It’s become tradition over the last few years for modders to import Carl Johnson from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas into different video games. And with FromSoftware’s latest game, Armored Core VI, it didn’t take long for someone to add CJ. In fact, it happened in less than 24 hours.
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Released on Friday, Armored Core VI is the first entry in FromSoftware’s mech franchise in over a decade. And it’s a very good game. In Kotaku’s review, Ethan Gach called it a “sometimes messy” but also “exhilarating and exhausting” game that is unlike anything he’s played in a long time, rewarding players who like to tinker and experiment with bombastic action and intense boss fights. In a lot of ways, it’s a perfect Armored Core sequel. But there’s always room for improvement. For example, Armored Core VI doesn’t normally include CJ from Rockstar’s hit open-world game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Let’s fix this glaring oversight.
Thanks to the fast work of FromSoftware modder and YouTuber Dropoff, Grove Street’s very own Carl Johnson is playable in Armored Core VI. Though, uh…be warned that CJ flying around as a giant mech-like warrior was never intended by God and the end results are disturbing. Impressive and fast work, sure, but you might have some nightmares afterward.
Now for the bad news. At the moment, the CJ mod for Armored Core VI isn’t available to download anywhere, including Dropoff’s Nexus mods page. So while Dropoff (with the help of modder TKPG) was able to add CJ to FromSoftware’s latest game in less than 24 hours, you can only watch for now.
Hopefully, soon enough, you’ll be able to take to the skies and die 30 times to a giant tank robot as San Andreas star CJ.
Bethesda’s forthcoming space epic Starfieldis apparently so long, it’s made the developer’s head of publishing Pete Hines lose all sense of time. At a Bethesda MainStream event during Gamescom 2023, Hines said he felt like the action role-playing game didn’t “really […] get going” until he took 50 hours to finish its main quest. That was after he’d already dropped 80 hours into sidequests.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
“80 hours in, I went from doing one game to a completely different game where I started really focusing on the main quest,” said Hines, “and then I got so caught up in the main quest, that I spent the next 50 hours just doing that. […] I’m here to tell you that this game doesn’t really even get going until you finish the main quest.”
“Telling somebody, ‘Oh, I played Starfield for 40 hours’ tells you nothing about what that person has done,” he said.
130 hours is an intimidating amount to put into anything, let alone something that turbo-blasts blue light directly into your eyeballs and brain. But try not to worry for your ocular health yet—it might not take you as long as it took Hines to bring the game to max speed.
In 2022, Starfield director Todd Howard estimated its main quest would take a player around 30 and up to 40 hours to beat. I suppose that isn’t much of a difference from 50, but at least you could have around 10 more hours to, like, go outside. Or play Crash Bandicoot.
In any case, Hines maintains that Starfield will claim a huge portion of your time. In another Gamescom conversation, this one with IGN, he said, “If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [with saying] ‘Now you’ve played enough Starfield to get what this game is.’ Because, like, I’m at 150, 160 hours on my current playthrough, and […] I haven’t even come close.”
Start clearing your schedule, then. Premium or Constellation Edition buyers can play Starfield in Early Access starting September 1, and the game is officially out for everyone on Xbox Series X/S and PC September 6.
During Gamescom’s Opening Night Live presentation, Blizzard took to the stage alongside host Geoff Keighley to announce that Diablo IV’s next update, Season of Blood, will start on October 17—just in time for Halloween.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
Much like Diablo IV’s current update, Season of the Malignant, Season 2 will introduce five new and returning endgame bosses, and will also come with changes to renown rewards, gem and stash storage, and resistance and status effects. While the studio didn’t divulge details on what those updates will be just yet, Blizzard came through with a new trailer showing off what to expect come this October.
If you thought that looked kinda gruesome, well, I’m right there with you. With vampire hunter Erys at your side, it’ll be up to the two of you to put an end to a new threat roaming the lands of Sanctuary. Erys is voiced by Gemma Chan, who you might recognize from Captain Marvel (Minn-Erva), Raya and the Last Dragon (Namaari), Crazy Rich Asians (Astrid), and Eternals (Sersi), among other films and TV shows. Revealing that this is her first video game performance, Chan, alongside Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson, briefly talked about the “badass warrior companion” Erys, some “cool vampiric powers” at your disposal, and a “big bad vampire lord” you’ll face at Season of Blood’s end.
But that’s not until October 17. For now, Season of the Malignant is still going on, and unfortunately, things haven’t been going well. After a controversial change to player power level, the studio addressed the community by promising to not make classes weaker, which Blizzard is aware leads to a “not fun” experience overall. Here’s hoping things go better with Season of Blood.
The sequel to Immortals: Fenyx Rising (2020’s open-world, Greek-inspired adventure game) was cancelled in July 2023, and we’re just now learning exactly what that game was meant to entail—and how much of a break from tradition it was planned to be for Ubisoft.
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According to Axios’ Stephen Totilo, who broke the news on August 21, the sequel (codenamed Oxygen) was an ambitious one that would combine features of two distinct, beloved games: FromSoftware’s action RPG Elden Ring andNintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Anonymous sources familiar with the game’s development spoke to Totilo, painting a detailed picture of a “vast game set across a fictionalized version of the Polynesian archipelago, made primarily by Ubisoft’s Quebec studio but developed alongside Polynesian consultants.”
“The goal was also to make a game very different from the rest of the Ubisoft portfolio,” a source told Axios. Instead of the typical Ubisoft map overwhelmingly dotted with icons, Immortals 2 would have far less map markers, and require players “to search harder to figure out where to go, by tracking animals, following the wind, or navigating via the position of stars in the in-game sky,” alleged a source. The core inspiration for this change? Elden Ring.
The sequel would reportedly also be very different from the original Immortals, with more realistic graphics, the abandonment of the first game’s narrator, fewer puzzles, and a “more malleable story in which player choice is significant.” According to Axios’ sources, the player’s character would try and “curry favor with various Polynesian gods” that would give them special elemental powers and the ability to shape-shift. They’d gain new tattoos on their body based on the narrative choices they’d make in game, all of which is rooted deeply in Polynesian cultural traditions and the notion of mana, or the belief that there’s a supernatural force flowing through humans, animals, plants, and more. A player’s decisions would affect the various islands on which Immortals 2 would have been set.
According to Axios, part of the reason Immortals 2 was canned was so that Ubisoft could focus on established IP like Assassin’s Creed Red. The first Immortals game was reportedly developed in just over a year, but the sequel was taking longer because of its ambitious scope and its comparatively small dev team. Apparently, however, “several playable hours were available in an internal demo” by spring 2023, and Ubisoft was “at a juncture about whether to fund full development or nix the project.”
We know Ubisoft ultimately decided to can it, but as Kotaku’s Ethan Gach pointed out in July 2023, Immortals: Fenyx Rising was “pretty good,” and the idea of a more expansive sequel that abandoned some of the tired markers of a Ubisoft game sounds exciting. Oh well, guess we’ll just get more Assassin’s Creed games instead.
As is the case with many Dungeons & Dragons groups, my band of outcasts fell apart. I’ve lamented the loss over the last few months, but now, I finally have a piece of that joy back thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3.
11 Minutes With Baldur’s Gate 3’s Character Creator
This comes as little surprise considering Larian Studios’ epic is based on the famed tabletop role-playing game’s fifth edition, referred to as 5e. As it’s been for many, D&D was my first role-playing experience, and I quickly fell in love. The game isn’t without its faults, garnering criticism for issues like using racist tropes and for parent company Wizards of the Coast being generally shitty. Still, every week I couldn’t help but look forward to Thursday when our group would get together to take down some bugbears, explore a cavern, or make a dangerous deal with a dragon. There’s a sense of community in having a standing date with friends and loved ones, something I was keen to get back following strict pandemic lockdowns.
But people have lives. With the coronavirus still lurking, fellow players would regularly need to bow out due to sickness or quarantine. And the parents in our squad had extra responsibilities to contend with. So some weeks we’d be missing a party member who was, um, off with that one character we met before, or, um, drank a bit too much ale at the tavern. Sometimes we wouldn’t meet at all. Finally, our Dungeon Master moved back to Australia and that was it, our death saving throw failed one too many times.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gives back some of what I missed in D&D
I was somewhat apprehensive to dive into Baldur’s Gate 3, worried my expectations were set too high or that it wouldn’t be the experience I hoped for. These are the same concerns that have kept me from looking into forming or joining an online tabletop campaign, worried that it wouldn’t match the energy of my last group and scared that, if it did, I would have my hopes dashed once again if it fell apart.
But Baldur’s Gate 3 is removed enough from the real thing that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to replace a true TTRPG group. That’s almost certainly why I’ve been more satisfied with my Baldur’s Gate 3 experience as a TTRPG replacement than someone who is still in the middle of a campaign (or several).
Instead, it satisfies my desire to get lost in a fantasy world where I can speak to wolves and cast spells on anyone who wrongs me, without having to worry that the realities of life might get in the way of this new joy I’ve found. I love getting caught up in the fantasy worlds of D&D and Baldur’s Gate. I get lost in crafting Capital L Lore, as Kotaku Staff Writer Kenneth Shepard called it. Baldur’s Gate 3 lets me feel like I get to finish the story I started with friends in some ways, while letting me branch out and try new things in others. I can still live out my Druid fantasy, but this time I’ve chosen a different subclass, for example. On top of once again getting lost in the role-playing I’ve been missing, I’ve now made plans to get in some BG3 multiplayer with folks from my former tabletop posse, including a Human Sorcerer, a Half-Orc Barbarian, and a Half-Elf Archer.
It still isn’t the same, however, and I don’t think a largely solo video game could truly replace my D&D experience. Multiplayer in a video game doesn’t quite match having a day of the week always dedicated to meeting up with friends, and there’s no DM carefully crafting the perfect encounter for the group’s level or playstyle. Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t let me describe an intuitive way to get around an obstacle, nor can I so freely draw upon the ideas of my fellow players. And why is there no damn use for rope in this game? Rope is an essential item with infinite functions.
No, it isn’t the same. Then again, Baldur’s Gate 3 would never up and move to Melbourne on me.
On Friday, Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller responded to the hero shooter’s Steam review bombing which led to the game becoming one of the most “overwhelmingly negatively” reviewed games on the storefront.
Overwatch 2’s New Story Missions: Worth The Money?
When Overwatch 2 season six, titled Invasion, launched earlier last week, it brought with it a new support hero, a new game mode, PvE story missions, and the free-to-play game’s debut on Steam, Valve’s popular PC gaming storefront. While the game’s Steam launch was supposed to give players another, potentially more convenient way to play the colorful team-based shooter, it instead led to an incredible influx of negative reviews. Though some players merely left reviews joking about Overwatch 2’s Source Film Maker porn-creation scene being better than the actual game, a majority of players voiced their disappointment with Overwatch 2 failing to deliver on its once-promised story mode.
Keller acknowledged OW2’s less-than-stellar Steam reviews in a recent blog post, saying:
…Although being review-bombed isn’t a fun experience, it’s been great to see lots of new players jump into Overwatch 2 for the first time. Our goal with Overwatch 2 has been to make the game more accessible than ever for more people than ever before.
Many of the reviews on Steam mention the cancellation of the much larger component of PvE that was announced in 2019 as one of their primary reasons for dissatisfaction with the game. I get that. That announcement was about an ambitious project that we ultimately couldn’t deliver.
If we can’t turn back the clock, then what can we do? We can keep adding to and improving Overwatch 2. That is how we move forward. This means more maps, heroes, game modes, missions, stories, events, cool cosmetics, and features—an ever-expanding, evolving, and improving game. This is the future of Overwatch. One where we will continually create and innovate on what is making the game great now for the players who are playing now.
Keller ended his remarks by noting that Overwatch is “such a unique game and world,” especially when players remember to actually work together on in-game objectives, and encouraged people to give the hero shooteran earnest try on Steam.
After 18 years, David Vonderhaar, the studio design director at Treyarch, announced he’s leaving Activision after shipping eight Call of Duty games since 2004.
Long-Lost Halo Demo Comes To Life
Vonderhaar made the announcement on his personal LinkedIn account, where he confirmed he’s moved on to a new project at a different studio but didn’t go into specifics in his post. He also thanked his former coworkers at Treyarch and the Call of Duty fans that have played the studio’s games over the years.
Today I am sharing that I have left Activision and Treyarch after an incredible 18 years and 8 Call of Duty games.
To my co-workers at Treyarch, I am immensely grateful for the time we invested working to improve our craft, never sitting on successes, and always wondering how to improve what we design and how we produce it.
Thank you to the Call of Duty community for your passion and enthusiasm. That energy has often fueled our determination as a studio and individuals. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to interact with so many of you directly online and in person. This energy will always be a massive part of me.
I am staying in the games industry, working on an undisclosed project I can’t discuss yet, but I am excited about a rare and unique opportunity. I’ll update you as soon as possible.
Vonderhaar’s Call of Duty portfolio is synonymous with the Black Ops series, which has been part of the military shooter’s rotating stable of sub-franchises since the first one launched in 2010. The most recent entry was 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
On Friday, Sega revealed the second trailer for its latest upcoming Yakuza game, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which sees longtime series protag Kazuma Kiryu take on the role of a gangster super spy with Spider-Man gadgets and explosive cigarettes at his disposal.
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The Man Who Erased His Name, which takes place between Yakuza 6 and Yakuza: Like A Dragon, follows Kiryu as he assumes the identity of a secret agent named Joryu after faking his death to protect his adopted children at the end of Yakuza 6. Apparently, Kiryu does a piss-poor job of keeping his new identity a secret, and winds up getting involved with a rival yakuza family that knows his past and is threatening to harm his children at the Sunflower Orphanage. I hope these goons aren’t within grabbing distance of a bike rack, because they’re in for a world of pain threatening those orphans.
Unlike Yakuza 7’s turn-based action, The Man Who Erased His Name will focus on action-based combat and will have two fighting styles: Yakuza style and Agent style. While Yakuza style sees Kiryu perform his typical street brawler fighting moves, Agent style will let Kiryu use new super-spy gadgets like rocket boots, explosive cigarettes, and Spider-Man-esque wires to take down thugs. You can see them both in the new trailer.
Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Aside from showcasing some scenes from the game’s melodramatic story, The Man Who Erased His Name’s will also see the return of many of the series’ light-hearted mini-games, which will include playable retro Sega titles like Sonic the Fighters, new karaoke songs to sing, as well as revamped cabaret club side-quests. However, instead of managing dates for customers like in previous games, players will instead go on dates themselves in a semi-live-action format similar to the internet chatroom and gravure photoshoot minigames from Yakuza 6 and Yakuza Kiwami 2. The game will also let you customize Kiryu’s outfits before he hits the streets by having him wear a fedora and shades for the first time in the series as well, which is rad.
The butt-end of the new trailer also revealed that The Man Who Erased His Name will include a playable demo of the next, next entry in the series, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which’ll see Kiryu and Ichiban Kasuga as dual protagonists. A clip from LaD: Infinite Wealth shows Ichiban in handcuffs, likely for the public nudity we witnessed in the Summer Game Fest trailer, before an older Kiryu breaks him loose.
Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is slated to come out on November 9 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Windows.
Baldur’s Gate 3 may soon let you change your in-game appearance after starting the game, offering an upgrade to the already-praised character creator.
11 Minutes With Baldur’s Gate 3’s Character Creator
Based on Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy RPG from Larian Studios not only lets you select your class and race but also allows you to customize your “attachments” (like jewelry and scars), hair, tattoos, and even genitals. If your imagination conjures it, chances are you can bring it to fruition. But once your character is set, that’s it. Unlike other RPGs such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Diablo IV that let players change their hair, makeup, and other features on the fly, you can’t swap or tweak any part of your character around in Baldur’s Gate 3 once you start the game’s story. However, Larian Studios’ director of publishing Michael Douse revealed in a response on X, formerly Twitter, to a player who begged to change their in-game look that the team is currently working on it.
“Sir please let me change how I look in the game,” X user TheTrustedTitan said. “I’m begging!!!!”
Douse didn’t clarify what he meant here, and there’s no publicly announced timeline for when this mid-game character customization option will come to Baldur’s Gate 3. But it’s great knowing the look you chose to start the game won’t be the one you’ll have to stick to forever. It’s also worth mentioning that only the PC version is out now. Baldur’s Gate 3 will come to PlayStation 5 on September 6, and the team is still trying to make multiplayer work on Xbox Series S before it comes to that console and the beefed-up Xbox Series X.
Here’s hoping it comes out soon, but even without it, the game is still super popular among critics and fans alike. This is just a nice-to-have, you know?
In recent years, Ubisoft has struggled to release games on schedule, with some titles like Skull & Bones being delayed over and over. But now, the company has announced something different. Instead of being delayed, it turns out Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch a week earlier than previously planned.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the next entry in the long-running open-world stealth franchise. This time around players will take on the role of Basim Ibn Ishaq, an assassin first seen in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. In Mirage, players will get a chance to see how a younger Basim evolves from a street thief to a fully-fledged assassin. Ubisoft is promising that, unlike recent AC games, Mirage will be a smaller, more stealth-focused action game and less of a super large open-world RPG. That sounds great to me, someone who misses those sleeker, sneakier entries. And what also sounds good to me is that we won’t have to wait as long to get our hands on this Assassin’s Creed prequel.
On August 14, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on October 5. The game was initially planned—after a delay in 2022—to be released on October 12. Ubisoft says that the game has now gone gold and will be ready for players a full week earlier than expected.
In an era where big, complicated video games are taking longer and longer to make and delays are becoming more and more common, this is a nice bit of news. Not just for Assassin’s Creed fans, who now get to play the upcoming game a week earlier than planned, but for anyone looking for a sign that perhaps not every big game that is completed and successfully ships has to do so on fire.
Of course that’s assuming Mirage launches in a respectable state and not filled with bizarre glitches, like the originally released version of Assassin’s Creed: Unity back in 2014. Either way, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is now set to launch on October 5 across Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Perhaps one day Skull & Bones will release, too.
Baldur’s Gate 3has been out for about a week now, and developer Larian Studios is revealing some early stats based on the decisions players have made. This includes what characters seem most popular to the community according to hard numbers. And fellow Gale romancers, our boy is winning in the popularity contests out the gate.
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Larian put together an extensive infographic with data on things like what class players are picking the most, what race people are choosing for their custom characters, and also what Origin character players are going with if they choose to take a party member for a spin as their protagonist rather than making their own original character.
The team says 93 percent of players have made a custom character (as they should for a first run, in my opinion), the 7 percent that chose to pick a premade character had a pretty sizable spread across all six potential Origin characters. The current ranking reads as follows:
6. Lae’zel with 11,765 players
5. Wyll with 14,862
4. Shadowheart with 15,966
3. Astarion with 22,286
2. Karlach with 22,514
1. Gale with 27,784
Image: Larian Studios
We (Gale fans) love to see it. Though Karlach was far and away my second favorite companion behind my wizard boyfriend, so it’s cool to see her getting some love as well. Furthermore, Gale also seems to be a popular romantic conquest for players, though he’s coming up behind Shadowheart. But ultimately, our boy seems to be a hit with Baldur’s Gate 3 fans so far. Though it’s unclear if some folks might be pursuing either of those paramours because they were rejected by Astarion, as the unambiguously evil vampire apparently has broken the hearts of “almost 100,000″ players since launch.
While there’s love for the arrogant but charming wizard, it seems his spells have also resulted in a lot of players’ death so far, with friendly fire from his attacks being the seventh-highest cause of death in the game. Simply walk around the fire, y’all. It’s not hard.
Lords of the Fallen was already a game, one that came out nearly 10 years ago by developer Deck13 (Atlas Fallen) and publisher CI Games. It was fine, but felt too much like a lackluster facsimile of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls formula to have much of an identity of its own. CI Games is back, though, with newly founded studio Hexworks to take another stab at Lords of the Fallen. And this time around, at least based on the previews, it sounds like a stellar Soulslike might be in the offing.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
Out on October 13 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, Lords of the Fallen is a third-person action-RPG with an interesting conceit: With the help of the Umbral lantern, you can reveal secrets hidden in the land of the dead while still traversing the world of the living. But should you die and end up in Umbral—which will happen since this is a Soulslike—you’ll still be able to fight for your life for the chance to return to Axiom. Die here, though, and you’ll start back in the land of the living having lost your XP. Typically Soulslike stuff, but that two-realm implementation offers a new perspective for the genre, something the previews call attention to.
So, considering the game comes out in two months, here’s a roundup of what early players are saying about Lords of the Fallen and how, as many of them purport, it’s sounding like an exciting Soulslike worth paying attention to.
After playing the opening hours of 2023’s Lords of the Fallen, our journey through this nightmarish world was eerily familiar, yet filled with a current-gen polish that games like the Dark Souls trilogy and Bloodborne could only dream of. Our initial impressions were that the game felt a lot like the PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls, which is not a bad thing, but from an aesthetic point of view, Lords of the Fallen leans even more heavily into the grimdark setting.
Image: Hexworks
I’ve played a couple of hours of new Lords of the Fallen and crucially, I can tell you it’s: good. If you’ve played a Soulslike before—or as Hexworks wisely describes the genre, which extends to Nioh, The Surge, and the rest, tactical action-RPGs—it’ll be immediately familiar. You can create a character from one of several preset classes, ranging from glass cannon mages to sword-and-shield warriors, with some more lore-y archetypes in between with a little clan-based backstory behind them: a raven-like archer, a brawler with a twist of wolves.
The moment-to-moment in my Lords of the Fallen demo ticked most of the Souls boxes I have when it comes to combat, but this game distinguishes itself in its concept of dual worlds. Axiom, the land of the living, is more or less the “normal” dimension, but it exists in parallel with the Umbral realm, the land of the dead. The two realms run simultaneously as you play, which takes advantage of tech on latest-gen platforms. It’s similar to The Medium or Titanfall 2‘s Effect and Cause mission, but spread across an entire sprawling dark fantasy world.
What surprises me most, however, is Umbral. This is the realm of the dead and exists parallel to Axiom. It can be accessed at almost any time, in real-time. But, once you’re there, you must fight through its more challenging enemies to reach an access point that brings you back to Axiom. While you can select to explore Umbral on your own, Lords of the Fallen will bring you there almost every time you die. Dying gives you a second chance in Umbral, where, if you survive, you can reach the realm of Axiom once more. This eases the usual challenge of the genre—mind you, Lords of the Fallen is still extremely tough—but also opens up a unique playground for puzzles I welcome.
By tapping into two distinct worlds at once, Hexworks completely revamps how we view death in a Soulslike. Lords of the Fallen turns the most infamously iconic, eternally frustrating thing about a FromSoftware game into more than a second chance: It’s a second world, one that functions entirely differently from the place we start out in. The result is a varied combat experience in a truly untamed universe, one that pulses with unknown wonders and its fair share of chills—no matter your familiarity with the genre.
Image: Hexworks
There’s a great fluidity to Lords of the Fallen’s combat too. You can seamlessly flow from light attacks to heavy attacks, and can even change weapon stance in the middle of a combo as well. I could start with two light attacks, press the stance switch button, and do another light attack, I’d get a unique attack in which my character seamlessly goes from a dual-wielded slash, into a two-handed thrust. This is even better when you add magic to the equation, as you’re able to easily swap between melee and magic attacks even mid-combo. It opens the door for a lot of freedom of expression through combat, which is something you don’t see all too often in the Soulslike genre.
While in the Umbral world, enemies slowly become more aggressive and powerful, but the XP multiplier increases as well, amping up the risks as well as the rewards in an enticing way. Being able to respawn allowed me to progress much faster and alleviated some of the frustrations that come with the genre. The Umbral world also offers access to shortcuts and gives you wild abilities that mirror Jedi powers. Lords of the Fallen is at its strongest when it leans into the mechanics of the Umbral world.
Umbral also softens the difficulty level of its chosen genre—up to a point. If you die in Axiom, you are resurrected in Umbral, then given another chance to defeat your enemy before you give up the ghost completely and need to corpse-run from the last Vestige to reclaim your Vigor (Lords of the Fallen’s souls). This doesn’t refresh your healing items, though, and the longer you spend in Umbral, the more Dread builds up, and the trickier things get. Enemies get tougher, and increasing numbers of zombielike creatures materialize in your path—they’re easy to kill, but their presence complicates the battlefield considerably.
Outside of exploration, you can use the lantern to rend a baddy’s soul from its body, then batter it for extreme damage. You can’t do this all the time, as you’ll need to power the lantern up to do it. This can be done by bursting pustules in the Umbral realm and sucking up the resultant juice, but if you can’t find a pustule, you might encounter an enemy with a blue glow—which means they’re invulnerable unless you reveal their parasitic Umbral companion floating alongside them. Hoover this critter up and not only can it power your soul attack, it will also remove their pal’s aura of invincibility.
Image: Hexworks
The game is not as obscure as its FromSoft progenitors, and that works in its favor, because when you’re being pulled in two directions and interrogating the tension between worlds, you want a sense of what’s going on, and where to go. Lords of the Fallen is all about playing as a heathen, shunned by the world for embracing a dark lantern that allows them to traverse the realms of light and dark. It’s all about being sacrilegious, defying the common knowledge and tasting the forbidden fruit. If you wanted to do away with subtext, you could say it’s what Hexworks is doing in discarding the commonly held beliefs around how death should work in this genre. How traditionally hard it must be. But the studio eschews that. And the result, at least at this early stage, is unique and compelling.
My time with the 2014 version of the game was quite frustrating. While the review is no longer live—the site I wrote it for is now defunct—I essentially said that, although the game had a compelling narrative, its cumbersome gameplay and unintuitive systems made for an ultimately forgettable experience.
The previews of the new Lords of the Fallen reboot are based on just two hours of gameplay, so a lot of questions will remain unanswered until the game drops in October. But based on everything I’ve read so far, Lords of the Fallen is sounding like it’ll be a pretty solid take on the Soulslike style of game.
Lords of the Fallen launches on October 13 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
It’s been two months since Diablo IV came out and players are airing their frustrations with the game, particularly now that season one is underway. One of the most contentious aspects of the loot-hunting action-RPG right now is inventory management, which has become a hot topic in the community.
Diablo IV, like previous entries in Blizzard’s storied franchise, features a massive amount of loot; expect a constant deluge of gear drops from bosses and chests and dungeons as you travel the world of Sanctuary. With a total of 110 inventory slots, your bag will inevitably run out of space. And that’s fine, until you need to make room for that awesome armor or weapon you just snatched. There are some options for clearing your inventory, but the process is so cumbersome and tedious that players are feeling burnt out from over-micromanaging their wares, a feeling I’ve experienced during my own playtime.
The problem with managing Diablo IV gear
The Diablo IV subreddit is inundated with folks decrying inventory management. With post titles like “Comparing items and clearing inventory is overwhelming” and “Inventory management is burning me out from this game,” it’s clear folks have grown weary of frequently rummaging through the in-game bag. Part of the problem is you can’t dismantle or salvage items anywhere in the world. Maybe it’s to make the game feel more lifelike, but to break gear down into other resources, you must travel to a blacksmith at any of Sanctuary’s many towns. This not only interrupts the loot-kill-loot loop by forcing you back to a borough to tend to equipment, it also wastes time as you head back to a town by either backtracking on foot/horseback or sitting through a long loading screen when teleporting. Either way, with a full inventory, looting becomes impossible until you clear more space in your inventory.
Diablo IV’s Strongholds Are A Great Way To Level Up This Season
Diablo IV’s Strongholds Are A Great Way To Level Up This Season
Aside from salvaging, you could drop useless things to make space for better loot. However, while doing so is easy with a few button presses, it’s ultimately a self-defeating endeavor as every piece of gear can be sold or broken down, which is far better for your longer-term bottom line. Maybe you can’t use that level 75 dagger with your Sorcerer, but the iron or cash you can turn it into are necessary and vital for character growth, particularly for upgrading your current equipment. And this process of inspecting every item to determine whether to break it down, drop, or sell has been at the forefront of players’ minds.
Diablo IV players are tired of rummaging their bags
In a popular August 8 Reddit post, user FullStackNoCode joked that fiddling with inventory in Diablo IV is “like having to pee every five minutes.” They went on to explain that they’re “tired of running to town” just to manage the bag, saying a solution could be to allow players to sell or scrap items immediately.
“That’s all just busywork anyway, and highly annoying,” FullStackNoCode wrote. “Then, our bag space could be reserved for things that we want to be looking at/thinking about.”
Image: Blizzard
Another popular post from July 21, a day after Diablo IV’s Season of the Malignant started, saw user jlarue2010 say this new content update should be called “season of inventory management.” This is in reference to malignant hearts, season-exclusive items offering statistical buffs for your characters such as strength or defense that also happen to take up inventory space.
Players are also bumping up against the limits of their item stash, a separate area which lets you easily transfer items between your characters. A popular July 26 post from user Protocide559 explained how they won’t start a second character due to their stash already feeling tight just from saving gear for their current Druid. Diablo IV’s seasons require you to start new characters to participate, but because of the limited storage space, Protocide559 said they’re sticking with their pre-Season One Druid and refusing to play multiple characters like they did in previous Diablos.
“[Blizzard will give you a chance to buy more storage space. Don’t worry,” user vague_diss joked in reply.
Diablo IV’s inventory will get better, just at a later time
For its part, Blizzard has addressed some parts of bag management. Gems, items that can be slapped onto gear to provide buffs such as health on kill or additional gold collecting, will take up less inventory space in a future update. The company also said storage upgrades are coming, but again, at a later time. It’s great that inventory management will become less frustrating as time goes on, particularly considering how tedious it was in previous Diablo games. In the first Diablo, for example, your inventory was divided into a grid. A gem would take up one slot while an axe might take up three, thus filling up quicker. The series has moved beyond grid-based inventories, but Diablo IV’s inventory limitations are still finding ways to annoy players and interrupt game flow.
This happens to my partner and I all the time. We’ll grind dungeons for minutes on end, only to stop right in the middle of it to scour our inventories to make space for the new thing that just dropped because we ran out of space. We do this for what feels like every 10 or so minutes as our bags fill up nonstop, repeating the process of inspecting and culling. It becomes draining after a while, especially when Diablo IV can’t stop spilling loot all over the place.
The recently released Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive RPG with high replay value due to all the choices you can make, so it might seem weird to be talking about the game getting an expansion. But the question has been asked, and the response from the people behind the hit RPG is basically, probably not, because high-level Dungeons and Dragons characters are too powerful.
The Week In Games: What’s Releasing Beyond Baldur’s Gate 3
If you’ve been on the internet lately, it probably seems like the world is obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3, which fully launched last week to rave reviews after an extended period in Steam Early Access. The turn-based Dungeons and Dragons RPG is truly blowing up on Steam, with hundreds of thousands of players logging in all at the same time to play (and also tohave sex…a lot of sex). And while the game is huge—taking dozens and dozens of hours to fully complete, with multiple endings—some are already wondering about future expansions. But, that’s probably not going to happen. And if it does happen, it’s going to take a long time.
In an interview with PC Gamer on August 7, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke said that the team hadn’t even started on an expansion. And sure, the game caps out at level 12, but DnD supports level 20 characters. Naturally, that seems to leave room for a big follow-up expansion. However, Vincke explained that he thinks it would be “very hard” to continue the adventure with the high-level characters players have at the end of the game. That’s because, in DnD, when players start reaching level 13 and beyond they become nearly godlike. Spells that high-level players gain access to include the ability to see the future, or just instantly kill anything with less than 100HP.
Larian Studios
“[High-level DnD] adventures require a different way of doing things, in terms of antagonists you’re going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly,” Vincke said, “Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort.”
Vincke explained that this is why a lot of DnD campaigns are designed for level 12 or lower characters. So while it might seem like a perfect opportunity for an expansion, to just let players hit level 20, it’s “not as easy as one would imagine.”
Promising an expansion too early could cause problems
Another issue that Larian Studios faces when trying to make a big follow-up expansion to Baldur’s Gate 3? All the choices you can make and the endings you can get. Vincke tells PC Gamer that if the studio was to build DLC for the RPG it would be hard, and players would have to wait for “a long time.”
There’d be one other complicating factor to making a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion that picks up at level 13: all the possible permutations of a finished Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign feeding into that starting point. If Larian were to build something like that, “you’d have to wait for a long time,” Vincke said.
He further added that if the studio announced expansion plans too early and then, partway through development, realized the expansion was boring or not very fun, it’d have to keep working on it and try to get people to buy something it doesn’t fully believe in.
“That would not be cool. So we have to have the freedom to experiment and do our stuff. And then when we’re ready to announce it, we will.”
So for now, there is no plan to make a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion, but there’s a small chance it could still happen. One day. Maybe.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is dense, but really rewarding once you’ve gotten the hang of all its systems which include tk. For some, the RPG’s combat has been particularly challenging, because it’s so embroiled in the game’s deep systems.
The Week In Games: What’s Releasing Beyond Baldur’s Gate 3
I’m about 40 hours in, and I’m still learning all the little nuances that can make a huge difference in a combat arena. If you’re struggling with fighting goblins, ghouls, and other beasties in Faerûn, here are a few general tips for getting out of a fight alive.
Distribute your healing items
When you’re looting or buying items in Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re probably not swapping through each character to do it. I know I don’t, at least. Most of the time, I let my main avatar character hoard everything until he becomes encumbered under the weight of it all. But inventory management is a huge part of successful combat encounters. You can’t just buy a bunch of healing potions and head out into danger. You need to manually give each of your party members some of your recovery items so they can be self-sustaining.
This applies to both health potions and Scrolls of Revivify, items necessary to revive your party members should they die in battle. No, I don’t mean fall in battle, I mean die in battle. This happens when a party member has been downed by an enemy attack and has either laid on the ground for too many turns without using the Help command to get them back into the fight, or is struck before you can get to them. Sometimes, your main character might be the one dead (though you can loot Scrolls off their corpses), or they might not be able to get to a fallen ally. So having a wide spread of your healing items is just good practice.
Shove your enemies off high places
As we said in our general tips guide, shoving enemies off high ground is one of the best ways to cut a fight short. Why waste time and turns whittling down an enemy’s health when you can simply push them off the side of a cliff? If you can position characters near high-ground enemies like archers or spell-casters, you can use Shove as a bonus action to send them tumbling down into a chasm. But depending on a character’s class, you can also learn abilities that help you do this. After leveling up my Warlock character, my Eldritch Blast ability now has a force effect that pushes enemies a great distance when I fire it at them. This has helped me take out enemies at a distance who were bold enough to perch themselves on high ground, unaware that I would send them falling to their deaths. Characters with high-strength builds like Lae’zel and Karlach are optimal, but spellcasters at least have some chance to pull off a good Shove. Always look for opportunities to knock someone down a peg. Or a ledge.
Image: Larian Studios / Kotaku
You might as well Jump
Movement is a key part of Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat. Each character has a specific distance they can move each turn, but there are several ways to expand or alter how they move. Jumping is one of the best ways to get some added value out of your movement , and it doesn’t take any of your actions, as it’s technically just an extension of walking. This helps you not only move over obstacles, hazards like fire or other traps, but can also give you some high ground if your character can reach them with a Jump alone.
Area-of-effect abilities are invaluable
No matter how big or small a combat arena is, the best teams can create and control space. Area-of-effect spells and skills are crucial in gaining and maintaining the upper hand in a fight. There are a few notable ways to make large areas dangerous to your enemies. Some of this can be through one-off abilities like the spell Cloud of Daggers, which creates a concentrated whirlwind of sharp objects for anyone to walk through and take significant damage. Placing this at a choke point can ensure your opponents inevitably walk through them and lose a chunk of health. I’ve taught both my character and Gale this spell and we’ve been able to control large parts of a field with it. Sometimes I’ll even push an enemy back into it with a well-placed Shove or Eldritch Blast, and then they have to walk through it again to reach us. Usually that’s more than enough to take them out.
If you want to control space without it being in a static area of effect on the field, abilities like Spirit Guardians will encircle its caster in a damaging aura that follows them as they move around the field. Close-combat enemies will inevitably have to get in close and take damage just to reach you. I had a fight against an army of rats in a small space, and casting Spirit Guardians meant that as they funneled toward my party they all immediately died as their 1 HP was lost.
Pay attention to how elements interact
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a lot of abilities that work in tandem with the elements. Some crowd control abilities like Grease and Web can trap or slow down enemies in a wide radius, then you can follow up with a fire-based attack or spell that will ignite the entire area, burning all the enemies within it. There are a ton of interactions like this that can help you use a foe’s attack to your advantage. If your whole team’s been covered in Grease, move everyone out of the affected area but position yourself where your enemies will have to walk through to get to you, you can ignite it and turn what was once an obstacle into an asset.
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku
Sneak in if you have to
Not every character is built to run into a fight head-on. But luckily, Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you tools to sneak in should you feel so inclined. This can be both helpful to get a better position and ambush your foes, or, in some cases, it can help you avoid combat entirely.
Every character has the Hide ability that, if you pass stealth checks, can help you navigate around a group of enemies. But also, using abilities like Invisible, Misty Step, or Dimension Door can help you get around enemies without detection.
Ungroup party members for better setups
Some of those maneuvers are easier to pull off if you split your party up. Ungrouping your team will let you move individual characters without the rest of the party following. For example, say you ungroup your spellcaster who knows Invisible, so they’re able to freely move around a battlefield unseen, reach high ground, and cast an AOE spell on the enemy team before any of them are the wiser.
This also works to ensure your team isn’t all clustered together when your opponents start to swarm you. Depending on the fight, you can use this to file in characters on different sides of a battle, letting you spread out, cover more ground, and keep your team from getting wiped out in one well-placed explosion.
It’s fine to run away sometimes
Say you’re surrounded by an enemy team and things are looking real rough. You know if you move even an inch you’ll be struck by an Attack of Opportunity that activates by walking away from an enemy in close proximity. Slap that Disengage action and you can retreat without worry. Enemies will still come after you, but this will let you move for at least a little bit without worrying about getting whacked in the back of the head with an enemy mace.
Destroy the environment (in an eco-friendly way)
The longer Baldur’s Gate 3 is out, the more we’re learning about how much abilities can interact with the environment. There are a lot of destructible objects, such as bridges, that you can use to your advantage. See a bunch of enemies on a bridge headed your way? Check if it has an HP bar you can cast a ranged attack on that will blow it up and send your foes falling down into the hole below. Or preemptively destroy it before your enemies can even get on it to reach you.
Hirelings let you craft your party
Sometimes you just don’t have the tools and abilities you need to pull off a strategic play. Perhaps you spec’d Gale with too many support abilities and now he’s not built to do as much damage as you like, or maybe you made Shadowheart too damage-heavy to help you create a good crowd-control setup. Respecing your characters is an option, but you can also just get a Hireling. These are essentially additional, preset party members who occupy certain classes/races, but are customizable beyond that. This can both replace lost or missed party members or just give you a greater sense of control over the character builds you’re working with. They cost 100 gold to hire and you’ll have to wait until you unlock Withers, who joins your camp after you explore the Dank Crypt in the Ravaged Beach at the beginning of the game, to hire them.
Screenshot: Larian Studios
Don’t be too precious about resources
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a pretty resource-intense game. On top of the items you’ll need to replenish, you also have Spell Slots that give you a limited amount of spell uses before you have to do a Long Rest. You can run out of these resources in just one fight, which means you need to be really deliberate with their use. However, being strategic doesn’t mean you have to hoard things. Generally, you’ll come across enough supplies to do Long Rests to heal up and get your Spell Slots back naturally through looting. If you haven’t, buying food from merchants is a quick, often cheap way to get those supply numbers up. But also, you bought healing potions for a reason. You have Spell Slots so you can use them. It may take some time for you to get comfortable using a consumable resource, but I’m telling you now, the game is a lot more generous with these things than it might appear at first.
Throw your junk items at enemies
Part of looting is eventually realizing that you have a lot of junk in your inventory. While there might be some temptation to drop stuff you don’t actually need, keep in mind that you can use Throw in fights to just fling the garbage you’ve picked up at an enemy to do damage. High-strength characters like Lae’zel and Karlach will get the most value out of this, as they can throw heavier things farther, so if you’re looking for someone to hold onto all the trash you’ve found on your journey, prioritize them. But spread it around, too. You wouldn’t want anyone to become encumbered and lose movement speed.
Fortnite, Epic Games’ crossover meme of a video game, is once again becoming the stage for some historical education, as a group of developers has used Epic’s Unreal Editor For Fortnite program to create an in-game museum dedicated to the Holocaust.
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As absurd as that might sound in premise, Fortnite did this in an official capacity for Martin Luther King Jr., and it was a well-intentioned if incredibly jarring tribute to a civil rights figure’s legacy. However, unlike that display, which was done as part of an official Epic Games partnership with the DuSable Museum of African American History and the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., this is from Luc Bernard, who directed The Light and the Darkness, a free historical game meant to educate players on the events of the Holocaust.
Bernard posted about the in-game display on Twitter, saying bringing something like this to Fortnite’s millions of players can bring museums and all their information to people, as a vast majority of people never visit these places in-person. According to a study, around 80 percent of people have never visited a Holocaust museum, so a digital alternative may at least reach some new people. In an interview with Euronews, Bernard said this was especially to reach Fortnite’s younger audience.
If you want to see the museum for yourself, it’s not live yet. But when it is, the code for the map is 4491-8501-3730.
All UEFN projects go through Epic, which has veto power over anything that comes through the system. So between the people making it and the big corporation approving it, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that this will be informative and respectful, even though Fortnite feels like a strange platform for this kind of thing. The game’s scale and reach makes it ideal for creators and historians to use it, but all the best intentions won’t make it any less ridiculous when you see Rick from Rick and Morty and Master Chief reading about one of the most heinous acts of human cruelty known to man. All that being said, kudos to the team, and I hope this reaches people and proves Fortnite can be more than just a meme.
Respawn and Electronic Arts’ popular single-player Star Wars sequel, Jedi: Survivor, is making the leap from current-gen to the older PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
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Launched in April, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the follow-up to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order. In this most recent Star Wars adventure from Titanfall devs Respawn, players again take on the role of Cal Kestis, a Jedi who survived the purge during the end of the Clone Wars as a young boy and who now hangs out with his ragtag found family of misfits as they try to free the galaxy from the Empire’s clutches. This very good follow-up originally skipped last-gen consoles in order to, in the words of the game’s director, offer up a “true new-gen experience.” But now, Cal Kestis is coming to a PS4 near you.
EA didn’t specify when these last-gen ports would be released and declined to offer any extra details to Kotaku.
The publisher clarified that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s current versions weren’t going to be left behind, and confirmed that “additional performance improvements” for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC still remained a “top priority” for Respawn. It also promised to share more about these improvements “as soon as the next update is ready.” This is good news, as the game still suffers from performance issues after previous updates helped, but didn’t quite fix, framerate drops and in-game stuttering.
For many, the news that EA is bringing Jedi: Survivor to PS4 and Xbox One will be surprising. While it makes sense from a financial standpoint—those older machines still have millions of dedicated players in 2023—it seems at odds with what Respawn said before the game’s launch.
Specifically, the game’s director Stig Asmussen explained the reason for skipping PS4 and Xbox One was so the team could deliver a “true new-gen experience in the Star Wars universe.” It seems Respawn is also willing to lower the resolution and framerate limits to accommodate the older hardware.
It’s also interesting that the game is coming to older, less powerful machines since Jedi: Survivor seemed to push the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S harder than most games. I’m curious how well the game will run on much older hardware, in particular the base Xbox One, which is rather long in the tooth. These consoles are almost a decade old, now.
In the words of Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat, opposites attract. Perhaps that kernel of wisdom can explain the recent announcement that Final Fantasy XIV—an epic, fantasy MMORPG—is crossing over with Fall Guys—a colorful, small-scale battle royale—in a future update.
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Final Fantasy XIV was a giant disaster when it first launched in 2010. However, following a complete shutdown of the original version in 2012, FFXIV was reworked into a better game known as Realm Reborn in August 2013, which was received much better by fans and critics. Since then, the game has received numerous updates and expansions, becoming one of the most popular MMOs in the world. And in the near future, the world ofFFXIV will includeFall Guys content, for some odd reason.
The odd news was announced in Las Vegas by FFXIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida—known online as Yoshi P—during the first day of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest 2023 on July 28. While the team didn’t release any videos or trailers of the Fall Guys content coming to the game, some screenshots were shared that show obstacle courses familiar to anyone who has played Epic’s popular game show-like battle royale.
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku
“These warriors of light are having a bit of a different time than usual,” joked Yoshida on stage during the keynote.
According to the producer and director, the new content will support up to 24 players at once and is currently in development. This new Fall Guys-inspired content won’t be added randomly to missions or in the open world, but will instead be added to the preexisting Golden Saucer, an in-game amusement park that contains mini-games for players to enjoy.
Yoshida further added that since it was given this opportunity the developer really tried its best to make the most of it. That’s evident in the screenshots, which contain obstacles and platforms that look very accurate to what you would see in Fall Guys. Even HUD elements from the battle royale seem to be included in FFXIV’s version.
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku
As for when you’ll be able to play this, Yoshida promised the new mini-games would be included as part of the 6.5 updates sometime in September.
But if you really can’t wait for that and you need some Fall Guys X Final Fantasy content in your life sooner than later, I’ve got some good news for your weirdly specific desire. On August 23, a Final Fantasy-themed battle pass will launch in Fall Guys and will run for six weeks. The update will include costumes based on iconic Final Fantasy characters and creatures, like Chocobos.
As promised, Blizzard held a livestream today, July 28, going over what Diablo IV players ought to expect from the game’s upcoming 1.1.1 patch. During the stream, the developers laid out their overall philosophy behind the expected changes, and got into some specifics about what to expect when it lands on August 8, 2023.
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The Diablo IV community hasn’t been particularly happy with recent changes to the wildly popular action RPG. Shortly before the game’s first season, Blizzard pushed a patch that made sweeping changes to classes and quality of life features that’s been largely seen as a net negative. Players felt that the unwelcome adjustments made the game grindier, among other things. Last week, Blizzard acknowledged that the changes weren’t great and promised to never release a patch of that nature ever again. While full notes for the upcoming patch are expected to arrive next week, August 2, today’s stream gave a good sense of what to expect, with some changes to player power and a few reversals of controversial changes. You can watch the whole stream here:
Blizzard
Sorcerer’s and Barbarians, patch 1.1.1 is for you
Early on in the stream, lead class designer Adam Z. Jackson said that the Sorcerer and Barbarian will see the most changes.
“We know that Sorcerers typically have a tough time when they start getting pushed into later Nightmare Dungeon tiers, so we’re going to be looking at ways to increase [late game survivability] specifically.”
Jackson also said that the team is pinpointing what they call “kiss curse mechanics,” which is when the player gains “a really cool power or effect and then we kind of take something or nerf some other part of you, usually for balance reasons to make sure that it’s not out of control.” One example of this is an expected change to the Serpentine Aspect:
“[The Serpentine Aspect] is the one where you can spawn an additional Hydra, but it reduces the duration of your Hydras. That’s no longer going to reduce the duration. It’s actually going to increase it.”
Jackson said that the Barbarian’s early game experience will also get a boost. One concrete example of this is an improvement to Fury generation. In a slide shown during the stream, Bash, Flay, Frenzy, and Lunging Strike all see their Fury increased.
Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku
Jackson said the Barbarian ought to expect other improvements to the late game experience with alterations to Unique items that’ll swap existing effects for more useful ones.
Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku
While the other classes can expect some updates, they won’t be as comprehensive as Sorcerer and Barbarian. Still, increases to Spirit gains for the Druid ought to be welcome.
Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku
Blizzard aims to start expanding build options for Diablo IV in future updates
During today’s stream, Blizzard expanded a bit on how it wants to see build options change for Diabo IV. Jackson spoke to this directly:
“Vulnerable and Crit are really, really strong right now. A lot of the meta is about [making] an enemy vulnerable, and then you do bonus damage to them, and then you stack as much Crit Strike damage chance and Crit damage as you can, and then you blow them up. [Diablo IV] actually was foundationally made with other types of builds that aren’t only those in mind. We have “Damage Over Time” […] we also have “Overpower” as a mechanic in our game. [We want those damage types] to have parity with Vulnerable and Crit Damage.”
Jackson said that the long term goals with Diablo IV are to ensure that “if you’re an Overpower build, or a Crit build, or a Damage Over Time build, you’ll be relatively equal in power to all the different types of ways to play. This will be in addition to improving how skills and effects scale as players increase in level, potentially opening the door to late game builds that make use of typically discarded abilities. What might that look like? Jackson gave a couple of examples:
“We have a lot of legendary powers and effects that spawn ‘a new thing.’ An example of this is the [Barbarian’s legendary power that] spawns earthquakes or dust devils. Another one is the Necromancer [can] leave shadow trails on the ground that deal damage. These [effects] deal what we call ‘flat damage’ which is [where] we give it a damage number and then that’s how much it does. And that damage number scales with player level. But we find is that a lot of these [effects] are really good in the early and mid game […] but then when you get to the really late game, they kind of fall of really hard. And what we want to do is find ways to add scaling so that the player can opt into making a build out of these things. So if I want to be an ‘Earthquake Barbarian’ or a ‘Dust Devil Barbarian’ I can actually do that.”
Another key way the team is looking to expand build options is to mitigate how many skills require specific scenarios to function. One such is the Sorcerer’s chain lightning, which currently sees bonus damage when the lightning bounces off of you. 1.1.1 will change things so that you gain bonus damage when Enhanced Chain Lightning bounces off of anything.
Teleporting out of dungeons will take 3 seconds again and treasure goblins are getting better
In a complete reversal, the controversial change from dungeon teleportation from three to five seconds is getting reversed. Game Designer Joe Shelly said that the original intention of the change was to mitigate players teleporting themselves out of tough encounters and boss fights. Given the community’s reaction over this change, however, teleports are back to three seconds.
And while associate game director Joe Pieopiora discussed how the Treasure Goblin’s Legendary drop rate was actually 50 percent, player frustration over infrequent encounters with them led to a perception that it was far lower. Starting at level 15, Treasure Goblins are now guaranteed to drop a Legendary.
Other quality of life updates
As discussed during last week’s stream, monster density for Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides are going up. During the stream, the devs showed off a slide of what the increased monster presence will look like.
And while bosses will see their health boosted, at level 35 and up you’ll be guaranteed a Legendary item drop. Legion events will also see a guaranteed Legendary drop.
On the technical side, patch 1.1.1 is also expected to address a specific VRAM issue for PC players, so the game should be more stable.
Patch 1.1.1 is expected to arrive on August 8, with final patch notes coming on August 2.
