bunce. Future scents the company intends to release include Ocean, Sports Arena, and—perhaps troublingly—Blood.
Bunce says that the device’s launch scents—which I’d argue are not the most aromatically pleasing lineup—were largely decided based on requests from gamers. They wanted smells to go along with action or horror games, thus all the explosions and gore.
Courtesy of GameScent
Those smells can be strong. During a demo of GameScent at this week’s Game Developers Conference, the device, paired up with Far Cry 6, dutifully pumped out the smell of carnage and burning rubber. It’s set to a two-minute timer, meaning it won’t create a complete haze over your room every time you get into a gunfight—but it’s still better to place the unit far from your gaming perch, rather than sit near it. While its tamer options like Forest are nice in a Febreze sort of way, anyone sensitive to smell, like myself, might get a headache after a few whiffs of car stink.
GameScent’s creators say they hope to release an additional 30 to 40 scents in the coming year, making it easier for players to customize what they’d like their experience to smell like.
The company’s products are largely made of essential oils, which you can easily pick up at the store. When I asked what’s to stop me from dumping in, for example, my own lavender oils, a rep for GameScent told me, “Honestly, it would probably work. Look, you might end up clogging the thing, and then you just take it out and flush it out with water.” To keep essential oil enthusiasts from using their own smells, the company plans to work with its community through an “insider’s club,” which will take feedback into account.
That being said, GameScent doesn’t plan to supply every user’s demand. “We get a lot of like—you know, X-rated requests,” Bunce says. “Very strange requests.”
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers had a problem: The land of Hyrule kept falling apart.
Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom might be able to guess why. Some of the game’s big advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, which allow players to create any tool they’re clever enough to stick together—required a lot of new and intricate development. Nintendo wanted to build something bigger and better with its Breath of the Wild sequel, but as the team worked on the game, the tools that would allow players to make all those shield skateboards and log bridges broke it. A lot. It was, programmer Takahiro Takayama says, “chaos.”
During development, Takayama would often hear devs exclaim, “It broke!” or “It went flying,” Takayama said Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference. “And I would respond, ‘I know. We’ll deal with it later.’”
The problem was the physics of it all. “We realized removing all non-physics-driven objects and making everything physics-driven will lead us to the solution we were looking at,” Takayama said.
The second fix was to create a system that allowed for unique interactions between objects, without any specific additional needs. That meant that players who wanted to make a vehicle, for example, could tinker with different tools instead of being restricted to something basic like a wheel and a board.
All that hardcore programming paid off. Ultrahand and Fuse are now fan-favorite tools, something players use to create flamethrowing penises and hacks used in speedruns. No matter how hard they tried, Hyrule never broke.
Those tools also meant players could solve puzzles in a variety of ways. “Regardless of what the player does, we had a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama said.
Arguably the biggest addition, though, is Diablo 4 on March 28, the first new Activision Blizzard title to hit Game Pass since Microsoft’s acquisition of the company was completed last year. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said that players shouldn’t expect all Activision Blizzard games to drop onto Game Pass the moment the deal was finalized, but this signals the start of more additions to come. New Diablo 4 players will also have plenty of time to play this RPG for dozens of hours before the paid DLC Vessel of Hatred releases later this year.
There’s also Supermassive Games’ The Quarry, a previous PS5 console exclusive and spiritual successor to Until Dawn. This time, a group of teenage counselors have to survive a night at an abandoned camp while being stalked by violent creatures and mysterious locals. As the player, you have to make a series of choices on behalf of all the characters to try and ensure everybody makes it out alive. (Spoiler alert: It’s very unlikely you will succeed.)
If none of those games are for you, this is still a very packed list of new titles for the rest of March into April. Here’s the full list:
Lightyear Frontier (Game Preview) (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) — March 19
MLB The Show 24 (Cloud and Console) — March 19
The Quarry (Cloud and Console) — March 20
Evil West (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 21
Terra Invicta (Game Preview) (PC) – March 26
Diablo IV (Console and PC) – March 28
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
Open Roads (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
Ark: Survival Ascended (Cloud, PC, Xbox Series X|S) – April 1
F1 23 (Cloud) EA Play – April 2
Superhot: Mind Control Delete (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 2
As you can imagine, with the release of MLB The Show 24, last year’s MLB The Show 23 will be leaving Xbox Game Pass at the end of the month, along with two other games:
Hot Wheels Unleashed (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Infinite Guitars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
MLB The Show 23 (Cloud and Console)
Xbox Game Pass costs $10.99 a month, while PC Game Pass costs $9.99 a month. PC Game Pass includes EA Play access, which offers another 70 games on PC. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, at $16.99 per month, gives subscribers access to everything — the PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass libraries, EA Play on both console and PC — as well as access to online multiplayer. Xbox Game Pass Core (formerly called Xbox Live Gold) costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year.
