AMD’s flagship RDNA 2 graphics card, the RX 6900 XT, continues to drop in price over in the US. Right now you can pick this once-fastest-ever Radeon GPU for just $500 when you buy an open box model from Newegg. That’s outstanding, given that this card cost twice as much when it debuted in 2020.
This is the fancy AsRock Phantom Gaming D model too, which brings a snazzy design and a faster 2340MHz boost clock (versus 2250MHz on the vanilla spec).
Blizzard has revealed the next chapter in its live-service ARPG, Diablo 4, and it revolves around a really handy mechanical spider.
Dubbed the Season of the Construct, the upcoming update will send players into the perilous and trap-riddled vaults of the legendary Zoltun Kulle in search of treasure, battling demonically possessed mechanical constructs in the process.
The main power grind will center on your new robotic companion, a spider-like friend called the Seneschal who comes with its own management UI and can be customized with magical stones of different rarities and power levels to alter its behaviors and abilities to your liking. With nearly 40 different stones to collect, there will be a wide variety of options for how your multi-legged buddy can complement your playstyle.
“You can make a build on the utility side that’s there to suppot and healing you. You can also build out one that does a little more defense and get a combination of stones that intercept any incoming projectiles and further modify that to pull all enemies in for a big hit,” lead designer on Diablo 4 season 3 Dan Tanguay told IGN. “We’ve tried to bake in a lot of possibilities there for players to discover.”
Season 3 also brings some hotly anticipated quality of life changes, the most noticable of which is WASD key control support for more direct control over your heroes on PC — seemingly a necessity in a season that will feature so many deadly traps that you would really be best off avoiding.
There will also be a plethora of competitive leaderboards driven by ladder-based trials called The Gauntlet, where players compete for a high score, the mightest of which will be greanted “a permanent home in the Hall of the Ancients,” and medals to show off on their profiles.
Other notable additions include an extra stash tab to store your ever-increasing pile of loot, and a reworking of Helltide events so that you don’t have to wait for short windows to engage in one of the Diablo 4 endgame’s most profitable events.
Diablo 4: Season of the Construct will launch on January 23rd.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
Houston, we have a new obsession.
Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Kate looks back on a 2023 game from Rocket Rat that very nearly slipped through our net…
Hey, you. If I’ve pitched this title correctly, you’re here because, like me, you are a thrall to the roguelike/lite deckbuilding genre. You’re in the right place, my friend, and I won’t waste your time: Today, we’re here to talk about Cobalt Core, one of the most underrated games of last year.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Back in December, Creative Assembly posted a lengthy apology to players for their recent handling of the Total War strategy series, in particular Total War: Warhammer 3 and Total War: Pharoah. Seeking to smooth down feathers ruffled by overpricing and buggy launches, to pick out two of the biggest fan complaints, the developers offered to – amongst other things – make Pharoah’s first paid DLC pack a free update.
That free update is now upon us, miladies and milords. Available January 25th, it’s called High Tides, and introduces two new playable factions with their own units and gods and some additional campaign mechanics. Here’s a trailer.
It’s been almost 30 years since Lara Croft took her first snowy steps in the mountains of Peru. In about 30 days, PlayStation players will get to re-experience Lara’s first three globe-trotting adventures, with a fresh look and feel in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
How did we get here? That story takes us to Austin, TX in 1998.
A burgeoning video game company, Aspyr, launches Tomb Raider II on Macintosh computers. Aspyr continued with the Tomb Raider franchise until 2003, launching Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider III, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
We’ve always wanted to revisit these titles, but we always debated the right approach. For years, we worked through the right balance of preservation and modernization. And once we felt we nailed it, we got in touch with our friends at Crystal Dynamics.
As Crystal Dynamics continues to expand the Tomb Raider Franchise, the timing seemed perfect to reintroduce audiences to the games that started it all. We wanted to both honor the foundations of the franchise and make accessible to modern audiences the original games in all their glory.
What would the balance of preservation and modernization look like? We call it Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft.
Within pre-production, we divided the conversation into three buckets: engineering, gameplay, and art. With these categories in mind, we led our conversations in the same order.
At the outset, we knew we would use the original source code and engine. Magic can’t simply be rebuilt. A critical feature for any updates we made was to allow the users to toggle back to the original look and feel for Tomb Raider I, II, and III.
It’s a love letter to all of our memories of these games, but it’s also truly fascinating to see how far hardware pushed in the ‘90s to make Tomb Raider work. Preserving that experience will continue to inspire engineers of today and tomorrow to push games to be more immersive and memorable.
We had a firm belief that the gameplay of Tomb Raider I, II, and III is timeless, and with our use of the existing source code, we had every jump, secret, enemy, and puzzle exactly as the original development team designed and intended.
So the conversation evolved into: how do we surprise and delight these fans? And that’s where we started brainstorming additions instead of revisions.
For our modern controller settings, we take inspiration from the Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld era of Tomb Raider. These changes are felt mostly in the way Lara moves – the right stick has full camera control and Lara moves directionally based on camera position.
Just like our approach to the graphical presentation, the original tank-style controls are still available to players via a menu toggle.
One of Tomb Raider’s strengths was the minimal UI. However, this can be frustrating for tougher bosses with massive amounts of health. We added a health bar to let you know if you should swap to the grenade launcher or if you should keep soaking pistol damage.
While the menus in Tomb Raider used 3D models for the health kit and ammo, the in-game assets were flat 2D sprites. This was a legacy compromise that we’ve adjusted to give a little more umph to item pick-ups.
This is a big moment for the Tomb Raider community, so we made sure to pack in as much content as possible. We’re excited to say there are over 200 trophies to earn including (my personal favorite) locking the Butler in the freezer. Sorry, Winston! See below for a sneak peak of a few you can look forward to discovering!
Exploring environments in Tomb Raider is magical. We want you to be able to share these environments and iconic moments, so we’ve added a robust photo mode to pose Lara, freeze gameplay, toggle between classic and modern graphics, and showcase these environments. We’re super excited to see what the community puts together with these modes.
So much of what we love about Tomb Raider is discovery, and we don’t want to spoil that.
Once we finalized the engineering and gameplay intent, it was time to move on to our biggest challenge and changes for the project—the art.
Our philosophy here was rather straightforward; we want the games to look the way they did in your mind. We knew we were on the right track in our early playtests because some play testers didn’t even know they were playing with the modern art toggled on.
We’ve worked hand-in-hand with Crystal Dynamics on the following modern art updates:
We send our admiration and thanks to the Tomb Raider community for inspiring us to work on this lovingly restored edition of Tomb Raider I-III. We’ll see you on February 14.
Pre-orders are available now on PlayStation Store.
Developer MGP Studios and publisher Red Deer.Games have announced that Project Downfall, their upcoming retro-themed cyberpunk first-person shooter, will be released on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on February 2. Watch the release date trailer above, and check out screenshots in the gallery below.
MGP describes Project Downfall as such: “Project Downfall is an action-filled, pixelated shooter set in a cyberpunk world, where the present is drastically different from ours. The players will be thrown into the life of Johnny Wick’s lookalike and smashed with gunfights left and right, where both reflexes and tactical thinking will be of the essence.”
The developers also promise a “non-linear plot that reacts with the players choices and moral decisions.” It’s already available on PC if you’d like to check it out there.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
After teasing a 3D sequel when Prison Architect received its final update last May, developers Double Eleven and publishers Paradox Interactive have announced that, yep, Prison Architect 2 is indeed a thing that is happening – and in 3D, no less. Prisons will now have multiple floors to police, as well as a whole new inmate behaviour system to navigate along the way that will feed into gang warfare, escapes and other budding management problems. It’s coming out surprisingly soon, too, with its reveal trailer dating it for March 26th.
Microsoft has snapped up 11 bit studios’ promising city-builder sequel Frostpunk 2 as a day-one PC Game Pass title.
Frostpunk 2, which for some time now has been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam alongside the likes of Hades 2, Manor Lords, and Hollow Knight: Silksong, launches on PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, in the first half of 2024.
Then, Frostpunk 2 launches later on console, with the game hitting Xbox Game Pass as soon as the Xbox Series X and S version comes out. A PlayStation 5 release is also in the works. We were told “further Game Pass additions from 11 bit studios portfolio are set to be unveiled at a later date”.
“As a Steward in Frostpunk 2, you will oversee an ever-growing metropolis and be required to carefully weigh the needs and demands of its society,” reads the official blurb. “Your people are concerned with the fate of their children and crimes on the streets. They complain about unhealthy squalor, escalated by industrial growth, but need places to work. And what if you cannot afford to reward their toil with food and shelter or take care of their health? You can’t please everyone and when radical factions start rising, it only takes a tiny spark for the boiling tension to blow up.
“30 years after the Great Storm, the tyranny has ended. The delegates can vote, with or without certain persuasions, to pass laws to fulfill people’s will and steer the entire City into one of many futures.
“All this with a mantra echoing in everyone’s minds: The City must not fall. But will you be the one to persist and witness its triumph?”
Check out IGN’s Frostpunk 2 preview for more.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Alright, alright, they’re in a disupte over the letter R as used for a logo for a video game company. As spotted by Respawn First, Remedy (they of the Alan Wake) revealed their new logo last year, a big letter R, and Take-Two (they of the owning Rockstar Games) contest it. Rockstar’s logo is also a big letter R, although I think they’re pretty different Rs.
Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2 ahead
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered has arrived, and with it a brand-new look into how the game was made. The Lost Levels are three short sections of the story that were cut during development. Excluded mainly for pacing reasons, they remain incomplete but are now playable. These glimpses into what could have been – which are thoughtfully explained thanks to developer commentary – include some interesting details, which despite not being game-changers, are fascinating nonetheless. Here are seven things we learned from The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s Lost Levels.
The first Lost Level features a party in Jackson that would’ve taken place directly after the first fight between Abby and Ellie at the Seattle theater, and just before the dance scene with Dina. It’s a low-key affair that is full of moments that echo darker steps on Ellie’s journey, such as opening the scene with a shaking, bloodied hand that reflects a very similar shot shown earlier in the game after Ellie brutally kills Nora. Starting the level like this was a very deliberate choice but one that Naughty Dog’s Banun Idris recalls not being an easy one to make:
“The opening for this was a little tricky. We needed it to match at least a little what you might expect emotionally coming from prior beats, because we were already purposely disorienting you in time and space. Remember you just came from this huge fight; to jump straight into it would’ve been a little too jarring. After some back and forth, we rooted it in Ellie’s nerves, calling back to her hands shaking in the theater, but this time for a much more innocuous reason which we’ll find out later. She’s nervous because she has a crush on Dina.”
Before she can reach Dina however, Ellie partakes in a few festival activities which share gameplay mechanics usually saved for more violent endeavors in The Last of Us. The most noticeable of these is a group of children playing a tag-like playground game where one of them plays the role of Clicker. Eliie joins in and you must use the listening mode to find one of the kids to capture. This sequence would eventually evolve into the snowball fight in Jackson at the start of the game, as Idris explains here:
“The thought was that these kids are in relative safety, but they still grow up with the dangers of Clickers and Runners and all those lessons would embed themselves in the games that they play. When the festival got cut, they tried to preserve this moment and move it to the front of the game where the snowball fight is, as a tutorial. However, being in the headspace of a Clicker doesn’t really teach you how to deal with them. Eventually, it evolved and they instead made the snowball fight which I think was way more effective.”
Other activities at the party include mixing a drink using the same interface you navigate to customise weapons with at a workbench, and a milk bottle throwing game that utilises the same controls used to launch a brick or bottle at an enemy. The prize for winning that game is a soft toy, Ollie the Elephant, who would later appear in Ellie’s story anyway, despite this whole level being cut. Idris explains how:
“A fun aspect of this is that if you did well, you could win a toy here and Ellie would place it in her pocket. If you had done this you’d find the toy with JJ (the baby) later back at the farm. When we cut this the toy made it through anyway because it was so cute. It’s the same one you see on the tractor at the farm, Ollie the Elephant.”
The second Lost Level takes us to the Seattle sewers, and was intended to have taken place just before Ellie’s showdown with Nora in the hospital. In these subterranean tunnels, we learn more about how Naughty Dog approached The Last of Us Part 2’s level design and environmental puzzles. Originally, this section was going to feature a series of water puzzles where Ellie has to battle a ferocious current. They were ultimately cut, but the water tech developed for them was revived in a later chapter. Designer Peter Ellis tells us all about it:
“This was one of the few areas of the game that used water flow as part of a traversal puzzle. The player has to go upstream to use the current to get to the platform and reach the other side. We mostly cut this mechanic game-wide, however, it remained in essence in the section swimming to the aquarium as Ellie where you’re avoiding the waves.”
In the sewers, we also learn about some simple-but-effective tricks that Naughty Dog’s level designers use to point us in the right direction. What initially appear to be meaningless dead ends are all there for a reason, whether it be to point you towards valuable materials or simply redirect you towards the critical path. This is expanded upon by Ellis in a section where a door leading to an empty room is used to turn the player around and toward a large pipe they need to crawl through.
“When players reach the doorway and enter the room, they’re faced with a dead end. The real reason for this dead-end room is that on the reversal when exiting back out of the doorway, players are faced with the route onwards – a pipe that they’d not been able to see when they were swept past it on the way in and something that was hidden from view when on the side platforms. The intention here being that the only option here is to go off the standard path in order to search for a way out.”
Another type of signposting is demonstrated in a later cut level, which uses blood stains on floors and walls to ensure Ellie never loses track of her prey. That prey takes the shape of a wild boar, with which Ellie has a showdown in the third of the Lost Levels, titled The Hunt. Although the level is not present in the final game, the boar itself does make an appearance, as a reference to the event is drawn into Ellie’s journal.
This sequence was, again, intended to disorientate the player and mirror the deer hunting sequence from the first game when we first took control of Ellie in winter. Idris details the meaning of the level and why it was ultimately cut.
“The boar hunt was one of the hardest levels for me to work on. It was a huge challenge with the systems that we had, and we kept trying but it never felt quite right.
Originally, the level happened after the Jackson festival – which also got cut – but before the farm. Once the festival got cut it became the prologue to the farm. The intended experience is that we jump forward in time after the fight with Abby in the theater. We don’t know where Dina is, we likely assume she’s dead because she was just bleeding out. Ellie is alone, and her hair is short, so maybe this is the future or the present? And she’s hunting. Hunting who? Abby still.”
Upon completing the hunt, Ellie would finish the boar off in an unflinching scene that would remind her of Joel’s death. Director Neil Druckmann details what this level aimed to bring to the story: “This was another opportunity to show how the violence that Ellie has experienced, the violence that she witnessed being afflicted onto Joel is still sticking with her. She’s still experiencing these PTSD moments.”
Banun Idris adds further context to the end scene in particular: “The boar kill was supposed to be anything but glorious, with the boar whimpering at the back of the gas station after Ellie’s relentless hunt. After this, hearing the drone that we kind of come to associate with Ellie’s trauma, we would hard cut to the stream where she’s washing her hands and holding rabbits that she hunted, about to return to Dina. There would be no mention of the boar.”
The PTSD that follows Ellie around is one of the overarching themes of The Last of Us Part 2, and this instance with the boar is not the only reference to her trauma in The Lost Levels. Her memories of Joel’s murder are once again shown during the aforementioned sewers level, in a jump-scare moment involving a Clicker corpse. Peter Ellis describes how it was designed to be as effective as possible:
“It was great to see people who user-tested this area become increasingly worried as we forced the player to squeeze past the fungus and inches away from the Clicker’s face. All the time not being sure whether the Clicker might be alive or attack them. Although we aren’t as cruel as to force a Clicker attack in such close proximity, we do have a payoff for this moment. This Clicker momentarily turns into Joel to show Ellie’s PTSD from what happened to Joel at the start of the game.
Ultimately, we decided to save this moment for the farm level as it was more impactful there because it could become the centre-piece of that experience. Whereas in the sewers we weren’t able to make much of a narrative point and give it the breathing room and reaction time that it deserves given the tight space.”
These are both haunting images that Ellie will carry with her all the way to the game’s violent conclusion, and ultimately influence her final decision. Although both are effective scenes, it’s fair to say that the game’s themes of trauma and the circle of violence hit home without them. Mainly cut for pacing reasons, you can see why the ultimate decision was made, but still, including these lost levels in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered makes for a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what goes into crafting such a well-told story-driven game.
Simon Cardy thinks that Ellie just needs to catch a break. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
