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Each year, the Game Informer staff reviews a ton of games, but only a select few earn the highest scores. While you can find our full list of reviews here, we know that some people are just looking for the best of the best, so we've gathered our top-scoring reviews of 2024 right here. Whether you're talking hotly anticipated blockbusters like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth or surprise hits like Helldivers 2 and Balatro, we have you covered with all the must-play games we've reviewed in 2024.
Be sure to bookmark this page and check back frequently, as we'll continue updating this page as more titles earn review scores on the top end of our review scale!
As the showcase piece for the Meta Quest 3, Asgard's Wrath 2 stands out in a sea of virtual reality titles available on the market today, offering an experience rarely seen in the medium. Read review
Platforms: Quest 3, Quest 2 Release Date:
December 15, 2023
Helldivers 2 swaps the top-down perspective for third-person while maintaining the frenetic, ballistic loop of crash-landing on hostile planets, completing difficult missions, and extracting against all odds. Read review
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC Release Date:
February 8, 2024
Even with some outdated and repetitive elements inherited through the 18-year-old structure of the original, Persona 3 Reload is one of the best entries in one of the most acclaimed modern role-playing franchises in video games. Read review
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC Release Date:
February 2, 2024
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy succeeds with everything it sets out to do, bringing three great games to modern consoles in their most approachable forms to date. Read review
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC Release Date:
January 25, 2024
Stellar Blade is out this week and our review, which you can read right here, is positive. We liked the game and were impressed by the depth of its action and world-building. Ahead of its release, but after spending some time with the game, we had a chance to reconnect with Shift Up CEO and Stellar Blade director Hyung-Tae Kim after speaking with him earlier this year. This time we spoke to him (through a translator) about inspirations for the game beyond Nier Automata (like the Bible and The Matrix), the approach to costumes and how they fit in the lore, and why having no minimaps in the game was a purposeful decision.
Game Informer: There are multiple endings?
Hyung-Tae Kim: There are multiple endings and actually, if you complete certain quests, there is a post-credits clip, as well.
Is there an ending you prefer?
This all depends on what choices and decisions the player makes throughout the game. There is no particular ending that I prefer. But then there is this hidden stage so I hope that players discover this and play that. If you want, I guess, a little happier ending then you will have to discover that post-credits clip.
There's no gameplay reward for unlocking costumes, but they are an important incentive for the player. Why are the costumes so important?
I do definitely believe that it is very charming for an iconic character to have this one iconic costume. But my strength is in character concept design. There was so much that I wanted to show to the world and to be able to convey that to the players. I decided that it would be a good idea to include different costumes, that was a good way to show what I wanted to show. And I also wanted the players to be able to go on a journey with the character in a style that they prefer. That's why.
What is the process of choosing and creating a costume?
It's not one method that is decided when creating the costumes. For example, the body suit – I designed it myself and then the 3D modeler; when they are done with the modeling of the costume, I will come back to it and then add more details and texture and typography and finish it for the game. Or for other costumes, we buy the actual clothes in real life, and then scan them, take the scan data, modify it so it looks more futuristic, and then complete it that way. So, it's very different. This way, you get to meet very diverse costumes in the game.
And on top of that, sometimes, when you play the game, you will see some costumes that look like swimming suits. And for those costumes, it's very important to depict the skin texture like how it changes because of pressure and how it's pushed up, or how it folds, how it bends like the body and the flesh and the skin. That's very important when we're trying to detail. So, for this, we actually cast a real-life model and then had the model wear the costumes and scan the model to use the data.
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Is there a lore reason why Eve wears so many costumes? Is she interested in fashion?
There was some kind of lore behind Eve showing a lot of interest in the costumes that were left behind on the surface of Earth. We did have that concept, and it was part of her character, but then we later decided that this doesn't really have to be shown in the game. We don't have to really make it known in the game, so that got taken out, but that lore still exists.
Did you ever consider tying costumes to character upgrades?
When making games in the past, I took it very seriously that I didn't connect the stats of the character and the costumes. It was important to me not to make it like that because if that happens, then only certain costumes will be picked by the users because they have better stats than the other outfits. I didn't want that to happen. I just wanted everyone to enjoy all kinds of different costumes that are provided in the game, regardless of the stats.
But of course, if you don't wear anything at all, then it would be dangerous on the surface of a desolate Earth. So we did put a little bit of a disadvantage there if you're not wearing anything.
Does the team see Eve as a Bayonetta-type figure who embraces her sexuality and uses it as a weapon?
I don't think Eve is aware of those charms that she possesses, so she's not that kind of character. So, she won't be able to combine that central attractiveness that the Bayonetta character has and to be able to combine that with their battles. But then it's not fully decided how Eve will evolve in the future, and what kind of realization she'll be met with in the future, so I guess it would depend on the users and what they like and what kind of interest they show towards the game. Maybe Eve will go through some kind of… being more socialized and adjusted, and maybe she will get to have new realizations and become someone different.
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Cans are an important collectible. Why cans?
That may be a personal taste. I personally like different can designs. And also, I thought it'd be more realistic to use cans where the Earth is ruined. As one of the preserved goods, cans would make more sense than other elements.
Are they based on real Korean brands?
We tried to, but no can brands would partner with us to have a collaboration, so we had to create them all originally in-house. We also consulted someone who is an expert in designing can packaging. We hired that person to come up with designs that would make them look real. In the future, hopefully we'll be able to have a collaboration with a real-life brand. Especially Pepsi, which we are very interested in.
Was a minimap ever considered? I would really like one in Xion.
If you slide up on the touchpad, you have access to the map in Xion.
Oh, but I want a little map that’s always available on the bottom corner of the screen.
I wanted to show as little UI design on the screen as possible. That's why I didn't include the minimap on the screen. But then yes, it is pretty necessary in an open-world area. When it's a linear area, of course, there are other hidden paths, but if you use the map, then maybe it'll become too easy in this linear part of the game. That's why I wanted to avoid having the map there for the players to constantly use. But then yes, of course, in Xion, you will want to consult the map more because as things constantly change, you'll be given new quests constantly, so the map does become handy. I do actually recommend using the map there.
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In the movie The Matrix, there is the haven city of Zion. In Stellar Blade there is the haven city of Xion. In Stellar Blade there is a location called Matrix 11. The Matrix was co-directed by Lilly Wachowski. In Stellar Blade there is a character named Lily. Are these all coincidences, or is The Matrix a big inspiration for Stellar Blade?
The Matrix is, of course, one of the movies that I love, but then rather than any direct inspiration or references that we got from the movie, you should see the Bible as more of a source of those inspirations. But then that doesn't mean this whole story was based on the Bible, heavily. It is more like they share similar lores.
That makes sense because The Matrix looks to the Christian Bible, as well. And of course, Adam and Eve are both characters in in Stellar Blade. Is the Bible a primary source of inspiration?
In terms of materials that we got for the plot, yes, the Bible, and yes it does have to do with the themes of the plot as well, but then ultimately, at the end of the day, this is an action-adventure game so when the players play this game, they can just take this lightly and just enjoy the game.
When people think, “Oh, this was based on the Bible,” then they tend to take it more seriously and expect maybe a heavier, more serious story there. And of course, we're very thankful for that interpretation, but what we wanted to focus on was more the gameplay itself.
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Why is there a setting to change the length of Eve’s ponytail?
I actually personally like the long ponytail that Eve has because it adds more to the movement and the action and I see that as an important element, but then I also realized that this wouldn't be for everyone. Some people might find it annoying, or maybe it obstructs a certain outfit or the screen when moving around, and I thought that could be interrupting or disturbing to some people, so I also wanted to include the shorter ponytail. But then after that, there have been demands about middle-length ponytails or the option to be able to control the length of the ponytail and so on.
Stellar Blade is out this year. There's another big game from a South Korean developer, The First Descendent coming out later this year. Does Shift Up feel it is a big year for Korean representation in video games?
We do have a hope that, starting with Stellar Blade this year, it will be an outbreak year for South Korean developers. In the past, up until recently, actually, Korean games have been rather isolated from the world because the gaming market in Korea is mostly mobile-centric. For console games, it was hard for them to gain any attention and there wasn't that much of a point where other global users were getting to access these games. There haven't been that many overlapping elements there.
But then, starting with Stellar Blade, hopefully, many global users will get to discover more Korean games and actually realize, “Oh, these are actually really good games!” And I'm starting with that; hopefully, other Korean developers will be more well-known. This year will be that year. And in that way, we even have a certain sense of duty there.
Are you hoping to make a Stellar Blade sequel next, or does Shift Up want to do something different next?
Right now, we’re focusing more on Stellar Blade – the game itself. We're focusing more on what the users will like, what they'll want to see more of, and what kind of additional content we'll be coming up. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the game that's coming out soon.
Stellar Blade is heading into full release, and you can dive into the action-heavy sci-fi adventure for yourself. You can read our full review for more details about how it turned out, or read our interview with the game's creative director to learn more about how the game came together.
Developer Shift Up does a good job of gradually introducing new core systems as you move through the lengthy adventure, but as we played ahead of public launch, our team discovered several things the game doesn’t tell you that can lead to a more enjoyable journey.
Turn On Auto Loot
While the developer made many smart decisions in creating Stellar Blade, we’re a little confused why the default choice for gathering dropped loot requires pressing and holding one of the shoulder buttons.
As soon as you start the game, pause and go to Settings > Gameplay and adjust the Auto Loot option to “On,” which is not the default. Eve will begin to pick up items and currency automatically without the need for your input – as long as you get close enough to the items on the ground, they’ll go into your inventory.
Set Hair Length
In that same menu we just pointed you toward (Settings > Gameplay) you’ll find another option to adjust Ponytail Length.
This is primarily a cosmetic choice for how you like the main character to look, but we mention it here for functional reasons. Depending on your playstyle, extraneous visual “noise” onscreen can be distracting, especially in a tense encounter.
Eve’s extremely long ponytail shows off some cool physics, but if it’s preventing you from having a clear view of enemy actions, consider changing the ponytail length to “Short”
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Ambush When You Can
Even standard wandering Naytiba enemies in Stellar Blade can lead to some tough and even game-ending battles. Take every advantage you can, including prioritizing an early unlock of the Ambush ability (findable in the Attack section of the Skill Tree).
Ambush lets you backstab enemies if you can get close enough before they turn around and see you. It’s generally an instakill, so it’s a good choice for eliminating the most powerful foe in a group before facing off against the less dangerous ones.
Rush To Open
Similar to the Ambush option above, it’s smart to unlock and use the Rush skill early on and use it to open fights where Ambush isn’t an option. This skill lets you close with an enemy instantly, and you can get some hits in before they have a chance to fight back.
It’s also an essential skill in more protracted combats, including bosses. After dodging or running out of the way of a dangerous attack, Rush lets you get back into the fray right away.
Guard First, Then Strike Back
More than many action games, guarding is an essential skill that you should practice from the very start. Excessive offensive play without guarding is a recipe for failure.
Your guard/shield will diminish with hits taken, but it’s an excellent way to confront the early moments of a fight, when you’re still feeling out an enemy. And while perfect parries and dodges are great, you may need a few strikes to recognize an enemy’s attack patterns, and guarding is the best way to weather those moments, with the exception of unblockable attacks.
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Improve Perfect Dodge And Parry
There’s no more surefire way to succeed in Stellar Blade than getting good at Perfect Dodge and Perfect Parry. It’s absolutely core to the combat system, and success with those skills opens up additional options and abilities.
Of course, the most important thing you can do here is observe and improve your timing in nailing these abilities. Much of that is about memorizing the different colored flashes and knowing which color corresponds to the need to dodge or parry. The training modules inside the Skills menu can help a lot with that practice. To find those, go to the Skill Tree Survival section, and tap Square while hovering over the Perfect Dodge or Perfect Parry ability. Seriously, there are no better skills to master.
But you can also hedge your bets. There are additional abilities in the skill tree and equipment in the game that make it easier to nail those tight windows for perfect dodges and parries. If you’re having trouble consistently hitting that timing, these are excellent skills and equipment items to focus on.
Scan, scan, scan
A tap of the central touchpad on your DualSense controller will send out a pulse scan of your surrounding area. It’s an easy thing to forget about as you run around slicing through enemies.
That would be a mistake. Making a point to scan frequently is a smart move. It reveals enemy locations that may be hiding. And it also shows critical interactable items and individuals, including dead bodies that can sometimes hold precious upgrades, like max health improvements.
It costs nothing to tap that scan, so get in the habit of doing it in each new area you arrive in.
Keep up with your sidequests
If you plan to try and mainline the golden path of Stellar Blade, feel free to ignore this tip. But for the rest of the players, you may be wondering what to prioritize in your extracurricular activities.
Sidequests provided by actual individuals in the game world are almost always a good bet. They provide more and better experience and rewards than just roaming around taking out monsters. Those character-provided sidequests also tend to be more interesting than the less personal assignments you can pick up from bulletin boards.
And, while we don’t want to spoil anything, it’s safe to say that the latter hours of the game turn out differently depending on certain sidequests you might have chosen to complete. Talking with and completing those character-connected side quests is a great place to put your time if you want to expand your time in the world of Stellar Blade.
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Pick up the phone!
It goes without saying that you should enter and use supply camps when you find them in order to rest and get your health and supplies back. But early on, you might not realize that you should also be trying to activate all the payphone locations that you encounter.
Phones activate a new fast travel point; you want as many of those as possible.
Even if you don’t initially plan to do a lot of fast traveling, later missions sometimes send you back to explore areas you’ve already visited, and having a more comprehensive selection of fast travel points gets you back to the action and the quest completions faster.
Unlock Beta and Burst Wisely
As you play through Stellar Blade, you’ll gradually unlock access to the Beta and Burst skills. Each skill tree adds new abilities that you can bring to bear in a fight by holding down L1 or R1 along with one of the face buttons. These are usually high-powered attacks; you should integrate them into your combat flow.
But even knowing that, it’s easy to cast too broad a net and weaken yourself by playing with too many different skills. That’s especially true in the midgame, while there’s still much to unlock.
In both the Beta and Burst skill trees, consider unlocking and completing the upgrades for one (or maybe two) of these skills before moving on to the others. Remember, both Beta and Burst skills pull from their own respective meters, so if you use one of the abilities, it will deplete that meter, preventing you from doing another deployment. It’s rare that you’ll be able to spam out multiple abilities that tap into the same meter. As such, it’s best to focus on individual skills that shore up weakpoints in your combat repertoire.
For instance, Shield Breaker is the bottom skill (L1+X) on the Beta Skill Tree, and as the name implies, it does a great job of breaking enemy shields. If you’re struggling with the early phases of boss fights when your foe often still has a high shield, this is a great choice. And rather than diversifying into other skills, we recommend unlocking the upgrades to Shieldbreaker before focusing on other skills. Alternately, Triplet (L1+Square) is a solid and consistent damage dealer and a great choice if you’re just looking to bring down standard enemies quickly.
Take the time to look through the full suite of Beta and Burst skills, and consider which individual abilities would be the biggest help to your playstyle, then focus on those.
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Follow the Green Dot
As you get started in Stellar Blade, you may encounter many individuals you feel you need to talk to. If that’s your thing, go for it. But if you’d like to focus on the individuals that actually have something to offer, look for the green dot next to an individual; these are actual quest-givers or other meaningful conversations.
Take the Hint
Occasionally, you’re going to encounter panels that demand that you enter a code sequence of symbols. Generally speaking, you need to find a different location that provides that code before you can input it.
Don’t bother trying to jot down the symbols. Instead, when you return to the appropriate unlockable panel, tap the “Hint” button to see the code. It’s not cheating. It’s simply showing you the code you already found elsewhere in the game, which matches this particular panel. If the “Hint” option is grayed out, you just don’t have the code yet.
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Experiment With Story Mode
We always advise that the best difficulty setting is the one that leads to the most fun for you as a player.
With that said, Stellar Blade features a tight and rewarding combat system – if you can enjoy the challenge of some tough combat, the default Normal Difficulty is the way to go. It has some hard fights, but with patience, you’ll succeed.
With that said, there’s nothing to say you can’t experiment with Story Mode, and doing so can help you prepare for winning a hard fight in Normal (or the eventual Hard mode, which unlocks after you beat the game).
In Story Mode, combat prompts pop up and time slows down in critical moments of battle, letting you learn exactly what buttons to press when that vicious boss descends on you.
If you’re committed to beating the boss on Normal, but you’re having a hard time, consider bumping the difficulty down to Story Mode to learn the ropes of the fight. Then, before you defeat the boss, switch back to Normal mode, which will reset you to your most recent save point. You can then go into the fight armed with a clear understanding of what buttons to press to react to each attack – but you’ll still have to nail the timing to win.
Good luck in your adventures with Eve across the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Stellar Blade!
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With the announcement of Fallout 76, fans are scrambling for clues that will shed light on the new game. A few concrete details come from the pre-existing information on Vault 76. Most vaults in Fallout were built for a specific purpose, and according to references in Fallout 3, Vault 76 supposedly held 500 people for exactly 20 years before opening and repopulating the surface.
Repopulation is important and all, but is this the most interesting route for a new Fallout? Playing a wastelander on a noble quest is something we’ve already done several times, but a game built around the events of a specific vault is an intriguing proposition. We delve into canon Fallout lore to reveal a bounty of bizarre and disturbing scenarios, any of which could make for an excellent spinoff.
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Vault 12
Vault-Tec, the company who built the shelters spread across America, is a notoriously unethical corporation in the Fallout universe. In collaboration with the U.S. Government, Vault-Tec built most of its vaults around “social experiments,” testing the effects of isolation and other variables in the tightly controlled underground communities.
Vault 12 is one of the most twisted of these experiments. Foregoing the very purpose of a fallout shelter, Vault-Tec intentionally left the door unsealed. Awash in deadly radiation, the survivors of Vault 12 were permanently transformed by Vault-Tec’s negligence.
Ghouls are familiar to anyone who’s played a Fallout game. Zombie-like in appearance, their rotting flesh is a product of exposure to massive amounts of radiation. Despite this, they’re often surprisingly empathetic characters, with thoughtful dialogue and a depth of experience taken from their horrifying life experiences.
One of the biggest hubs of ghouls is Necropolis, a city players may run across in the original Fallout. The massive population stems from, you guessed it, the residents of Vault 12.
Here’s the pitch: Survival horror on a community scale. Players try to maintain life as a resident in the vault while people get sick and decay. You decide who gets Rad-X and who has to bear the brunt of the radiation then manage the dividing populations as people turn to ghouls and lose sympathy for their fellow residents. Imagine a combination of some of the haunted vaults in Fallout 3 and the oppressive wartime decisions of This War of Mine and you’ve got Fallout: Vault 12.
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This, for a whole game.
Vault 29
One criticism of Bethesda’s Fallout games was the removal of the ability to kill children. Although sadistic, the complaint had two main pillars. Firstly, Fallout 1 and 2 had the ability; it benefited the player in no way and made virtually every NPC in the game hostile, but it was technically possible. Secondly, kids in the Fallout games have been historically ... very annoying.
Enter Vault 29, population: children. Another perversion of an experiment by Vault-Tec, no one over the age of 15 was allowed into the shelter. The only confirmed survivor, a mutant named Harold, emerged from the vault in 2090 and would go on to become one of the wasteland’s most influential residents.
Here’s the pitch: A dark, violent version of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Harold entered the vault at age five and experiences his entire adolescence in the underground tunnels, so players would experience his life one year at a time. The early years would be chaos, both from the initial panic of being without adults, but also because we’d experience them as a kindergartner.
As time wears on, we’d mature and start to learn about the political structure of the vault. I’m picturing Battle School from Ender’s Game with multiple factions with different leaders and styles, all led by charismatic children. Like Ender’s Game, this game would still have truly bleak themes and conflict without resorting to kids toting firearms. As Harold, we’d come to understand the dynamic of the different factions, and fight to become a part of the most influential groups.
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This, but ya know. Radioactive.
Vault 43
Twenty Men. Ten Women. One Panther. That’s the idea for Vault 43, a shelter that really calls into question Vault-Tec’s understanding of the word “experiment.” Nothing is known about the outcome of this vault, and that might be for the best.
Here’s the pitch: Asymmetrical multiplayer. The men and women work together to try and build a society that’s democratic, charitable, and most importantly, panther-proof. Meanwhile, the panther is slinking in and out of the shadows, testing the defenses and eating anyone who strays too far from the beaten path.
The game’s pace could play out similarly to Evolve. In the early rounds, the panther is weak but the residents don’t have access to many resources. As time goes on, the men and women can fortify doors and board up air vents, but they won’t be able to stop the panther from accessing more radioactivity than Dr. Manhattan. Sure, the humans have numbers on their side, but how many people is enough to stop a radioactive, mutant panther?
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This, but it breaks. A lot.
Vault 53
Intended to test the inhabitants’ resilience to everyday inconveniences, appliances in Vault 53 were designed to break every few months. With 1000 residents, this meant a near-constant stream of necessary repairs to maintain basic living conditions. One can only imagine the psychological toll of living inside deliberately faulty infrastructure, especially when that infrastructure is absolutely necessary to keep out the devastation on the surface.
Here’s the pitch: A smaller and more intimate take on Fallout, styled after indie titles like Papers, Please. Each day would bring new items to repair and new pressures to consider. For instance, the vault’s quartermaster needs his air circulator fixed. You have the skills to do this, but your family also needs more nutrients than daily rations allow. Do you repair the unit and hope that your good faith sways him, or refuse to give his unit back until he delivers the needed food?
Repairs would gradually get more complex, and the needs in the vault would grow more dire. As more systems in the shelter failed, there’d be no way to satisfy everyone. Vault 53 demands you make sacrifices; where those sacrifices come from is up to you.
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Vault 69
Vault 69 begs the question: was anyone at Vault-Tec ever a scientist?
The vault had the standard thousand residents, but only one of those residents was a man. Less the product of principled hypotheses and more that of a giggling middle schooler, Vault 69 has virtually no available information.
Here’s the pitch: Uhh, no comment on this one
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This, but not a dog. A puppet.
Vault 77
Although we don’t have the name of the sole resident of Vault 77, we do have a significant amount of information on his circumstances. Locked into the shelter alone, it took more than a year for him to open the crate marked “Government Issue: Puppet Ration.” Once he did, he swiftly descended into a delusional and codependent relationship with the inanimate objects.
After developing an intimate bond with one in particular (a puppet sporting a Vault-Tec jumpsuit similar to his own), the man eventually left the vault. Accompanied by the puppet and a tamed giant ant named “Mr. Pinch,” his expedition into the wasteland was an unwilling miasma of violence and death, led by the whims of his puppet.
Here’s the pitch: Styled after A Way Out, this linear adventure would be a mandatory co-op experience. I’ll get this out of the way now; yes, the player assigned to the puppet would have to spend the first hour or so in a box. It’s important to the characters’ motivations. Once the two players are united however, it would largely be the puppet’s show.
The puppet could tell the human character where to walk, which quests to take, who to kill. Although the human may have locomotion, the puppet ironically holds all the power.
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Fallout is a series that embraces both the devastation and the absurdity of post-apocalyptic life. It’d be great to see Bethesda to keep experimenting with the style of games in its unique universe. Just, for the love of god, stay away from Vault 69.
Head here to read our review of the first season of the Fallout TV show. And here are the lessons someone should (and shouldn't) take from Fallout. For a more serious take, check out our exhaustive history on the making of Fallout 4.
When Star Wars: Episode IV– A New Hope– then simply known as Star Wars – hit theaters in 1977, it changed cinema. The grand scale, eye-popping visuals, and relatable cast of characters made it an instant classic and established the IP as one of the biggest of its time. However, it was its sequel, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, that demonstrated that not only was creator George Lucas’ magnum opus more than a one-off fluke, but he had established a universe ripe for expansion. Read more...
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Star Wars? Star Wars.
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This month, Hades II graces Game Informer's cover. After playing several hours of the Early Access build (which is publicaly available as of today), we traveled to Supergiant Games' studio in San Francisco to interview several of the core team members – creative director Greg Kasavin, studio director Amir Rao, art director Jen Zee, composer Darren Korb, and voice actor Logan Cunningham – to get the full story of the game's creation. The cover story reveals why Supergiant decided to create its first sequel, how it chose a new protagonist in Zagreus' sister, Melinoë, along with her mythological origins, and how the team is changing its approach to early access and the content it has planned for the future. It also features an in-depth breakdown of Hades II's new features and our impressions of the game so far.
We want our cover story on Hades II to be a celebration of the game and a peek behind the curtain at Supergiant, with the hope that anyone who reads it will have a more exciting and informed experience when they play the much-anticipated sequel. If you're a fan of the original game or this new installment, we suspect you'll read about what we learned and discover even more about what makes the franchise so special.
The stunning cover art is an original piece by Supergiant's famed artist, Jen Zee. It depicts Melinoë, princess of the Underworld, as her mentor, Hecate, gazes at the moonlit horizon.
Other features appearing in issue 366 include an interview feature with Digital Eclipse's Chris Kohler about how the studio conceived its Gold Master Series consisting of The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Nolan Good discusses the history and continuing legacy of the long-running MMO, Final Fantasy XI. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, editor-in-chief Matt Miller visited Wizards of the Coast to preview its upcoming set of new rule books aimed at evolving the tabletop game. Wesley LeBlanc flew across the globe to Seoul, South Korea, to get an in-depth look at Nexon's upcoming free-to-play looter shooter, The First Descendant. For soon-to-be graduating students, cash in that success with your parents using our annual graduation gift guide. In addition, we have previews for titles including Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, The Rogue: Prince of Persia, Monaco 2, and Still Wakes the Deep.
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Hades II has launched into Steam Early access, and it’s also Game Informer’s next cover story (which launches on May 14). Whether you’re a returning fan or a newcomer, it may take a few runs to get your bearings as Hades II sports new progression systems, resources, and new layers to existing mechanics. It can be a lot to dig into, given the game more or less tosses you into the deep end without context for how things work, at least initially. Instead of spending several runs figuring things out, here’s a short, spoiler-free primer explaining some core new features to get you going on the right foot.
What Are Ashes?
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Ashes are a currency used for unlocking Arcana cards. They serve a similar purpose as Darkness from the first game. They often appear as a reward for completing a room, but you can also purchase more from the Wretched Broker’s shop.
What Are Arcana Cards, Grasp, And Psyche?
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These are unlockable character perks found at the Altar of Ashes, located in The Crossroads. Fans can draw a similarity to the Mirror of Night from Hades 1. Examples of Arcana card effects include gaining two health points every time you exit a location or starting each run with 200 gold. Arcana cards require spending a certain amount of Ashes to obtain (and some require an additional resource). Cards consume portions of your Grasp.
Grasp of the Arcana (or just Grasp for short) is a meter dictating how many Arcana cards a player can have active at once. Every Arcana card consumes a certain number of Grasp bars. If the Grasp meter has 10 bars, then equipping cards that consume 5, 3, and 2 bars would max it out. If you’re a Transistor fan, this system is similar to how managing Functions worked in that game.
By spending a large amount of Psyche, another currency obtained by completing rooms, you can increase the limit of your Grasp. For example, instead of having only 10 bars, it could have 12 or 16. This way, you can have more cards active or use more powerful cards that consume a larger portion of Grasp.
What Are The Purple Bones?
This is another resource/currency called Ancient Bones. It’s a reward for completing encounters and is primarily used to purchase resources from the Wretched Broker’s shop.
How Do I Mine Ore, Fish, And Compel Shades?
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During runs, you’ll come across metal ores prompting you to mine. In the first area, Erebus, you’ll find piles of silver crescent moons, for example. Additionally, certain shades prompt you to “compel” them, and you’ll also encounter fishing holes.
These situations require one of Hades II’s Gathering Tools. Mining ore requires a pickaxe, fishing holes need a respective rod, and compelling shades require a magical tablet. You gain Gathering Tools at the Cauldron, but you’ll still need to trade specific resources to unlock them fully.
How Does The Cauldron Work?
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The Crossroads features a giant cauldron situated in front of Hecate. This is where you’ll bring resources/currencies gathered during runs to perform “incantations,” which are permanent upgrades for The Crossroads and general quality-of-life perks.
For example, one incantation summons the Wretched Broker, allowing him to permanently set up shop in the Crossroads. Another unlocks the aforementioned Gathering Tools. One incantation even allows you to view the recipes for other incantations in the menu (before unlocking this, you can only view these recipes at the cauldron itself). One particular incantation is called Fated Intervention; without spoiling, prioritize unlocking this one. It likely won’t have an immediate effect, so be patient.
One incantation that becomes available early (that you should unlock as soon as it does) is called Divination of the Elements. It allows Melinoe to perceive the elemental affinities of Olympian boons.
What Are Elemental Affinities?
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Olympian boons now have one of four elemental properties tied to them: fire, water, air, and earth. After unlocking Divination of the Elements, you’ll see small icons indicating each element on every boon you encounter. Demeter’s frost-based boons are generally (but not always) water types, while Hestia’s tend to be fire.
The elemental affinity matters because there are now boons that can only be used if you possess enough boons of a certain elemental type. One may require you to have three wind-based boons in exchange for a powerful ability, for example. This adds another layer of strategy to selecting boons, as you’ll be torn between chasing a long-term investment or short-term power gain.
Hades II is available now in Early Access on Steam and in the Epic Games Store. Be sure to check out our cover story hub below for exclusive Hades II stories and videos throughout the month.
With the sun out and the temperature rising, it must be summer. That means it's time to stay cool indoors and watch a litany of gaming showcases airing throughout the season. Highlighted by Summer Game Fest, we've created a schedule listing every notable showcase occurring over the coming months, the date and times they air, and a summary of what they entail. Be sure to bookmark this page, as it will be updated regularly as new events are announced and airdates are confirmed.
What It Is: Hosted by popular streamer Asmongold, the event will provide a stage for over 40 games and includes sitdown interviews with their creators.
What Is It: Each year, the Guerilla Collective provides a platform for indie and AA games. The event also serves as an umbrella for other showcases taking place over the week.
What It Is: Host Laura Kate Dale confirmed late fall that the Access-Ability Summer Showcase will make a return in June. The event highlights accessbility-focused titles and features created by disabled developers.
What It Is: The flagship gaming showcase of the summer returns to the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles. Organizer and host Geoff Keighley will take the stage to show off what’s likely to be a litany of world premieres and game updates.
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Day of the Devs
Start Time: Immediately following Summer Game Fest
What It Is: iam8bit and Double Fine's annual showcase offers an entertaining bastion for a litany of the most creative, eye-catching, and, perhaps, bizarre upcoming titles in the industry.
What It Is: The coziest presentation of the year highlights over 70 artistic, emotionally resonant titles with one thing in common: they'll give you all the feels.
What It Is: The seasonal event will feature 40 upcoming games in what is being billed as "the most ambitious showcase yet". We don't know what else to expect besides updates on "blockbuster games" and deep dives on in-development titles.
What It Is: Typically Xbox's biggest showcase of the year, it's probably safe to expect several hopefully big announcements coming from the publisher's many first-party studios. Immediately following the Showcase is a not-so-mysterious presentation centered on probably, maybe, almost certainly, the next Call of Duty game.
What It Is: It's the 10th anniversary of the PC Gaming Show, and its celebrating by rolling out over 50 games coming this year and beyond. The batch includes world premieres, exclusive announcements, and more.
What It Is: Ubisoft hasn't revealed what it has up it's sleeve, but it's tough not to imagine that Assassin's Creed Codename Red won't appear. Other known titles in its upcoming slate that are likely to appear include Star Wars Outlaws, The Rogue Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition, and maybe, if we're lucky, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake and/or Beyond Good & Evil 2.
What It Is: Nintendo has promised to hold a June Direct focused on games launching in the latter half of 2024. The company also confirmed that the presentation will not mention the Switch successor.
What It Is: The anime-themed indie showcase is a summer staple. If previous years are an indication, expect a Vtuber host, musical performances, special guests, and, of course, plenty of game trailers.
What Is It: This event is for virtual reality aficionados by virtual reality aficionados. Expect to see the latest and greatest VR and AR titles racing to headsets.
What Is It: So far, THQ Nordic has confirmed that Gothic 1 Remake and Titan Quest II will appear at its digital showcase. As for speculation, we know it's publishing the remake of Disney Epic Mickey launching this year and the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin. We're curious to see what else the publisher has to show.
It's once again just about time for a new Pokémon Trading Card Game expansion to hit store shelves. Continuing the Scarlet & Violet series is Twilight Masquerade, a set that focuses on the Teal Mask DLC of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet video games. Because of that, players can expect locations, characters, and Pokémon from Kitakami, the folklore-rich area from the first part of the Hidden Treasure of Area Zero storyline.
As such, new Pokémon like Bloodmoon Ursaluna, Fezandipiti, Okidogi, Munkidori, and Sinistcha are all featured in Twilight Masquerade. However, the most common new Pokémon I encountered during my opening of several booster packs sent over by The Pokémon Company was Ogerpon; I pulled several different versions of the grass-type Legendary Pokémon from The Teal Mask.
Pokémon Trading Card Game: Scarlet & Violet – Twilight Masquerade adds 226 cards, including 14 new Pokémon ex cards, more than 30 Trainer cards, and dozens of special-illustration cards. I'll always love Gen I the most, so I was happy to add new cards featuring favorites like Alakazam, Zapdos, Ninetales, and Eevee, but my absolute favorites are the special illustration versions of Applin, Sunflora, and Infernape. I also adore the Hearthflame Mask Ogerpon ex card that I was lucky enough to grab.
You can check out my favorite cards I pulled from booster packs below.
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Pokémon Trading Card Game: Scarlet & Violet – Twilight Masquerade is available on May 24. For more on the long-running Pokémon Trading Card Game, including other galleries from past expansions, head to our Pokémon TCG hub at the banner below!
Ever since it came to Switch at the tail end of last summer, Vampire Survivors has been my plane game. Sure, other run-based indies like Balatro and Dead Cells, all-encompassing triple-A titles like Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and retro compilations like Sonic Origins and TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, have shared that title, but I always know that when I need to pass time on a flight, no game does so as effectively as Vampire Survivors. Logically, I know that each run will last, at most, 30 minutes, but for some reason, it never feels that way. And because of that, I look down for what feels like 20 minutes, and when I look up, 2 hours have passed.
I travel a lot, so I play Vampire Survivors fairly regularly. Still, each time I turn on the game, developer Poncle has snuck more into it. New characters, new maps, new ways to customize your experience – I'm continually surprised and delighted by additional features and content the developer has added in the time since I fired up the game. Sure, Poncle puts out free updates on a regular basis, sometimes even as surprises, as was the case last week, but these paid pieces of DLC – each of which cost $2.50 or less – are the tentpole content releases. The latest, Operation Guns, crosses over with Konami's legendary Contra IP in both expected and unexpected ways to deliver the same Vampire Survivors fun we've known with a distinct Contra flavor.
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Operation Guns adds a significant amount of Contra content to Vampire Survivors. On top of 11 new characters, 11 base weapons, and 11 weapon evolutions, Operation Guns brings an enormous Contra-themed map called Neo Galuga, which progresses almost in lockstep with how the original Contra (and its recent remake, Operation Galuga) advances. You start out blasting, slashing, zapping, whipping, and otherwise annihilating humans and robots, but as you go further into the map, more sinister threats show that this isn't just some standard Earth-based war. Alien eggs, structures, and enemies slowly join the fray, as do an increased number of robotic adversaries. Just like what happens in the original, the alien and cyborg presence eventually takes over the war, giving Poncle plenty of room to play with the Contra license.
Before I knew it, I went from blasting away foot soldiers to enemies on jetbikes to waves of flying Metal Aliens and snake cyborgs. I loved repeating the same process of leveling up my character and their weapons, but with myriad fun discoverables scattered throughout the Neo Galuga map. Along the way, I uncovered some fun Contra-themed power-ups – like homing missiles – that allowed me to further combat the alien horde.
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However, the biggest surprise came near the end of my first successful run on Neo Galuga, as a ticker appeared on the bottom of the screen, telling me that something big was happening in a specific corner of the map. I only had a few minutes to get there, and with denser waves of enemies impeding my path, I was worried I wouldn't get there in time. However, once I did, I was greeted by one of the coolest things I've seen Poncle do with Vampire Survivors. I won't spoil it beyond saying it's a unique encounter that pays homage to an iconic fight with one of the Contra series' recurring enemies.
Though I've only done a few runs, I'm steadily unlocking new characters and weapons. Most of the new content is clear about how to unlock the next character, which is helpful in unlocking additional weapons. You unlock Bill within the Neo Galuga map, then unlock Lance by evolving Bill's Long Gun, and so on. It's all in service of giving the player a clear route to experiencing all the content that Operation Guns has to offer with as minimal friction as possible. Add on top the Bonus Stage, and the Operation Guns DLC is well worth checking out for all fans of Vampire Survivors, regardless of your Contra fandom.
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The wildest part about all of this, as I always tout, is the sheer value of Vampire Survivors. Though the game is often on sale, it never really needs to be; even if you buy the game and all its DLC at full price, you're spending less than $15. It runs well on Switch, which is where I play it, but it's also verified for Steam Deck, hammering home that this is the ultimate plane game. Though Poncle continues to release free updates a year and a half after its initial Steam release, these major tentpole releases excite me for the future of Vampire Survivors.
Will the future hold more crossover content? We've already received collaborations with Among Us and Contra, but words could not describe how excited I'd be for crossovers with even more prominent properties like Final Fantasy or Resident Evil; imagine slashing your way through hordes of fiends in Zanarkand as Lightning before a boss battle against Sephiroth, or exploring Raccoon City as Chris Redfield, taking down low-level zombies before a Nemesis spawns on the map. The Operation Guns DLC even has my imagination running wild with some less obvious crossovers like Street Fighter; so many of those characters have such iconic moves. Starting off with Ryu throwing a Hadoken before evolving it all the way up to a Shinku Hadoken would be a natural progression that could be applied to several of the series' characters. And since Vampire Survivors includes music and remixes from the Contra series, that makes these crossover ideas even more enticing.
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This article isn't about speculation or creating a wishlist, though. But that’s what Vampire Survivors' latest DLC inspires. It shows that Poncle is more than capable of giving these IPs the care they deserve while staying true to the Vampire Survivors formula that made me fall in love with the game in the first place. Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns DLC is out now on all platforms aside from PlayStation (that version arrives later this summer when the main game comes to the platform) and costs just $2.50.
For more on why Vampire Survivors is well worth your time, check out our review of the base game right here.
Dungeons & Dragons has a big year ahead of it. The classic tabletop RPG is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and the most significant event of that celebration is undoubtedly the release of a revision for the game's core rules, including the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. Backwards-compatible with the entirety of the 5th edition of the game, the new books are nonetheless a big new step forward for the game, reflecting a decade of iteration and evolution as the game has exploded in popularity.
The books aren’t far off. Players and Dungeon Masters alike can watch for pre-orders starting on June 18; each book is set to be priced at $49.99. Each of the three new books comes in at a hefty 384 pages apiece.
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Characters from the classic D&D cartoon get a makeover in this internal art from a chapter opener in the new Player's Handbook. Artist Credit: Dmitry Burmak
We had the good fortune to visit Wizards of the Coast a few weeks ago to learn more from the artists and designers about what to expect in the revised game, and we have a ton of exclusive details about the revised D&D in this month’s Game Informer magazine. The magazine article includes extensive insight from Wizards of the Coast designers, including Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. Our conversations with the designers offer great depth into what to expect out of each of the three core books on the way. We hope you’ll support that kind of exclusive coverage of D&D with a subscription to GI for less than $2 an issue so you can check the article out for yourself.
In addition to all the fun new design insights discussed in our magazine article, we also wanted to show off some of the remarkable art coming as part of the latest books. We’re including that here, alongside details from the art team working to craft the game’s look.
We’re especially excited to reveal a close look at the cover art for the new Player’s Handbook.
As the first planned release of the three new core rulebooks, it’s also likely the one that’s most important to the broadest swath of D&D players; its appearance in each prior edition has helped define the tone of the game.
The new Player’s Handbook front cover embraces the game’s revitalized approach to pushing forward legendary characters from across the history of the game. We see the likes of Yolande the Elven queen, Strongheart the knight, Elkhorn the Dwarven warrior, the divine Mercion, and the rogueish Molliver, all charging together into an adventure. These are figures hearkening back to the earliest era of the game. Wrapped around them is a benevolent gold dragon – a nod to the “golden” 50th anniversary of the game and an enticing reminder that the dragons in the game’s title can be allies as frequently as enemies.
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A gold dragon teams up with a party of legendary heroes to confront a red dragon and its kobold minions in the full front cover art for the new Player's Handbook. Artist Credit: Tyler Jacobson
The new cover art comes from the experienced hand of freelance illustrator, Tyler Jacobson. “I’ve worked on DND since 2009. And I did the covers back in the fifth edition,” Jacobson says. “I did the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, as well as many of the other covers that came after that for [titles] like Storm King’s Thunder and Volo’s.”
The direction for the cover art is highly intentional, meant to reflect the content inside. “With the cover art, we wanted to represent each experience,” Jacobson says. “How do we make the Player's Handbook look like it's the players' experience? And how do we make the Dungeon Master’s Guide feel like the Dungeon Master’s experience?”
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The back cover of the Player's Handbook features an unknown party of adventurers flying into danger on the back of a bronze dragon. Artist Credit: Tyler Jacobson
A separate piece of art on the reverse side of the Player’s Handbook goes the other direction from the mythical heroes depicted on the front, depicting a party of unknown heroes, and nodding to players who will craft their own legends.
The new Player’s Handbook (and all the rulebooks moving forward into this new era of the game) features a red book spine, which, in my mind, subtly nods to some classic visual cues like the classic red boxed set from the 1980s. But whether that’s intentional or not, the red hue also easily sets the new books apart from any other recent rulebooks you have on your shelf.
Early book printings will bear a D&D 50th seal on the back – a recognition of the big five-decade anniversary.
As fans have come to expect, you can also look forward to alternate book covers available in your local game store – the new alternate Player’s Handbook depicts a gorgeous scene of elves and a sinuous gold dragon, all printed in a gold foil treatment.
Beyond the cover, there’s no shortage of art filling the books' pages, as evidenced by the extensive visuals we saw from the interior pages of the Player’s Handbook.
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Artist Néstor Ossandón Leal shows the process from sketch to completed art. Artist Credit: Néstor Ossandón Leal
“A lot of our chapter openers are famous heroes,” says studio art director Josh Herman. “Almost every chapter opening features a different hero, or group of heroes in a different setting. So, you've got Dragonlance, and other ones, like Ravenloft; you’ve got a whole suite of them. Whereas the Dungeon Master’s Guide is all about villains. The cover is all about the villains and the sort of threats that the DM gets to play up. And in that art, you get to see a lot of our famous locations and some of our famous villains in its chapter openers. So, it's sort of like the opposite side of the coin; we want to present all of the facets of the game in a way that hopefully people can understand.”
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The completed art that launches the Fighter class section in the Player's Handbook. Artist Credit: Néstor Ossandón Leal
I was especially struck by the mix of characters and settings on display in the revised books. Where many prior official books seemed to default to the familiar Forgotten Realms setting (chief home of the Baldur’s Gate video games), these new core books seem to embrace the multiversal nature of D&D, including the characters and locations of myriad worlds. “I think like 10 years after [5th edition’s launch], all of these settings have come out,” Herman says. “Like Spelljammer, Dragonlance, Planescape. That's probably why the differences are so much there; we want to show off all the different ways that players can play just like you can choose any type of character, and we want to create a broad gamut for you to pick from.”
The art in the new core books has a chief goal of helping to further an understanding of the game. Spells are often shown being cast. Art for character backgrounds shows a possible place your hero could have come from. It even extends to the visuals of creatures in the Monster Manual. “There's a lot of mindfulness about the mixture; to pick the monster design accurately to the stat block,” says art director Emi Tanji. “If it's a creature that does slashing damage or something like you want to make sure we see claws. And you want to make sure if the art has shows something that's like a stinger, but there's nothing in the stat block – that would be weird, right?”
As I had the chance to explore completed pages during my visit to Wizards of the Coast, I was impressed by the bounty of art that fleshes out the books and how the art is presented to act as a visual tool for organization. “We worked with the design team to ensure that every class starts with the left-hand page,” Herman says. “Whereas before in 2014, it was just kind of a running journal. Now what we wanted to do is every class would open with a full-page piece of art on the left-hand side with a similar set of lead data on the right hand, so that every time you get to a new class, you get sort of an immediate visual, which we tried to theme around almost like an iconic version of what that class is.”
The revised books also gave the art and design team at Wizards of the Coast a chance to return to some of its most iconic visuals and refine the approach, including the titular dragons of the classic five metallic and five chromatic species. “All the dragon stuff was really great,” Herman says “We went through all 10 of them. We have new designs for all of those and there will be a lot of that in the Monster Manual for sure. We are trying to update those designs to be something in which players could see that dragon's personality or what biome they live in, or where they fit in the cast of all of the dragons.”
As a longtime D&D player, I came away from perusing this new version of D&D with a lot of excitement. The art we’re sharing here publicly is just a sampling of what I had the opportunity to look over; there’s a cohesive visual language to the new books that is enticing. And I love the way the game seems to embrace the long history of heroes, villains, and iconic named monsters that have arisen over 50 years of play.
If the art on display here has you excited, I hope you don’t miss out on our in-depth tour of the design work expressed in the books themselves, as described in this month’s Game Informer magazine. Our eight-page article includes details on all three books, including new character options, building player bastions, new apex-tier monsters on the way, and the surprising importance and inclusions of what is arguably the oldest D&D campaign setting of them all – Greyhawk. In a magazine that is chiefly focused on video games, we figuratively rolled the dice on offering this level of depth on a tabletop game like D&D in one of our issues, thanks to its incredible influence on gaming, and its recent success and reach to newcomers. If that kind of coverage is something you like, we’d appreciate your support in checking out the magazine.
In the meantime, enjoy exploring the breadth of all this new Dungeons & Dragons art! Click through the gallery below for full-size images of all the art included in this article, plus additional first-look pieces on the way in the new books.
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During our trip to Supergiant Games for our Hades II cover story, we had a chance to speak with one of the studio's original seven employees and its principal voice actor, Logan Cunningham. From providing the voice of Rucks in Bastion to Red's titular Transistor to Hades himself, Cunningham has played a vital part of every Supergiant title. In this rare interview, we ask Logan how he entered the world of voice acting, how he joined Supergiant Games, and which characters are his favorites to play (and which he'd want to redo).
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Game Informer: When did you first discover that you were good at creating or imitating voices?
Logan Cunningham: I don't think there was ever a moment that I discovered that. I always did that. From when I was a kid, my brother and I, we would record stupid little... almost like our own little radio plays but based on Star Trek: The Next Generation, just with a cassette recorder. I don't know; maybe it started there. The first time I think I realized I had a voice that people consider to be nice was in elementary school because my English teachers would always ask me to read from whatever book we were studying at the time. But I never set out to be a voice actor. [I] certainly [had] no formal training. There's not really any formal training for voice acting that I think exists. Everybody falls backward into it, just like I did. From my understanding, from my experience with everyone, every voice actor that I meet, I ask them like, 'Oh, how did you start?' and it's always the same story. 'I did one, then I did another, a third one, and now 15 years later here I am'. And my case is a little different in that the way I got my first job was from knowing one of the people who started Supergiant Games and then also knowing [Supergiant composer] Darren Korb.
Did you have any go-to characters you liked to imitate? Or was there a character you concocted that became your primary voice?
I was pretty much weaned on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I think even at, like, six I had a pretty good Patrick Stewart. But not really. I didn't really focus on anybody in particular. If I encountered a voice that I liked, I would just sort of do it – not for anyone, just for me. Just on my own in the bathtub, which I still do.
The most sacred places to practice: the shower, the bathtub.
It's where you're at your most vulnerable.
Yes, quite literally. When you first made your big leap into doing voice acting, as you mentioned, coming on with Supergiant, what was that initial conversation like?
It was literally my friend Amir [Rao], who I knew had left his job at Electronic Arts with his friend Gavin Simon, and they moved from LA back to San Jose, which is where we're all from, Amir, me, and Darren, into his dad's house and they started a startup; which was a game developer, which I don't even think I knew that term at the time. All I knew was a friend of mine was making a video game. And they had gotten to the point where they wanted to try something with voice-over, and so now they needed an actor, and I was the actor that they happened to know personally. And they had no money, and so I was cheap. And I was roommates with Darren in New York at the time, who was already involved. He came on board maybe, like, December '09? And then I recorded the first lines of Bastion [in] February; yeah it was Presidents Day weekend 2010. Yes, it really did just start with me doing a friend of favor.
When you look back on your first big role as a voice actor with Bastion, how did you feel about that performance at the time? And how do you feel about it now that you've had a chance to reflect on it over a decade later?
I was just trying to get through it. I had no idea what I was doing. None of us did. Darren and I certainly, that was our first time working on a video game in any capacity, but I just approached it as an actor. I just tried to keep the character consistent and give it as much life as I could. I had a lot of help from Greg [Kasavin] writing an amazing character and amazing story. Once we were working on Transistor, the Transistor performance is pretty much just me, but just kind of at a whisper. And with Rucks in Bastion, the narrator, what made a good take during those sessions was if the voice was right. And then in Transistor, what made a good take was if the performance was right.
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Hades
To jump ahead to Hades II, what new characters do you provide the voice for in the game?
I'm not going to say. I'll let people guess and figure it out. Hades, I can confirm because he's in the trailer.
How did it feel when you first heard Supergiant was doing its first sequel? How did it feel to be returning to a world for the first time instead of preparing for a whole new one?
Really happy and I wasn't surprised at all. At all. Because we loved making that game so much. It was so clear, to me anyway, that we weren't done with it. There was so much still left to do and explore and characters to meet and stories to tell. So I was thrilled.
I was excited, too, especially because I really enjoyed your work as Hades in the first game. Can you talk about the process of preparing for that role, what that looked like, and what you felt you needed to bring to that role to bring that character to life?
Just imagining not the worst dad possible, but a very difficult one who's just a workaholic, is constantly busy and never has time for you, is really powerful, and has a really important job. And because of it, [he's] miserable most, if not all, the time but is also still kind of a person and has a past and regrets and all those things that make a character interesting. But yeah, coming up with the voice was a lot of fun because it is basically just Tywin Lannister and Tim Curry as the Lord of Darkness in Legend, if you've ever seen that movie. So yeah, getting to play around with that.
The Voice of Supergiant Games
Here are all of the characters Logan Cunningham has voiced in Supegiant's first four games.
Bastion - Rucks
Transistor - The Transistor
Pyre - The Voice, Bertrude, Dalbert, Lendel, Ignarius
Hades - Hades, Poseidon, Achilles, Charon, Asterius, The Storyteller
Of all the characters you've voiced in your games, do you have any ones that stand out as your favorite or most cherished characters? Do you feel particularly close to them the way some actors do about a role or character that they've played?
Favorite is probably a tie between Rucks and Hades. Rucks because he was the first and my introduction to Supergiant; my foot in the door, if you like. Hades, because he was so much fun to do. It's really fun to play someone who's just, like, a bastard. He's just like a s****y person. But what often comes to mind is the Transistor, actually. Like, if I have the opportunity to sort of do that one over, I might. Or I will at least heavily think about it. My kind of immediate reaction once I played the thing from start to finish was like, 'Okay.' I wasn't quite sure I was playing that guy. I felt I was maybe playing somebody else.
Now that you've been doing this for so long, and you mentioned before not being formally trained, what were some of the on-the-job training lessons you've learned over the years to improve as a voice actor?
All kinds of vocal warm-ups. Whereas at the start, it might take me a couple of hours to get ready. Now I am pretty much good to go in 20 minutes to half an hour. I know how much time I need to spend with the script if I'm lucky enough to have the time to see the lines beforehand because very often, it's just 'Hey, who are we doing today? Achilles? Great, all right'. And it's mostly in the recording session itself, I'll get a chance to read the line, whatever the next line is that we have to do, I'll get to read through it once or twice and then I just have to go for it. So, I guess I've gotten more efficient. But I think everyone at Supergiant, certainly all of us who worked on Bastion and we're all still there, we've all gotten more professionalized, I guess.
I always wonder about this with voice actors because I find myself doing this. You mentioned before it's fun to sort of do a voice when you're alone, you're around the house just doing a voice; do you ever find yourself doing that with any of the characters you've played in the past? Do you ever just go around the house and start talking as Hades randomly since you mentioned how much fun it is to occupy that role? Or do you sort of retire them once the project is over?
I don't really, but I will find myself doing, randomly at times, voices that inspired some of those characters. I still love just walking around my place just doing lines from Deadwood as Al Swearengen, which was a huge influence on Rucks. At the very least, it's a nice vocal exercise. But it's just kind of one of those silly, crazy things that actors do, and one of the reasons it's good that I live alone.
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Bastion
What advice would you give to someone who is interested in pursuing voice acting or to aspiring/young voice actors who want to improve?
Make sure you're an actor, that you know how to act. Because it's not just doing funny voices. I think it used to be that way years and years ago. It's not anymore. Keep working, keep improving. Take classes, take every opportunity you have. If you know people who are making things, work with them. If you know a decent amount of those people who are making stuff, one of them might make it and remember you and take you along. That is absolutely what happened to me.
How would you compare your experience working on Hades II to previous games? Has this felt the most challenging or the most exciting? How do you feel about what is being asked of you for this game compared to what you've done before?
Not necessarily more challenge. It's just different. What I will confirm, and I think this has been confirmed maybe in other places, there are a number of returning characters that I did in Hades in Hades II in addition to some new ones, which are the ones that I can't talk about. So there might be a character of mine from the first one where Melinoë, the protagonist, might mention, 'blah, blah, blah' to 'blah blah blah' and that'll inform the performance. There is a kind of melancholy that I've certainly felt with a lot of the characters that I've been doing in the sequel compared to the original, Hades 1, which hopefully adds interesting layers. I don't know, we'll see. We're still working on it.
Is there a character you've played from the Supergiant Games that you most identify with on a personal level?
Is it weird to say Charon?
Why is that?
He's someone who doesn't say words and generally would like to be left alone, I think [laughs]. I can imagine running a store just like, 'Ah, get what you want, get out.' I identify with that.
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Transistor
What is the thing that you're most proud of with Hades II, both in regards to what you're bringing to it as an actor and what the game is doing to build upon the first game? What are you most excited about for players to experience?
I won't be able to speak to my own work on it until it's done. All I know is just I'm working on it, I'm doing it. Darren, who's my director, is happy with what I'm doing. I seem to be delivering what he's asking. Greg seems to be satisfied as well. It's feeling good. It's sounding good to me. I'm just happy that [Hades II] is happening, that it exists, and that it is already as good as it is. And that people are beginning to discover that on a larger scale.
Hades was such a massive success for the studio. As someone who was there from the humble beginnings, how have you personally internalized Hades' overwhelming success?
I get recognized occasionally on the street for Hades, which is very strange. And that's largely I think due to the NoClip stuff that we did. In support of Hades once 1.0 came out, we did some videos for Twitter, for YouTube, and, obviously, through NoClip, quite a few of our faces got out there in a way that they hadn't before. Pre-Hades, the sort of public faces of Supergiant, the recognizable faces, were basically Greg and Amir. And Darren, on occasion. But now it's me at the bar that I go to all the time, and some, like, 23-year-old kid coming up to me like, 'Sir, are you are you...? And I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah, I am'. And it blows his mind, and in my head, I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm him. Somebody's got to be. It's me, yes. Thank you for playing, nice to meet you, good to see you.' So that's been an alteration or an accommodation I've had to make my life since release. Obviously, winning the BAFTA was huge. I was much more excited for all the other people who won BAFTAs. Greg and Jen [Zee] in particular, who I feel have gone unrecognized for their amazing work for far too long.
How has it felt seeing Supergiant's growth from what it was in the beginning to where it is now?
We just have more resources now. Certainly, from my perspective, from my role there, I'm privy to this; we have access to a much higher, I don't know if caliber is the right word, but we are able to at least get in contact with and have conversations with and possibly even cast actors that we wouldn't have been able to get 100 feet in front of, or even 100 miles, even five years ago. And now, that seems to be something within our reach and is within reach, and I'm excited for people to discover that as well.
But at its heart, we're the same. We're the same people. Amir and Darren and me, we still make each other laugh with the same jokes that we made each other laugh at when we were 17 or whatever. We still share, whenever we do get together, horror stories, war stories from making Bastion. From Transistor, how terrified we all were making that one. The kind of wild child that is Pyre and how we didn't learn really how to describe that game until it was out. But we're kind of like a shark: we don't really stop. We don't take too many breaks. We just move on. We finish something once we're happy with it, and then we let it out.
We're in a better place now than we were. Hades was our first experience with our Early Access, and that worked out really well for us. And we're doing the same with this one. We were pretty still early on with Hades, and we knew that Early Access was something we were going to do, I remember talking to Amir about it and him just saying 'Yeah, this is the game we've made so far that I'm least worried about'. Because of Early Access, anything that's wrong with the game, we'll just fix it before we ship it. So we're not gonna have to wait three years until we ship a completed thing to figure out if people like it or not. Or even know what it is or how to describe it.
Hades II is available now in Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Be sure to visit our cover story hub for more exclusive features and videos about the game.
Students across the land are donning gowns and readying their cap-throwing arms. If you’ve got a gaming or tech fan celebrating their big accomplishment, it’s likely you may also be looking for a way to congratulate them on their achievement. We’ve assembled a curated selection of tech, toys, tabletop games, and more to delight the new graduate this year. Read more...
Long-running British comedy panel TV game shows are not something we usually cover here at Game Informer (a magazine and website devoted to informing readers about video games), but Taskmaster, the long-running British comedy panel TV game show, is getting a video game adaption. The Taskmasters themselves, Greg Davies and Alex Horne, will be represented in-game, and Horne, who created the concept of the show and is technically its sole writer (see below) was available to chat about it. We learned about the upcoming VR game (releasing June 13 on Quest), why the American Comedy Central version of the show didn't work, whether or not it is time to give an American version another shot, and what it is like to meet yourself in VR. So without further ado... it's little Alex Horne!
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Game Informer: Do you play video games? Are you a fan at all?
Alex Horne: No, not really. I used to have an Amiga when I was growing up in the 80s. I do have a Quest and I did play it a little bit during lockdown. I played it quite a bit. I found it useful for that. But I've got three boys, three kids who are 11, 13, and 14, so my job is to tell them to stop playing computer games and go outside. But they do play a lot. They play a lot of Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite. But I'm not a gamer, so this has been a whole education for me.
But you’ve played Taskmaster VR, right?
I have. I've had a demo. I've dipped my toe into it. It's too weird, though, for me to play. To meet myself in it and be a contestant. It reminded me of the very first time I put on the VR headset, or even put it on my mum, as well. It blows your mind the very first time. It was like that, again, going around the Taskmaster house, in particular, was so eerie. It's so lifelike. Not lifelike, because it's obviously cartoony, but it's so well drawn and faithfully recreated.
The Taskmaster house is there and you can walk around? It's accurate?
It’s so accurate. Sort of unnecessarily accurate. The house itself in real life is disappointingly small. It's a bungalow. There's only one floor. There's only about five rooms. So, we could do anything with the house. But instead, we've absolutely faithfully recreated the Taskmaster House [laughs]. But it's amazing. You can open every cupboard, and you'll see things from the show. There are lots of Easter eggs, things hidden around that are irrelevant. And all the rooms are pretty much the right dimension, we've had to slightly swell the corridor in the kitchen, because they're narrower in real life. It is great. And also, there's so much potential. In the real house in the real world, there's a door that opens and has nothing behind except for a green screen, which gives us potential… we've never really used it. But similarly in the VR house, you could open a door and end up in a different location.
Is the stage in the game, as well?
Yeah. You end up in the studio. And it's like the TV studio. So if you look around, you'll see the cameras, and where the audience sits, and you'll see Greg [Davies] on the throne. The team have been to the house a lot and they've measured up and they've taken pictures, you know, like estate agents would. And they've been to see the live show. They've tried to make it, so if you're a fan of the show, it'll be really exciting to be in the world. And hopefully, if you're not a fan of the show, it's a… VR games are so weird. The ones I know, it feels like either Star Wars, that’s brilliant, or that job one where you're doing something really menial, and this is hopefully somewhere in between the two. So they are quite practical, simple tasks, but you're in a fantastical world.
I imagine this would be hard for you to answer: did they get your height correct in VR? If I play the game, do you tower over me?
I don't know what height I am anymore. I've lost all sense of that. You know, if you Google a Hollywood actor and try to find out how tall Johnny Depp is, you'll never get the right answer. And I think it's the same with me. I can't find the right answer. So, I think I'm smaller in VR. I should be small in VR. It’s the correct Taskmaster height for me.
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Did you come up with any tasks specifically for the game? Did you give the team ideas?
It was a collaborative process. And, to be honest, the team – Scallywag Arcade – came up with things and they quite nervously put them to me and I may have tinkered with them, but they know computer games. I know Taskmaster games. And we sort of met in the middle. So, they came from them and I've absolutely given them all the seal of approval.
There's a tiny bit of me that… tasks are quite precious for me, without sounding too serious, there's only a certain number. I'm worried I am going to run out one day. There's certain things I've come up with which are so good because for me it's not all about the task. It's about the little layers. For example, your time starts when you've done a thing. You said a certain word or whatever. And they've come up with some great ideas. For example, your time doesn't end unless you don't put the thing in a box. I'm not sure if I'm being very clear, but they've completely got the Taskmaster language and ideas. So yeah, I've collaborated, but I can't take responsibility for all the games.
One of my favorite things about the show – and I don't know how you guys feel about it, honestly. It's hard to tell as a viewer – but I love when the contestants smudge the rules to get around a task.
Are there opportunities to do that here? Because sometimes videos games have to be rigid in order to work. Is there room for that in Taskmaster VR?
That's one of the real challenges. We definitely want that. Well, what you can't necessarily do is sort of nitpick the language quite so much. But there's definitely multiple ways around [a task]. So, the whole point for me of a good task is there might be three or four ways of doing it. And then one or two ways we haven't thought of which is on the verge of cheating, but it's not. It's just a clever workaround. And yes, we hope that's built into the game.
On the verge of cheating. That’s a great way to put it.
I'm really hoping we watch people do things that we didn't think, or we discover that people have done things in a completely different way than what we expected.
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Are there any quintessential tasks from the show? Like really popular tasks that had to be in the game?
No. It's the opposite of that. One of the things we pride ourselves on in the show is that we never repeat a task. So, when you open the envelope, you have no idea what it’s going to be.
Here's the thing. When we did Taskmaster America – we did one ill-fated series for Comedy Central – and I think one of the mistakes we made was that we repeated all the tasks. They were ones we'd done in England. And it just felt like we were treading water a bit and it wasn't exciting. We should have taken much more of a risk and done brand new tasks. And that's what we decided to do with this. We don't want players to go, “Oh, well I know what to do with this one. I've seen five people do it.” So, it's all brand new. There's elements of tasks that we love from the show, but there's nothing taken directly from the show.
I will admit, I was hoping… one task that I love was when you had all the contestants blindfolded and they drove a moped around a parking lot.
Yeah, by the the railway museum.
Is there anything like that in the VR game? I love the idea of like you being blindfolded in VR and having to perform a task.
Well, it's an ongoing project, I don't think there's a blindfolded one in there, but I might be told otherwise by the devs. I don't know how that would work. That's a great idea. Do you mind if we steal your idea that you've stolen from us?
Please. Everything's a circle, right?
I mean, you can blindfold yourself. You can do whatever you want. But um, yeah. It's a good idea. Thank you.
What does the writing room look like for Taskmaster? How does that work?
I’m afraid you're looking at the writing room.
Just you?
It is, yeah. It's quite stupid because most comedy shows do need a writing room. But from the very beginning it was just me. And actually, most of the team that make the show, it's still the same people – producer and director and some of the team. So, people do chip in with ideas, but it's kind of me and I'm a bit precious about it and a bit control freak, I suppose. Because I think it's quite delicate to get the right balance of being interesting, but not crazy and kooky. So, yes, pretty much me.
In New Zealand they have got a team. Sometimes I'll watch it and think, “Oh, yeah, we should get a team.” But I don't want to let it go. We get suggested a lot of tasks by the public, but very rarely, seldom, do they come up with one that's actually good.
I imagine it's more complicated than you think.
It is. And also, we thought of most things now, because we've done 18 series. That's a lot of tasks, you know, it's 600, or whatever it is. So, most of the time people will suggest something and we'll say,“We tried that. It didn’t work.” Or, “We have actually done that.” So the writing room is just me and my dog.
Do you think it's time to give an American reboot another shot?
I think so. We learned a lot from that. I think what we should have done is brought Greg over, we should have new things, and we should have made it the same length as the UK show. We agreed to everything that Comedy Central said, because we thought they knew best. And I'm sure they know best in lots of ways. But I think we if we did it again, we would stick to our guns a bit more.
Adam Douglas has a ghastly secret. He shared the recipe for a Cuban dish – the Arroz con Pollo – in an in-game radio station in Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, and it’s one that he describes as “very controversial.” The trick, according to Douglas, a senior writer at Night School Studio, is to use boneless, skinless chicken thighs for the dish instead of bone-in, skin-on thighs and drumsticks.
“My family’s from Cuba,” says Douglas. “It was my mom’s recipe that I have transformed into my recipe. And so, the version in the game is my version, which in the Cuban community is a very controversial version, and I stand by it. I still haven’t told my mom about any of this, by the way. I’m genuinely afraid of telling her this.”
In between chuckles, Douglas’ colleague Sara Hebert, the publishing and marketing lead at Night School, promises to send a copy of this story to his mother.
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Afterparty
Charming Chatter, Flawed Heroes
In some ways, this closeness feels like an influence on the games Night School is known for, which often feature relatable, ordinary characters banding together in otherworldly, extraordinary circumstances. Oxenfree stars a teenager, Alex, embarking on a weekend trip with a group of friends to a local island, only to accidentally unleash a series of paranormal events. Its sequel is about a much older and stoic adult named Riley, who navigates similar supernatural happenings with her coworker, Jacob. Then there’s Afterparty, in which college best buds Milo and Lola drink their way out of Hell. These adventures feature conversations taking place organically; dialogue is the crux of the game rather than an auxiliary feature to nudge the plot along.
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Oxenfree
This is the very DNA of Night School: a vision founders Krankel and Adam Hines hoped to realize from the very start.
“I’ve been talking to Adam for years about wanting to start something [...] at that time, you had Telltale Games, which were cutscene focused, and then sometimes [you] walk around and solve some puzzles, and then on the other end of the spectrum, I think Last Of Us had just come out maybe a year or two earlier, and that was the apex of what narrative and action gameplay could be together,” says Krankel. “But we’re looking right in the middle and going like, ‘There’s no games out there that don’t have cutscenes, but yet have lots of stories that work really well.’”
Night School’s most acclaimed feature is its dialogue tree system, which mimics the cadence of real-life chatter. Words are exchanged even as characters wander about their environments, and any lulls in conversations become meaningful; as Riley in Oxenfree II, for instance, you can even choose to ignore Jacob’s attempts at small talk and simply not respond if it’s proving too incessant. Conversations, too, can be interrupted when new distractions are introduced – spotting a new clue or pointing out a familiar landmark – causing them to diverge in different directions. At times, the focus on dialogue almost feels like a bold decision, which places incredible faith in the charisma of the games’ characters. After all, a deathly boring or unlikable cast may well be a death knell for the game.
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Oxenfree II
Fortunately for many Night School games, their cast lacks a certain air of pretension – a quality plaguing many video game heroes today. Douglas attributes this to the flaws deliberately written into Night School protagonists.
“[Riley from Oxenfree II] has made mistakes as we all have," he says. "She’s endeavoring to do better, as some of us try to do, and some of us don’t. And in some ways, she succeeds, and [in] some ways, she really doesn’t. And I think keeping that in mind, that life is complicated, it can be messy, it very rarely goes the way that you think it is. It is part of what made her, in my opinion, just so relatable and so human.”
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Night School co-founders Adam Hines (left), Sean Krankel (right), and Oxenfree II game director Bryant Cannon (middle) at Summer Game Fest Play Days 2023
But for all its successes with spearheading deeply authentic conversations, Krankel seems reluctant to peg Night School games as predominantly dialogue-driven stories, admitting this trajectory may change for the studio’s future games.
"Story is critical, and even talking is critical, but the idea of wall-to-wall, highly verbose gameplay that you see in Afterparty or Oxenfree and Oxenfree II, I think we’re pretty malleable on that,” he says.
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Scrappy Beginnings
As with many indie developers, Night School hails from humble beginnings, with the team working on the first Oxenfree out of Krankel’s kitchen. Krankel was previously co-workers with Cannon at Disney, as well as Oxenfree environment artist Heather Gross, while Hines (Krankel’s cousin) was fresh out of Telltale Games. In 2016, Oxenfree was released to critical acclaim. This was quickly followed by a Mr. Robot mobile game, Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n, inspired by the popular television thriller, and the one game Krankel reckons is Hines’ crowning achievement at Night School (the game has since been delisted from both Android and iOS app stores). It was also around this time that Telltale acquired the rights to make a Stranger Things game, with Night School contracted to develop a companion game. Telltale’s unexpected shuttering, however, meant Night School was unable to bring the game to fruition.
Night School was understandably reticent about that episode, but Krankel lets in that the game was “semi-far along” in development, and was going to be closely tied to Telltale’s Stranger Things in some capacity. “The gist of it, that I’ll say, is just that they were making a big Stranger Things game and reached out to us about making a small one that could talk to the big one. And it was really cool. It was really interesting how the two games might have talked to each other [...] in a very compelling way.”
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Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n
This Stranger Things companion game was built upon Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n, which unveiled its events through the discovery of a discarded burner phone, alongside text messages and conversations playing out in real time.
In a way, this was another attempt by Night School to explore different ways of fleshing out dialogues – a vision that felt quintessentially Night School. “That was a foundation that we’ve never wanted to fully leave behind, but we haven’t done anything with that general design for years,” says Krankel. “It’s something now that we’re in the early stages of exploring [...] but the Stranger Things game that we were working on used that and took it a lot further.”
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Next Stop Nowhere
Netflix and The Cloud
Perhaps to Netflix, Night School’s storytelling ethos is complimentary to its cloud gaming ambitions. Having dabbled with interactive storytelling with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the streaming giant eventually acquired the studio in 2021, with Night School being the first developer included under Netflix’s growing roster of companies. Night School’s portfolio seems particularly suited to cloud gaming for now, given the lack of twitchy mechanics and a heavy emphasis on narrative rather than the adrenaline-fuelled bombast of other games. At the moment, Oxenfree remains one of two games that are part of Netflix’s beta test on making games playable on select television models, PCs, and Mac.
“Netflix is a story company. Netflix tells stories. They entertain the world with different types of stories,” Krankel says. “We’re a story company; we just happen to make playable ones. And so, the conversation turned into less of a ‘Hey, we’d like to license your game,’ and more like, ‘Hey, would you like to do more stuff just for us? Would you like to keep using your general ethos in our bigger environment?’ And that felt pretty good.”
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Night School co-foudners Sean Krankel (left) and Adam Hines (right) filming for a behind the scenes video in Los Angeles
Acquisitions are usually met with some amount of trepidation, but as hackneyed as this may sound, those we spoke to at Night School agree it hasn’t changed the studio in ways that aren’t true to its identity. Instead, any changes stem from just being part of a bigger organization now.
“I have an answer that sounds facetious, but it’s not. It’s just that I’m in a lot more meetings now. That is not because of the Netflix acquisition,” says Rohrmann. “That’s just the nature of working for a larger organization. But yeah, other than that, I’m still making music the way I did before, so I’m super happy about that.”
Cannon agrees. “I think it’s changed, but not necessarily because of Netflix. It’s just because we’ve grown and we’ve had to adapt to having more people at the studio, having a lot more different personalities at the studio and egos at the studio. And it’s just new, it’s something that a lot of studios have faced before. We’ve definitely had growing pains there, but it’s also enabled us to do things that are in the future going to be that much bigger and more exciting for our players.”
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The Night School Studios team
Changing Tides
That said, Netflix’s cloud gaming efforts are still in its nascent stages. It hasn’t been long since the demise of Google’s cloud gaming experiment Stadia, but Night School seems largely optimistic about the deal. The acquisition has given the studio more resources and the means to refine its games. Take, for instance, how Oxenfree II was released in 32 languages – a feat that Krankel says would not have been possible without Netflix.
“Before, we were a tiny California company that, if we could scrounge up enough money to get localization funds, we would start putting the game out in other places, and we didn’t even know if our localizations were that good, to be totally honest, because we were a small studio working with outsourcing teams. And now we’re like, ‘We can put our s**t everywhere, and we should do it, and we should do it right,’” says Krankel. He even points out the studio might very well be working on its dream game at the moment, with Cannon at the helm as its game director.
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An example of dialogue localization in Oxenfree
“I’d say when we were working out of Sean’s kitchen, we never ever thought that we’d be here 10 years later. As big as we are, to me, it did not seem possible,” says Cannon with a wistful smile. “And so, when I think about how much we’ve grown and how much more ability we have to make a big impact on the industry and players, it’s helpful for me to think back to those days and think of that beginner’s mindset we had, that was like, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re so passionate about this. We care about it deeply.’ And thinking about how much that mattered to me, and how much if I were to describe to [Bryant from] 10 years ago what would come of this, he’d be very, very happy. It’s pretty incredible, and I don’t want to forget those early days.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 363 of Game Informer.
The final character of Street Fighter 6's Year 1 DLC plans, Akuma, finally hit the game earlier this week. I had the chance to catch up with director Takayuki Nakayama about the importance of the Great Demon. However, in February, I sat down with Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto to discuss the addition of Ed to Street Fighter 6. During that conversation, Nakayama shared an intriguing anecdote about how important Ed was to the development of Street Fighter 6.
When the team sits down to decide on the characters, they think of balancing out the roster not only in style, but through the regions and countries the characters represent. However, the story of the game –in Street Fighter 6's case, World Tour – also plays a big role.
"From an outsider's perspective, when you see the characters themselves, you might think, 'What's the significance of them? What's their connection?'" Nakayama says. "But as you play World Tour and Arcade mode, those become more evident and clear in some way."
When Ed was initially announced as the third of four characters arriving via DLC during Year 1, some wondered about his significance to the broader Street Fighter 6 game. After all, he was merely a background character in Street Fighter IV before making his playable debut in Street Fighter V. But, according to Nakayama, Ed was actually one of the most important characters in terms of influencing the development of Street Fighter 6.
"From my perspective, Ed is actually a very important character in the series now," Nakayama says. "He was actually the reason why we have Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6, because in Street Fighter V, that was the character we tested out with simplified commands for specials, and that eventually evolved, and we learned from implementing him in Street Fighter V, and we took those learnings to create Modern Controls in Street Fighter 6."
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While Ed was instrumental in developing Modern Controls, a fan on social media's love for him sent the development team down the path of developing Street Fighter 6's most substantial mode.
"He's also the reason why we have World Tour," Nakayama says. "When we were working on Street Fighter V, and Ed was released, I was looking at my feed on social media, and I took note of someone who said they're a really big fan of Ed, and they love how he looks, they love how he plays. 'I feel like I could actually play a fighting game! It's my first fighting game, and it's so much fun!'"
However, because of Street Fighter V's limited mode offerings, even after years of post-launch development, it inspired Nakayama to create a new experience for players such as this social media user. "Street Fighter V doesn't have a large-scope, single-player mode like World Tour," he says. "And so they didn't like seeing Ed get bodied by other players. And because he or she loved him so much, I felt the responsibility of creating a new mode that shines the different characters in this master spotlight and doesn't show them really getting hurt too much by other masters and characters. That was one of the big reasons we decided to make World Tour for 6."
Street Fighter 6 arrived on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, and PC on June 2, 2023. To learn why we consider it one of the best modern Street Fighter games, read our review here. For more on the making of Street Fighter 6, read our full cover story here. To read our history of the Street Fighter franchise in the lead-up to 6, head here.
I woke up this morning and put on a white Hanes t-shirt mass-produced by a machine able to produce clothing at a rate no human ever could. But shirts like this used to be made by humans. While making coffee, I ask Siri on my iPhone what the weather will be like today and what my day’s schedule looks like, and a few seconds later, an artificial intelligence-powered voice gives me the answers I’m looking for. After sitting down at my work computer to write this, I opened Spotify and checked out my Discover Weekly playlist, hyper-curated to my tastes based on the other music I’ve listened to over the past week.
On Instagram, my ads feel uncannily targeted to me, and on X (formerly Twitter), I see a new batch of posters for Amazon’s upcoming Fallout streaming series called out for using A.I. None of this is possible without machine learning, which is what powers A.I. in other, more automated interactions some people use in their life and work, be it the chatbot ChatGPT, image creator Midjourney, or something else. But, as things like Siri, targeted ads, and curated playlists on Spotify settle A.I. into our lives in such a way we might not realize, there’s a war brewing between humans and A.I. (and the people developing it and advocating for it) in the games industry.
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Caves of Qud uses Markov chains, a type of generative A.I., as a tool for statistical prediction
“We’ve elevated as a species – we have the idea of creative art as personal expression,” Brian Bucklew, co-creator of the popular sci-fi roguelike Caves of Qud, tells me. “Generative A.I. is extremely transgressive because it’s not only displacing jobs, it’s displacing humans from a space where we’ve decided, ‘This is about personal expression.’ We’re looking at it and saying, ‘Can [A.I.] be good art if there’s fundamentally no expression underlying it?’ Nobody has an answer to that. [A.I. in creative spaces like art] is totally new, and I don’t think we’ve reckoned with that at all.”
A.I. in Independent Spaces
Bucklew is one of the many independent developers – solo and within studios outside the triple-A publishing machine – I spoke to about A.I. and its use and effect on game development. Bucklew’s Caves of Qud has been in development for more than 15 years. He says he’s watched functions and jobs previously held by humans get replaced by automation and A.I. throughout his career. Even things he used to code by hand are now automated in game development engines like Unreal. He also says Caves of Qud is in a sub-genre that explicitly uses generative systems.
“These aren’t [language learning models (LLMs)]; this is not Midjourney,” he says when I ask if he uses A.I. in the game’s development. “This is not some of the new attentional-based A.I. that is getting a lot of the press right now, but this is absolutely machine-based generative systems. So the answer is no if you’re asking if we use LLMs to generate code, but the answer is yes, we use, for example, Markov chains [generative A.I. that uses current events to analyze the predictability and production of subsequent events] to generate books. And these really aren’t that different except, again, in scope.”
He says LLMs and Markov Chains are different but that both are statistical predictors; the latter is more primitive than the former, however. In either use case, he says good results come from hand authoring on top of the generative use of A.I. Javi Giménez, the CEO of Moonlighter and Cataclismo developer Digital Sun, agrees, noting there is no top-down mandate at the studio to use A.I. but that various developers there use it as a tool alongside their creative output.
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Cataclismo
“What has happened naturally is that some people at the studio – sometimes it’s artists, sometimes it’s programmers, sometimes it’s designers – use some of the tools for specific tasks,” Giménez tells me. “Some artists, for example, might be using it to create compositions based on images they already created to explore things fast. [What] I see is that professionals on the team are adopting A.I. as something that empowers them [...] and that’s something happening naturally.”
Guillaume Mezino, founder and developer at Kipwak Studio, which is working on a 3D wizard school sim called Wizdom Academy, says he first made the use of generative A.I. programs like Midjourney mandatory. Instead of using Google Images to search for references to creatures for players to encounter, developers at Kipwak used Midjourney.
“I said to all my team members, ‘Try to use it as best you can in every way you can and let’s see where we can go from that,” he says. “After a few days, it was the best decision ever. The artists saw it as a good ally to help them make decisions and open their minds to new possibilities.”
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Wizdom Academy
Of course, it’s important to note there’s an inherent relationship between Mezino, the studio's founder, and the employees there that might prevent said employees from saying otherwise. After all, he mandated A.I. to begin with. Would these developers want to use A.I. of their own volition? Anecdotally, within the wider games industry, I’d say no.
When I ask Mezino about A.I. replacing jobs at the studio now or in the future, he says most of the work A.I. does for Kipwak is work that a human would never have done. For example, he says Wizdom Academy features a lot of artwork. “If I had to pay humans, if I had to pay people to do 150-plus artworks, we would have never been able to do it,” he says. Instead, someone at the studio used A.I. to create those artworks. I ask if Wizdom Academy would exist without A.I. He says it would – just not as fast or as good. There’d be less art, fewer conversations (also powered by A.I.) to have with teachers at the school, and overall, “We would have gone for something way simpler, so less appealing, and I don’t think anyone wants that.” But that begets another question: Do people want the version of this game that uses A.I.?
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Wizdom Academy
Even though Giménez’s studio uses A.I. in its processes, he still feels there’s a legitimate concern about where A.I. gets its information from. He believes more substantial intellectual property and copyright legislation is necessary to protect human creatives. He doesn’t know the catch-all solution, though. Mezino says his team only gives A.I. work that people at the studio have created by hand.
“We are not comfortable with the idea of work being used to train A.I., work that was not paid for by companies,” Mezino says. “We do what we can and for us, it means we always have to give it what we do first – to give it our job, our work, and we ask it to do something with it, and we take it back and work on it again. That’s the best we can do.”
Mezino, like Giménez, wants to see stronger legislative protections placed on how A.I. is used to protect original artists.
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Wizdom Academy
A.I. and Ethics
Hilary Mason, machine learning expert and CEO of A.I. entertainment start-up Hidden Door, agrees. She wrote a book, Data Driven, with the Obama administration’s chief data scientist, DJ Patil. It centers on this topic and the questions and methods those interested in using A.I. should adopt to do so ethically.
She’s not immediately concerned with A.I., adopting the mindset that humans are still in control. But 20 years from now, she understands why communities are worried. “It’s not unreasonable to imagine a future in which you can describe a movie you want [...] and there wouldn’t be technical limitations in the way of it being created for you right there,” she says. “And it might actually be great. How do we, today, set up the foundation so that when we have that capability, we will value human energy and creativity?”
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Hilary Mason, machine learning expert and CEO of Hidden Door, an A.I. entertainment startup, in a video for Wired
She says there are activists and communities big and small, loud and quiet, working to make this happen. But she also admits it’s impossible to know what A.I. and the surrounding conversation looks like 20 years from now. For her part, Hidden Door strictly licenses the properties and IPs it uses to bring A.I.-created D&D campaigns to users. Not ready to share specifics, Mason says Hidden Door is partnering with a number of fiction authors to make these campaigns happen. She envisions a world where someone could watch a new Star Wars movie and immediately go home and whip up a D&D campaign set within the movie’s world, laws, and physics using Hidden Door and its A.I. dungeon master. And it would do so ethically thanks to licensing agreements that ensure the right people get compensated and share Hidden Door’s revenue.
Of course, Star Wars might be a pie-in-the-sky property, but Mason is excited about some of the book authors already on board.
Bridging the Gap
For someone like Cameron Keywood, founder, director, and solo developer at DragonCog Interactive, A.I. was the only way to turn his vision of a game into something people can play, he says. “I have used it in development, but that was from a budgetary point of view because I’m a start-up studio, and artists, while they do good quality work, are quite expensive for the work I am doing, which is a visual novel,” Keywood tells me of his upcoming sci-fi game, Baskerville, that reimagines 1902’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. “I needed 30 backgrounds and 18 characters, and that would have cost a lot. For projects like that, I think it’s okay.”
Keywood says he questions where A.I. gets its learnings from, and while he appreciates that A.I. has allowed him to create a game he can’t otherwise make, he’d prefer to hire an artist. But financially, it’s not possible for him. He ponders using A.I. to create something like Baskerville that could earn enough money for a future project where he hires artists to create the art. Ultimately, he hopes A.I. remains the assist tool he feels it is today, but he could see it going a more disruptive route that ends with humans losing jobs.
Matt Wyble, COO of Marvel Snap developer Second Dinner, positions A.I. in a similar vein. “[A.I.] is unlocking our ability to make experiences that we couldn’t have made before,” he tells me via email. “It’s not replacing team members but rather, empowering our small but mighty team to create like they never have before.” Wyble’s coworker and Second Dinner vice president of A.I., Data, and Security Xiaoyang Yang likens A.I. tools in the workplace to building a “mech suit” for developers.
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Baskerville solo developer Cameron Keywood used A.I. as an assist tool for background art in the visual novel
“Imagine A.I. as this ally that can play Marvel Snap across countless scenarios, mimicking players of varying skill levels using decks of different archetypes,” Yang writes to me via email. “Overnight, the A.I. tool analyzes all the games played and generates insights on game balance, spotlighting overpowered elements or underutilized strategies, which is invaluable for designers. With this new ‘Mech Suit,’ designers no longer had to release a game, knowing it might have balance issues, relying on player data post-launch to make adjustments, which often led to suboptimal player experiences. Now, designers in this mech suit can significantly reduce these instances by identifying and addressing balance issues even before the game hits the market.
“It’s a protective, rather than reactive, approach to game balance, ensuring players get a more polished experience from day one.”
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Baskerville solo developer Cameron Keywood used A.I. as an assist tool for background art in the visual novel
When asked how A.I. could disrupt creativity within game development, Yang says it’s crucial to remember that the human element is at the heart of every game. He posits that games without a human’s touch don’t have fantasy, achievement, emotion, storytelling, and connection.
“It’s like what [Apple co-founder Steve Jobs] said about computers being the bicycle of the human mind,” Yang says. “In today’s context, A.I. is the e-bike of human creativity in game development. It empowers designers to explore wild new ideas, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in game design.”
Ultimately, he sees a future where progress in A.I. is not merely about leveraging technology for efficiency tasks like coding but also about embracing it as a tool and partner in the creative process. Of course, that line, the separation between a tool or partner and the loss of a job, grows thinner by the day. And in a world where executives continue to squeeze pennies on the dollar out of everything in game development, it’s not hard to see the day when leaders cross that line in the name of cost-cutting.
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Kohlrabi Starship solo developer Katja Wolff opted not to use A.I. art or audio
Solo developer Katja Wolff of WolKa Studio, which is developing sci-fi farming sim Kohlrabi Starship, has primarily opted not to use A.I., even if she understands why someone in a position similar to hers might.
“I tried a lot of A.I. tools, but in the end, I decided not to use it beyond sometimes brainstorming,” Wolff tells me. “So basically, it’s zero A.I. art, zero A.I. audio, but sometimes I use ChatGPT for brainstorming in the English language because it’s not my mother tongue.”
As for why ChatGPT is as far as she’s gone with using A.I., she simply wasn’t impressed with the options for A.I. art and audio development, noting that programs like Midjourney can’t create the homogenized visual style one might want in their game. She thinks it’s a matter of time before these programs catch up, though. And as A.I.-powered technology grows more competent, she hopes legislators will work harder to protect creatives. She likes Steam’s approach: requiring developers to indicate A.I. usage on the game’s page but only after the developer proves the game doesn’t use copyright-protected data.
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Kohlrabi Starship
Like Wolff’s use of ChatGPT, RoboSquad Revolution developer Zollpa utilizes the program to streamline the studio’s organization. CEO Aaron Jacobson says Zollpa uses ChatGPT to organize notes after meetings, something that might take hours to do by hand but is done in minutes by A.I. “It’s something that we probably would pay a secretary a full salary to do for us and [ChatGPT] is just able to do that, and in a very short period of time with just a few clicks of a button.”
That’s one secretary job lost to A.I. at Zollpa.
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Kohlrabi Starship
He says it uses ChatGPT to brainstorm new character classes, weapons, and names for the robotic characters in RoboSquad Revolution, which began as a blockchain idea that uses NFTs before sentiment around that technology soured (and funding money largely disappeared in that sector) and the team scrapped the idea. Jacobson says that technology might be integrated into the game one day.
Jacobson says Zollpa built RoboSquad Revolution narratively on the premise of A.I. Twenty years from now, A.I. robots have taken over and are “walking versions of Siri or something like that,” that you control with third-person shooter gameplay. Jacobson says that despite using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas that make their way into the game, “the development of the characters in the game is absolutely 100 percent created by humans,” except for the voices; those are created by A.I., which Jacobson justifies narratively by explaining the robots in-game are powered by A.I.
Looking 20 years into the future of our real world, Zollpa marketing and brand specialist Richard Henne thinks the game development landscape will be a lot more competitive because of A.I.
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Robosquad Revolution’s robot characters are voiced by A.I.
“I imagine that bigger companies who are squeezing for over-the-top profits are going to try to use this for everything from character models to generative levels, which again is already happening, to voice – all that stuff, I’m sure is going to be attempted to be fully replaced,” Henne tells me during the same conversation he and Jacobson explain the robots in their game are voiced by A.I. “My hope is that companies do not fall for that. But if we’re actually talking 20 years from now, I do think it’s probably going to be a lot more of a competitive landscape, there will likely be layoffs, there will likely be protests and social movements, and I would be very surprised if this doesn’t happen.”
But like Mason, Giménez, and everyone else I speak to, Jacobson and Henne want to see stronger legislation created to help regulate A.I., a technology that, by all accounts of those I talk to, is one where Pandora’s Box has been opened. Unfortunately or fortunately, it’s here to stay, depending on where you fall in this conversation.
The Problem on the Horizon
Bucklew feels the issue at the heart of the A.I. discourse, the rightful concern that people will lose jobs to the technology, strikes at a problem with society itself: We do not protect those affected. He says using copyrighted content to train A.I. models is unethical and should not be allowed – you should have to compensate users. “The other side of it, which is just using automated systems to replace human labor, that to me – whether or not that’s ethical – we’ve decided as a society that’s what we do, right?”
The shirt I put on this morning was once a product created by human hands until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century turned it into a more automated process. People lost their jobs. But time advanced, and jobs were created around the new emerging markets, jobs that hopefully the jobless picked up. Bucklew says the same happened with car manufacturing, construction, and many other workforce sectors. With proper transition management, he thinks these massive changes in how society works can be smoother.
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Cataclismo developer Digital Sun does not mandate use of A.I., but various individual developers use it as a tool to bolster their output
“I think we’re in the middle of a [transition] now, and so it’s extremely painful for a particular alignment of laborers who are visual artists, musicians, or voice actors,” he adds. “And they don’t have a job to go to, and we don’t have any kind of safety net in society to say, ‘Well, you’re going to be fine. We’re going to allow you to move to this new constellation of labor,’ but nothing’s going to stop this constellation of labor. [The] cynical business lines of force are going to force that new constellation of labor because everyone else will simply not be able to do business on a competitive level without it.”
Cynically, Bucklew is not confident the cat can be put back into the bag, though. And he’s not confident we’re adequately prepared for the A.I. transition we’re barreling toward. He ponders whether we should focus more on what happens afterward when people lose their jobs rather than what’s happening today.
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Caves of Qud
“To the extent that we allow capital to drive these systems, I don’t think there’s any route where all the labor that can be replaced by automated systems isn’t replaced by automated systems, and the questions we’re going to have to be asking in 5 or 10 years are ones that just seem bizarre to us,” he says. “[That’s] obviously disastrous for the way society’s stood up right now, where you should have a job and pay your bills with the money you earn.
“I think that alignment is failing quickly and will fail more quickly than we can figure out how to get people into new jobs. And so, we have a real problem over the next 50 years as these systems continue to take off.
This article originally appeared in Issue 365 of Game Informer.
In 2009, a video game called Canabalt was published on the iOS App Store. It had a simple premise: Your character flees through a crumbling urban landscape, making great leaps across rooftops at the touch of your phone screen. It met great success and charted in what was then only a burgeoning mobile game ecosystem. Canabalt popularized the infinite runner genre and would ultimately put its designer, Adam Saltsman, on the map.
Now working under the name of Finji as its creative director, Adam’s rise as a designer as well as his partner’s, Bekah Saltsman, as both a publisher and CEO, has been stunning to watch, especially considering the simplicity of that first big hit. Whether you’re playing the bass guitar as Mae Borowski in Night In The Woods, organizing patchwork-colored boxes in Wilmot’s Warehouse, or floating listlessly through space in Capsule, Finji continues to offer memorable, beautiful experiences from trailblazing game designers unlike any other.
But for Adam and Bekah, in those early days of entering the indie game industry, everything always led back to that original, impossible question: How do you even make a video game?
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Overland
Bridging The Gap
For as long as Adam can remember, he wanted to be a video game artist. Fascinated with the vibrant colors and rich SunSoft sound chips of original NES cartridges, the video games of his childhood quickly took over his imagination. He designed his own levels for Super Mario Bros. on sheets of grid paper. He ordered floppy disks with the Wolfenstein level editor built-in. He experimented with the Doom level editor, then eventually the Quake editor. However, despite being a part of this growing generation of designers with a dream to create console games that felt like some of their childhood favorites, it was never clear how exactly you get from hobbyist to career.
“That gap, in the early 1990’s in rural Michigan, is a very wide gap,” Adam says.
Upon graduating from the University of Michigan alongside Bekah, the Saltsmans made the move out to where the ever-growing indie scene was just beginning to flourish: Austin, Texas. An environment with excellent studios and cheap rent seemed the perfect place for Adam to cut his teeth and enter the industry. Unfortunately, getting your foot in the door at major developers of the time was much more complicated than anticipated, so he looked to other routes. In 2006, Adam transitioned into tech contractor work to dedicate sufficient time toward launching his and Bekah’s new studio, Last Chance Media. Beginning with only a few days each month, the two created simple, arcade-feeling Flash and iOS games that promoted simple game mechanics and aesthetic sensibilities that fit into Adam’s love for pixel art and incredible game soundtracks. Around this time, Adam’s first major titles begin appearing: Canabalt, Gravity Hook, and Fathom. Adam’s platformer, Fathom, had an especially intriguing finale that took some of his fans at the time by surprise – a boss fight you could not win.
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Canabalt
“You die, and you have this bizarre exploration experience,” Adam says. “You find this door at the bottom of the ocean, it opens up, and you sink down into it.”
Until that point, the Saltsmans’ stories in games always seemed to present something both unexpected and unnerving: a sinking robot, a crumbling city, a suffocating space mission. The games were always fun and engaging, but they had something larger to say. Each new project from Adam and Bekah were then examples of both creativity in design and were challenging the idea of what a game could even look like. That philosophy would eventually spur the change of Last Chance Media into their latest team-up and best-known collaboration: Finji.
Finji Begins
Having scraped and saved for nearly 10 years, the Saltsmans were finally ready to unveil their development studio, Finji, on March 3, 2014, along with its first major internal project: Overland. It marked an exceptionally creative endeavor for Adam and Bekah, leaving behind action platforming in favor of eerie, strategic grid-based movement. Any given level is presented from a bird’s eye view, showing various interactable elements for your character and hiding others within obscuring shadows.
“The diorama, at a glance, should look like a little apocalyptic story,” Adam said. “That was the rule for the level design: there should clearly be your characters, menacing forces and an escape route.”
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Night In The Woods
However, before they could reach that final product, the Saltsmans put out a very candid, transparent request on their blog, seeking animators and audio engineers who weren’t looking to create something that sounded or looked like anything else on the market. Rather than base qualifications simply on prior experience or padded portfolios, they ensured interested artists were considered through paid, practical demos and tests that proved their intuition and problem-solving skills rather than simply their past work.
Adam and Bekah have always been keenly aware of the toxicity in some of the gaming industry’s highest-stake work environments, particularly regarding “crunch time” before release. That attitude bleeds not only into their game development but also into their relationships with creators as studio publishers themselves. In fact, before they agreed to publish Tunic with creator Andrew Shouldice, they mentored him on the project for years prior. This way, Finji could view Shouldice’s work on the game not only from a marketability, quality-assurance, or localization perspective (which was crucial) but also as fellow creative partners.
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I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
“Our relationship didn't start with a publishing negotiation; it started with them taking time to give a stranger some feedback and advice,” Shouldice said. “It's that willingness to help that I think makes them such an important part of the game development community.”
Another of Finji’s published games, Wilmot’s Warehouse, first appeared as a part of Humble Monthly on Steam, but creator Richard Hogg knew that in order to improve the game’s performance and expand its audience, he would need a proper publisher. While Hogg had worked with various publishing groups before, it seemed that Finji was especially capable of providing a friendly, cooperative relationship in which everyone involved could have input on the game’s design. Much like an indie record label that emerges from veteran bands supporting younger artists, Finji’s own history in creating games sets it apart from other publishers.
“Finji is exactly like this, and, just like with those labels, there is an integrity and a camaraderie that naturally comes out of it,” Hogg said.
Ten years after those initial Overland blog posts, Finji is still looking for projects unlike anything else and continues to make space for game developers and creators who wouldn’t usually be in the room. In Adam’s experience, he’s found that indie developers often fit into two modes: People who want to make games just like their favorites or people who want to make games that correct the flaws in those same titles and invent something new. More often, however, a Finji game fits in neither category. There would be no Chicory: A Colorful Tale without Link’s Awakening. No Canabalt without Mirror’s Edge. No Night In The Woods without one of Adam’s own personal favorites: Kentucky Route Zero.
“You are giving the player an experience they otherwise would not have had,” Bekah said. “They are able to experience games in a way that they’ve never experienced games before. That idea is fed through Night In The Woods.”
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Wilmot's Warehouse
Seven years since Night In The Woods’ initial release, the game continues to leave as much of an impact as it did when fans first played it. Its casual platforming roots meant for an especially approachable gaming experience, and Scott Benson’s wholly unique art direction helped the game transcend its medium and find itself in myriad forms; fan art, tattoo designs, cosplays, and more.
“There were thousands upon thousands of responses on social media, from people who discovered it last week to people who discovered it seven years ago, talking about how that game not only changed what games were for them but also changed them as a person,” Bekah said.
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Perhaps the most recognizable aspect of Finji, beyond their award-winning games, is its logo: a ferret wearing a crown. Designed by Richard Hogg (creator of Finji’s published title, Wilmot’s Warehouse), the design embodies two very important parts of the founders Adam and Bekah Saltsmans’ lives.
The crown is representative of their eldest son, Kingsley, while the ferret mascot is a sly reference to Marty Stouffer’s Wild America on PBS, which featured a mob of pet ferrets in one episode. The scene showing their escape is a favorite of Adam’s.
As for “Finji,” the studio’s name serves as a loving homage to the childhood nickname for their youngest son, Finnegan.
Combining elements of the Saltsmans’ humor, inventiveness, and nostalgia were paramount in Hogg’s logo design.
The sheer approachability and ease of access toward Finji games like Night In The Woods remains one of the studio’s hallmark factors and one the Saltsmans pride themselves on. “No Fail” mode was included in Tunic so combat-averse players can still enjoy the adventure. In the BAFTA award-winning Chicory: A Colorful Tale, you have a fast-paced, engaging action-adventure that still relies on a touching story about creativity and passion. In these same seminal titles, Finji brings together creative teams and designers who lend their original voices to the blossoming indie game industry.
“Chicory is a great example because you have somebody who maybe hasn’t art directed a game that size before, and so it looks super special,” Adam said. “And you have very subversive gameplay. You don’t hurt anybody in Chicory.”
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Tunic
These past 10 years, Finji has shown that person-first, supportive video game publishing and development can lead to higher quality experiences, never sacrificing camaraderie for crunch. The unifying factor between their games, then, is the incredible attention to detail each of their gathered teams present toward story, setting and character.
“You can tell these all go together, even though none of them look the same,” Bekah said. “They have this hyper-dedication to place, where the place is an extra character in the game that has motivations that act out upon the player.”
Nowhere will this be truer than in Finji’s upcoming 2025 title.
Spiritual Successor
Overlapping with the marketing and releases of both Tunic and I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (from Sarah Northway, marking the first woman-led release with Finji) development began for Finji’s newest title, Usual June, in February 2021. The fundamental design was going to be very different from its past published releases, like Tunic. Usual June would be a more bespoke and considered experience, less so an open-world for the player to freely explore. It’s also the first development project from Finji since Overland’s release in 2019. But while Overland and Usual June are both stories about the end of the world, the latter marks another major genre departure for the Saltsmans and Finji: a 3D action-adventure.
“An initial inspiration was Secret Of Mana, which is Bekah’s favorite game,” Adam said. “It has real-time battles with dodging and charge attacks. We thought, let’s take the guts of that.”
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Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Usual June is a paranormal story, fundamentally a mystery story, but not with a normal, formulaic detective structure. The playable character, June, has the supernatural ability to speak with ghosts, which when combined with the “weird-looking, glowing stuff” (as Adam puts it) briefly shown in the trailer, you’re left with the notes of impossibility lying at the root of Usual June’s mystery. The worldbuilding for Finji and their narrative collaborator, Sweet Baby Inc., then became a sort of experiment: How would a normal-enough town of people react to sudden changes of supernatural phenomena? What are the consequences of learning about the paranormal beneath the surface?
“In Usual June, you will mostly see what June sees and mostly understand what June understands, which is not going to be everything,” Adam said. “There will be things that you don’t fix, there will be some things that don’t get explained or are too hard to explain. I hope that’s one of the things that people love about it, that there’s space to inhabit and think about it.”
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Usual June
One way players will be able to inhabit the mystery of June’s town, Fen Harbor, more fully is through its inclusive storytelling within the detective-mystery as a whole. Rather than rely on checklists for June to mark down as the mystery comes to a close, Adam and Bekah lean further into the common tropes of some of their favorite sci-fi and supernatural mysteries, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I Am Not Okay With This, and even, for Adam especially, the Godzilla films.
To demonstrate this, Adam began to act out a noir-like scene where a hard-hitting journalist might be visiting a mysterious character who knows more about the mystery than they’re letting on. He proceeded to fish around and pick up miscellaneous objects from nearby shelves in order to seem aloof as he continued to question his suspect.
“Outside of Phoenix Wright, I’ve never seen a game work like that,” Adam said. “The story areas weren’t a 3D space where you can wander around and look at weird stuff on the shelf while you banter with a character.”
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Adam and Bekah Saltsman
With much more to learn about Usual June before its release sometime next year, the Saltsmans and their team at Finji look forward to teasing further secrets. How does a missing kid case fit into June’s life? Where is this alternate world full of neon-colored caves and crystalline monsters? And what’s the connection between June’s powers and Teddy, her friendly ghost companion?
All of that remains to be answered... Or will it be?
“It’s not going to be a game where all the things get explained,” Adam said. “A lot of the joy for us is going to live in leaving places for people to have fun in the fog.
This article originally appeared in Issue 365 of Game Informer.
Revealed during The Game Awards 2023 last December, The First Descendant is an upcoming looter-shooter RPG from Nexon and one of the South Korean company's first forays into the console market space. Due out this year, this free-to-play third-person multiplayer shooter is hoping to attract players within the Destiny 2 and Warframe community and newcomers alike. And after playing the game for a couple of hours, we're inclined to believe Nexon is on to something here.
Ahead of the game's release, Game Informer editor Wesley LeBlanc traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to visit Nexon and speak to some of The First Descendant's leads about what players can expect, its plans for the game after launch, and more.
Check it out in Game Informer's exclusive interview feature below:
Goichi "Suda51" Suda is arguably the most consistently unique game designer in the industry. He created Killer7, the No More Heroes series, worked with James Gunn (before he directed Guardians of the Galaxy or was put in charge of DC films) on Lollipop Chainsaw, and lots more. In preparation for his role as the keynote speaker at MomoCon this year, we caught up with him over e-mail to discuss his next game, Hotel Barcelona (a collaboration with Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro), remastering his 2011 game Shadows of the Damned, Batman, and more.
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Hotel Barcelona
Game Informer: Hotel Barcelona is inspired by horror films. Are there specific films you cite as references?
Goichi "Suda51" Suda: There are a lot of them. Swery of White Owls is the main creator, so you should probably ask him this question, as I don't want to spoil anything. It's mostly based on Swery’s own personal tastes – however, I do have a good amount of input in it as well – so I'd suggest continuing this interview with Swery himself. I'll be looking forward to reading it!
How do you and Swery split the work on a game like Hotel Barcelona? Do you collaborate on a script, or do you each handle specific characters? Does one of you handle gameplay, the other story?
At first, Swery was like, "Let's write the whole thing up character by character," but now I'm extremely busy with Grasshopper projects so I've been leaving most of it up to him. We both came up with a lot of ideas, but Swery has been doing most of the work; I do provide some input sometimes, but Swery and White Owls are handling the actual development.
What are your favorite time loops in fiction?
One would be the German show Dark on Netflix. Also, Flower, Sun & Rain is time loop-based, too; that time loop was actually based on an X-Files episode called "Monday" (Season 6/Episode 14) that was really interesting. That was where the idea from Flower, Sun & Rain FSR came from.
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Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered
Has the Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered tempted you to make changes that are closer to what you wanted it to be?
No; this game feels like our own child – it's something we created, and we love it for what it is. For the remastered version, content-wise, we simply added a New Game+ feature and new costumes we weren't able to include before. We'd always wanted to do a proper, loyal remaster for SotD. It originally stemmed from Kurayami (which ran in Edge Magazine in the UK), which is something else that I'd actually like to make a game out of at some point. But Damned is Damned, and Kurayami is something else altogether now.
Damned actually came from the sixth draft of Kurayami. If possible, I'd like to do something with all the first through five drafts, respectively, which are all very different.
The fourth draft ended up becoming Black Knight Sword, and Kurayami Dance was I believe the third or fifth draft, I think.
You were publicly unhappy with Shadows of the Damned at launch. How do you feel about it in 2024?
A lot of things happened at the time, but I look back on the whole experience pretty fondly now. While we were making the original, we definitely had a lot of friction with EA – we argued about a lot of aspects and ideas for the game, and both we and EA made a lot of compromises, but those experiences are what brought about Garcia, Paula, Fleming, and their whole story, so I love the end result as a Grasshopper game in general and as our own personal creation as well. I had some great experiences with Mikami making the game; we got called out to Los Angeles by [publisher] EA this one time, and there were like ten people in this hotel suite sitting at this big table. When we walked in, it kinda freaked us out. We got really bitched out, getting asked things like, "Just what the hell are you trying to make?!" That kind of experience is rare – especially in the video game industry – and I feel like if this was the underworld or something I probably would’ve gotten whacked in that room (laughs). So many of the experiences we had back then were super interesting and are really fond and valuable memories now.
Now that I think about it, I believe that hotel thing happened at the Marriott in Los Angeles. Like I said, there were like ten people from EA – some of their top dudes – all lined up, and we had no idea what was going on. We were simply told, "Come to this meeting." No context or anything, so we were shocked when we got there. It's actually sort of an awesome memory now. It wasn't exactly scary, since being the video game industry and all, I knew we weren't actually going to get killed or anything, but we were definitely surprised.
Anyway, I'm really proud of what we made, and I cherish all the memories I have of those times.
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What is the most underrated Suda 51 game?
There would be two: Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked & Blood+ One Night Kiss. Blood+ wasn't released outside of Japan, but Samurai Champloo was released in Japan and North America. They're both really great games, and the stories were totally different from their respective original versions. Also, these two games basically spawned the No More Heroes.
If you get the opportunity, be sure to try Samurai Champloo. Blood+ is only available in Japanese, but if you can, please give that one a try, too. I consider Samurai Champloo, Blood+, and No More Heroes to be my "Big 3 Sword Action Games." Without the first two, I'm not sure that No More Heroes would have ever been made.
What are some of your recent favorite video games that you didn't work on?
I've downloaded a ton of games recently, but I have the bad habit of not actually getting around to playing them [laughs]. I started Helldivers 2 recently, and I'm still deciding on whether or not to really get full-on into it. I've also been digging Alan Wake 2, which I haven't cleared yet but would like to sometime soon.
What are some of your recent favorite movies and TV shows?
TV: 3 Body Problem (both the Tencent version and the Netflix version); movie: The Iron Claw.
You and Swery65 use similar names. You both strive to make unique games. Does it bother you when people confuse the two of you? Or is it flattering?
I'm really good friends with Swery, so it doesn't bother me at all. I mean, they're totally different numbers anyway, so I really don't get annoyed or anything when people get them mixed up.
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Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro's Deadly Premonition
What surprised you about working with Swery?
It's well-known that Swery is the director and CEO of White Owls, but he's also a really good producer, and he also does project management-related stuff, as well. He's generally thought of as mainly a game creator, but he's actually really proficient in all kinds of game development areas; he writes scenarios, he handles things like product management, etc. I think he has this image of just drinking lots of beer and messing around a lot, but he's actually a super serious, hard worker and a really great producer – and although Swery himself may not want me to say stuff out loud [laughs], he's really quite professional, which I've seen firsthand throughout his career, and I want people to know this.
What do you think he would say is surprising about working with you?
Probably the fact that although we promised we'd both write up the scenarios for Hotel Barcelona, I ended up not doing it and left it up to him [laughs].
Are there other developers you would like to collaborate with in the future?
I spoke with Akihiro Hino, CEO of Level-5 a little while back, and I'd really like to collaborate with him on something. The difference between the two of us is like night and day, so I think it would be really interesting to see what we could come up with.
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Lollipop Chainsaw
Would you consider making a licensed DC video game with James Gunn?
I haven't spoken with him much recently apart from a few greetings or DMs on Twitter here and there, but I think I would totally be down with doing another game with him if the opportunity presented itself. I love Batman, so if it was going to be a DC game, then I’d really like to try doing something with the Black & White series. Also, James is really good at always making sure to get back to me quickly whenever I message him, which I really appreciate, but I know that he's obviously extremely busy, so I try not to bother him too much.
When will Killer7 get the remake/remaster treatment?
Unfortunately we don’t own the IP for Killer7 – Capcom does – so I don't really have any say in that.
Are you familiar with terms like 2-minute meta, homogenization, or even transpose lines? If you are, then this article might be up your alley. New expansions are always a fun time, especially for high-end raiders who will be getting shiny new buttons to press, and with that comes new rotations. After approximately 8,000 hours of playing Final Fantasy XIV and clearing The Omega Protocol on release, I think I'm able to provide some insight about the new weaponskills, spells, and abilities (and their implications for rotations, openers, and general play) I saw at a recent preview event for its upcoming Dawntrail expansion. I am not an expert at every job, and I could not test each job to its limit, so feel free to point out mistakes on my part.
Unless it is pertinent to the rotation flow, potencies from damaging abilities are purposefully left off since many balance changes could come before the game launches. And just a heads up: don’t use this overview to find your job’s perfect rotation at launch – I will leave that to the mentors in The Balance.
Before we hop in, here is a critical reminder: Everything here was seen on an in-development build and is subject to change. Not just potencies but abilities may be changed or removed, and new ones we didn’t even see might be in the game at launch. As a little black birdie once said: We just don't know.
Overview
Some high-level things:
Multiple jobs get additional mitigation or upgrades to existing mitigation. This makes me wonder how much damage the combat developers plan for us to take. In some instances, like in The Omega Protocol, tanks must have a healer mitigation to live through the damage. Are the mitigation changes to enable every tank to handle a buster by itself, or will they still need external mitigation in high-end content? We will have to wait and see.
Creative Studio III has standardized raid buffs to 20 seconds in Dawntrail. Even Searing Light is 20 seconds and now increases damage by 5%. I don't have screenshots to confirm CSIII has changed every 15-second raid buff, but it would be strange if several did get changed and some did not.
As mentioned in the 81st Live Letter, some actions will now have the ability to be consolidated into one button if it's part of a combo. 1-2-3 combos for every job released before Dawntrail have remained untouched and cannot be combined into one button. Viper and Pictomancer do have this implemented into what I view as their 1-2-3, though it is not optional. I was surprised at how little this new feature is utilized; every instance of it felt warranted.
Jobs play very similar to their Endwalker versions. From what FFXIV director and producer Naoki Yoshida, lovingly referred to as Yoshi-P in the community, has said and what we see now with the new information, Dawntrail will not be the expansion where we see extensive job changes. Yoshi-P has mentioned that the changes some players would like to see could happen in 8.0, but we have no specific information on that now, and plans could change by the time the next expansion comes around.
Tanks
All tanks receive the following:
Lv. 94: Enhanced Rampart - Adds an additional effect to Rampart that increases HP recovery via healing action on self by 15%.
Lv. 96: Melee Mastery II - Potency upgrades to various weaponskills.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Reprisal - Extends the duration of Reprisal to 15 seconds.
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Paladin
Lv. 76:Supplication, Sepulcher - New Atonement combo actions.
Lv. 92: Guardian - Reduces damage taken by 40%. Gives a shield equivalent to a heal of 1,000 potency.
Lv. 96: Imperator - Upgraded AoE Requiescat.
Lv. 100: Blade of Honor - oGCD combo action off Blade of Valor.
The magical sword-and-board tank that headlined the previous expansion isn’t seeing any adjustments that fundamentally change the rotation. You will hit the same button for Atonement, Supplication, and Sepulcher. There's no trait upgrading the old Atonement stacks into the new combo - you will have all three as soon as you unlock Atonement. All Atonement combo actions preserve your 1-2-3 combo. Sepulcher has a higher potency than a Divine Might Holy Spirit, so you will want to have it inside of your Fight or Flight window, but that might not always be possible. Blade of Honor is an oGCD and won't be pushing anything out of your burst, either. Goring Blade is only available during Fight or Flight, which feels strange, but it will not matter in most cases. And yes, Shield Bash and Cover are still there.
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Warrior
Lv. 92: Damnation - Reduces damage taken by 40%. Grants a 400 potency heal-over-time for 15 seconds after the effect of Damnation expires.
Lv. 96: Primal Wrath - oGCD combo action off Inner Release that is able to be spent after using Fell Cleave three times while in Inner Release.
Lv. 100: Primal Ruination - GCD combo action off Primal Rend. Guaranteed critical direct hit.
Warrior's shiniest additions are both tied to Inner Release. There are two new buttons to press every 60 seconds, but Warrior has plenty of space for more buttons in its burst, so there's little to ponder here. Damnation's heal-over-time effect triggers as soon as the damage mitigation effect ends, so you could Shake It Off early to get the regen before waiting for Damnation to expire at the probable cost of being grossly inefficient. Warrior and Paladin keep their damaging gap closers, which may be confusing since Dark Knight and Gunbreaker lost theirs, but pragmatically, it makes sense as their burst windows can afford the space.
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Dark Knight
Lv. 54: Shadowstride - New non-damaging gapcloser that teleports you to enemy target. Replaces Plunge.
Lv. 68: Delirium - Upgraded Blood Weapon. Combines the effects of old Blood Weapon and Delirium.
Lv. 92: Shadowed Vigil - Reduces damage taken by 40%. 1,200 potency heal after dropping below 50% HP or after 20 seconds.
Lv. 96: Scarlet Delirium, Comeuppance, Torcleaver - GCD Combo actions that replace Bloodspiller during Delirium.
Lv. 96: Impalement - GCD combo action that replaces Quietus during Delirium.
Lv. 100: Disesteem - GCD combo action off Living Shadow.
Dark Knight is the first entry on the list where the opener may change beyond pressing the new buttons. In the standard opener, you would pop Blood Weapon about four seconds before pulling. Now, Blood Weapon is combined with Delirium, and the stacks only last 15 seconds, so you would lose one or two of the Delirium stacks waiting for raid buffs to come out if you kept the old Blood Weapon timing. Living Shadow no longer costs a gauge, so you can summon Esteem earlier to get more of his big hits under buffs. I don't anticipate either of these changes to cause too much hassle, but they are changes nonetheless. The new gap closer is a nice change to reduce the amount of weaving necessary during burst windows, and you can still reduce its cooldown with Enhanced Unmend if you want to - although if this article makes sense to you, then you almost certainly won't be. Shadowed Vigil providing an Excogitation-like effect could save you during Walking Dead. It wouldn't be efficient to use a 40% mitigation on top of Living Dead, but if it keeps you out of the grave, it keeps you out of the grave.
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Gunbreaker
Lv. 56: Trajectory - New non-damaging gapcloser that dashes you to enemy target. Replaces Rough Divide.
Lv. 92: Great Nebula - Reduces damage taken by 40%. Increases maximum HP by 20% and restores the amount increased.
Lv. 96: Fated Brand - AoE Continuation for Fated Circle.
Lv. 100: Reign of Beasts, Noble Blood, Lion Heart - GCD combo actions off Bloodfest.
This is still Thancred. An AoE Continuation for Fated Circle is nice for high mob count situations, although I don't anticipate seeing those in high-end raiding. The new Bloodfest combo is an interesting, high-damage replacement for other GCDs in the opener. With either 2.5 or <= 2.47 second GCD recasts, there are three very obvious candidates to be replaced by the new combo in the opener, and it allows for holding more cartridges coming out of your burst. This may help alleviate the awkwardness of two cartridge windows; Kronk will have to check the timeline. At Media Tour, the Bloodfest combos did break the Gnashing Fang combo. This is a good candidate for changing when it goes live or even in future patches. Having three GCDs that don't have Continuation procs during burst would be an enormous quality of life benefit for popping mitigation or moving the boss.
Healers
All healers receive the following:
Lv. 94: Enhanced Swiftcast - Reduces cooldown of Swiftcast to 40 seconds.
Lv. 94: White Magic/Tactician's/Magick Mastery - Potency upgrades to various spells.
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White Mage
Lv. 40: Aetherial Shift - 15 yalm dash in the direction you are facing. 60-second cooldown.
Lv. 92: Glare IV - Instant-cast GCD combo action off Presence of Mind. 3 stacks.
Lv. 96: Medica III - Upgraded Medica II.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Tetragrammaton - Two stacks of Tetragrammaton.
Lv. 100: Divine Caress - oGCD combo action off Temperance. 400 potency barrier to party. members within 15 yalm radius. Grants Regen with 200 potency for 15 seconds after the barrier effect fades.
Glare mages stay glaring. Ever since the change to give all healers 1.5-second casts on their primary damaging skill, I don't think movement has been problematic for White Mages. Still, it certainly doesn't hurt to have three instant casts every two minutes and a lengthy dash every 60 seconds. The dash is not tied to Temperance or any other ability and unlocks very early. There are many potential uses, such as adjusting at the last second or moving for Defamation-like mechanics. Medica III didn't upgrade the initial heal but did boost the regen to 175 potency for a total of 875 potency over its 15-second duration. Divine Caress is a powerful tool, and as you will see with the rest of the healers, the capstone abilities of healers in Dawntrail are strong.
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Scholar
Lv. 92: Baneful Impaction - oGCD combo action off Chain Stratagem. Deals damage over time for 15 seconds and is able to be stacked with Biolysis.
Lv. 96: Concitation - Upgraded Succor.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Recitation - Reduces cooldown of Recitation to 60 seconds.
Lv. 100: Seraphism - 100 potency heal over time for party members within 50 yalms. Changes Adloquium to Manifestation and Concitation to Accession. Resets Emergency Tactics recast timer and reduces its recast timer to one second. Lasts for 20 seconds. Effect cannot be stacked with Dissipation. Three-minute cooldown.
Lv. 100: Manifestation, Accession - Upgraded instant-cast Adloquium and Concitation. Can only be used while under Seraphism.
A new damage-over-time ability, upgraded Succor with 180% shielding (the heal is the same), and reduced cooldown of Recitation is nice, but the real eye-catcher is Seraphism. Instant-cast Manifestation or Accession with Emergency Tactics on every cast for 20 seconds is a lot of healing throughput. Manifestation ups the healing to 240 potency with no change to the shield, and Accession ups the healing to 240 potency with a 180% shield. Even though you can't pair it with the increased healing effect of Dissipation, you can use it with Fey Illumination and whatever other increased healing effects your party brings. One interesting bit is that it does provide a heal over time, but its duration is not neatly divisible by three to account for the server tick like most over-time effects in the game are - aside from Flamethrower on Machinist. We will have to wait and see if there is anything to that or if the timer will be changed at launch.
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Astrologian
Lv. 30: Astral Draw - Draws the Balance, the Arrow, the Spire, and the Lord of Crowns (At Lv. 70 and beyond). Changes to and shares a recast timer with Umbral Draw after using.
Lv. 30: Umbral Draw - Draws the Spear, the Bole, the Ewer, and the Lady of Crowns (At Lv. 70 and beyond). Changes to and shares a recast timer with Astral Draw after using.
Lv. 30: Play I - Plays either the Balance or the Spear.
Lv. 30: Play II - Plays either the Arrow or the Bole.
Lv. 30: Play III - Plays either the Spire or the Ewer.
Lv. 30: The Balance - Increase damage by 6% if target is melee, 3% if ranged.
Lv. 30: The Arrow - Increase HP recovery via healing by 10%.
Lv. 30: The Spire - 400 potency shield.
Lv. 30: The Spear - Increase damage by 6% if target is ranged, 3% if melee.
Lv. 30: The Bole - Reduces damage taken by 10%.
Lv. 30: The Ewer - 200 potency healing over time for 15 seconds.
Lv. 92: Oracle - oGCD combo action off Divination.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Essential Dignity II - Three charges of Essential Dignity.
Lv. 100: Sun Sign - oGCD combo action off Neutral Sect. 10% damage mitigation for party members within 30 yalms for 15 seconds.
That may look like many changes, but it is less overwhelming than you think. Starting with the post-90 additions, Oracle is a simple damaging oGCD you press after Divination. Helios Conjunction matches Medica III's update: no change to initial heal but an increase to the heal over time effect to 175 potency, totaling 875 potency over its entire duration. Neutral Sect gets a follow-up in Sun Sign that gives the party another 10% mitigation, which is a less exciting capstone than White Mage and Scholar's. Even so, party mitigation is strong and always welcome.
The card rework feels intuitive. You will get three cards for each draw: one for damage, one for mitigation, and one for healing. If you want to quibble about increased healing not being a mitigation and a shield not being a heal, then fair enough, but it's a good heuristic. There are now three play buttons – four if you count Minor Arcana – which eats up precious hotbar space. We lose Astrodyne, Redraw, and Undraw to compensate, though many Astrologian players don't even have Undraw on their hotbar. The final result of the rework is slightly less rDPS that will probably be made up in raw potency, fewer cards to play for burst, and more utility.
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Sage
Lv. 82: Eukrasian Dyskrasia - AoE damage over time effect. Augmented from Dyskrasia after pressing Eukrasia. Does stack with Eukrasian Dosis.
Lv. 96: Eukrasian Prognosis II - Upgraded Eukrasian Prognosis.
Lv. 100: Philosophia - Increase healing magic potency by 20% for 20 seconds. Grants party members in 20 yalm radius Eudaimonia, which gives a 150 potency heal every time you land a spell for 20 seconds.
Expectedly, Sage and Reaper didn't receive any massive changes, seeing as they were the latest jobs added to the game. Having an AoE damage over time is nice, especially when it doesn't take up more space on the hotbar. Eukrasian Prognosis II increases the shield to 360%. Psyche plays into the idea of Sage being the healer who does the most damage by doing damage. That's all it does: no healing, not tied to anything, just damage. We get Pankardia, except it's not called Pankardia. 20% increased healing is substantial, equal to Scholar's Dissipation. The fact that Philosophia is duration-based and not stacked-based could mean a late weave with higher spell speed comfortably squeezes out some extra healing potency, but I don't think that will be a factor in determining the ideal spell speed.
Melee DPS
All melee DPS receive the following:
Lv. 94: Enhanced Second Wind - Increased potency to 800.
Lv. 94: Melee Mastery - Potency upgrades to various weaponskills and abilities. Various jobs have different names for this, but the idea of the trait is the same.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Feint - Extends the duration of Feint to 15 seconds.
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Monk
Lv. 64: Earth's Reply - oGCD combo action off Riddle of Earth. Heals self and party. There are two potencies attached to Earth's Reply: "Cure Potency: 300" and "Earth's Resolve Potency: 500." I did not take enough screenshots to confirm if Earth's Resolve replaces the function of the Earth's Reply that is currently in the game; apologies.
Lv. 96: Wind's Reply - GCD combo action off Riddle of Wind. 900 potency.
Lv. 100: Fire's Reply - GCD combo action off Riddle of Fire. Grants Formless Fist after using. 1,300 potency.
At this point, we should expect Monk to change every expansion. This rework does change the core of the job while still keeping the flow. Instead of managing a buff and damage over time debuff, you build stacks in each form with one weaponskill and spend them with another. The rate at which you switch GCDs is different while still feeling somewhat familiar. Brotherhood allows you to hold ten Chakra, which will help prevent overcapping. Keen eyes will notice this is the first entry that lists potencies. There are some implications: I'm not smart enough to math it out myself, but let's look.
In the preview event build, opening the Lunar Nadi was stronger than opening Solar. Wind's Reply and Fire's Reply are very powerful, and on the GCD, it makes me wonder if setting up Perfect Balance windows earlier, like in Double Solar or Solar Lunar, will become standard. Fire's Reply granting Formless Fist and Wind's Reply not granting it will probably affect where the optimal placement will be. Landing Demolish under buffs is now less important, so Monks will have more flexibility when entering burst windows. I could be cooking a little too hard and be completely wrong about everything. All I know for sure is that Monk is still fast, and the most hardcore Monk players will still lock their frames to avoid Riddle of Fire drift.
Lv. 70: Nastrond - Replaces Geirskogul while in Life of the Dragon. Stack-based with two-second recast timer instead of 10-second recast.
Lv. 92: Rise of the Dragon - oGCD combo action off Dragonfire Dive.
Lv. 96: Lance Barrage - Upgraded Vorpal Thrust.
Lv. 96: Spiral Blow - Upgraded Disembowel.
Lv. 100: Starcross - oGCD combo action off Stardiver.
As stated in the 81st Live Letter and the subsequent Live Letter Digest, Dragoon did not receive the planned extensive overhaul once the developers decided on their vision for combat in 7.0. If you were a fan of Endwalker Dragoon, then I think you will be happy with this rework. The seven-part GCD combo stays intact with the last GCD before Raiden Thrust losing its positional. Dragonfire Dive, High Jump, and Stardiver now have follow-up oGCD combos. Even with the loss of Dragon Sight and Spineshatter Dive, the burst window is still relatively busy and less prone to drifting.
Life of the Dragon is still around with a few adjustments: Life only lasts 20 seconds, eyes are gone (so pressing Geirskogul immediately puts you into Life), Nastrond has three stacks instead of having a 10-second cooldown, and there's a 15% damage increase while in Life that I don't think is currently in the game (Note: I don't have footage to confirm Nastrond always has three stacks, perhaps there is a condition or is tied to a trait). Players will no longer accidentally let their Life window drift because they forgot that Geirskogul will be off cooldown as soon as Life ends. They still might be tanking the floor, though.
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Ninja
Lv. 26: Aeolian Edge - Increased potency when spending Kazematoi.
Lv. 45: Increase Attack Speed - Huton gauge is gone and the increased attack speed now a trait.
Lv. 45: Huton - AoE version of Suiton.
Lv. 54: Armor Crush - No longer extends Huton. Grants two stacks of Kazematoi.
Lv. 66: Dokumori - Upgraded Mug.
Lv. 92: Kunai's Bane - Upgraded AoE Trick Attack.
Lv. 96: Deathfrog Medium - Upgraded Hellfrog Medium after using Dokumori.
Lv. 96: Zesho Meppo - Upgraded Bhavacakra after using Dokumori.
Lv. 100: Tenri Jindo - oGCD combo action off Ten Chi Jin.
Sasuke has some shiny tools beyond Chidori in this expansion. None of them should change the rotation in a meaningful way. The most noticeable change is the removal of the Huton gauge and Huraijin. Armor Crush will be generating stacks of Kazematoi instead of extending Huton, and Aeolian Edge will be spending those stacks. Ninja players, myself included, don't play Ninja for the filler; we play for the big burst windows, so that change isn't too impactful, aside from not needing to refill the Huton gauge after long periods of downtime. Kunai's Bane is a nice visual upgrade to Trick Attack, and being AoE is great. A fancier spender of Ninki is a nice little bonus every two minutes. Tenri Jindo is the main attraction, and while it has a lot of potency, it isn't as much as Hyosho Ranryu and thus won't feel as bad when it doesn't crit.
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Samurai
Lv. 82: Tengetsu - Upgraded Third Eye. 500 potency heal after eight seconds.
Lv. 92: Gyofu - Upgraded Hakaze.
Lv. 94: Enhanced Hissatsu - Reduces Hissatsu: Guren and Hissatsu: Senei cooldown to 60 seconds.
Lv. 96: Zanshin - oGCD combo action of Ikishoten.
Lv. 100: Tendo Goken - Upgraded Tenka Goken after using Meikyo Shisui.
Lv. 100: Tendo Setsugekka - Upgraded Midare Setsugekka after using Meikyo Shisui.
Lv. 100: Tendo Kaeshi Goken - Tsubame-gaeshi combo for Tendo Goken.
Lv. 100: Tendo Kaeshi Setsugekka - Tsubame-gaeshi combo for Tendo Setsugekka.
If you have ever read or watched a Samurai guide to become sufficient at playing Samurai, you will almost certainly remain sufficient. Not being able to Tsubame-gaeshi without first pressing Meikyo Shisui feels a bit strange. It probably won't matter much in Savage, but it might be more relevant in Ultimates, where looping isn't a thing. Tendo Goken and Tendo Setsugekka are nice upgrades that won't change the rotation. Zanshin being an oGCD makes it a comfy weave in burst windows. Third Eye getting an unexpected upgrade is a nice bonus. You won’t be griefing your healers quite as much if you decide to take avoidable damage to gain Kenki. You wouldn't think about doing that, though, right? Right?
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Reaper
Lv. 92: Sacrificium - oGCD that replaces Gluttony when Enshrouded.
Lv. 96: Executioner's Gibbet - Upgraded Gibbet after using Gluttony.
Lv. 96: Executioner's Gallows - Upgraded Gallows after using Gluttony.
Lv. 96: Executioner's Guillotine - Upgraded Guillotine after using Gluttony.
Lv. 100: Perfectio - Ranged GCD combo action off Communio after using Plentiful Harvest.
Just like Sage, there are just a few notable changes here. Plentiful Harvest allowing a use of Enshroud instead of giving gauge is nice to prevent overcapping. I don't think it prevents Reaper from being resource negative over two minutes - the change makes no difference to net gauge. Harpe and Harvest will grant you gauge, though they won't appear frequently in the rotation. Sacrificium is another Enshroud weave that has three potential slots to slide into. Gluttony will enhance your Gibbet and Gallows combo or Guillotine. Perfectio has a range of 25 yalms, which is ten more than Hell's Egress or Hell's Ingress will take you, so you will almost always be in range to cast it. Early Gluttony becomes a more attractive option for an opener now that buffs are 20 seconds long. Perfectio taking up a GCD might result in rearranging double Enshroud windows to ensure both Perfectio's land in buffs.
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Viper
This is where I put my hands up and give credit to people who craft openers and rotations. I cannot, in good conscience, give you an idea of what the opener will look like or how the rotation will flow. The staff at the preview event even gave us documents to help explain the kit, but I'm still lost. If you frequent The Balance Discord server, your understanding of the job will probably be as good as mine. You will have to go elsewhere to get a comprehensive breakdown of the new job. Here's what I can say about Viper:
You will do your 1-2-3 combo primarily with a sword in each hand. The dual sword icon indicates which combo route you should pick with separate routes providing one of two buffs: Swiftscaled (15% attack speed) or Hunter's Instinct (10% damage increase). You have an alternative combo starter to your 1-2-3 that applies Noxious Gnash: a debuff on the target, which increases your damage against said target by 10% at the cost of less damage. A separate combo chain will apply both buffs and the debuff called Dreadwinder. Dreadwinder has two stacks and a 40-second cooldown.
The red gems below the dual sword icon are your Vipersight gauge, which allows you to use a ranged combo. The blue gauge is called either Serpents Offering or Serpents Ire - I am not sure which it should be called as both were referenced, and I may be misunderstanding it. This will allow you to use your big burst, called Reawaken, where your GCD recast timer speeds up, and you do some hefty damage. I don't believe it's a fixed speed - with our preview gear that provided 952 skill speed, the GCD recast after receiving the Swiftscaled buff was 2.07. The Reawaken GCD recast was 1.65 seconds, approximately 20% more haste after the 15% buff. Or, perhaps the dev team decided they always want the GCD to be 1.65 seconds while you are Reawakened.
Viper feels like a mix of Samurai, Reaper, Gunbreaker, and Monk. Samurai in the sense that it doesn't have a raid buff, and you're maintaining two buffs that you won't ever need to think about during optimal play - they should just naturally refresh and aren't in any danger of falling off. Reaper in the sense that you're maintaining a debuff on your target, and the Reawaken window feels very similar to the Enshroud window. Gunbreaker in the sense that there are lots of oGCD weaves. And Monk in the sense you feel like you're playing fast. Is it bad that Viper feels like a mix of all these jobs? If it takes four, I think it stands out enough to have its own identity. There are lots of contextual combo choices that, at face value, make it seem engaging. High-end raiders don't know what that means; we only know the optimal choice.
Physical Ranged DPS
All physical ranged DPS receive the following:
Lv. 94: Enhanced Second Wind - Increased potency to 800.
Lv. 94: Ranged/Marksman's Mastery, Dynamic Dancer - Potency upgrades to various weaponskills and abilities.
Lv. 96: Resonant Arrow - GCD combo action off Barrage.
Lv. 100: Radiant Encore - GCD combo action off Radiant Finale. Does damage based on the number of Coda used in Radiant Finale.
Bard mains are rejoicing around the world now that their songs no longer require a target. While finessing your rotation to account for downtime might have been fun optimization for some, I think many more would much rather have the ability to use downtime to cycle your songs. I can only imagine what the backstage must have looked like when planning songs during Trio mechanics in Endwalker and all the previous expansions. We have another featured potency, and for good reason. In Endwalker, Army's Paeon was only slightly better than Mage's Ballad, so with the addition of Heartbreak Shot, perhaps the song order will change to accommodate. Someone else will have to do the math to confirm, though. Bard's more priority-based rotation means slotting in Resonant Arrow and Radiant Encore should be straightforward.
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Machinist
Lv. 92: Double Check - Upgraded Gauss Round. Now AoE.
Lv. 92: Checkmate - Upgraded Richochet. Still AoE.
Lv. 94: Enhanced Multiweapon - Two charges of Drill or Bioblaster.
Lv. 96: Excavator - GCD combo action off Chain Saw. Increases Battery Gauge by 20.
Lv. 100: Full Metal Field - GCD combo action off Barrel Stabilizer. Guaranteed critical direct hit.
Machinists get some really neat tools. Heh. Double Check and Checkmate are nice upgrades, mostly for improved visuals that will make Hypercharge windows more fun to look at. Full Metal Field is a sweet-looking ability, and not having to spend a Reassemble on it is great. Two charges of Drill and the addition of Excavator could shake up the opener a bit. You could still opt for the Delayed Tools opener and save Excavator, Full Metal Field, and the extra Drill for after Hypercharge. However, waiting for more qualified individuals to speak on that matter is a good idea. The Heat and Battery economy has changed, which will be reflected in Queen timings. In full uptime, you're sending Queen at 80-100 Battery and using Hypercharges to delay Battery generation, if needed. In Dawntrail, you will have 40 more battery from Excavator every two minutes and three less Heat generating GCDs due to Excavator and Full Metal Field. Maybe we will see 100 Battery Queens every minute now?
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Dancer
Lv. 92: Last Dance - New GCD. Can only be used after Standard Finish or Finishing Move.
Lv. 96: Finishing Move - Upgraded Standard Step after using Flourish.
Lv. 100: Dance of the Dawn - Upgraded Saber dance after using Technical Finish.
Despite its reputation for being the easiest job to play amongst the physical ranged DPS, Dancer has a lot of abilities to cram into burst windows. Thankfully, the new additions are all GCDs, so you won't have to manage any more weaves on top of all your feathers. Last Dance is a simple follow-up to Standard Finish without any frills. Flourish changes Standard Step to Finishing Move, which removes the need to do any steps before using. I did not test if you could Standard Finish, pop Flourish, and then Finishing Move, but I would imagine Standard Step and Finishing Move share a recast timer – if they didn't, that'd be awesome. Dance of the Dawn is effectively a buffed Saber Dance every two minutes that still costs 50 Espirit – again, nice and straightforward additions.
Magical Ranged DPS
All magical ranged DPS receive the following:
Lv. 94: Enhanced Swiftcast - Reduces the cooldown of Swiftcast to 40 seconds.
Lv. 94: Arcane/Enchanted Blade/Pictomancy Mastery - Potency upgrades to various spells and abilities (Black Mage's equivalent, Enhanced Enochian is at Lv. 96).
Lv. 98: Enhanced Addle - Extends the duration of Addle to 15 seconds.
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Black Mage
Lv. 90: Paradox - Always grants Firestarter. Only available when swapping from ice to fire or from Manafont.
Lv. 92: High Thunder - Upgraded Thunder III. Can only be used while under the effect of Thunderhead.
Lv 92: High Thunder II - Upgraded Thunder IV. Can only be used while under the effect of Thunderhead.
Lv. 96: Retrace - Moves Leylines to your current location.
Lv. 98: Enhanced Polyglot II - Three stacks of Polyglot.
Lv. 100: Flare Star - New GCD. Can only be used with six stacks of Astral Soul.
There's a lot to dig into here, so let's start with the simple changes: Leylines is moveable with Retrace, Polyglot now stacks up to three, Flare Star is the new "finisher" after filling the Astral Gauge. Swapping to ice will reset the Astral gauge. Manafont will grant full mana, Paradox, and three Umbral Hearts. Sharpcast is gone, and to compensate, you will be given a Thunderhead (functions the same as Thundercloud) proc every time you swap from ice to fire, vice versa, or from unaspected to either. Your Thunder spells can only be cast with that proc. Also, Paradox will always give you a Firestarter proc, but you only get Paradox when swapping from ice to fire. If I understand correctly, Black Mage will have more instant casts to use for movement with less flexibility on when you receive them.
I've only ever played standard line Black Mage, and even I know the Black Mage iceberg goes deep. There is one very impactful change here that will affect non-standard lines. We learned in the Live Letter that mana regeneration will now be based on spells casted while in ice. Only ice-based spells will trigger the increased mana regen, and the amount of mana restored is based on how many stacks of Umbral Ice you have. Three stacks of Umbral Ice will restore 10,000 mana, and one stack of Umbral Ice will restore 2,500 mana. I did not test how much mana is restored with two stacks of Umbral Ice; apologies. In an optimal scenario, your ice phase will now be Blizzard III, then Blizzard IV, and then you're done.
Seasoned Black Mage players will need to confirm, but I see transpose lines losing a lot of relative value. Transposing to ice gives you one stack of Umbral Ice, which will make your ice phase extra painful as you can't wait for mana ticks. Umbral Soul will restore mana based on how many stacks of Umbral Ice you have, so maybe there's something to investigate there. Transposing back to fire will not grant Paradox, which is how it works in Endwalker, but now you will lose your only chance at Paradox if Manafont isn't off cooldown. The opportunity cost of transposing is more significant - especially since the ice phase of the standard line will now just be two spells, though this doesn't mean it can’t work in some lines.
There could be some fun optimization in this new version of Black Mage. I don't play the job enough to know what that might look like, but I remain hopeful that the job will still be fun. The doomposting has already begun, and I don't think there's any stopping it. Maybe I'm crazy, but I have a good feeling about this one.
Lv. 100: Summon Solar Bahamut - Summons Solar Bahamut.
Lv. 100: Umbral Impulse - Replaces Ruin III while Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100 Umbral Flare - Replaces Tri-disaster while Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100: Sunflare - Replaces Astral Flow when Solar Bahamut is summoned.
Lv. 100: Enkindle Solar Bahamut - Orders Solar Bahamut to execute Exodus.
Lv. 100: Lux Solaris - New oGCD. Heals party members within 15 yalms for 500 potency. Can only be used after summing Solar Bahamut.
Despite having a decent number of new abilities written out, Summoner hasn’t changed very much. Necrotize replaces Fester, and Searing Flash will help you do a little more damage every two minutes after pressing Searing Light. Solar Bahamut is a cool addition, though many people aren't too thrilled, given the number of other Primals in the game. It doesn't change anything about the rotation, but there is a new oGCD that gives a heal to the party every Solar Bahamut summon, which is a nice bit of utility. Solar Bahamut is your first summon and should be in your burst every two minutes, with Bahamut and Phoenix alternating the odd-minute windows. Demi-summons were untouched, aside from some potency upgrades.
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Red Mage
Lv. 92: Vice of Thorns - oGCD combo action off Embolden.
Lv. 96: Grand Impact - Upgraded Jolt/Impact after using Acceleration.
Lv. 100: Cineration - oGCD combo action off Manafication. Granted after consuming all stacks of Manafication.
Red Mages didn't get a new finisher. Vice of Thorns and Cineration are oGCDs that will most likely slot between the current finishers instead of extending your melee combo. Manafication granting a use of your melee combo instead of giving Black and White Mana is nice, although it still cancels your combo. Acceleration being used on Jolt or Impact instead of Veraero or Verthunder will be different. That does mean fewer procs of Verstone and Verfire, but I do not know if that will affect your Black and White Mana generation in a meaningful way. Even though it's already possible, it might be easier to prevent your Fleche and Contre Sixte from drifting with the reduced Swiftcast cooldown.
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Pictomaner
For our grand finale, I will refrain from going too in-depth again. I spent more time on Viper than Pictomancer, so my limited understanding of the new jobs might be even more apparent here. Your favorite content creator or The Balance will certainly have more to say, but here's what I learned:
Pictomancer has two systems to manage: Palette Gauge and Canvas. The Palette Gauge is filled by the finisher in your 1-2-3 combo and grants you one stack of White Paint, which you can use on your default spender: Holy in White. Once you have 50 gauge, you can use Subtractive Palette to spend the gauge, which upgrades your 1-2-3. After a certain level, Subtractive Palette will also convert one stack of White Paint to Black Paint, which is used on the Black Paint spender: Comet in Black.
The Canvas holds three motifs: Creature, Weapon, and Landscape. These motifs operate on a 40 second cooldown with three stacks, a 60-second cooldown, and a two-minute cooldown, respectively. Landscape holds your raid buff, Starry Muse, an area of effect in which you and party members must stand to receive the buffs. These buffs include a 5% damage increase for the whole party, reduced cast times for only the Pictomancer, and augmentation of certain Pictomaner spells. You receive many buffs whose effects weren’t directly stated in this preview build, so I may be missing something.
The Weapon Canvas holds Weapon motifs, providing an instant-cast ranged combo where each step is a guaranteed critical direct hit. You can slot four motifs into the Creature Canvas, and rendering them to life will deal damage. Every two Motifs rendered will create a Depiction, either a Moogle or a Madeen, that will execute their attack when brought to life.
I struggle to think of a job in the game comparable to Pictomancer. While it is unique, it does take up a caster slot without providing a raise, which might make it less attractive in a progression setting for some groups. Running double caster is always an option; there have been very, very few encounters in the game that require groups to run double melee, if any. If your group is having trouble with damage deep into progression, it is probably a skill issue - and by skill issue, I mean you're not critting enough.
Today's Wholesome Direct overflowed with thoughtful, creative, and, most of all, relaxing titles either out today or on the horizon. The showcase spotlighted dozens of titles you should go out of your way to check out, but I singled out 13 that most excited me in no particular order. Be sure to catch the entire showcase here.
Caravan Sandwitch
Developer: Studio Plane Toast – Release: TBA
When your sister goes missing, it’s up you you to hop into a high-tech van to find her. Whether in the van or on foot, Caravan Sandwitch takes players across a “hopeful” post-apocalyptic open desert filled with color. Solve puzzles in this combat-free experience and help your community using the van’s array of tools, such as a scanner and grapple hook.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home
Developer: Alblune – Release: 2025
I love Picross and welcome any unique spin on the formula. Squeakcross covers those bases by letting you solve puzzles that transform into cheese-shaped furniture to decorate a cute little mouse’s home. With hundreds of decorations and accessories to collect, I look forward to solving tons of Picross puzzles and giving the mouse a better home than I live in.
Tiny Lands 2
Developer: Hyper Three Studio – Release: 2025
The sequel to the 2021 isometric puzzle game dramatically ups the production values with photorealistic dioramas. Like its predecessor, you’ll examine two versions of a densely detailed world to spot their differences in this laid-back scavenger hunt.
Map Map: A Game About Maps
Developer: Pipapo Games – Release:
We’re all used to passively filling out maps in games, but Map Map makes this the core of its adventure. As a cartographer for a crew of treasure hunters, you explore a series of islands and mark relevant locations on your blank map to help them explore. Uncovering ruins, wildlife, forests, and secret areas requires you to rely on your sense of direction and then notate its precise location on your map using various helpful tools, such as a compass.
On Your Tail
Developer: Memorable Games – Release: 2024
On Your Tail aims to prove that even solving mysteries can be relaxing. Set in a scenic seaside village, you control Diana, a curious detective searching for the perfect summer vacation. Unfortunately, a masked thief spoils the good vibes, so you’ll collect clues, chat with residents, and use your deductive skills to unmask the culprit. Or you can spend time cooking food, fishing, and playing arcade games in the city’s leisurely interactive sandbox.
Great God Grove
Developer: Limbo Lane – Release: 2024
Try to stay with me as I explain this game’s premise: the god of communication has started a war with other gods, triggering an apocalyptic event. It’s up to you, a mail carrier for the gods, to save the world by wielding a mouth-shaped megaphone/vacuum that can suck up characters’ dialogue bubbles and spit them out to solve message-based puzzles. Backed by an equally kooky art direction, this bizarre-looking adventure has me shouting for more.
Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato
Developer: StudioBrando – Release: August
As Miho, you open a pantry to grab a potato for your grandmother’s soup recipe, only to be pulled into a strange fantasy land. Worst of all, the potato’s been stolen! This 3D adventure sees players explore a bright world filled with strange, talking animals, food-based topography, and other mysteries to retrace the steps of a great traveler who came before. Miho also learns the importance of food and family.
The Star Named EOS
Developer: Silver Lining Star – Release: July 23
This photography-based adventure unfolds in a hand-drawn world. As Dei, you’ll capture photos while following in the footsteps of your missing mother to solve puzzles and piece together a family mystery. You can read more about it here.
Discounty
Developer: Crinkle Cut Games – Release: 2025
In Discounty, you’ll manage your own supermarket as a local entrepreneur in a quirky town. You’ll set prices, create sales, appease your customers’ varying tastes, and redesign its appearance to turn a failing business into a thriving cash cow. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, as the more successful you become, the more people you’ll encounter that are actively plotting your downfall.
ILA: A Frosty Glide
Developer: Magic Rain Studio – Release: TBA
I’m always up for pocket-sized open-world games, and ILA: Frosty Glide fits that bill. As a young witch-in-training, you’ll soar across an island surrounded by snowy mountains atop a skatebroom (that is, a broom ridden like a skateboard). During your journey, you’ll learn new spells, solve platforming puzzles, find collectibles, and uncover secret areas.
Freeride
Developer: Flightyfelon Games Inc. – Release: 2025
Described as an “oddball RPG”, you’ll board a train to the spirit world to chart a path of self-discovery. Meet and befriend troubled spirits with individual goals and motivations, wield telekinesis to help others or yourself, and, most importantly, eat ice cream. Decision-making funnels into determining your personality type, with characters reacting differently towards you based on how you behave.
Albatroz
Developer: Among Giants – Release: 2024
Backpacking is fun, but it’s also physically challenging and may not be viable, depending on your location. Albatroz translates the fun of backpacking into an RPG where you’ll trek through beautiful landscapes in search of a lost sibling. As you hike towards a mythical mountain, you’ll pass through villages filled with interesting locals, stay prepared through thoughtful inventory management, earn more abilities via a skill tree, and visit locales such as tropical coastal areas and frigid mountain ranges.
Littlelands
Developer: Rafael Martin and Kyle Creamer – Release: TBA
Sporting a gorgeous art direction that resembles a living toy set, Littlelands sports some old-school Zelda in its top-down adventure design. You’ll explore dungeons, find treasure, and make new friends who can teach you new skills by helping them with their problems. Though you can fight enemies, you can also chill out and cook dishes, farm berries, catch insects, or go fishing.
Other games that excited me, such as After Love EP, Screenbound, While Waiting, and Building Relationships, appeared yesterday at Day of the Devs. You can read about them and the other cool games in our showcase recap here.
What was your favorite reveal at the Wholesome Direct? Let us know in the comments!
This month, Dragon Age: The Veilguard (you read that right – Dreadwolf is no more) graces the cover of Game Informer. After years developing Baldur's Gate and its sequel early in its history, BioWare struck out to create its own fantasy RPG. That series began with Dragon Age: Origins in 2009. It was followed up with Dragon Age II in 2011, and then Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014. While the Dragon Age series' history has its ups and downs, fans have been patiently waiting for BioWare to return to the franchise, and 2024 is finally the year.
We visited BioWare's Edmonton, Canada, office for an exclusive look at Dragon Age: The Veilguard, including a look at its character creator, its prologue and opening missions, and more. We also spoke to many of the game's leads about the name change, the series' shift to real-time action combat, the various companions (and the relationships you can forge with them), and The Veilguard's hub location. You can learn about the titular Veilguard, Solas' role in the game, and so much more in our 12-page cover story for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
But there are plenty of other excellent reads within this issue of Game Informer! Some of us flew to Los Angeles, California, to attend Summer Game Fest and the not-E3 weekend's various other events to check out new games, interview developers, and more. Our previews section is jam-packed with new details about upcoming releases we can't wait for.
Brian Shea flew to Warsaw, Poland, to check out two upcoming releases – Frostpunk 2 and The Alters – and he came away excited about both. Jon Woodey went hands-on with Final Fantasy XIV's upcoming Dawntrail expansion (and spoke to director Naoki Yoshida, too), and as someone with 8,000 hours in the game, his words are the ones you'll want to read.
On the freelance front, Charlie Wacholz writes about how last year's Dave The Diver is one of the best game representations of the rewards and struggles of working in the food and beverage industry, and Grant Stoner spoke with Sony and Microsoft about the development of process and history of the companies' Adaptive and Access controllers. And for a lil' terror this summer, Ashley Bardhan spoke to several horror game developers about why the alluring town known as Silent Hill is a crucial location to Konami's horror masterpiece.
As always, you'll find an editor's note from editor-in-chief Matt Miller, reviews from various freelancers and staff editors, a Top 5 list (hint hint: dragons), and more.
Here's a closer look at the cover:
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Summer Game Fest has slid comfortably into the slot once occupied by E3, and it has only gotten bigger with each passing year. With hundreds of media members and content creators converging in Los Angeles, California, developers and publishers brought a ton of promising new games and updates to existing games. We spent hours getting our hands on the most anticipated titles on the horizon, all while discovering the hidden gems among the higher-profile titles.
This year saw Summer Game Fest Play Days extended an extra day to last a full three days, meaning the Game Informer crew had even more time to try out plenty of amazing games over the course of our time at the show. On top of that, other developers held several adjacent events to capitalize on the concentration of media and creators in town. Check out our favorite titles we've seen, played, and talked about below, and be sure to check back throughout the weekend as we see more games!
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2XKO
PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
I finally got my hands on 2XKO, the promising 2D fighter set in the League of Legends universe. With approachable controls, a gorgeous art style, and an established roster of Champions, 2XKO is all about finding the fun as fast as possible. On top of that, 2XKO uses the tag-team mechanic in unique and engaging ways. Though I've never been a League of Legends player, I'm looking forward to experiencing this universe through the 2v2 fighter that Riot has confidently created.
Developers Treyarch and Raven Software are taking big swings with the next installment in the long-running Black Ops series. Set in 1991, the campaign serves as a true successor to the Black Ops Cold War campaign. The story promises to be full of paranoia and espionage intrigue, with a mysterious entity infiltrating the United States government and the Black Ops squad going rogue. The multiplayer promises a compelling package, with 16 new maps and a ton of new weapons, as well as the return of Classic Prestige. Add in round-based Zombies and an ambitious Omnimovement system, and Black Ops 6 is the most excited I've been for a Call of Duty game in 2019's Modern Warfare.
If you've ever tried to get into birdwatching, you know the most fun part is figuring out exactly which bird is which. That’s the basic idea behind Flock, a game where you identify cute and weird made-up creatures. When you encounter one of the game’s little animals, you have the opportunity to observe its markings and behavior, and then attempt to identify it as one of the animals in a certain family. For example, the first little guy I encounter is a Gleeb, and based on its hopping, I’m able to identify it as a Gallus Gleeb, a chicken-like variant of the creature. As you progress, this identification progresses in complexity, and I’m excited to play more and fill out my personal catalog of these funky dudes. – Charles Harte
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Harmonium
Xbox Series X/S, PC, iOS, Android
Since the dawn of video games, music has been a crucial part of the experience, so it’s always exciting to see a game manage to reinvent the way the player interacts with the soundtrack. In Harmonium, you play as Melody, a deaf girl who goes on an Alice in Wonderland-style journey to recover her grandmother’s sheet music. Her experience with music is unique, relying on visuals and rhythm, and her method of communication is just as fascinating. Melody speaks American Sign Language, signing through each conversation, but with some of the magic people in this new world, she finds other ways to nonverbally communicate by creating new gestures to describe her surroundings. I may have come for the music, but I stuck around for the sign-based puzzle-solving. – Charles Harte
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Marvel Rivals
PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
The hero shooter genre has evolved in myriad ways over the last decade, and Marvel Rivals hopes to have learned all the right lessons from the rapidly changing category of games. Marvel Rivals brings 19 iconic heroes and villains for you to control as you duke it out across established locations in the Marvel Universe. I really enjoyed playing through several matches as characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Storm, Doctor Strange, and Groot. If you're a fan of Overwatch-style gameplay or just the vast Marvel Multiverse, Marvel Rivals is one to watch.
Read our full Marvel Rivals preview here. – Brian Shea
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Metaphor: ReFantazio
PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PC
The duo primarily responsible for the beloved Persona series – Katsura Hashino and Shigenori Soejima – is branching out to create an all-new IP with more than a few familiar elements. Metaphor: ReFantazio takes the Persona formula and evolves it in numerous ways. On top of taking place in a fantasy world, Metaphor also introduces new action-style elements to start some of the game's turn-based battles, plus a line-based positioning system that encourages you to think strategically in battles. Add in the charming cast of characters, grotesque boss battles, and summonable entities known as Archetypes (and throw in the trademark penchant for stylish UI and cutscenes for good measure), and Metaphor: ReFantazio could very well be just familiar enough for Persona fans to give it a look, but just different enough to provide a breath of fresh air to those who have spent the last several years playing through the developers' long RPGs. – Brian Shea
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Sonic X Shadow Generations
PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Sonic Generations, the 2011 greatest-hits style remake meant to celebrate the series' 20th anniversary, is finally receiving the remaster treatment, but this Sonic Team has higher ambitions than just giving players better performance and visual fidelity and calling it a day. Sonic X Shadow Generations adds an entirely separate, standalone campaign starring everyone's favorite broody Sonic doppelganger, Shadow the Hedgehog. Shadow tackles various stages and bosses from across his history with special powers, like Chaos Control, in tow. And for those who want to experience Sonic Generations in a modern setting, the original story and stages have been remastered with 60 FPS performance and added Chao Rescue objectives.
For more on Sonic X Shadow Generations, check out our full preview here. – Brian Shea
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Valorant
PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
In the lead-up to Summer Game Fest, I visited League of Legends developer Riot Games to get my hands on the upcoming console version of Valorant. The game has been available on PC for four years now, and Riot is bringing all the content it has released in that span to its newly announced console version. This being the acclaimed studio's first time appearing on consoles, the developers have done a terrific job of adapting the mouse and keyboard controls to gamepads, and with excellent performance, cross-play between consoles, and a still-ambitious content plan, Riot could inject even more life into its popular hero shooter.
Bloodborne arrived on PS4 in 2015 and immediately became one of the best games of the year, earning a 9.75 out of 10 from Game Informerand even taking home our award for Best PlayStation Exclusive. But something about that game has stuck with players. In addition to resonating with a wider audience than many of From Software's most iconic titles to that point, Bloodborne delivered an engrossing world full of mystery and challenge, causing it to remain top-of-mind for many Soulslike fans even today. In the lead-up to the launch of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, I sat down with the creator of Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Demon's Souls, and Bloodborne to learn why the 2015 PS4 exclusive holds as special a place in his heart as it does the game's many fans.
For Miyazaki, who has directed nearly every game in From Software's legendary Souls catalog (including Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne), the relationship between offense and defense started getting more fully fleshed out during the development of Bloodborne. "It's become something much more fluid and active, I think, which was a very defining characteristic of Sekiro, and it's something I've been thinking about since Bloodborne," Miyazaki says. "Perhaps in Sekiro, it appears most obviously or its the clearest form that I think that philosophy can embody. And personally, I think there's one more level we can crank it up to and sharpen that and hone in on that mechanic even more, but I think Sekiro was a big turning point."
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Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
I then follow up, asking the director why the critically acclaimed title sticks out in the vast pool of his other beloved creations. "A couple of reasons," he begins. "The first one being it was probably one of the most challenging development cycles we've had from a studio perspective. The second, perhaps bigger element is how personal it was for me in the sense that I've imparted a lot of my own ideas into this game, whether it be story, the world-building component, or even the game mechanics and game systems that are in place. It is perhaps the strongest reflection of my type of flavoring of a game that one can experience."
However, Miyazaki's influence is undeniable in the entire From Software catalog, which can likely be attributed to the fact that he has been heavily involved in the stage and level design from Demon's Souls all the way up to Elden Ring. "My approach of making games as the game director, it's like sandwiching from a very high, conceptual level and painting the final image of what we're trying to achieve, as well as going really granular on some of the detailed elements of what the players experience," he says. "By sandwiching the game development process, the middle almost has only one place to go which is completing that whole experience. Of course, the high-level conceptual stuff might be easy to imagine, but of the details that I pick and choose to oversee myself, the level design is one of them because I think that experience really creates and raises the floor of what players are going to feel and experience through the game design. This is true with Elden Ring and true with Dark Souls as well: I'll look at what's being done and say, 'Alright, this, this, this, and this I'm going to oversee,' because I know which points in that experience are going to be the most effective and sandwich the high-level vision plus the details that players see."
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Elden Ring
That influence and approach carried into Elden Ring, the latest critically acclaimed From Software title in the Soulslike subgenre. "In the case of Elden Ring, there was the very high-level conceptual vision, and then there were the details," Miyazaki says. "The defining details for me throughout that game was artwork, the level design, the animation, as well as the text that you see on screen. I think that was the strongest supporting factor that helped elevate the entire experience for players. And because Elden Ring was such a massive experience to design certain levels, we did hand off to other level designers and game designers and I think that is what helps the company grow massively through this experience. Every game has a different set of details that need special attention and one of them that seemed appropriate to work collaboratively or hand off to other designers was the level design in this case. And that, again, I think helps elevate the company as a whole in terms of the talent we have."
Though Bloodborne and Sekiro are tentpole moments in the evolution of the Soulslike subgenre, Elden Ring is the most successful game in the young category's history. Not only does it carry an almost unheard-of 96 out of 100 on reviews aggregate site Metacritic (including a rare 10 out of 10 from Game Informer), but it also took home several Game of the Year Awards, including from Game Informer and The Game Awards.
Now, players have an excuse to jump back into that acclaimed 2022 title as From Software is poised to release Shadow of the Erdtree, the long-awaited DLC for Elden Ring. For more on Shadow of the Erdtree, be sure to check out our glowing review of the latest DLC right here.
If you're at all familiar with the Dragon Age series, you likely already know BioWare has experimented quite a lot with its gameplay. From Dragon Age: Origins' real-time strategy RPG approach to Dragon Age II's mostly-set-within-one-city action experience to Dragon Age: Inquisition's strategy-action mix, BioWare hasn't quite defined the franchise's combat. However, a through-line is apparent from Origins to Inquisition: BioWare seemingly wants this franchise to be action but has attempted to shift to that without abandoning its longtime fans.
With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has completed its transition from strategy to real-time action, but thanks to an optional tactical pause-and-play combat wheel that harkens back to the series' origins, I feel it's found a great (battle)ground for Dragon Age combat. Of course, it's hard to tell how Veilguard's action will hold up over what is sure to be a dozens-of-hours-long RPG, but if what I've seen so far is any indication, the studio is on to something.
"I think the first thing to keep in mind is that combat [...] in the franchise has been an evolution," game director Corinne Busche tells me within BioWare's Edmonton office. "Every single entry reimagines what combat is like and I would say our goal was to make sure we had a system that allowed players to feel like they actually were able to step into the world of Thedas. They're not a player observing from afar – they are inside of this world. Being this authentic world that's brought to life, the combat system needs to support that, so you are in control of every single action, every block, every dodge, every swing of your sword."
Busche says players complete every swing in real-time, with particular attention paid to animation swing-through and canceling. On the topic of canceling, I watch Busche "bookmark" combos with a quick dash. With this mechanic, players can pause a combo's status with a dash to safety and continue the combo where they left off afterward. Alongside the dash, there's a parry for some classes, the ability to charge moves, and a revamped healing system that allows players to quickly use potions by pressing right on the d-pad.
Busche says each character will play the same in a way, regardless of class, in that you execute light and heavy attacks with the same buttons, use abilities with the same buttons, and interact with the combo wheel in the same way. During my demo at one point, we use a sword-and-shield Warrior Qunari that hip-fires and aims their shield to throw it like Captain America while hammering down big damage with a sword. Pressing the same buttons as a mage might throw out magical ranged attacks instead of a shield.
Abilities, like a Spartan-like kick from a Warrior or a Mage's firewall that deals continuous damage, add to the player's repertoire of combat options. Warriors can parry incoming attacks, staggering enemies in the process. Rogues have a larger parry window, and Mages can't parry at all but instead throw up a shield that blocks all incoming damage so long as they have the mana to sustain the shield.
"That is just the baseline that allows us to get that level of immersion of, 'I'm actually in this world; I'm a part of it,'" Busche says. "But again, the abilities, the strategy, linking my companions' abilities together to perform devastating combos, that is really where the depth and the complexity comes into play."
This extends to companions, who, at your choosing, bring three abilities (of their five total) into combat, executed either with quick select buttons or the pause-and-play combat wheel. Every time you rank up a companion's Relationship Level, you unlock a skill point to spend specifically on that companion – this is how you unlock new combat abilities.
Though companion skill trees pale in comparison to Rook's expansive tree, which features passive abilities, combat abilities, and more, as well as paths to three unique class specializations, there's still some customization here.
You can find the skill tree for Rook and companions within Veilguard's start or pause menu. This menu contains pages for Veilguard's map, journal, character sheets, and a library for lore information, too. Here, you can cross-compare equipment and equip new gear for Rook and companions, build weapon loadouts, and customize your abilities and builds via the aforementioned skill tree, which looks relatively easy to understand.
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Large circle: Class
Diamonds: Abilities
Medium circle: Major Passives and Ability Upgrades
Small hexagon: Traits
Small circle: Minor Passives and Stat Boosts
You won't find minutiae here, "just real numbers," Busche says. In other words, a new unlocked trait might increase damage by 25% against armor, but that's as in-depth as the numbers get. Passive abilities unlock jump attacks and guarantee critical hit opportunities, while abilities add moves like firewall and spartan kicks to your arsenal. As you spec out this skill tree, which is 100% bespoke to each class, you'll work closer to unlocking a specialization (which doesn't take reaching the max level of 50). Every class has three specializations, each with a unique ultimate ability. Busche says BioWare's philosophy with the skill tree is "about changing the way you play, not the statistical minutiae."
If you completely ignore companions in combat, they will attack targets, use abilities, and defeat enemies all on their own. "[Companions] are their own people, "Busche says. "They have their own behaviors, they have their own autonomy on the battlefield, they'll pick their own targets. As their plots progress, they'll learn how to use their abilities more competently, and it really feels like you're fighting alongside these realized characters in battle."
Speaking to companion synergy, Busche adds, "I see all the abilities Harding has, and I see everything that Bellara is capable of. And sometimes, I'm using vulnerabilities synergistically. Maybe I'm pausing or slowing time with Bellara so that I can unleash devastating attacks with Harding, knocking down the enemy, and then me, as Rook, I'm rushing in and capitalizing on this setup they've created for me. It is a game about creating this organic sense of teamwork."
Busche says there are more explicit synergies, with intentional combos where specific companions can play off each other, and you can queue up their abilities to do just that. That’s what the pause-and-play combat wheel is for in Veilguard.
In this screen, which pauses the camera and pulls up a flashy combat wheel that highlights you and your companions' skills, you can choose abilities, queue them up, and strategize with synergies and combos the game recognizes, all while targeting specific enemies. Select what you want and release the wheel to watch your selections play out.
During a mission within Arlathan Forest after Veilguard's prologue, Busche utilizes Veilguard's dual-loadout mechanic. As Rook, you can create two weapon loadouts for quick switch-ups mid-combat. As a mage Rook, she uses magical attacks to add three stacks of arcane build-up to make an Arcane Bomb on a Sentinel, a mechanical set of armor possessed by a demon. If you hit the Sentinel's Arcane Bomb with a heavy attack, the enemy will take devastating damage. Once the Sentinel has an Arcane Bomb on it, Busche begins charging a heavy attack on her magical staff, then switches to magical daggers in Rook's second loadout, accessed with a quick tap of down on the d-pad to unleash some quick light attacks, then back to the staff to finish charging its attack. She then unleashes the heavy attack, and the Arcane Bomb explodes in a liquidy whirl of green magic.
"I've seen [Veilguard's combat] refined over time [and] I love it," BioWare general manager Gary McKay tells me. "I love that balance of real-time fluid action, but also the ability to have the depth in the RPG, not just in terms of pause-and-play, but the depth in terms of how you bring your companions into the battlefield. What are you going to do with their skill points? What's the loadout you're going to use? Everything is about bringing Rook to the center of the battlefield, and I love it."
Former Dragon Age executive producer and Veilguard consultant Mark Darrah feels Veilguard is the first game where the combat is legitimately fun. "What I see in Veilguard is a game that finally bridges the gap," he says. "Uncharitably, previous Dragon Age games got to the realm of 'combat wasn't too bad.' In this game, the combat's actually fun, but it does keep that thread that's always been there. You have the focus on Rook, on your character, but still have that control and character coming into the combat experience from the other people in your party."
I get the sense from watching Busche play several hours of Veilguard that BioWare has designed a combat system that relies heavily on players extracting what they want out of it. If you want to button mash and use abilities freely when their cooldowns expire, you can probably progress fine (although on the game's easier difficulties). But if you want to strategize your combos, take advantage of elemental vulnerabilities, and min-max companions and Rook loadouts, you can do that, too, and I think you'll find Veilguard rewards that with a more enriching experience.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
The release of Sonic Generations in 2011 gave players a series-wide greatest hits remake package to celebrate 20 years of Sonic the Hedgehog. Though other characters appeared in Sonic Generations, Sonic – in both his Classic and Modern forms – was the sole playable character. Now, 13 years later, the well-liked celebratory release returns as the latest Sonic remaster, but it's not simply the same package with performance enhancements. Sure, those are there, but perhaps the biggest selling point is the inclusion of Shadow the Hedgehog as a playable character.
But Shadow is much more than a reskin of Sonic. Yes, the base of Shadow in his Sonic Adventure 2 debut was that he could match Sonic's abilities, but we've seen him appear in a variety of gameplay styles, with varying powers at his disposal. During my hands-on session, I was able to experience his Chaos Control ability, which was the power that introduced players to Shadow back in his debut scene. That power lets Shadow slow down projectiles like rockets so he can easily dodge them or use them as platforms.
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The notion of giving Shadow a distinct skillset in his standalone campaign in Sonic X Shadow Generations originated with the dark hedgehog's first starring role in a game. "The original Shadow the Hedgehog game was thought of as a spin-off from a Sonic game," Sonic Team creative officer Takashi Iizuka says. "In order to really spin it up to be something fun and interesting and new, we had to think of, 'What is something we haven't done or don't do in Sonic games? Let's put that in and have it be part of the Shadow gameplay.' That's where the shooting action came in for Shadow the Hedgehog. It was to really make sure that it doesn't just feel like we're changing the character, but it's still the same game; we want different gameplay as well."
Shadow the Hedgehog has garnered notoriety due to its structure, poor critical reception, and oddly mature twist, in which Shadow shoots enemies with a gun while uttering mild curse words. However, it laid out the blueprint for what Sonic Team wanted to do with Sonic X Shadow Generations. "For the Generations content, because Shadow Generations was coming inside of the whole Generations format, we wanted to keep the same game format for Sonic Generations that we have for Shadow Generations," Iizuka says. "So, the platform action game style was something you could put in and have it be this unified package, but we didn't just want to have it be like, 'Oh, okay, so you have levels just like Sonic." We needed something extra. And that something extra – all the new actions Shadow can do that Sonic can't – that's where we're differentiating the gameplay inside of Shadow Generations. So, it still feels like a Generations game, and this is just the Shadow story, but you still get the new actions and abilities and the new gameplay because of Shadow."
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At the end of the Summer Game Fest trailer, which announced the release date of Sonic X Shadow Generations, fans we shocked to see Shadow suddenly sprout wings, hinting at a potential new ability Shadow may have in this new game to continue differentiating Shadow Generations from the preexisiting Sonic gameplay. "Shadow has Chaos Control, but outside of that, it may feel like too much of the same and we wanted to make something new and interesting with the Shadow content," Iizuka says. "We said, 'We have the same platform action format. We have similar running and jumping. We have Chaos Control. But what else can we put in here to really make the gameplay different and unique?' That's where the idea came up for the Doom Powers: We need to give Shadow these extra abilities and extra powers to allow new gameplay formats to be born."
We're sure to learn more about Shadow's unique abilities and Doom Powers in the lead-up to the game's launch. Sonic X Shadow Generations arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on October 25. For our recent hands-on impressions of the game, head here.
Earlier this year, Sega announced Fearless: The Year of Shadow, a yearlong celebration of one of Sonic's biggest rivals, adversaries, and frenemies, Shadow the Hedgehog. In the past, Sonic Team creative officer Takashi Iizuka told me Shadow is his favorite character in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise outside of Sonic. It makes sense; after all, as the director of Sonic Adventure 2, where Shadow made his debut, Iizuka was instrumental in creating the dark hedgehog.
"Even now, if you ask me who my favorite character is, Shadow is going to pop up there," Iizuka says. "Even when we think about the foundation of the entire franchise, Sonic and Shadow are really holding up so much of the franchise. They're very popular and dynamic characters."
But perhaps the biggest component of The Year of Shadow arrives at the tail end of the calendar, as Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the third theatrical release in the Sonic cinematic series, introduces Shadow to the film franchise. "So actually, the whole reveal at the end of Sonic 2 didn't come from me; it came from the movie writers," Iizuka says. "This is after movie one came out and was so popular and everyone was like, 'We've got to do a second movie!' The ideas just started flowing and one of those very rough scripts that came from the writing staff included that at the end we see Shadow. I was like, "Oh my gosh!' So that idea was put in there by the writers. The writers did a great job because they know the fans, they know the audience, they know the characters, and they really wanted to make something fun and interesting and exciting. They love Sonic and they did a great job even at that rough stage of making sure Shadow was in that movie two ending. So, really, kudos to the writers and the team making the movie to know our characters and know the fans."
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Iizuka is excited to be able to highlight Shadow this year, but hints that it might not be a one-off promotional venture when it comes to the Sonic brand. "In this year, I'm super happy that we have a game with Shadow featured in it with some great storytelling," Iizuka says. "We have the movie coming out with Shadow in it and we have a lot of spotlight put on Shadow, whether it's in a licensed product or animation or whatever it is that's coming out, we're just very, very happy that we get to promote Shadow so much this year, and we look forward to, in the coming years, being able to put a spotlight on some other characters in our franchise."
Sonic X Shadow Generations arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on October 25. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 hits theaters on December 20. For more on Sonic X Shadow Generations, read our hands-on impressions here.
If you're wondering what games are coming up in 2025, we've put them all in one convenient location. This list will be continually updated to act as a living, breathing schedule as new dates are announced, titles are delayed, and big reveals happen. This should help you plan out your next year of gaming and beyond.
As the gaming calendar is constantly changing, we highly recommend you bookmark this page. You'll likely find yourself coming back to find out the most recent release schedule for the most anticipated games across PC, consoles, VR, and mobile devices. If you notice that we've missed something, feel free to let us know! Please note that games will not get assigned to a month until they have confirmed release dates.
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Donkey Kong Country Returns HD
I interviewed various Veilguard leads for the cover story, and one of the first questions I asked each of them was, "Why the name change?" Here's what each told me:
BioWare's Leads On Changing The Name To Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Veilguard game director Corinne Busche: "First of all, I would say that these games are reflections of the teams that make them, and as part of that, it means we learn a lot about what the heart and soul of the game really is as we're developing it. And we quickly learned and realized that the absolute beating heart of this game are these authentic diverse companions. When we took a step back, as we always do, we always check our decisions and make sure that they still represent the game we're trying to build. It just felt like we needed a title that represented what this game was truly about.
Now, I want to be clear: I adore Solas [and] he plays an important role in the game, but this is not a game about Solas. So in all things we do, trying to capture that authentic experience, we felt the title really needed to change."
Veilguard creative director John Epler: "Dragon Age has always been about characters, not just the villains, but also your team, your companions, the other characters in the world. And as we were building Dragon Age: The Veilguard – there's this analogy I like to use, which is, 'If you want to carve an elephant out of marble, you just take a piece of marble and remove everything that doesn't look like an elephant.' As we were building this game, it became really clear that it was less that we were trying to make The Veilguard and more like The Veilguard was taking shape as we built the game.
Solas is still a central figure in it. He's still a significant character. But really, the focus shifts to the team. It's about the people you recruit. It's about stopping the end of the world with this group of specialists, these incredibly interesting and diverse characters that you recruit into your team. [We] realized Dreadwolf suggests a title focused on a specific individual, whereas The Veilguard, much like Inquisition, focuses more on the team."
BioWare general manager Gary McKay: "First, let me say: Solas is still very much part of this game. This is absolutely nothing to say that he's taking a back seat. But when we reflected on what was really the heartbeat of this game, we really saw the companions jumping out at us. I think you could argue [these companions] are the best the franchise has ever seen. We have seven incredibly unique characters, each with their own personalities, motivations; they have deep stories, and you have an opportunity to really interact with these characters in a way that both shapes their story but also influences the main story, right down to having an opportunity to impact their fate.
It's not just the story; they are also integral to the gameplay as well. And so when you look at it from really what the heartbeat of this game is, the centerpiece of the game, it's about the companions – the Veilguard. We felt that the title needed to reflect what we thought the centerpiece of this game was."
Former Dragon Age executive producer and Veilguard consultant Mark Darrah: "I think it's absolutely the right choice. Names can take on a momentum. Arguably, this game has kind of, in a way, been called Dreadwolf to some degree since its earlier days. As the game evolved, as [BioWare] figured out exactly what it was, it's very mature to step back and say, 'We called it something. Does it really still reflect what the game is?' And I think the fact the team was willing to take that step is amazing, and I think this is absolutely the right decision."
The Solas In The Room
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When I ask about Solas' role in the story after I learn his namesake is no longer in the game title, Darrah says Veilguard is still taking the Elven God's narrative in a good direction. He adds, "It allows us to, hopefully, give a good conclusion to all the varied attitudes toward Solas that are going to be coming from people who love Solas, who agree with Solas, who hate Solas, people who want to kick Solas off of a building – I think that we give you the opportunity to bring that to a close, but then tell a greater story about The Veilguard and about the world as a whole."
Talking to Epler, I learn more about how Solas isn't exactly the big bad I expected before seeing the opening hours of Veilguard. There's a lot more nuance to everyone's favorite bald elf.
"The most interesting villains to myself, and honestly most people, are not just straight up, 'I want to end the world.' To them, they are the heroes of the story, and Solas is no exception," Epler tells me. "Solas always feels that he is a tragic hero but a hero nonetheless, so he's coming into this believing firmly that what he did, that which you stopped him from doing, was the right thing – that you made a mistake. But now he's trapped and can't reach out and actively affect [Thedas], so he needs to work with you.
"That allows us to provide a lot of nuance to that relationship," Epler says.
If you're wondering what Epler means when he says Solas trapped, it's quite literal – in the game's prologue, which is part of the 20-minute gameplay segment BioWare recently released (the above video), the player-character Rook and companions Lace Harding, Varric Tethras, and Neve Gallus stop Solas' attempt to destroy the Veil, a barrier between the magical Fade and Thedas. I won't spoil exactly what happens here, but Rook passes out moments later and wakes up in a dream-like landscape to the voice of Solas himself… because he's trapped here.
He explains he was attempting to move the Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain, both of whom are part of the Evanuris or Elven gods of ancient times, to a new prison because the old one was no longer containing them properly. Unfortunately for Solas, he's trapped here – the Fade – by our doing and Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are free, blighted, and roaming Thedas. It's up to Rook to stop them, but it seems they'll have to work with Solas (or at least listen to his guidance and advice) to do so.
"So one of the principles we took to when we were building the story of The Veilguard early on was we wanted the beginning of the game to feel like the final chapter of an earlier story and you're coming in right at the end, you're coming in as if you've been chasing Solas – the [Solas at the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition's Trespasser DLC] who said he was going to end the world and tear down the Veil," Epler adds.
Epler says players will see early on (and as the narrative develops across Veilguard) that Solas sees much of himself in you, the player-controlled Rook, especially "the parts that maybe he doesn't like to face." As a result, there's an interesting push and pull between Solas and Rook. He says players can define the relationship between these two characters with their choices in dialogue.
"You can continue to be suspicious and hostile towards him, or you can start to see him and find that common ground, that connection between the two of you, and really develop a different relationship over the course of the story," Epler says.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
Remakes tend to be more exciting than remasters because the improvements often go beyond mere bumps in resolution or framerate. At best, studios reimagine classic experiences in exciting new ways, sand away rough edges, and somehow retain the intangible x-factors that made fans fall in love with these titles in the first place. At the very least, remakes offer a great way to play antiquated or less accessible experiences on modern hardware.
The remake boom has been in full swing in recent years to the point that it’s starting to get tough to keep track of all the projects in the works. Thankfully, we’ve gathered as many of the announced remakes (not remasters) that we could find and gathered them in one neat list, arranged chronologically by release window. This will be an evolving list that will be updated as new remakes are announced and released, so be sure to keep an eye on it over the coming months.
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Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed
Release: September 24
2010's Epic Mickey was a cult favorite of the Wii, but its gameplay flaws held it back from becoming a true Disney classic. Developer Purple Lamp is transferring the adventure to a new canvas to paint a prettier, more appealing picture in Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. This full remake reworks the Wii motion controls to a contemporary setup and gives Mickey new platforming moves and abilities for his magic paintbrush. The Wasteland has been reimagined and looks better than ever, thanks to the improved graphics.
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Silent Hill 2
Release: October 8
Bloober Team is reviving Silent Hill 2 with a modern coat of paint. The minds behind Layers of Fear and The Medium may not have the greatest critical track record, but hopefully, working with an established (and better) template will yield more positive results. It would be nice to have a good, modernized version of Silent Hill 2 after the less-than-stellar HD port from 2012. Silent Hill 2 will come to PC and PlayStation 5 as a timed console exclusive.
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Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven
Release: October 24
First released in 1993, the Super Famicom RPG is getting a full 3D glow-up. The update includes rearranged compositions by SaGa composer Kenji Ito (as well as the original versions), English and Japanese voiceovers, and enhancements to its turn-based combat. For fans, the remake retains Romancing SaGa 2's signature nonlinear storytelling and choice-driven dialogue.
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Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake
Release: November 14
HD-2D is becoming an increasingly popular template for reviving classic JRPGs. It worked wonders for Live A Live, and Square Enix is giving Dragon Quest III the same treatment. Despite the number, the game is a prequel to Dragon Quest I and II and is the first chapter of the Erdrick Trilogy. The remake sands off the rough edges of the NES classic with modernized features and adds new narrative elements.
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Gothic
Release: 2024
2001's Gothic is getting a faithful glow-up that looks to reintroduce the RPG to a new audience. The combat system and control scheme, a criticism of the original, has been reworked to feel modern and, most of all, playable. Developer THQ Nordic Barcelona even released a playable teaser to obtain feedback and ensure it's on the right track. As 20+ year-old game, Gothic has been a tough game to revisit on PC, making this remake all the more welcomed.
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Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Release: 2024
Months of rumors proved true when Konami revealed it was remaking arguably the most beloved entry in the Metal Gear series, Snake Eater. Boasting, as Konami put it, "cutting-edge graphics and 3D audio," this new version will faithfully retell the story of Big Boss' origin. Best of all, the iconic theme song is back in full force.
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Until Dawn
Release: 2024
Although it doesn't feel like it, Until Dawn is almost nine years old. That means it's officially old enough for a remake, and that's exactly what's happening to the hit horror title. The previously PS4-exclusive game is being rebuilt for PS5 and PC by UK developer Ballistic Moon (with guidance from the original developer Supermassive Games). In addition to making an already great-looking game look even nicer thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the gameplay has been refined, and the adventure features new environments, new collectibles, and re-cut narrative sequences.
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Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake
Release: 2025
If you wind up loving the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III and want more, Square Enix has you covered. Dragon Quest I and II are getting the same treatment. Best of all, both remakes will be packaged together as a single release.
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Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Release: 2026
Development has been rocky for The Sands of Time’s impending remake, to say the least. Besides the game’s reveal garnering backlash from fans due to its unimpressive graphics, it has been delayed twice: first by two months, then indefinitely. In hindsight, it’s wild to think we were supposed to be playing this in January 2021. In May 2022, Ubisoft announced it had moved development from its fledgling Indian studios back to Montreal, where The Sands of Time was first created. While it's unfortunate that Ubisoft Pune/Mumbai couldn’t bring the remake together, we’re excited to see if Ubisoft Montreal can reapply the same magic.
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Front Mission 3
Release: TBA
Nows that the remakes of Front Mission 1 and 2 are out in the wild, all that's left is the 3rd game, which, if you're a North American fan, was likely the first one you played as it was the first entry to launch outside of Japan. Like the previous two remakes, Front Mission 3 is heading to Switch exclusively at launch and features improved visuals and controls.
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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Release: TBA
The reveal that arguably the best Star Wars game ever was getting a much-needed remake had fans raising their lightsabers in celebration. Unfortunately, the game’s development seemingly succumbed to the dark side after reports surfaced that progress had stalled, and work on the game has switched hands from Aspyr Media to Saber Interactive. The game went radio silent for a long period until Embracer Group sold off Saber, prompting the studio's CEO to confirm that KOTOR is "alive and well". We hope that's the case and look forward to eventually seeing the remake in action.
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Max Payne 1 and 2
Release: TBA
In April, Remedy Entertainment pleasantly surprised the gaming world when it announced it had struck a deal with Rockstar Games to remake Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Remedy sold the IP to Rockstar in 2002, but the two are partnering to revive the gritty crime series that popularized Bullet Time. The project, which will combine both games into a single title, will be made by Remedy, with Rockstar footing the bill on development and publishing, and target current-gen consoles and PC.
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Splinter Cell
Release: TBA
It might not be a new entry, but a remake of Sam Fisher’s first outing is better than nothing after years of waiting. Ubisoft Toronto sits at the helm of the project and plans to rebuild the game from scratch using the Snowdrop Engine while maintaining the classic stealth elements. Outside of recently losing its director (on good terms), it’s unclear how development is faring or when we’ll get to see this fresh spin on the franchise.
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The Witcher
Release: TBA
CD Projekt Red’s litany of upcoming projects includes a full remake of the first Witcher game. It’s being built in Unreal Engine 5 by developer Fool’s Theory (with supervision from CD Projekt veterans) and is said to be very early in development. The Witcher, released for PC in 2007, isn’t the easiest game to revisit due to its age and lack of console ports. Now that Geralt and friends are mainstream draws, newer fans can finally experience the adventure that started it all.
Which remakes are you looking forward to playing the most? Let us know in the comments!
From Software games have garnered a reputation – alongside the rest of the Soulslike subgenre – for delivering difficult, punishing experiences that reward persistence with an unparalleled thrill of victory. The latest release, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, has attracted attention and, in some sectors of the fan base, controversy for how punishingly difficult it is. The week before the expansion's release, we sat down with From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki to talk about the notion of difficulty and how the passionate fan base has surprised him over the years.
The Soulslike genre, particularly From Software games, puts an emphasis on death as part of the gameplay experience. When you fight a challenging enemy, it may feel insurmountable, but by taking a studious and persistent approach, players can recognize patterns, develop skills, and, sometimes, with a little luck, pass the trials to progress through the game. "I think of all of the different ways I want to be killed as a gamer and as a player, and thinking about the difficult curve and certain challenges that we placed in front of other players is something that, as a gamer, I just hoped or wished would exist as an experience," Miyazaki says.
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The difficulty and the unknown build a certain level of tension, contributing to a feeling of dread that some players can't get enough of. Not knowing what's around the corner, then the feeling of seeing something you couldn't imagine in your wildest nightmares provides the level of surprise that From Software hopes to achieve with each passing encounter. To achieve this, Miyazaki takes on much of the level-design responsibilities to ensure that players feel that tension in appropriate ways.
"The entire genre from Demon's Souls all the way to Elden Ring – the so-called From Software Soulslikes games – I have always taken a very heavy involvement in stage design and level design because I want to create those exact experiences," Miyazaki says. "As a player walks through this world, I know that they have a very fragmented understanding of the lore, the surroundings, the type of monsters, whereas I don't. So, the map and level design are supposed to serve as this guide in a way to help players pick up more information and piece together what they think that world is. That is the reason why I level design myself: to make sure that those moments aren't lost. And yes, it's a very time-consuming process, but [fans recognizing the level design intent] makes it worthwhile."
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But Miyazaki knows that many of the games he creates are inherently difficult, but the dedicated players of the genre always seem to rise to the challenge. "There is certainly a lot of surprise, especially when watching content from really, really good players," he says. "We design certain experiences with the intent of, 'Oh man, I'm sure they're going to have a tough time with this,' but somehow, these players are able to overcome all the obstacles with their skill. With regards to difficulty, I know we get a lot of credit for saying, 'Yeah, our games are difficult,' but it's not a matter of simply cranking up the difficulty. It's doing so fairly."
"When players are killed, and they can understand why they were killed in an instance, and it feels justified – 'Okay, yeah, that makes sense' – that's the game design we're trying to achieve," Miyazaki continues. "I know a lot of players out there are probably going to disagree: 'What are you talking about?! This game doesn't make sense! What the heck!' But we try to make sure that there is a learning curve and a feedback loop that the players are able to extract from that they can then bring into the next attempt. We believe in difficult games, but not games that are unjustly or unfairly so. But, of course, there's still room for improvement on our side, as well."
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With Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree available now (read our review here), the Soulslike and From Software community is back to debating the merits of the developer's difficulty. But regardless of the debate, history has shown that players will eventually adapt to this new level of challenge and defeat the seemingly undefeatable. From Software has shown an unprecedented level of mastery in understanding how to create content for its community, so while some players may currently feel like Shadow of the Erdtree is too challenging, it will be interesting to observe how that sentiment swings once those same players get more time with the expansion under their belts.
As part of the character creation process for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, players will have to select both a class for their player-controlled Rook and a faction. After customizing much of your Rook's body, including things like a Qunari's horn type and material, for example, with the hundreds of options available in Veilguard, it will be time to pick said class.
There are three classes to choose from: Rogue, Mage, and Warrior. As the names suggest, each features a unique combat system and plays differently as a result. Though you’ll be performing things like light and heavy attacks using the same buttons, what those attacks do varies based on your class. For example, a sword-and-shield Warrior can hip-fire or aim their shield to throw it like Captain America, whereas a Mage can use that same button to throw out magical ranged attacks – read more about the combat of Veilguard in Game Informer's exclusive feature here. Plus, as you spec out these classes and unlock their individual specializations, the differences will only grow even more stark.
The Rogue has access to three specializations. The Duelist is the fastest of the three, with two blades for rapid strikes; the Saboteur uses tricks and traps; and the Veil Ranger is purely range, sniping enemies from afar with a bow.
The Mage can utilize necromancy with the Death Caller specialization; Evokers wield fire, ice, and lightning; and the Spellblade uses magic-infused melee attacks.
The Warrior can become a Reaper, which uses night blades to steal life and risk death to gain unnatural abilities; a Slayer, a simple but strong two-handed weapons expert; or the Champion, a tactical defense fighter.
While these specializations don't matter upfront – you class into them via the skill trees you progress through the game – it's nice to see the potential of each class before you choose it.
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For the penultimate step of the character creator, at least during the demo BioWare shows me, players select a faction. The Grey Wardens return, joined by other returning favorites and new additions like the Antivan Crows, the Mourn Watch, the Shadow Dragons, the pirate-themed Lords of Fortune, which is what I chose in my demo for the current Game Informer cover story, and the Veil Jumpers.
Each faction has unique casual wear, which is worn in specific cutscenes when the character isn't donning armor, and three unique traits. The Lords of Fortune, for example, gain additional reputation with this particular faction, have increased damage versus mercenaries, and perform takedowns on enemies with slightly less effort. Veilguard game director Corinne Busche says this faction selection, which ties into your character's backstory, determines who your Rook was before, how they met Varric, why they travel with Varric instead of their faction, and more.
"The message of The Veilguard is you're not saving the world on your own – you need your companions, but you also need these factions, these other groups in the world," creative director John Epler tells me. "You help them, they help you now."
He says BioWare wanted to avoid the trope of needing to gather 200 random resources or objects before helping you save the world. Instead, the team aimed to create factions that want to help you but have realistic challenges and problems in front of them so that narratively, it makes sense why you help them in return for their help when the time comes.
"Gameplay-wise – each of our classes has a specialization, and each of them is tied to a faction," Epler continues. "But beyond that, each faction has a [companion] as well as [people we're calling agents, ancillarily] who exist as the faces of these factions. We didn't want to just say, 'Here's the Grey Wardens, go deal with them.' We wanted characters within that faction who are sympathetic, who you can see and become the face of the faction, so that even if there are moments where the faction as a whole may be on the outs with you, these characters are still with you; they've still got your back."
If you want to make changes to your character's physical appearance, you can do that with the Mirror of Transformation, found in the main Veilguard hub, The Lighthouse. However, class, lineage, and identity are locked in and cannot be changed after you select them in the game's character creator.
[Editor's Note: This article previously stated players can change their physical appearance, class, lineage, and identity using the Mirror of Transformation. That is incorrect as class, lineage, and identity are locked after you first select those. The article has been updated to reflect that, and Game Informer apologizes for any confusion this mistake may have caused.]
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
As BioWare prepared to show me the character creator for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in its Edmonton, Canada, offices, I expected something robust – it's 2024, character creators have come a long way, and Bioware has a rich history of good customization. Despite my expectations, I was not prepared for how robust it actually is in Veilguard. Robust enough, even, that BioWare used it to create most of the NPCs in the game, save for mainline characters like companions. Setting hyperbole aside, it is a staggeringly rich creation system, and I look forward to seeing player-created near-replicas of celebrities and monstrous creations that'd be more at home in a horror game.
But I'm also looking forward to the community's reaction to the Dragon Age series' best character creator yet. At the heart of it is inclusivity, Veilguard game director Corinne Busche tells me before letting me guide her through creating my own character.
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As is usual, there are four races to choose from: Elves, Qunari, Humans, and Dwarves. After selecting Qunari, Busche pages through various presets, explaining the game allows for more detailed looks at each and the ability to choose pronouns with she/her, he/him, and they/them separately from gender, select different body types, and more. You can view your character, referred to as Rook in-game, in four different lighting scenes at any time, including The Veilguard's keynote purple hue, a bright and sunny tropical day, and a gothic night.
I joke with the team that after spending upwards of an hour creating my Dragon Age: Inquisition character in 2014, I immediately restarted the game after seeing him in the first cutscene; the in-game lighting made my hair color look terrible amongst other issues I had with my Inquisitor. Veilguard creative director John Epler says the team is aware of countless stories like that with Inquisition and its green-hued character creator, adding BioWare worked hard to squash that concern in Veilguard.
Head and body presets can be selected individually and customized to your liking with 40 different complexions that include smooth, rugged, youthful, and freckled skin tones, skin hues ranging from cool to neutral to warm, undertones to those skin tones, and even a melanin slider. Busche tells me BioWare relied on consultation to represent all people authentically. There's a Vitiligo slider (where you can adjust the intensity and amount of it) and sliders for your forehead, brow, cheeks, jaw, chin, larynx, and scalp. You can select your undergarments, with nudity as well because "this is a mature RPG," Busche adds, and use the "Body Morpher" to select three presets for each corner of a triangle and then move a cursor within it to morph your body or head into a mix of these presets. It's an impressive technology I'd like to see adopted in other games.
I can keep going: You can adjust height, shoulder width, chest size, glute and bulge size, hip width, how bloodshot your eyes are, how visible cataracts are, the sclera color, how crooked your nose is, how big its bridge is, the size of nostrils and the nose tip, and there are as many sliders, if not more, for things like Rook's mouth and ears. On ears alone, I see you can adjust asymmetry, depth, rotation, earlobe size, and even add cauliflower ear to your Rook. Busche says makeup blends modern stylings with the fantasy of Dragon Age with more than 30 options, including eyeliner intensity, color, glitter, eye shadow, lips, and blush.
Tattoos are just as customizable alongside options for scars and paint. Tattoos, scars, and paint are very culturally relevant to some lineages, BioWare tells me, with unique tattoos for elves, for example. You can add tattoos to Rook's face, body, arms, and legs, and you can adjust things like intensity, too.
Im most impressed, however, by the hair options on display; there are a ton, and as someone with long hair, I'm especially excited about the fun selections I can make. You can finally dye your hair with non-traditional colors, and it's gorgeous. EA's Frostbite engine uses the Strand system to render each style fully with physics. "The technology has finally caught up to our ambition," Dragon Age series art director Matt Rhodes says.
After customizing all of that and selecting our Qunari's horn type and material (of which there are more than 40 options to choose from), it's time to pick a class out of the Rogue, Mage, and Warrior – read more about Veilguard's classes here. Since we built a Qunari, we went with Warrior. For the penultimate step of the character creator, at least during the demo BioWare shows me, we select a faction. Out of the six options, we select the pirate-themed Lords of Fortune.
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"Rook ascends because of competency, not because of a magical McGuffin," BioWare core lead and Mass Effect executive producer Michael Gamble tells me in contrast to Inquisition's destiny-has-chosen-you-characterization.
"Rook is here because they choose to be and that speaks to the kind of character that we've built," Busche adds. "Someone needs to stop this, and Rook says, 'I guess that’s me.'"
Ready to begin our Rook's journey, we select a first and last name and one of four voices out of English masculine, English feminine, American masculine, or American feminine options. There's a pitch shifter for each voice, too, allowing you to tweak it to your liking further.
Don't stress too much about locking in your character creations before beginning the game – the Mirror of Transformation, which is found in Veilguard's main hub, The Lighthouse, allows you to change your physical appearance at any time. However, class, lineage, and identity are locked in and cannot be changed after you select them in the game's character creator.
From here, we're off to Minrathous, and you can read more about that famed city in our cover story, which is available here.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
Throughout my visit to BioWare's Edmonton office for Game Informer's current cover story about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, game director Corinne Busche reiterates that the studio designed the game with inclusivity in mind. That's extremely evident in the character creator, where players begin their journey in Veilguard. It's easily the best character creator in series history and possibly the most robust I've ever seen in a video game. From hundreds of sliders and options to customize your player-controlled Rook to the ability to pick pronouns separate from gender and more, this character creator speaks directly to the inclusivity of Veilguard – read about my in-depth look at the character creator here.
But that feeling doesn't end in the character creator. It also extends to the world – ice mage and private detective companion Neve Gallus has a prosthetic leg, for example – and in the way you can play Veilguard.
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Before starting the game proper, a playstyle screen allows players to customize various options affecting how Veilguard plays. Here, you can select difficulty, or playstyle as BioWare calls it, with options like "Storyteller" for those interested more in the story versus the combat, "Adventurer" for an experience that seemingly balances story and combat, and a difficulty called Nightmare – there might be more, but this is all I see during my demo. At any point during Veilguard, you can change the game's difficulty unless you select Nightmare, which is the hardest of difficulties. That's a permanent selection.
There's another difficulty option called Unbound, though, allowing players to customize their gameplay experience to their liking. You can adjust how wayfinding helps you in-game; there's aim assistance and even an auto-aim option. You can adjust combat timing to make parrying easier or harder, with a balanced, forgiving, and a third harder option. You can change how much damage your enemies do to you, and how much damage you do to enemies by adjusting their health. There's also an option to adjust enemy pressure. And, if you're not interested in death-related setbacks, there's a no-death option you can turn on.
"[None of these options] are a cheat," Busche tells me. "It's an option to make sure players of all abilities can show up."
She also says players can look forward to similar accessibility and approachability options you might expect, though I'm unable to pour through Veilguard's other options to confirm exactly what's there.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
With just four days in Seoul, South Korea, I filled my maps app with pins of restaurants, Buddhist temples, must-see attractions, scenic parks, market streets, and more to visit. I clocked around 10 miles of walking daily and think I saw as much of this massive city as possible with my allotted time. My journey from east to west, north to south of Seoul was only possible by the city’s expansive public transportation network of buses and trains. And while I listened to “Magnetic” by K-Pop group ILLIT more times than I’ll admit (when in Korea, right?) through headphones on these trains and buses, I spent much of my time observing how others spent time waiting for their stop.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone is glued to their phones, myself included. But unlike me, doom scrolling on X (formerly Twitter) before switching to Instagram before switching back to X, a lot of people were playing games I recognized, like League of Legends’ auto chess spin-off, Teamfight Tactics. But there we also plenty of other games I didn’t know, like Light of the Stars, Soul Strike, and more. While touring one of Nexon’s Seoul-based studios, Magnum Studio, I asked its head, Beomjun Lee, if mobile gaming is as popular as my public transportation travels had me believe. His answer was a quick yes. A study published by Statista Research Department in February concludes that, according to its 2022 survey, 63 percent of South Koreans play mobile games, with the market having an estimated worth of 14 trillion South Korean Won (or $10.2 billion) that year.
Nexon, the company that invited me to its studio, has plenty of mobile hits, like FIFA Mobile and MapleStory M, and a good amount on PC, too. Based on how many PC cafes I saw in Seoul, I’d guess PC is the biggest gaming market in South Korea or close behind mobile. But its staple of console releases features just two so far: KartRider: Drift and last year’s The Finals. With its PC and mobile gaming on lock, Nexon is slowly aiming West, looking to break into global markets and focusing on console releases alongside its usual output to do so. And what better way to do that than with a free-to-play (easy entry), third-person (ripe for customization), looter-shooter (a genre popularized by the likes of Destiny and Warframe that continues to dominate a large mindshare of games)?
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Ambitions In Albion
The First Descendant is just that, and though I was weary of another free-to-play game, and another looter shooter at that, after an hour of hands-on time, I’m excited, antsy even, for its release this summer when I can play more.
Revealed last August as part of Gamescom 2023, The First Descendant is in development at Nexon’s Magnum Studio with its sights set on a Summer 2024 release. I pushed for a more exact release date, but the team wasn’t ready to share; it’s clear it’s working hard to polish it up in these last few months, and for good reason, too – the team has lofty ambitions with The First Descendant.
“The main feature of The First Descendant is the PvE co-op element,” Lee, who is also the lead producer of the game, tells me through a translator. “It’s an online shooter RPG, and we consider it the next generation of looter shooters.”
That term caught me by surprise. It’s a bold statement, almost braggadocious, but after talking with Lee and creative director Minseok Joo and playing the game for an hour, I understand where the team is coming from. In my early hands-on impressions, the First Descendant feels like a mish-mash of other greats in the genre. Taken literally, it’s also a looter shooter made exclusively for the “next generation” of consoles as it’s coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S alongside PC, with crossplay and cross-progression, too.
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Going Hands-On
Dropped to an Earth-like sci-fi world where humanity is on its last leg in a city called Albion, my chosen character, Viessa, is searching for something called the Ironheart. She’s joined by an ally named Bunny (yes, her suit’s silhouette is that of a bunny). Immediately, weapons are crunchy and tactile. I sense every bullet in the controller and the on-screen recoil, and it feels great. It helps that the entire game, developed from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, is gorgeous. I joke with Lee that I’m happy the team is making a console version of the game as The First Descendant will melt my PC, which is admittedly due for an upgrade. Seeing words like “frame generation,” “ray reconstruction,” and “ray tracing” in the options confirms my belief.
The weapons aren’t anything special, though. In my play session, I encounter machine guns, submachine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers, and long-range snipers. They all feel great, but The First Descendant isn’t doing anything new here. Each character’s magical powers are what makes combat distinct. Viessa has access to ice, with a passive skill that creates spheres of ice around her body to damage and slow enemies that get too close, and four active skills that do area-of-effect damage, increase running speed and shield, and more. She can even place a snowstorm onto the playfield, damaging and immobilizing those caught within.
Setting the stage
One hundred years ago, the Vulgus crossed over the dimension, destroying life as humans knew it. The alien Colossi arrived, too, bringing even more destruction. The surviving humans gathered in Albion to restore humanity. Over time, they worked with Vulgus Magisters and evolved from swords and shields to guns and magic, thanks to special genes that house magical Arche unlocked within humans. Those humans whose Arche was awakened became the Descendants, Albion’s chosen protectors. Things are on the up. That is, until Karel, the new Vulgus leader, invades in search of the Ironheart, which is also what the Descendants are after.
The Ironheart can close the dimension that Karel, his Vulgus army, and the Colossi used to reach Albion in the first place, and it’s up to players to find it.
Her abilities are wildly different from Valby, the water-based character I’d play as later. Valby consumes less mana when standing in water and has moves to create puddles, making for a rewarding ability loop. She can even liquify the area around her, allowing her to move through enemies with increased defense and speed. Viessa’s moves are more straightforward, but Valby’s is more rewarding as part of a co-op experience, even if it takes longer to get my sea legs.
As I progress through the prologue, I encounter Karel, The First Descendant’s big bad. He immediately, seemingly, kills Bunny, and it’s clear he’s not mincing words. He will do whatever he must to obtain the Ironheart.
Unfortunately for Viessa, at the ready to avenge Bunny, Karel dips, leaving a Gravewalker tank boss behind. This boss fight (and the Stunning Beauty boss I’ll take on later while playing as Valby alongside a developer from Magnum Studio) is the highlight of my time with The First Descendant. Each boss has its own set of moves and mechanics to follow, including checks that require more strategic work, but how I, the player, fight them most intrigues me.
The First Descendant is fast. The characters move swiftly, and abilities, which fly loosely, allow them to zip around in combat. I can imagine the magical chaos that ensues with a full team of four. But the grapple hook excites me most about the possibilities of The First Descendant’s combat.
While fighting enemies, I scan by clicking the right stick to find weak points highlighted in blue. After shooting them enough, they turn yellow, meaning it’s time for my favorite part of the game: grappling up to the yellow part and ripping it off. It’s an awesome mechanic and takes an experience I’ve played hundreds of times in looter shooters – shoot the boss a bunch – and makes it more dynamic. It’s not just about shooting; it’s about blasting a weak point long enough that I can grapple to it and then work to yank it right off, shedding the boss’ layers as I do.
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Crafting Your Descendant
Outside of combat, the game offers plenty of customization that powers free-to-play experiences, though I don’t know how microtransactions will play into the game. You can customize loadouts for every character, each with their own weapons and abilities. There are a ton of costumes, ranging from maid outfits to fire brigade uniforms and more, and you can customize various areas of your character with unique chest pieces, Fortnite-style back pieces, and more. You can test out all of this in Albion’s Lab, a test field with customizable dummies to check your loadout’s damage output, feel, and more. Speaking to the team’s commitment to the game and its community, this Lab was recently added following feedback from a recent beta.
“This is my first time seeing it,” Lee says while showing it to me, indicating just how recently it was added. He says players can expect the game to change and grow with the community in this way.
I’m always nervous about free-to-play games and the associated monetization, but if The First Descendant sticks to cosmetic-focused microtransactions, as opposed to letting players pay to perform better in combat, for example, Magnum Studio is on the right track with the wealth of options I see for character customization.
I like that each character so far feels quite different, and leveling each up individually, instead of focusing on a single character for months or years, seems like a smart call in contrast with the genre. Knowing that three friends playing will have various Descendants to choose from, allowing for multiple strategies in how we approach missions, is exciting.
As for keeping players engaged beyond the game’s initial launch, Lee says the team is taking a seasonal approach, with new battle passes in each drop. As is now the standard in the live-service genre, each battle pass will contain season-specific cosmetics, and you’ll need to play through the new content to obtain them.
With an hour of The First Descendant playtime behind me, including a studio tour and interview with the team’s leads, I am (im)patiently waiting for its release this summer. Despite my initial love of Destiny and attempts in Warframe at one point in my gaming history, both (and many others in the genre) have passed me by. Jumping back into them is too daunt- ing and too confusing today. But The First Descendant is giving me what I want from those games, with variations on the formula, too. I still have questions, but Nexon still has time to answer them. For now, I’m crossing my fingers I get into the next beta.
This article originally appeared in Issue 366 of Game Informer.
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The culture around social interaction is constantly shifting, but those profoundly strange years of the pandemic were especially jarring. In the wake of such a weird cultural moment, I’m certainly not the only one left wondering how the dust settles, especially as it relates to how we meet up, build friendships and relationships, and socialize. If you’re a gamer, answering those questions requires an additional layer of complexity since we spend much of our free time in virtual worlds. I’ve found myself wondering where our favorite hobby fits into the equation.
For some years, the “third place” gave a name to a thing that’s been part of our lives forever. If home is your first place, and work is your second, the third place is the other social and gathering hub for your life as part of a community. But especially in the wake of COVID, it seems clear that many people have adjusted their relationship to social clubs, churches, coffee shops, bars, and public meet-ups. As many individuals disconnected from some of those social spaces, there’s a void we haven’t all yet filled.
Into that void have come the virtual places of our lives, whether they play out on social media or, as is likely if you’re reading this, in online games. Increasingly, games act as their own communities, often equaling or surpassing the thought and energy we put into other activities.
Indeed, much of that energy is the playing of those games – the countless hours of Call of Duty or Fortnite matches, raiding in Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft, or socializing and joking with friends in cooperative runs at Helldivers 2 or Deep Rock Galactic. We pour our attention into these games and are rewarded with relaxation, the excitement of discovery, and a growing sense of mastery.
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Helldivers 2
It’s also the conversations and expertise that arise around those games. We comb through subreddits and community forums to discuss strategy. We read websites (like this one) and magazines to understand the games better. We build friendships that persist for years around shared adventures and discoveries in a virtual space, further fleshed out on platforms like Discord. In these places, even single-player games feel like social hubs for interaction and engagement as we seek out others who share our excitement for a given character or franchise.
Despite my love of games and the friendships I have formed as I’ve played them with others, I have to admit to some ambivalence. I treasure those late-night moments of triumph against a raid boss, but I miss more frequent in-person get-togethers with my buddies. I get excited about the many conversations about a game I like online, but I rarely feel like the connections I make there persist into real friendships.
None of that is to disparage the connections and enthusiasm we all find in our gaming. But there’s no doubt we can get too much of a good thing. Even with a nearly endless selection of games to enjoy, we’ve all come across sobering articles where we learn that many in the same demographic of core gamers feel lonely and isolated. That’s not a clear line of causation, but it does give reason to pause. If gaming is our new third place, is it meeting all the goals that older social gathering places once did? Should we really expect them to? That’s a heavy weight for someone’s hobby to have to bear.
I’d assert that the culture may have moved past the concept of a single third place. Whether it’s individual games, shared virtual social spaces, or traditional gathering places of the past, humans are animals that crave connection, and we make communities in the places we can. I don’t think we need to shy away from the interconnectedness that can arise from gaming, even while simultaneously seeking interaction elsewhere. At the same time, even while acknowledging my great love of games, I think they can be a trap that keeps us from forming other friendships and relationships. Like so many things in life, it’s finding a middle ground – embracing new routes to virtual connections without forgetting about the real-world options just outside our door.
This article originally appeared in Issue 366 of Game Informer
Deflecting a crossbow’s bolt in real life takes practice. In the Resident Evil 4 (RE4) VR port, all it takes is lifting the controller in the air at the right time.
And it’s always satisfying.
The parry mechanic is one of the novel additions of the 2023 remake developed by Capcom. Whenever a bolt or melee attack from an infected villager is about to impact Leon Kennedy, you only need to press a button to deflect with the in-game knife. This action grants an opportunity to follow up with an attack on the spot while simultaneously adding to RE4’s original close-quarter smackdown.
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Adapting this to the PlayStation VR2 wasn’t easy. Instead of Leon doing a swift animation with just a button press, you need to grab the knife from your chest, lift it up in the air, and match the incoming attack. It’s more involved, sure, but also more immersive, adding a new layer of novelty to the mechanic.
“Enemy attacks have attack detections set at the weapon’s position,” director Keisuke Yamakawa says. “So, just by checking the contact between the enemy’s attack detection and Leon’s knife, we were almost able to get our anticipated behavior. When we managed to perform the first parry, the team was very excited about how much fun it was, and we were convinced that [the] VR Mode was going to be entertaining.”
Parrying is just one of many elements that went through careful consideration when translating the remake to virtual reality. To find out more about the process, Game Informer spoke to Yamakawa and producer Masato Kumazawa about the development of the VR Mode, how the VR version of Resident Evil Village served as a foundation, and what to expect in the future from Capcom’s ongoing push into the medium.
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Knife Party
Would Leon throw a knife in the midst of battle? Virtual reality grants you greater control over characters, and the team had to consider all possibilities of player agency. In deciding where to place boundaries and where to allow people to experiment, Capcom came up with three main pillars. Namely, whether your actions are fun in VR, whether you feel like you’re incarnating Leon, and if it all fits the RE4 experience.
At first, the team wasn’t sure about this possibility. In the VR version of Resident Evil Village, you can not only throw knives as Ethan Winters but weapons as well. Since Ethan is a civilian, the concept of him throwing whatever he has at hand to hit an enemy and make a quick escape doesn’t sound irrational. However, Leon has had a ton of training and experience in the field, so he wouldn’t be throwing a pistol at somebody’s head.
Ultimately, the developers figured players would want to throw knives as Leon regardless, so they added the mechanic for VR. Unlike Village, there’s a slight delay before returning the knife to the shortcut slot after throwing – which is placed on your virtual body at arm’s reach. Moreover, there’s the advantage of recovering a bit of the knife’s durability by manually returning it to the slot. Considering knives have a more prominent use in RE4, this all fits the concept well. Aside from attacking enemies, you can throw knives at bear traps to trigger them safely out of harm’s way or do target practice with chickens to get eggs.
In the VR version of Village, you’re able to close your hands to form a fist and punch werewolves. Unlike the knife, there’s no delay or cooldown time preventing you from defending yourself with this method. Sure, the damage is vastly inferior in contrast to knives and guns, but since it’s considered a VR novelty and not a proper mechanic, there isn’t a penalty in place. Allowing you to punch Ganados as Leon was also considered early in development. The problem, the developers say, was it meant replacing the existing melee system in favor of a punch you could repeat without a clear penalty. Funnily enough, you can wield two knives simultaneously to stab enemies quickly. But of course, the durability will prevent you from endlessly repeating this action. (Unless you find all Clockwork Castellans to unlock the Primal Knife, which can be upgraded to become indestructible. You’re welcome.)
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Of course, Village wasn’t the only point of reference. The original Resident Evil 4 got a standalone VR version developed by Armature Studio and published by Oculus Studios back in 2021. While the team didn’t mention it as an inspiration, there are multiple similarities, such as cutscenes displayed on a virtual TV of sorts. As for the world itself, there isn’t a big focus on interactivity, which is one of VR’s standout features. Perhaps more importantly, the first-person perspective shifts to third-person each time you perform melee actions, like the flat version.
“During the spinning kick attack, Leon’s posture changes drastically, and his body rotates,” Yamakawa says. “Therefore, it was clear that placing the camera at the head position would not produce a proper image. It was also important to be able to check the surrounding situation and the enemies caught by the kick, so we decided to use the third-person view from the beginning.”
Alternate Realities
In addition to throwing knives and manually parrying attacks, you can grab items and inspect them up close, do revolver tricks à la Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid, and even reload a shotgun by cocking the weapon with one hand. In order to keep up with the intensity of the RE4 remake, a lot had to be streamlined along the way.
Barrels and crates containing items can be destroyed by swinging your knife, but you can opt to use a button prompt that does the action for you as well. In the base game, whenever Leon enters a dark area, he turns on a flashlight until you’re back in a well-lit environment. This happens in VR, too, but the light is attached to your head by default, following your movement. You can, however, grab it from your forehead and move it yourself, similarly to Village, until the section ends. Each weapon has its peculiarities, especially when it comes to reloading, but some are simpler than what you’d expect in VR. As the team says, these shortcuts are intended to make it so your attention is on the action around you.
“For the shotgun and other weapon types that load one shot, we understand that as a VR game, it would be very interesting to reload one shell at a time,” Yamakawa says. “But in Resident Evil 4, the combat is very intense, and if the players have to reload the shells one by one during combat, it would make it very difficult and might affect your level of enjoyment.”
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According to Kumazawa, the release of the VR Mode was scheduled “a year after” the initial release of the base game, which came out on March 24, 2023. It ended up being less than that, being released as a free DLC on December 8 of the same year.
This was partly thanks to the fact that when the core team was still developing the main game, it also started working on aspects of the VR Mode. Additionally, the director of Village helped the team during the initial phases of development, while Yamakawa himself worked on the VR version of Resident Evil 7. It made for a much smoother process, even if mechanics like dual-wielding weapons had to be made from scratch.
In the “Integrated Report 2015” document released by Capcom in the same year, the company expressed its interest and commitment to VR for its Development Division 1, the group responsible for the Resident Evil series. Nine years later, half of the mainline Resident Evil games released in this time have gotten a VR version on PlayStation headsets. The Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes and Armature’s version of RE4 are the outliers.
When asked if this focus on VR has influenced the way Capcom develops new games in the franchise, knowing it’d be working on a VR version ahead of time, the team suggested otherwise. “The simple answer is ‘No,’” Yamakawa says. “It’s very important to us that the main game is as interesting as possible, so we didn’t make any changes to it just because there was going to be a VR mode.” This, in addition, encompasses core additions like the parry. It wasn’t until the team started iterating on the base game to translate the experience to VR that tweaks and changes to the mechanic were made.
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The interviewees say they implemented all the elements they wanted for Resident Evil 4 VR. Once they wrapped up the project, they realized VR was well-suited to the franchise. While they didn’t discuss specifics, Kumazawa says they “plan to undertake more challenges in the future.”
Moreover, Kumazawa adds that one of the reasons for releasing the VR versions of Village and 4 as free DLC is that the team wants to try to help expand the VR market. Yamakawa, personally speaking, joined the project as a director because of his enthusiasm for VR.
While conditions such as motion sickness continue to be a concern for players to access VR, Yamakawa says there’s been substantial improvement in comparison to the original PlayStation VR headset.
“When we received the first version of the original VR development kit, I spent a lot of time playing it,” Yamakawa says. “VR also matches with the Resident Evil franchise really well. I would like VR to get much more popular with the public. Since headsets can still be quite expensive and heavy, I would love for the kits to continue getting lighter and more affordable to make it more [approachable] to the general audience.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 364 of Game Informer.
Dragon Age features a ton of different customization options. Just within the character creator, there are hundreds of options to customize things like hair, body type, what your playable character Rook's face looks like, and so much more. There are also a ton of armor options, too.
Companions have an armor slot, a ring slot, an accessory slot, and a weapon slot, while Rook has access to even more – a helmet, two weapon slots, a belt, an amulet slot, and two ring slots. A belt having its own slot might sound odd as it's not an armor piece people typically think of when kitting out an RPG warrior. However, the belt is an important facet of Rook's kit. The better Rook's belt, the better the potency of their healing potions, which are replenished by destroying green pots scattered about the world. That's not all, though, as higher-quality belts can proc [editor's note: proc is a term used as a shorter way of saying "programmed random occurrence"] additional effects like momentary invulnerability.
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When creating your character, you can immediately view aspirational armors, which won't play into Rook's class until the "mid-to-late game," according to game director Corinne Busche. You can also toggle Rook's starting gear and casual wear in the creator, giving you a pretty good look at how Rook will look in more laidback cutscenes, in combat, and how they might appear later in your Veilguard journey. Busche tells me a lot of the gear in Veilguard is bespoke to your Rook or their followers, which is to say, an armor piece for a Warrior-class Rook probably won't be in a chest for a Mage-class Rook. On a similar note, armor designed for companion Bellara Lutara can't be used for another companion like Lace Harding.
In just my few hours viewing Busche play the game as part of my visit to BioWare's Edmonton office for our current Game Informer cover story, I see a lot of armor to collect from things like chests scattered about Arlathan Forest, for example, and elsewhere. Some of it looks awesome, and some of it doesn't quite line up with my personal taste. That's how it goes in the genre of RPGs.
However, Busche tells me there is transmogrification, or transmog for short, in the game, and calls it "robust." This means you can take an armor's stats and apply it to a different piece of armor. In other words, if you have a really cool piece of armor you like and find a new piece with better stats but don't want to give up the look of your current armor, you don't have to. Transmog allows you to take that new armor's stats and apply them to your current armor, giving you all the benefits while keeping the visual style you prefer.
Transmog isnt just for Rook, though; you can transmog armor and other things for your companions as well. I don't get to see how Veilguard's transmog system works in-game, but just knowing it exists allows me to rest easy knowing my Rook will look as fashionable as possible while saving Thedas.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
In December 2023, Epic Games launched the next chapter of Fortnite, one of the most popular games of all time, with a huge virtual performance featuring Eminem, his avatar landing on a stage in front of fans in a far-off world. Who thought hip-hop would take it this far?
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Eminem in Fortnite (2023)
As we celebrated the 50th anniversary of hip-hop last year, it’s now a good time to look back at how ingrained hip-hop music is in gaming, from NBA2K (remember that 2K13 soundtrack curated by Jay-Z?), Mortal Kombat, and Need for Speed, to Cyberpunk 2077 and, of course, Fortnite.
Mortal Kombat 11 came out of the gates in 2018 with a fiery trailer featuring music by 21 Savage, and later Megan Thee Stallion live-streamed an MK11 match on Twitch. The lore of Grand Theft Auto continues to grow, powered by recent GTA Online updates featuring Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Time will tell how hip-hop will be used in Grand Theft Auto VI, which at long last stopped playing hard to get and finally gave us a trailer to chew on in December.
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ToeJam & Earl (1991)
But while rappers might have quickly penetrated into the suburbs with their music in the early 1990s, that wasn’t going to happen as easily with a Genesis cartridge. One of the earliest hip-hop-infused games, ToeJam & Earl (1991), centers on two alien rappers who have crash-landed on Earth, desperate to return to their home planet. Other games followed, with varied success, including 1996’s PaRappa the Rapper. By the early aughts, Def Jam Vendetta, NBA Street, and GTA San Andreas signaled hip hop was here to stay in gaming. Today, while hip-hop is regularly featured in games, we still haven’t seen the genre make its way on a large scale to the RPG, strategy, or sci-fi genres.
Game Informer recently spoke with some of the architects and rappers involved with the hip-hop games of the past few decades, including Josh Holmes, co-creator of NBA Street & Def Jam Fight for NY, ToeJam and Earl creator Greg Johnson, rapper Saigon, and former Rockstar leads. How did these game designers go about fashioning games that incorporated hip-hop at a time when the genre was coming of age? How did they get rappers – sometimes legendary ones – to lend their voices, their likenesses, and their stories? Why did some games fall short? We then asked these hip-hop stars and game developers about the future. What role do they see hip-hop playing in gaming in the coming years? What will it take for hip-hop to be the soundtrack for a sci-fi game as much as it is for an NBA2K game? And how do video game developers make sure the culture remains authentic? This is the story of the past, present, and future of hip-hop in games.
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ToeJam & Earl (1991)
The Early Days
Greg Johnson’s sleeper hit ToeJam and Earl came out the same year the whiny synths of N.W.A.’s opus Alwayz Into Somethin’ were unleashed on the world. Born to a white mother and a Black father, Johnson describes going to an ethnically diverse Los Angeles high school in the mid-1970s and listening to the kind of music that served as a forebear to rap – funk, R&B, and jazz. Specifically, Johnson recalls listening to artists like Stevie Wonder, Parliament, and Herbie Hancock. Johnson initially wanted to get into biolinguistics (“I was going to be the one to talk to the dolphins and the whales”), but in the early 1980s, he tried his hands at games during a time when Tandy, an early computer that could play games, and Space Invaders in bowling alleys were king. “I got really intrigued at the idea of what a game might be. It was wide open. You could do magic,” Johnson says.
Johnson says gaming machines couldn’t really handle complex music in those days, so putting in great music, including hip-hop, wasn’t yet in the cards. But with the Sega Genesis arriving in North America in 1989 and Johnson now consuming the music of rappers like Young MC and Heavy D, he linked up with programmer Mark Voorsanger to start work on ToeJam and Earl. As the story goes, while still working on his first game, Starflight, Johnson, long obsessed with alien life, had a dream about two aliens with hip-hop inclinations.
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ToeJam & Earl (1991)
The offbeat Sega Genesis game definitely leaves an impression. Titular characters ToeJam and Earl, alien teenage rappers from a musical planet dubbed Funkotron, crash land on Earth. In each island world, our two red and orange heroes amble about, avoiding hostile humans while picking up pieces of their ship in the hopes of ditching Earth and getting back to their homeland. “I thought it would be really fun to flip things on its head and do some satire. [ToeJam and Earl are] the sane ones. They’re cool and funky. It’s the Earthlings who are the crazy ones in this insane world,” Johnson says.
Other Early Creators
The early days of hip-hop games were a wild west with no enduring franchises and many one-offs. Not all games are remembered as fondly as others, either. 1995’s Rap Jam: Volume One for SNES features character models of rappers like Coolio, Yo-Yo, and Warren G facing off in games of street basketball. NBA Street it was not. Besides a barebones hip-hop beat in the menu, the actual in-game action is devoid of music entirely, hip-hop or otherwise. Not even a DJ scratch. Then there’s the graphics and perplexing controls.
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Rap Jam: Volume One (1995)
Pascal Jarry, calling in from Bordeaux, France, is well aware of how his game turned out. But the 20-year industry veteran, who has designed games in three languages and on three continents, was just a young game developer back then.
Jarry and his business partner already had a finished game, which focused on street culture, having come up with friends who were into graffiti and skateboarding in France. But the game needed a distributor. One day in the early 1990s, Jarry says he received a call from someone representing “Motown,” offering up the licenses for well-known rappers. Motown Games was a spin-off of the storied Motown Records and had just come off of Bebe’s Kids, an ill-fated video game version of the 1992 film by the same name.
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PaRappa the Rapper (1996)
Soon, Jarry and his partner landed in the United States to promote the game. During a video game show on the west coast, Jarry recalls running into Coolio and inadvertently leaving him hanging after the rapper gave him a high five. “My friend Marco, the guy doing the art, said, ‘Man, you left him hanging!’” Jarry recalls with a laugh. He had half a mind to go back and complete the handshake, but Marco advised him that would be even worse.
Regarding the many critiques of the game, Jarry emphasizes that he definitely wanted to record music and sound from the featured rappers but describes his hands being tied. “At the time, I was just a subcontractor in the corner,” Jarry says. “The game was not the best game we have ever made. I like the journey of finishing that game much more than the game itself.”
Hideyuki Tanaka, character designer and art director of Bust a Groove, a 1998 cult classic hip-hop rhythm game, continues to stay connected to his game today. He has two Instagram accounts full of artwork and merchandise and a website.
Tanaka said he began drawing at a young age, primarily influenced by manga. That work eventually landed him on a kid’s television show, where he designed characters using 3D computer graphics, which caught the attention of a Square Enix producer. “They considered this to be a rhythm game and incorporated elements of fighting games to enhance the entertainment value as a game,” Tanaka explained.
Bust a Groove is not just influenced by hip-hop music but also dance, with different characters drawing from different dancing styles. Piping hot character Heat moves around a subterranean stage with the swagger of Usher as his platform shoes skate across the floor. Tanaka explained that the game’s dance choreography draws inspiration from many sources including Saturday Night Fever (character Hiro), MC Hammer, and even Spike Lee. Bust a Groove was produced with the expectation of being released in Japan, but he is heartened that the game was embraced in the U.S. and Europe as well.
The Big Leagues
The early aughts were big years for hip-hop video games. The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, in addition to punk, also had artists like Nas. And finally, entire video game franchises were being built with hip-hop, including EA’s Def Jam Vendetta, which arrived in 2003 with a roster of fighters including Ludacris, Method Man, and DMX.
Co-creator Josh Holmes says building the roster of hip-hop legends was a collaborative effort, and his team had a quick turnaround – nine months – to pivot from an intergalactic wrestling game to what became Def Jam Vendetta. Holmes personally met with each rapper to pitch them on the game and outline their role.
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NBA Street (2001)
The initial game did not have all the artists the team originally wanted. Some were on tour, while others weren’t sold on the project. But with sequels Def Jam: Fight for NY and Def Jam: Icon, Holmes says rappers really started to trust the franchise’s intentions. “To this day, I continue to receive messages from fans who express how much these games meant to them and how they wish for another sequel,” Holmes says.
Mark Jordan, a.k.a. DJ Pooh, in addition to being a legendary LA-area hip-hop beatmaker for songs like Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day,” joined the Grand Theft Auto franchise as a writer for San Andreas and later provided the cosign that convinced Dr. Dre to feature in GTA Online. Pooh brought a lot of other hip-hop talent to Rockstar, including Julio G (née Julio Gonzalez), the veteran voice of 93.5 KDAY radio in Los Angeles, who has worked with the likes of Eazy-E and Snoop Dogg. Julio G ended up also being the voice of Radio Los Santos, the in-game radio station that plays the same West Coast ’90s hip-hop that Julio G helped beam across SoCal.
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Def Jam Vendetta (2003)
“Myself and DJ Pooh, we’ve known each other since the ’80s,” Julio G tells Game Informer. He clarifies that he’s not even a gamer, but that one day in 2003, he received a call from Pooh asking him to come down to talk about this new video game he was putting together. Julio G agreed without a second thought – and without fully understanding that he was about to be in one of the biggest games ever.
At a Los Angeles studio, Pooh asked Julio G to read from a script. Some Rockstar staff were also present. It was in this setting that Julio G delivered hilarious lines like “We got a shout out from Denise in Ganton for her man. Give her a call, man!” a reference to one of CJ’s girlfriends. And later, when a riot erupts all across Los Santos, Julio G gets on the airwaves to urge calm. He recorded his segments in about two to three hours, with 90 to 95% of those coming on the first take, he says. “I’m just reading and flipping it my way.”
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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)
While every other DJ on the game goes by an alias, Julio G says Pooh insisted that Rockstar use the radio veteran’s real name because he wanted it to be authentic to LA and the legacy of West Coast rap.
As far as the range of tracks on Radio Los Santos, including Chicano rapper Frost’s “La Raza,” Julio G clarifies that that was “all DJ Pooh.” Julio G says he didn’t even hear the full recording of all of his work until someone showed him a compilation of his segments on YouTube last year.
He also had some surprising things to say about Eazy-E, who, in addition to being a gangsta rap pioneer, was also working on a video game concept before dying of HIV in 1995. The idea is something Julio G says Eazy would talk a lot about with him. “The whole concept of [his] game was getting your lowrider to a supershow, and in the process, you had to go rob somebody… go hydraulic hopping against this dude in a different neighborhood. It was like a Grand Theft Auto in its own way. He was working on it when he passed in ’95. He was working on it all through ’94,” Julio G says.
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Kobe Bryant in NBA 2K24 (2023)
Rockstar’s Hip Hop Nerds
Several Rockstar brass also had a passion for hip-hop and took the task of weaving the genre into their games very seriously. One of Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser’s idols is Rick Rubin, the founder of Def Jam Recordings. Another is Greg Johnson, longtime Rockstar Games senior researcher, not to be confused with the ToeJam game developer. This Greg Johnson, now at Lightspeed LA, is a veteran hip-hop journalist for publications like Spin, Complex, and XXL. In the early 2000s, Johnson’s editor friend told him about a new opportunity at Rockstar Games, which wanted to build out a dedicated research team to gear up for the development of San Andreas. “Especially for that game, having a potential hip-hop journalist that could make the leap to game design was one thing that they were strongly considering,” Johnson says. Rockstar and Johnson quickly connected during a series of interviews, and he was soon reporting directly to Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on the job.
Adam Tedman, former Rockstar vice president of new media and global head of digital marketing, who now works at Dan Houser’s new Absurd Ventures, was particularly keen to talk about Rockstar’s use of hip-hop in The Warriors, its 2005 beat ‘em up adapting the 1979 movie of the same name, and in Grand Theft Auto IV. Tedman helped bring producer Statik Selektah to GTA IV’s expansions, where Selektah produced tracks for Talib Kweli and Freeway. Selektah tells Game Informer he met Tedman in 2008 right after GTA IV dropped. “They asked me to come out and produce a couple of records and do the radio station and all that. It was like a dream come true,” Selektah says.
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Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
Sometimes when hip-hop comes together to create music for games, there are unintended consequences. Rapper Saigon, maybe best known for his recurring role in HBO’s Entourage Season 2, says that when he went over to record “Spit” at Selektah’s house specifically for GTA, the two ended up with an entire album, All in a Days’ Work. “If I didn’t go there to do that song, that album never gets made,” Saigon said.
As a rapper early to moving between television, music, and video games, Saigon is impressed with the current generation of rappers, who are taking things to a whole new level. “They’re making songs solely for Rockstar Games and NBA2K and all those big games,” Saigon says. “It feels good to know I had some kind of influence to the generation who went on to become the most successful generation of the culture ever.”
The Future of Hip-Hop and Gaming
Several of the hip-hop stars who spoke to Game Informer are serious gamers. Saigon has been playing games for decades (“I was the one who learned how to warp [on Mario]”). Selektah speaks about unwinding with Call of Duty and GTA as a single father after his daughter goes to bed.
These days, Johnson thinks the gaming industry is starting to recognize the sheer creative talent in the hip-hop world. “When you get to know them, you find a whole bunch of comic book fans, you find anime nerds, a whole bunch of dudes who used to compete to see who could draw comic book heroes better in the third grade, you know?” Johnson says.
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Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)
For sports games, it’s almost inevitable that hip-hop found itself there because the music made a huge impact on several generations of NBA and NFL athletes. But now the question isn’t just about artists appearing in a game as a one-off but about actually having true equity from a business standpoint. He mentions musician Raphael Saddiq, a cofounder of independent game publisher IllFonic. Johnson expects more stars to think more about the business side of video games down the line.
He’s unsure exactly how hip-hop will be used next and if games will use hip-hop more heavily in sci-fi and other genres. But he calls rap “outlaw” music and thinks it can serve as the sound of many different stories and worlds. This is something game developers should keep in mind. “Whether you’re sampling or replaying, that’s a very hip-hop mentality and sensibility. If you’re interested in representing any outlaw vibe, any rebel culture, it could be rastas, it could be bikers, it could be smugglers, hip-hop is always a good soundtrack for that.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 363 of Game Informer.
Few types of media hook me like a good documentary. The genre uses the best elements of traditional filmmaking to amplify what will always be the greatest story ever told: reality. Whether it’s an educational look at the natural world, a gripping true crime tale, or an enlightening biography of a noteworthy figure, the best documentaries manage to educate as effectively as they entertain.
The video games industry is now old enough to have been subjected to its fair share of documentaries, from The King of Kong to Indie Game: The Movie to Netflix’s High Score. But no matter how good they are, they all generate a tough-to-pin-down anxiety in me I never consciously noticed until recently: By the time the film ends, or, more often, in the middle of it, I just want to stop watching and play the games in question.
It’s a frustration shared by Chris Kohler, the editorial director at Digital Eclipse. And it’s one of the reasons why he enjoys working on the studio’s Gold Master Series. Essentially the gaming equivalent of the Criterion Collection, it consists of two titles, The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Each game takes players on a playable history lesson of its subjects, be it a single game, a creator, or an entire studio. The result is a new genre Digital Eclipse can call its own: the interactive documentary.
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Digital Eclipse’s neon-lit arcade
Built On Preservation
Digital Eclipse has led the charge in commercial video game emulation since its early years. Founded in 1992 as Williams Digital Arcade, it specialized in creating arcade-accurate console ports of classic arcade titles via emulation at a time when this was mainly accomplished by replicating an arcade game’s code from scratch.
“It was if you went and bought The Godfather on VHS, and it was just new people trying to recreate the version of The Godfather that was on film instead of somebody coming up with technology that would allow you to take a filmstrip and get that information onto a Blu-ray or DVD or whatever it is,” Kohler explains.
Digital Eclipse is a pioneer in commercial emulation. While the studio’s methods equated to a more enjoyable gaming experience, it also served as an early example of game preservation. Kohler says the company was essentially built on the need to pay retro games the proper respect.
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Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
The 2000s saw the company undergo a complicated period of mergers and rebrands before reemerging in 2015 as Digital Eclipse once more. This saw the studio shift its focus back towards preservation in the form of retro game compilations such as the Mega Man Legacy Collection, Disney Afternoon Collection, and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. These titles included bonus features such as long-lost concept art and other development and marketing materials that, with each release, gradually grew from being a sideshow to almost the main attraction.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, released in 2022, is perhaps the most impressive of these game bundles. In addition to packing in 13 old-school TMNT games, it boasts an exhaustive number of forgotten materials such as original magazine ads, scans of the original game boxes and manuals, comic book covers, and never-before-seen concept art. For ’80s babies, they weren’t just revisiting old TMNT games; they were reliving the franchises’ early pop-culture boom while getting a behind-the-scenes look at how these games were brought to life.
While retro collections help keep old games alive, Kohler says they only offer the “What” of a game’s overall history. They don’t provide the “Who,” “Where,” “How,” and, most importantly, the “Why.” To fill those gaps, Digital Eclipse needed a fresh approach.
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Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Creating A Genre
Kohler joined Digital Eclipse in July 2020. At the time, the company had licensed the Karateka IP from creator Jordan Mechner to create a new retro collection of sorts. Unlike its previous projects, Digital Eclipse had full control over the Karateka game’s direction since the studio didn’t have to work with a publisher. The Karateka title became Kohler’s first major project, and the team also gained access to years’ worth of Mechner’s personal materials. These included his journals documenting his daily life while developing Karateka, design documents, publisher correspondences, and more. As Kohler pored over decades-old legal negotiations and Mechner’s written insights into creating Karateka and other games, he and the team saw the potential to tell Karateka’s story in a new fashion.
“And just realizing that there was this incredible narrative behind this game, and because we had Jordanʼs journals where he was writing down day by day everything that was happening in his life as he was creating this game, we could really go far beyond the idea of the retro collection,” says Kohler. “We could really tell this in a narrative way, and the story itself can become the main event, as it were.”
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The Making of Karateka
The seed for the interactive documentary had been sewn, and the team began brainstorming. What if they could tell a linear story that takes players down the complete timeline of a game’s development? Better yet, what if players could play not only the finished product but also its various prototypes?
It was around this time that Digital Eclipse began a partnership with Atari to create a title celebrating the companyʼs 50th anniversary. Coincidentally, Atari wanted something different than the average retro collection, and Digital Eclipse saw this as the perfect opportunity to implement its nascent documentary game concept. The idea that was originally envisioned for The Making of Karateka would make its debut in Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection.
In addition to conducting a staggering amount of research, Digital Eclipse filmed interviews with former Atari employees and industry luminaries. Perhaps most impressively, it included over 100 playable Atari games, from the iconic to the forgotten, via emulation. The result was a robust story of Atari’s founding and golden age told through linear timelines divided by chapters. Players read informative blurbs, viewed development documents and other key materials, watched documentary clips, and, of course, played the games that define a generation. As a bonus, it had even developed modern reimaginings of select titles.
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Digital Eclipse CSO and Head of Publishing Justin Bailey summons Karateka’s dreaded hawk at the Portland Retro Expo
The result was a resounding success. Atari 50 earned widespread acclaim as one of the most complete and well-made video game compilations ever created. It also worked as a successful proof-of-concept for the fledgling interactive documentary concept.
“By taking that all the way to the finish line, we were able to kind of work out the structure and the format,” says Kohler. “And as weʼre kind of getting towards the end of Atari 50, it was like, ‘Okay, now itʼs time to take all these learnings that weʼve had by finishing out Atari 50 and then revisit that back on to Karateka.’”
By this time, Digital Eclipse had also signed on with famed UK developer Jeff Minter, creator of hits such as Gridrunner and Tempest 2000, for a title documenting his studio, Llamasoft. Thanks to Atari 50, Digital Eclipse found a winning formula for telling more great stories from video game history. The Gold Master Series was born as a result, and The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft adhered to Atari 50’s blueprint to tell their respective stories and expand players’ appreciation for them.
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Reshaping History
“Nobodyʼs really doing what weʼre doing,” says Kohler. “And maybe for good reason. Maybe weʼre crazy, but weʼre doing our best to try to figure out what this new type of video game is.”
The Gold Master Series team consists of former game journalists like Kohler and Dan Amrich, who handle the lion’s share of researching and crafting the resulting narratives. The games are made using the Eclipse Engine, proprietary software specially designed to easily ingest emulators, either licensed or developed in-house, to run several old games from a plethora of platforms. The Eclipse Engine is the secret sauce of the Gold Master Series, as its ability to juggle emulators alongside sound and video in a fast and responsive manner is the reason why navigating the games’ timelines feels smooth and snappy.
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Of course, each game needs a central topic, and everyone at Digital Eclipse, as you might expect, has a personal wishlist of subjects. “Iʼm still waiting for that call from Shigeru Miyamoto,” says Kohler. “He has my number.” I found it hard to think that anyone could top Jordan Mechner. His absurdly meticulous note and record keeping (Kohler: “Nobody’s that organized! Who does that?!”) makes him the gold standard when it comes to providing enough reference material to fill a game. But Kohler tells me that so long as the subject is interesting/important, how much they choose to hold on to isn’t a prerequisite to be considered for a Gold Master Series game. If Digital Eclipse needs something, one way or another, they’ll find it. And whatever they gather will shape the game accordingly. Jeff Minter didn’t have as many design documents as Mechner, so Digital Eclipse leaned more into showing what the actual games looked like. Llamasoft includes models of the cassette tapes along with advertisements and reviews from UK gaming mags at the time. Some materials aren’t found until close to the end of production.
Atari 50, for example, had to be patched to include film footage recorded by a Berkeley University student of Atari back when the company was still called Syzygy. Essentially an amateur documentary capturing the birth of Atari, the footage vanished for decades. While the Atari Museum possessed a copy of the film, Digital Eclipse didn’t have the rights to use it. So, instead, the studio had to track down one of the students who made it, get their permission to use their footage, research the legal rights for its commercial use, and patch it into Atari 50 after it was already finalized. “We did so much legwork to get that little like, two, three minutes snippet of a film in this,” says Kohler.
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Battlezone designer Owen Rubin at his controller-laden work station
That effort speaks to the length Digital Eclipse will go to ensure its interactive documentaries are as rich and comprehensive as possible. “We have not had a situation yet where weʼve wanted to tell a story and have not been able to find cool things to tell that story,” Kohler says. “So, I donʼt think we ever will. I think we can find the things.”
The closest comparison I offer for the Gold Master Series is they feel like modern museum exhibits. A museum attendee can breeze through exhibits, giving little more than cursory glances, and walk away with a basic understanding of the history lesson told. Conversely, they can read every card, press every button, and play every video to absorb more details. Kohler says Digital Eclipse wants the Gold Master Series to offer the same range of engagement and that either approach, no matter how shallow or deep, is perfectly okay.
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Additionally, Digital Eclipse is always looking for ways to add interactivity beyond just playing an emulated game. One great example is The Making of Karateka’s rotoscope theater, where players can watch a short clip of the game while toggling each animation layer, almost like Photoshop filters. In fact, Kohler cites the rotoscope theater as an example of how Digital Eclipse has only scratched the surface of what the interactive documentary can evolve into. That leads to the million-dollar question: Does he consider these types of experiences to be true video games?
‘Yes, I think itʼs a video game,” Kohler explains. “I think itʼs a video game as much as [a] documentary film is a film. And I think that in the same way that filmmakers and film critics back in the ’70s kind of started looking at film and saying, ‘We should be talking about film by making films about film,’ we should be talking about video games by making video games about video games.”
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Writing The Next Chapter
Kohler says Digital Eclipse regularly receives feedback that players unfamiliar or unattached to the subject of the Gold Master Series are less willing to give them a shot. It’s a constant challenge to communicate that not only has Digital Eclipse made these games with such people in mind, but you’ll likely walk away with a newfound appreciation or even fandom for the games being discussed.
“I think it all goes back to the fact that video games are just such a new medium,” he says. “And weʼre only sort of just scratching the surface of what could be done with that interactive medium.”
Despite this, Kohler says he believes that if Digital Eclipse keeps doing the work, eventually, they’ll attract enough attention to break through to a wider audience. At the end of the day, he believes people do enjoy being educated, as evidenced by the popularity of more traditional documentary-style programs and podcasts. In his eyes, the Gold Master Series isn’t just about teaching – he refers to the term “edutainment” as being “tainted” – but also about bringing more nonfiction into the medium of video games.
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The Making of Karateka exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The Gold Master Series titles have unintentionally been released at a cadence of one per year (Llamasoft in 2024, Karateka in 2023, and their spiritual predecessor Atari 50 in 2022). Kohler says not to expect this pattern to continue, but the team has various projects in the works. Atari’s acquisition of Digital Eclipse in the fall of 2023 has presumably provided a stronger financial safety net, so I only hope we have many more Gold Master Series games to come. And while Kohler is hopeful, he also doesn’t want Digital Eclipse to monopolize the genre. He hopes their work creates enough of a demand to inspire other studios to pursue similar projects.
“We should be telling our own stories,” he says. “We shouldnʼt be letting books and films or a Netflix series tell the stories of video games. We should be looking at that ourselves because itʼs all part of the video game industry needing to treat video games with more respect.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 366 of Game Informer
<p><img loading="lazy" src="https://www.gameinformer.com/sites/default/files/styles/body_default/public/2024/06/13/d265e3b9/emmrich.jpg" width="800" height="450" alt="Dragon Age: The Veilguard Game Informer Cover Story Exclusive Details" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-body-default" /></p>
<p>Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a BioWare RPG, which means a lot of things, including the fact that the game will feature romance. Based on what I learned during a recent trip to BioWare's Edmonton office for the current <em>Game Informer</em> cover story, Veilguard will be the team's most romantic game yet. </p>
<h2>Relationship Level</h2>
<img loading="lazy" src="https://www.gameinformer.com/sites/default/files/styles/body_default/public/2024/06/13/db54040d/warrior_rook.jpg" alt="Dragon Age: The Veilguard Dreadwolf Game Informer Cover Story" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-body-default" />
<p>Every companion in the game has a Relationship Level related to Rook, and the choices you make (and not even specifically about the companion, but in the world in general), what you say to companions, how you help or don't help them, and more all play into it. Every time you rank up a companion's Relationship Level, you unlock a skill point to spend specifically on that companion. Though companion skill trees pale in comparison to Rook's expansive tree, which features passive abilities, combat abilities, and more, as well as paths to three unique class specializations, there's still some customization here. </p>
<p>Each companion has access to five abilities, but you can only take three into combat. Thus, it's important to strategize which abilities to spend a skill point on and how those abilities can synergize with your current build on the battlefield. Though I couldn't confirm, Dragon Age series art director Matt Rhodes hints that companion issues, problems, and personal quests will play into this Relationship Level and how a companion interacts with Rook. </p>
<p>"[Bellara Lutara, for example] has her own story arc that runs parallel to and informs the story path you're on," Rhodes tells me while I watch game director Corinne Busche play through a linear, story-driven mission in Arlathan Forest where Rook is searching for Bellara. Busche adds that "relationships are key, not only romance but friendships. We wanted to lean into not just the relationships the characters have with you but the relationships they have with each other. It's a found family, and at the end of the day, they need to trust they all have each other's back." </p>
<h2>Romance</h2>
<img loading="lazy" src="https://www.gameinformer.com/sites/default/files/styles/body_default/public/2024/06/13/bd546151/lace_and_varric.jpg" alt="Dragon Age: The Veilguard Game Informer Cover Story Exclusive Details" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-body-default" />
<p>However, fret not, BioWare fans – romance is a key part of relationships in the game, Busche says, noting some of the romances will get quite spicy. However, not all of them will, as "each romance has a very different flavor," according to Busche. Some characters are straight to the point, while others are more awkward, having never been in a relationship before. "You learn who these characters are in how their romances unfold," she says. She likens romantic and platonic relationships to another way to "level up" your companions. It's not just experience and skill points that determine Rook's standing with companions, but diegetic conversations, too. </p>
<p>BioWare has already revealed that every companion in Veilguard is pansexual, notably different from the community-dubbed "playersexual" approach in some games, which sees NPCs adjust romantic and sexual interests based on the player rather than their own sense of sexuality. As pansexual companions, they are attracted to people of any gender (or regardless of gender). That's a critical distinction because, in Veilguard, your companions aren't just going to vie for your affection – they might take attraction to other companions in the titular Veilguard. </p>
<p>Giving one companion the cold shoulder might nudge them into the warm shoulder of someone else on the team. Busche says companions can form romances with each other, although I'm unable to confirm if that means locking Rook out of forming a romance with them. </p>
<p>I saw nothing resembling romance in my very early hours with the game. However, I did see the romantically inclined "emotional" response in Rook's dialogue choices at times, which led to my Rook flirting with ice mage and private detective companion Neve Gallus. Busche says this is the option to flirt and push platonic relationships into romantic territory, though Rook's flirtatious efforts aren't always reciprocated. But that's not to say you should ignore the other options – I saw dialogue choices resembling friendly, snarky, and direct, too, and I can see how these different flavors of dialogue likely mix and mingle into Rook's relationships with companions. It's still a mostly mysterious system to me, but as Veilguard is due out this fall, I don't have to wait too long to learn more and neither do you.</p>
<p>For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below. </p>
Dragon Age: The Veilguard will feature nudity. That's something I learned firsthand while customizing my Rook within BioWare's Edmonton, Canada, office earlier this year during my cover story visit. We were customizing a feminine Rook, and while adjusting body options - read Game Informer’s in-depth feature about Veilguard’s character creator here for more details – our Rook's shirt disappeared to let us customize things like chest size.
And that's when Veilguard game director Corrine Busche smiled, likely knowing full well that nudity in the character creator means nudity elsewhere in the game, like in Veilguard's romances, something I know BioWare fans will be delighted to hear. "This is a mature RPG," she tells me.
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I only see topless nudity in the character creator, and when I later ask BioWare if there is bottom nudity as well, I'm told that's something it wants to let fans discover for themselves in the game. Interesting answer, considering we're talking about genitalia here, but I don't push further. Though the game's leads wouldn't share too much about romance options in the game, I have a feeling nudity will play a part in some cutscenes and that's what BioWare is alluding to.
Nudity has been present in previous BioWare games, but it's almost always been implied. Characters are sometimes naked in romance scenes and elsewhere, but arms, legs, shadows, and pieces of scenery obscure characters' more… oogly bits. With some of those bits on full display in the character creator, I have a feeling Veilguard's romantic scenes will be the spiciest in the series' history. And the game's pretty visual design, running in EA's Frostbite engine, only adds to that.
Okay, I think I've hit the limit that I can write the word nudity on my work computer before it gets flagged by HR or something. You'll have to wait for the game's full release this fall to learn more about nudity, romance, and more.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
During my visit to BioWare in its Edmonton, Canada, office earlier this year for the current Game Informer cover story on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I heard a sentiment repeated throughout the day from the game's leads: in past Dragon Age games, BioWare stumbled onto great companions, but with Veilguard, it's the first game where the studio feels it purposefully and intentionally created great companions. As such, those companions are key to everything happening in Veilguard.
With such a significant emphasis on these characters, I spoke to some of the game's leads to learn precisely about BioWare's philosophy on companions in Veilguard.
"No, that is the case," BioWare general manager Gary McKay tells me when I ask if he agrees with the stumbled-onto-greatness sentiment. "I would first start with Dragon Age – each installment in this franchise has been different, so we didn't set out to make a game that was a sequel or the same game as before. We really wanted to do something different and we did push the envelope in a couple of areas, companions being one of them. Once we got knee deep into it, we really realized we had something special with these companions, again, around the motivations, the story arc, and it really started to become the centerpiece for this game."
The Philosophy Behind Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Companions
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Game director Corinne Busche agrees, adding that Veilguard's companions are "the most fully realized complex companions we've ever crafted." She also believes they're the Dragon Age series' best. "They're complicated, they have complicated problems, and that's what's interesting," she continues. "As much as I adore the companions and the journeys I've been on with them in past Dragon Age titles – previously, it feels like companions are going on an adventure with me, the main character, whether it's the Hero of Ferelden or Hawke, you name it. But in [Veilguard], in many ways, the companions are so fleshed out that it feels as though I'm going on a journey with them. I'm exploring how they think and feel; I'm helping them through their problems. We're working through their unique character arcs. They feel like my dear friends, and I absolutely adore them."
Busche says these companions participate in the game's darker and more optimistic parts. "We've really moved into a place where you can have the highest of highs, and it can be colorful, it can be optimistic, but also, you can have the lowest of lows where it gets gritty, it gets painful, it gets quite dark. But throughout it all, there is a sense of optimism. And it creates this delightful throughline throughout the game."
When I ask creative director John Epler about BioWare's philosophy behind Veilguard's companions, he reveals a phrase the studio uses: Dragon Age is about characters, not causes.
"What that means for us is [...] let's take the Grey Wardens, for example – the Grey Wardens are an interesting faction but by themselves, they don't tell a story, but there are characters within that faction that do," he tells me. "And the same thing with other characters in the story. They represent these factions, they show the face of the other parts of Thedas and of the storytelling we really want to do, which, again, shows Thedas as this large, diverse living world that has things going on when you're not there."
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Epler says one of BioWare's principles when creating Veilguard was that the world exists even when you – Rook – are not around. There are things, ancient conflicts, grudges, and more, that happen even when Rook isn't participating in them, he says.
"You kind of come in 'in media res' in some of these, so that's where we wanted to go with the companions," he says. "They have stories of their own. Where can Rook come into these stories, and what interesting ways can those stories develop not just based on themselves but also based on Rook's presence within them?"
Dragon Age series art director Matt Rhodes adds that companions are the load-bearing pillars for everything in Veilguard, so "when you're designing them, it's not just designing a character; they're the face for their faction, the face for, in [some cases like Bellara Lutara], an entire area of the world." From his aesthetic-forward part of developing companions in Veilguard as the game's art director, he tells me Veilguard's characters are (hopefully) going to give cosplayers a challenge.
"The previous art director had the mindset we should make things easier for [cosplayers], which I think is a misunderstanding of cosplayers," Rhodes says. "We've seen the kind of challenges they're willing to take on, and so we've gone for, in some cases, a level of complexity and detail that I hope a lot of them are excited to rise to the challenge for."
A Quick Detour: Neve Gallus
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As Neve Gallus is the companion I spent the most time with during my visit to BioWare, I asked Epler about this character and her role in the game. Here's what I learned: "So Neve is a private investigator in Minrathous. Minrathous is the capital city of the Tevinter Empire. It’s also a mage-ocracy; mages run the entirety of the Empire – they’re all-powerful. A lot of them still believe in slavery, they keep slaves, it’s a very oppressive, totalitarian regime. And Neve is a member of the Shadow Dragons, which is a rebel faction within Thedas that fights back against this mage-ocracy, fights back against this oppressive, very damaging regime that’s taken over the city, because she believes there’s good, and she is there for the common people. So if you’re not a mage in Tevinter, you are lower than dirt for a lot of people. She and the Shadow Dragons, in general, fight back, but Neve, in particular, is this character that represents this more, ‘voice of the streets, the voice of the common people.’ In previous Dragon Age games, you go to Orlais, you meet Emperor Celene, you meet Briala; we wanted to have a character that showed not just what is Tevinter at the top, but what is the average person who lives in Tevinter. And she is very much about, again, fighting oppression, fighting tyranny and, as a private investigator, finding clues and ways through problems that aren’t maybe as action-focused as some of the other companions."
Companions, In And Out Of Combat
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Rook's companions in Veilguard have roles both in and out of combat, but since I only saw a few hours of this game (which is sure to be multiple dozens of hours long), I wanted to ask Busche about these roles and how they play out. Here's what I learned:
In Combat
Bushce: "So companions as realized characters, we have to take that premise when we talk about how they show up in combat. These are their own people. They have their own behaviors; they have their own autonomy on the battlefield; they'll pick their own targets. As their plots progress, they'll learn how to use their abilities more competently, and it really feels like you're fighting alongside these realized characters in battle. So I love that, I love the believability of it. It feels like we're all in it together.
"But then when it comes time for the strategy, and the progression I might add, that's where a sense of teamwork comes into play as the leader of this party as Rook. When I open the ability wheel, I almost feel like we're huddling up. We're coming up with a game plan together. I see all the abilities that Harding has, and I see all that Bellara is capable of, and sometimes I'm using vulnerabilities synergistically. Maybe I'm slowing time with Bellara so that I can unleash devastating attacks with Harding, knocking down the enemy, and then me as Rook, rushing in and capitalizing on this setup they've created for me. It is a game about creating this organic sense of teamwork.
"Now, there are more explicit synergies as well. We very much have intentional combos where your companions can play off each other, you can queue up abilities between them, and each of those abilities will go off and have their effect. But it results in this massive detonation where you get enhanced effects, debuff the entire battlefield, all because of planning and teamwork. What makes it really cool is you can introduce Rook into that equation as well. One of my favorite things to do is upgrade some of Harding's abilities so she will automatically use some of these abilities that normally I'd have to instruct her to do. And she'll actually set my character up to execute that combo that, again, has that detonation effect."
Outside Combat
Busche: "It's one of my favorite topics. I talked about the idea that these are fully realized characters, that they're very authentic and relatable. So outside of combat, what that means is they're going to have their own concerns, fears, distractions, and indeed, even their own sanctuaries, their own personal spaces. In our base of operations this time, our player hub, the Lighthouse, each of the companions has their own room. And what I love about it is it becomes a reflection of who they are. The more time you spend with them, as the game develops as you work through their arc, their room and their personalities will evolve and flourish and become more complete as they trust you more and you understand them better.
"What's interesting, you mentioned romance, the companions also develop romantically and I'm not just talking about with the main character Rook; I'm talking about each other. There are moments in the game where two of our companions fell in love with each other and I had to make some pretty challenging choices as it related to the quest we're on. And it broke my heart, it absolutely did [Editor's Note: I get the sense Busche is talking about a specific playthrough of Veilguard here – not a definitive sequence of events for every playthrough].
"So I would say, as you're adventuring with them, as you're returning to the Lighthouse and getting to know them – all these decisions and conversations and things you learn about them – it endears them to you in a way that I honestly haven't experienced before. And sometimes that fills me with joy and sometimes it breaks my heart."
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
We've reached the end of Game Informer's Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story coverage as we prepare to launch our next exciting issue. But I still have this one last feature to publish, and it's about Bellara Lutare, the Dalish elf and member of the new Veil Jumpers faction in the game. During my visit to BioWare's Edmonton, Canada, office earlier this year, I checked out the game's expansive character creator, its in medias res prologue, and the first mission after said prologue.
Though BioWare released a big look at Veilguard's prologue via a 20-minute gameplay trailer last month, they haven't released much about that subsequent mission, where you meet and recruit your first companion, Bellara. I learned a lot about this character, and knowing I was one of the first outside of the studio to see the mission where you meet her, I spent a chunk of my interviews with the team's leads talking about Bellara. So, for my final feature on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, here's everything I learned about this quirky elven mage.
Everything We Learned About Bellara Lutara In Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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In talking with BioWare's various leads, like game director Corinne Bushce, creative director John Epler (who is personally responsible for writing Bellara and leading her development), and BioWare general manager Gary McKay, it's clear the team has a deep love for this character. She's energetic, effervescent, and academic, and as a companion for combat, she's a character I’m pretty excited to use in my party.
"I love Bellara, I think she's fantastic," McKay tells me. "I see people that I know in her and so that's how she really resonates with me. I love the whole tinkerer aspect to her. It was a collective to bring that character to life. It was everything from the writers, to the editors, the animators, to character modelers, to the texturing, to how we light her. I'm really proud of that character."
Bellara In Combat
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When I ask Busche about Bellara, she gives me some insight into what I can expect of the mage on the battlefield. And Bellara sounds like an excellent choice for both support and elemental combos.
"Oh my goodness, she is amazing," Busche says. "So, first of all, she is a mage. She is an explorer of ancient Elven ruins. She is an elf herself and a member of the Veil Jumpers faction. They investigate the ancient ruins of Arlathan. Everything about her character as a mage leans into that, but she also challenges the kind of archetypal idea of a mage."
She does that by attacking with a bow at range using electrically charged arrows. But she's also casting spells that slow down time or heal allies and Rook. She does that by channeling magical energy into her gauntlet. Busche says she starts as a support character in combat, thanks to her healing spells, but notes players don't have to build her out that way. She also leans into electrical damage, and "damage type really matters a lot when we get into the strategy and tactics," Busche says.
"You can spec her out in a way where she's unleashing this devastating vortex that pulls in all enemies into an electrical storm. Maybe then we unleash our own [area of effect attack] with all the enemies clumped together," Busche adds. "She can debuff all the enemies with the shocked affliction, where they're taking passive damage. I mentioned she can slow time, she can heal. She is one of the characters that you can build out [to have her] healing spells heal you autonomously, so if you're the kind of player that likes to be on the frontlines [...] Bellara might just be the perfect companion for you."
Bellara's Place In The World
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Epler, who writes Bellara, tells me about her place in Thedas as an elf and the connection elves have to the magic of the world. He says if you've paid attention to the franchise, you likely already know that elves are historically an oppressed people in the games. Now, with two of their gods on the loose in Veilguard, magic has poured back into the world in a big way.
"She represents the Veil Jumpers," Epler explains. "Now, the Veil Jumpers are a faction that's appeared in the comics before, but otherwise, this is the first time it's appeared in the games, and they are the ones journeying through Arlathan, where the ancient elven empire used to exist and left a lot of artifacts when it disappeared. When the elves fell from immortality thousands of years ago, they still left a lot of their artifacts and a lot of their, for lack of a better term, magical technology behind, and Bellara represents this yearning to find the truth of who the elves were because not only did they lose their magic and their immortality, they lost a lot of their history.
"A lot of what they know of their past is based on myth, it's based on rumor. Bellara is a knowledge seeker. She wants to find out what's true, what's not; she wants to find the pieces of who the elves used to be and really understand what their story was, where they came from, as well as figure out where they're going next, and find a future for the elves. And within the context of The Veilguard, she joins the team, first of all, to help stop the gods because Bellara feels at least partially responsible since they are elven gods, but also to maybe find a little bit more of who they used to be. Because again, you're dealing with these elves that were around millennia ago that have now reemerged into the world, and who better to teach her who the elves used to be than them."
A Quick Detour: Magic
During my discussion, Epler spoke about magic's place in the world and how it differs in Veilguard from previous Dragon Age games. Here's what he said: "Historically, as you've mentioned, we've been in the south of Thedas and south Thedas is Ferelden, Orlais. Both are fairly still oppressed, they still have circles. Mages are viewed with suspicion, but Tevinter has always been this land where mages rule, mages are in charge, mages make the rules, mages run the show. So what does that look like? And as we've gone through [Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition], magic has become more and more present. And part of that is because Solas has been slowly preparing this ritual for longer than anyone in the Dragon Age universe is really aware of, but also, just going into the spaces where magic is, by definition and by the lore, much, much more present. And it's been fun because, again, we do have rules; we want to make sure we're not violating the lore or violating things we've said before. But it's also, again, that permissiveness of, 'Okay, what is the most interesting way to do this? What's the most interesting way to tell the story? [In] Origins, II, on the Eclipse engine, we could talk about this fantastical magic, but the engine didn't really allow us to show it. For the first time, we're really able to let the visuals speak for themselves and not have to tell the player, 'Trust us, it's spectacular; this magic is really cool.' We can actually show you and let you drink it in."
For one of my last questions to Epler, I was curious about the contrast between Bellara, an elven mage who is optimistic and bubbly, and Solas, a determined and tragic character. He indicated there might be more to Bellara than meets the eye.
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"Solas sees himself as the tragic hero," Epler says. "He's not capable of really being happy, he can't let himself be happy, partially because he carries the guilt of what he did bringing the Veil, doing what he did to the world. Whereas Bellara is somebody who has seen tragedy, and as you get into her character arc and get into her backstory, you realize this is a character who has seen a lot of tragedy. But that tragedy, instead of wallowing in it, she's forced herself to push past it. She looks at her regrets, and she tells herself, 'I don't want to feel regret.'
"Whereas again, Solas tends to wallow in his to a large degree. And it allows us to create a very big differentiation. Part of it is also because Solas is an ancient elf, whereas Bellara is a Dalish elf, but she just sees a problem and wants to solve it. She feels a tremendous amount of responsibility to her people [...] to the Dalish, and to the Veil Jumpers, and that drives her forward. That said, she does have her moments where she has doubt, she has moments where she has a more grim outlook, and there are moments where you realize that some of her sunny, optimistic outlook is kind of a mask that she puts on to hide the fact that she's hurting, she's in pain. But in general, she doesn't see any benefit to wallowing in those regrets."
We learned today that Bellara will be voiced by Jee Young Han, known for her roles in Perry Mason,Unprisoned, and as Sentinel Dax in a previous Bioware game, Anthem. To see the rest of the cast, along with Rook's four voice options, click here.
[Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Bellara’s last name is Lutare, not Lutara as it previously incorrectly stated]
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
Dead by Daylight (DBD) has been one of the most popular multiplayer games (and horror titles in general) since its launch in 2016, but fans have dreamed of experiencing its universe in a single-player format. Developer Behaviour Interactive agreed and enlisted the cinematic storytelling expertise of Supermassive Games (Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Quarry) to create an original story in the DBD universe. That game became The Casting of Frank Stone, and it terrorizes Game Informer’s cover this month.
We traveled to Behaviour’s studio in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to play an early slice of the game and speak to lead developers from both studios to learn how the collaboration came to be. The story also reveals some of the DBD-style mechanics remixing Supermassive’s traditional gameplay template and also provides exclusive details on the game’s filmmaking mechanic.
Check out the cover art below, which was executed by Behavior’s senior concept artist Maïlys Garcia.
In addition to the cover story, issue #368 also features a six-page Dead by Daylight retrospective. Writer Alex Van Aken interviewed two of the game’s principal creators to learn the history of the DBD’s development and its future, including exclusive details of its upcoming Castlevania crossover.
But wait, there’s more! Contributor Pao Yumol spoke to the creator of Vampire Survivors to learn the story behind the game’s creation and its surprising success. Editor Charles Harte wrote a six-page preview for Visions of Mana, including insights from its principal creators. With Devolver Digital celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, Brian Shea spoke to its founders to learn how the company grew from a small renegade startup to an indie publishing behemoth. The issue also includes previews for upcoming titles such as Lego Horizon Adventures, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Persona 3 Reload’s Episode Aigis – The Answer, and more!
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