Author: Game Infliction

As I took my first steps on Scars Above’s mysterious planet, I felt my excitement and fear rising. Almost immediately, an encounter with its grotesque alien creatures turned out to be much more complicated than I anticipated. I even died a couple of times before making any significant progress at all, giving me the impression that I was at the beginning of a harsh and nervewracking journey that was going to ask the very best of me to survive on its default difficulty level. But my fear of the unknown proved to be unjustified in this case, and the initial thrill dissipated after an hour or so when I’d unlocked the first few of a vast arsenal of weapons. After that, most of my battles became trivial, and they remained that way until the very end – even when I turned the difficulty up to hard.

Scars Above’s first section is calm. You’re introduced to your protagonist, Doctor Kate Ward, and the rest of the space scientific crew while they are investigating a strange object in Earth’s orbit. Some silly chit-chat, puzzles, and exposition later, you get to (barely) know your team and craft your first device — a tool that will become like the standard assault rifle you find in most shooters, but with shock ammo. Then, you’ll hear an unnecessarily serious speech from your captain that is supposed to be inspiring but ends up being cheesy due to its delivery and timing. The next thing you know, you wake up on an unknown planet with no idea about what happened or where everyone went.

Right after picking up an electric cutter – a basic melee weapon with the most boring attack pattern I’ve seen – I faced the first enemy. This one was easy enough, a kind of spider that usually brings some friends but doesn’t really mean any trouble — unless there are too many friends. However, when I grabbed the assault rifle I’d built and got back to the main road, it was the turn of the second type of creature: a mutated scorpion that usually hides underwater. It surprised me coming out of nowhere, and then zapped me with a poison projectile. After dealing with the beast and his partner, I realized that my life was still going down thanks to the new status. There was no way of curing this, and a few seconds later, I was respawning at the checkpoint. The same scene repeated a few times until I managed to stop catching the beast’s vomit with my face and reached the next checkpoint.

What honestly felt unfair at first became the most important lesson I learned through the nine hours and six chapters of Scars Above: keep your distance from the enemies and everything they throw at you. Your electric cutter is a joke – even with the charged attack that you can unlock, it will always leave you exposed when you could just blow the aliens’ heads off with a good headshot. Of course, sometimes this will be challenging in a linear third-person shooter in which you’ll face faster monsters and smaller spaces with nowhere to run as you move through levels, but after the first couple of hours you probably won’t need any combat tips at all. You quickly craft new guns and gadgets and level up, and before long you’ll end up being so powerful that you’ll find little to no resistance.

In essence, the weapons in Scars Above are the typical guns you’ll expect from any type of shooter, but with an elemental twist: there’s the aforementioned assault rifle with electric bullets, a gun that can be charged up to shoot fire ammo, a grenade launcher that freezes enemies, and a shotgun that disintegrates them with acid. As you might imagine, you can chain attacks with these weapons and produce elemental reactions that will deal bonus damage to anything that comes near you, and you can also use the environment to your advantage. Fire and acid bullets create a strong explosion, while shooting an enemy standing on water with your grenade launcher will freeze it faster. Some enemies will have a weak point in their body that will represent the element you want to shoot them with, and there are color-coded orbs around the levels that are effectively explosive barrels that deal elemental damage, too.

This is a clever way of making you change weapons at all times, thinking of which is the best and most effective plan against what’s in front of you. It kept me interested for a while… until I realized that the system worked a little too well. Most of the creatures in front of me could be squashed in mere seconds by exploiting any possible elemental combination, regardless of their strength or the situation. Instead of being one part of a larger plan, shooting an electric orb at the right time completely exterminated all the threats around.

If this wasn’t enough of an advantage, Kate has the ability to craft a variety of gadgets, such as a barrier that protects her for a few hits, a gravity grenade that makes everything in its area except you slow for way too many seconds, or a hologram that baits creatures, among others. All of these use the same resource (batteries), which are crafted from a resource that’s pretty much everywhere, or replenished by refilling your inventory at any checkpoint. This is way too convenient because it means you’ll hardly run out of ammo or crafting resources, especially after you’ve increased your carrying capacity.

What’s worse is that the variety of gadgets that seem interesting and well thought-out when used individually felt useless when they start to overlap with each other. For instance, you can basically spam the gravity grenade and earn effectively the exact effect and/or advantages of all the other gadgets. And you can forget about dying when you find permanent healing items with several charges that can be easily refilled.

Some regular enemies that you’ll discover later will make things a bit more interesting, like one beast that can teleport behind you or a fungus monster that blinds you. They arrived a bit too late to the party, though, after I’d already become pretty bored by several hours of effortlessly killing everything around me.

Not even the bosses stand out as challenges, except perhaps for the first one that you meet while you’re still creating your basic guns. That doesn’t mean that these battles are completely uninspired – they do come with mechanics that will keep you changing ammo constantly and moving around big arenas. They are fun while they last, but they also don’t present ideas that you haven’t seen already in other games (and better executed). For example, breaking the surface where an enemy is standing isn’t exactly new, and it doesn’t feel great either when you can do it more than once in a row without letting the boss move or shoot you back if you’re fast enough. The fact that some boss battles are repeated doesn’t help the case, either.

What’s so frustrating about all of these issues is that Scars Above has its moments of pure joy. Facing a new creature for the first time normally involves a moment of genuine surprise, and figuring out how to handle them is engaging. Even being an unstoppable killing machine can bring satisfaction when you feel rewarded by perfectly understanding the tools at your disposal, or just by feeling your own power. And some of the later areas even took me by surprise with their scatological and repulsive (but in a good way) design, at least when compared to the dull plains and boring swamps from the earlier stages. The lack of a map directing you around is a good choice as it makes you follow your intuition and find the way, even if none of the scenarios are really big or full of secret pathways. The building blocks for a more engaging game are here, but they are surrounded by elements that lack polish, depth, and any sense of challenge.

Apart from fighting, you’ll spend time analyzing resources, clues left in the environment, and some pretty basic symbol-matching puzzles. There’s an intention of bringing a scientific perspective, considering our protagonist’s background, which is mixed in the exploration – for example, when scanning unknown objects we hear what Kate is thinking. She approaches how one creature’s digestive system works with genuine amazement, wondering how its body evolved into that group of organs and functions.

The delivery of Erin Yvette, Kate’s voice actor, feels fresh and embodies a character more worried about discovering and understanding what’s around her during these calmer moments. It’s a shame that her face lacks any expression during most cutscenes, creating an unintentionally hilarious contradiction between what we are hearing and what we see.

The objective of finding the rest of the crew is one of the main plot points, but it is weak and lacks any motivation due to the fact that we don’t know anything about them. I can’t tell you a single thing about any character apart from that they are “people of science” and one of the dudes has a cute little cat toy that wears a hoodie. The intended emotional moments don’t land and some of the transitions between scenes are incredibly abrupt, killing the pacing and the tension built.

Something similar could be said about the plot. While Kate’s motivations are clear and you always know why you’re doing what you’re doing and why, it can’t be said that it’s interesting or original at all. The world of Scars Above feels flat, with some cool alien designs here and there, but not much else that made me want to explore every corner or find all the available audio logs. Far into the story, there are some cool ideas that I won’t spoil, but they are either abandoned or never pay out in any major way, and it’s a disappointment to watch them fizzle out.

Despite economic concerns and considerable worry about the enormous scope of contemporary big-budget projects, game developers seem more hopeful and ambitious than ever. This is possible thanks to a healthier and more collaborative relationship with players along with some cautious optimism about artificial intelligence.

This enthusiasm for working with the audience means much more than just reacting to feedback and suggestions on Discord. I spoke to multiple developers that have put not just early code, but game-making tools into the hands of passionate players at a very early stage and invited them to help shape the experience – sometimes hiring them to work on it full time as a result.

Now in its 26th year, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences hosted its DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit in Las Vegas last week. The event attracts developers and leaders from across the games business to get together and discuss the biggest challenges of the moment while celebrating the top achievements of the past year at a peer-judged awards ceremony that we partner with the Academy on to live stream. This year IGN’s Stella Chung joined Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller to host the awards, and you can watch the full thing here.

DICE is unlike a lot of other events that we cover because the information we can bring you from it is less about announcements and more about spotting trends and getting a feel for what’s going on in game developers’ heads. Every year the Academy sets an overarching theme that establishes the general tone, but it’s usually pretty spot-on in terms of nailing what’s on everyone’s mind. In the past this has sometimes meant that there’s been an element of buzzword-compliance to the conversations up on stage, especially if (some) studio executives are doing the talking rather than creative leaders.

First there was the gold rush to mobile and free-to-play gaming years ago that evolved into the move towards games as a service. Both of these trends came with accompanying giddiness about the potential for individual games to make billions of dollars, usually spouted by obviously media-trained men wearing Patagonia vests over button-down shirts. That eventually sort of stumbled its way into blockchain and metaverse over the past couple of years, and that leads us to the artificial intelligence bonanza of today. With each step along that path, there has always been a healthy dose of cynicism from the group at DICE, because it’s predominantly the community of game makers that takes the “Arts” part of “Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences” very seriously.

This year’s theme was simply dubbed “the long game.” In the past, it would have been easy to see that and scoff that it was going to just be about more live service games and the new and relentless ways to exhaustively poop out content for experiences in pursuit of maximizing fun-sounding acronyms like ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) and LTV (lifetime value), but that was not the case. Instead, the prevailing ideas that came up in presentations, roundtable discussions and (most importantly) conversations in the bar was about the human element of game creation, and the fact that truly great experiences come from a respectful relationship with players.

What this means is that the next great trend in game development isn’t necessarily some new tool or feature, but incorporating the players directly into the development process. And the ways to unlock this new paradigm were discussed at length this past week.

The keynote speaker for the event was New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson, one of a handful of authors, alongside William Gibson, that have helped define the lexicon of the modern interactive age. In his 1992 novel Snow Crash Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” and described scenes that are responsible for much of the nonsense we so often hear from tech billionaires trying to lay claim to the concept three decades later. As part of his presentation, Stephenson quoted Rebecca Barkin, the cofounder of his own “open metaverse” company Lamina1, stating “you can’t architect a compelling experience backward from a desired financial outcome.” This was a powerful opening comment to an industry that has frequently spent a lot of energy trying to do just that. It served as a great way to frame the event that followed.

In an onstage conversation with Outerloop Games’ Chandana Ekanayake, Double Fine’s Tim Schafer reminded everyone that “human beings make games,” and noted that he feels his job is often about creating a bunch of scenes that an improv actor then crashes through to test the limits of. This focus on delighting players and ceding control to their influence was reinforced again and again in almost every conversation I had with developers at the event.

Over the past 20-something years, we’ve tended to think of “generations” of games in terms of how they’re directly tied to hardware capabilities. Better technology makes things run faster, and look cooler with fancy lighting and ray tracing and triple-digit frame rates. Right now though, it seems we’re going through a different kind of generational shift that is entirely about giving players more agency in how games are built and the experiences they offer.

Schafer noted that historically games were built by a small group of gatekeepers. That’s been changing for a while now, as evidenced by the huge number of indie games that are helping push boundaries in all directions, the spectacularly creative mod scene for PC games, and the escalating power of game-making tools from Roblox to Unity and Unreal. The empowerment of players that we’re seeing is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, but what does feel fresh is the amount of trust and the influence that passionate players are having on game development. This also seems to be where cautious optimism about AI comes in.

While much of the conversation so far has been about the ethical questions raised because of AI-generated artwork and narratives, there’s some tangible excitement for using these systems as a way of interpreting ideas. Rather than requiring expertise in a complex tool like Unreal’s editor, developers are starting to envision scenarios where an AI can understand what is being described to it, and get the ball rolling on making that idea a reality. Unleashing a tool like that in future certainly seems to have the potential to completely change the nature of design and implementation. As my colleague Sam Claiborn has mentioned several times on Game Scoop, game dev is relatively inaccessible compared to other artforms, just as film was before video cameras. AI has the potential to empower creative people to share their ideas without needing to be a programmer, a writer, an artist, and a composer all at once.

One thing seems certain: the next generation of games that are truly cultural phenomena at the scale of something like Fortnite will be games that have been made in direct, hands-on partnership with players rather than simply thinking of them as customers.

John Davison is the publisher and editorial lead, and has been writing about games and entertainment for more than 30 years. Follow him on Twitter.

This review exclusively covers the multiplayer mode of Company of Heroes 3. For thoughts on the campaigns, read our Company of Heroes 3 – Single-Player review.

For a lot of long-time fans, Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy series that’s more about competitive play than single-player campaigns, and we’ve logged hundreds more hours playing against other people than against the AI in scripted scenarios. That’ll certainly be true for Company of Heroes 3, because while the single-player campaigns are trapped in a quagmire of a strategic map and bogged down in their storytelling, in multiplayer we can focus on what really matters: moment-to-moment gameplay, balance, and faction mechanics. CoH3 nails all of that thanks to a wide variety of factions, snappy unit controls, and great multiplayer stability.

I’ll say that, as of a few days after launch, this is the most diverse, balanced, and stable multiplayer game in the entire Company of Heroes series to date. Sure there are specific balance issues – the M18 Hellcat’s too tough! Those flamethrowers are OP! – but show me an RTS without balance issues at launch and I’ll show you a liar. (It’ll be you. I’ll be pointing at you.)

Emphasis on movement and physical reality, how long a gun takes to move around, to set up, and to aim before they can become lethal is what flavors Company of Heroes games, and that flavor is richly present in CoH3. Units have counters and counter-plays like in other RTS games, but using them effectively is dependent on your deployment and tactical maneuvers rather than simply a rock-paper-scissors triangle. An anti-tank gun counters vehicles, but only in ambush or defense situations; a flimsy scout car can bedevil one with flanking maneuvers because the men behind the gun’s forward-facing shield can only turn their weapon so fast.

The highlight here is the series’ distinctive interplay of infantry and vehicle combat. Infantry units rendered as whole squads make the battlefields come alive with motion even when there are only a few actual units present, with each member covering terrain as a group with others and taking cover to protect themselves. Watching infantry in action is also better than ever, with detailed animations showing men vaulting over nearby cover on their own to get past fences and walls. Vehicles, meanwhile, come in their own speeds and flavors, and are forced to deal with realities like turret rotation speed for tanks or turn radius for wheeled vehicles. To best use or defeat a unit you have to understand how it moves, turns, and accelerates. The quality of animations and of most models (with some notable exceptions) goes a long way towards that, though sound design is far below this series’ standard.

In fact, perhaps the single biggest disappointment in Company of Heroes 3’s multiplayer mode is that its sound seems oddly muddled. Individual sound effects, taken in isolation, are excellent, like the delightful blast and ring of a shell exploding against a tank. That nice bass explosion, however, can too easily fade into the background when other weapons are firing. There’s something weird going on when sounds start playing over each other, as they often do in a battle. Something to do with not starting and stopping correctly, maybe? For example, the sound of a tank engine idling doesn’t always play correctly if you weren’t looking when the tank stopped moving. This would normally be a curiosity, but sometimes vital sounds – noises meant to alert you to units under attack off screen can vanish under machine gun fire – don’t play or get totally lost in the background, causing you to lose a unit that would otherwise have lived if you’d retreated it. Likewise, a longstanding and fun feature of CoH is that you can hear enemy vehicles in the fog of war, but in CoH3 that disappeared idling engine noise lets tanks get a bit stealthier than I’d like.

Despite those oddities that are most noticeable for long-time players, the general pace of fights has improved. The balance of damage and time-to-kill for units is much better than in the past, weighing the value of quick reactions with the likelihood of a squad getting wiped out before you can react at all. For example, infantry squads very generally have more protection from explosions while in retreat, so they can more reliably escape barrages of grenades or artillery with at least one or two members alive (preserving their valuable experience/veterancy status).

Fundamental balance changes like these also draw out the stages of a match, letting the early infantry and light vehicle combat flourish for longer before medium vehicles, crew weapons, and tanks move in for the kill. A lot of that is down to faction design, where – barring a few exceptions – every side can build a playstyle focusing on their choice of the triad of tanks, infantry, and support weapons. That’s a contrast to Company of Heroes 2, where certain playstyles from the original just weren’t supported due to resource constraints.

CoH3 provides interesting new tools to use in your fights. Building on the series’ long-established tradition of garrisoning troops in buildings to use as defensive emplacements, some infantry units can now assault and enter garrisoned buildings to force enemies out of their strongpoints. Elevation over enemies is treated as a bonus, too, meaning height plays a greater role. Where normally red, yellow, and green cover have always had their own meanings, a degree of elevation over enemies now weakens or eliminates their cover. A stone wall that would’ve protected your men from machine gun suppression in the past is far less effective if that MG is firing from a house atop a hill.

Tactical mobility is likewise upgraded, as utility vehicles can now tow field guns while infantry can hitch a ride to the front on certain tanks. It’s not just a little touch of realism, it’s a tactical option that lets a heavy mortar do a lot more work on the offensive, or an anti-tank gun move up to quickly secure a taken position against counterattacks.

For all that, there are still a few nagging little issues in the gameplay mechanics. For instance, broad classes and counter-systems leave some weird stuff that’s very unintuitive. Open-topped vehicles aren’t affected by flamethrowers in the way you’d expect, and you’ll see jeeps and halftrack gunners merrily firing away amidst patches of inferno. Likewise, if you don’t know the WW2 gear in advance you won’t understand that your Wirbelwind Flakpanzer can’t damage medium armor, despite its very loud and impressive gun – a problem that better interface and more direct unit descriptions could have headed off.

None of this would matter much if the map design was bad. After all, it doesn’t matter how dynamically you can affect the battlefield if the battlefield is boring as dirt. Thankfully, the terrain of Italy and North Africa delivers in spades. The emphasis on a variance of open spaces, and the tight, winding streets of urban combat is some of the most fun map design I’ve seen in an RTS. Italian maps, for example, are replete with agricultural hillsides to capture in tank maneuver warfare, but parts of the map will be a twisting snarl of little streets in a tiny town, requiring fierce house-to-house fighting to take. The sense that you can firmly control part of the map well is never entirely there, so you’re forced to constantly watch your back lest flanking enemies snag a key cutoff in the rear and deprive you of income from your entrenched front sectors. It’s the best kind of strategic paranoia.

There’s also a notable lack of obnoxiously designed maps with single strategic chokepoints that draw out matches, which were a series staple and are mercifully absent here. No, instead we get a pleasant selection of varied maps, all of which cater to a breezy style of 30 to 40-minute matches – though I could see a particularly hard-fought 4v4 stretching past the 60-minute mark.

I quite love the range of units available, and the focus on equipment from earlier in the war adds a lot of less-seen tanks and gear. Each of the four factions – the Wehrmacht and Deutsches Afrikakorps for the Axis, Americans and British for the Allies – has its own three sub-specializations called battlegroups. Those let you purchase specific unique units, abilities, and upgrades on top of the playstyle customization within each faction.

Among the allies, the Americans take a much more flexible approach while the British are a more rigid, if simpler, faction. Americans choose between air support, mechanized, and infantry abilities and upgrades on top of their battlegroups, giving a total of 12 possible choices for strategies on top of choosing the build order for your units and structures. It means that every match as the Americans brings in an array of possibility, giving you that powerful fantasy of being the Western powers’ beating industrial heart.

The British have to advance linearly through their tech, making them the simplest faction to learn, but the core units they get access to are good at their jobs without exception. This lets them lean on diverse battlegroups that can be specialized into an artillery/infantry, air and sea power, or armored force. Unfortunately, while other factions are blessed with cool abilities as their units gain veterancy (when they level up, another series staple) the British have little in the way of incentives to preserve your units over raw stat boosts.

The Axis forces, meanwhile, are also two wildly diverse groups. The Afrikakorps (DAK) are the most mobile faction, able to call in halftracks carrying infantry or pulling guns as a set of base abilities. In return for that flexibility they have to be careful, shepherding their resources in order to be sure that none are wasted because accessing new units requires they build expensive buildings and upgrades. DAK players will need to make their chosen strategy work rather than adapting to what enemies are doing, as the wrong buy at the wrong time can mean precious minutes go by before you get the unit you actually need.

Finally, the German regulars, AKA the Wehrmacht, are slower-moving and defensive-minded but also flexible in how they execute that goal. They’re most interesting for their big, mid-match choice between two playstyles: either going on the offensive with short-range Panzergrenadiers or transitioning to opportunistic, defensive ambush with tank-hunting Jagers. Having one big interesting choice based on what opponents are doing keeps the whole faction fresh each match.

I do have one pet peeve with faction design – and please forgive me in advance for how truly peevish this is – but I dislike the appearance of ahistorical or never-fielded weapons systems in what is otherwise a historically inspired game. Equipment like the Sherman Whizbang, which never actually fought in this part of the war, or the Churchill Black Prince tank, which was never even finished, feels out of place in a game that otherwise highlights cool history from the North African and Italian part of World War 2. They’re just a couple examples, but they feel like units added more to cater to the demand for more powerful toys rather than as design choices around an interesting period of warfare with its own limitations.

Off The Battlefield

Much like single-player, the framework around everything that isn’t a match is almost barebones, and some interfaces and issues are really counterproductive in CoH3’s quest to being the kind of competitive RTS it has the potential to be. These range from basic features like the lack of a replay system – a must-have for competitive players who want to know why and how they won or lost. There’s also the broader issue of stat tracking that’s simply unavailable. How many matches have I played? How many have I won, or lost? Do I have an ELO or MMR? Post-game stats exist, but are anemic – they show infantry and vehicles, but not ubiquitous team weapons, and are padded by strange “damage dealt” metrics that rarely add up to their supposed totals for units or players.

That’s not to mention in-match interface problems. Take the shortcomings when playing with a team as examples: If you’re playing with more than one ally, there’s no way to tell which teammate owns a specific unit – same goes for if you’re playing with two opponents. You can also swap between Team Colors and Player Colors, but the player colors aren’t separated by type or any color theory. So your allies can be red and pink and an opponent can be orange, all while you’re blue and an enemy is green, rather than putting warm colors on one team and cold on another. You know, like Relic did Company of Heroes 2.

And there are little annoyances, like tooltips for your battlegroup abilities not having the cost of the unit or thing you’re unlocking on them. How should I know if I want a unit right now when I don’t know if I can afford it?

But! But! And I cannot lie, it’s a big but: This game is fun as hell in multiplayer.

Everybody knows Lady Dimitrescu is tall, but I was still shocked to see just how large she loomed over me from a first-person angle in VR. Resident Evil Village VR captured my undivided attention even beyond my fascination for the tall vampire lady, offering a fresh perspective on a nearly two-year-old game I have played a dozen times over. From the robust tutorial before you start playing to the many ways you can customize the controls for the most comfortable experience, Resident Evil Village’s VR mode is no afterthought, but rather a well-crafted and exciting way to experience an already excellent game.

Nothing has been watered down in the transition to VR: you’ll endure Ethan’s rescue mission from start to finish. That said, this mode doesn’t quite give you access to everything Resident Evil Village offers – the timed challenge Mercenaries mode is not supported in VR (probably for the best, given that it’s all about moving quickly), and the modifiers you may have already unlocked in the non-VR mode, such as weapon attachments and upgrades, are not transferable to VR mode and you will have to unlock all those items once again. This obviously isn’t a big deal for anyone playing Resident Evil Village for the first time, but as someone who has unlocked and upgraded all of my weapons over the course of several playthroughs, that was disheartening. Interestingly, Village VR does offer new weapon attachments, such as a bayonet for the M1897, which you can purchase from The Duke after destroying a certain number of wooden goats scattered throughout the village.

Unlike the third-person mode available in The Winters’ Expansion last year, Resident Evil Village mostly flourishes in VR. Exploring this remote European village, I’ve never felt more immersed in the action. From using my hands to move shelves and barricade doors, to reloading my firearms physically, to drowning Ethan’s hand in First Aid Med, Resident Evil Village VR captures a level of realism that is simply unachievable in traditional 2D first-person games.

Village VR looks beautiful; you can easily get lost roaming its maps and taking a closer look at all the little details in the environment. Castle Dimitrescu often had me doubling back to examine all the paintings and photographs on the wall. That said, because the action is all up in your face, it is easy to spot the low-res textures on some things while exploring, most notably the rotten food that is littered throughout the village.

Resident Evil Village VR’s controls have all of the expected options, allowing you to play either standing or sitting, each with its own pros and cons. Playing standing provides easier access to your arsenal, but usually meant I couldn’t play for as long without fatigue, while sitting down extended my play time but could cause some uncomfortable angles when throwing pipe bombs or using the scope to aim with a sniper rifle. Customizing the control scheme is helpful for either method, allowing you to swap between options like physically reloading weapons manually or having that be handled automatically. I opted for a hybrid of the two as it was really fun mimicking the motions of using a real firearm, but in situations where a lot of action was occurring and things got hectic, it was convenient to have my guns automatically reload.

Knife combat has also been greatly improved; what was once limited in movement and stiff with a controller now feels extremely smooth and responsive as you take actual swipes at your enemies and crates alike. (Or you can punch every crate you see; that’s pretty effective, too.) The more interesting thing I discovered when playing with the knife, however, is that you can throw it without worrying about collecting it after because it immediately respawns in your holster a few seconds later. That makes for a handy way to kill enemies and destroy boxes from afar without using ammo.

Accessing Ethan’s arsenal is done with your hands, pulling weapons and ammo from different areas of your body. While the idea is immersive, the different ways you have to access your weapons can be a bit cumbersome. Sometimes I went to grab a land mine only to pull out my flashlight instead, while other times I would reach for my shotgun only to grab my sniper rifle. I wish there was a hybrid option that allowed me to pull up a quick menu with four preset weapons of my choice, similar to what Resident Evil 4 VR offered, but that doesn’t seem feasible given the lack of a D-Pad on PS VR2’s new Sense controllers.

While I would sometimes forget Village has a block ability since I never had to use it during the base game (even when playing on the challenging Village of Shadows difficulty), it was my new best friend in Village VR. With the number of enemies coming at you all at once, plus the high stress of trying to get avoid damage while simultaneously reloading your weapon, blocking became a very useful tool I hadn’t previously relied on.

Blocking may have felt new, but one feature that’s actually exclusive to VR is the ability to dual-wield weapons. This makes it a lot easier to get out of tight situations, or to simply bust open some lycan skulls faster. Weapons that were once used with two hands, like the shotgun, can also be wielded with one hand with the pistol held in the other. That’s super convenient if you need to get a quick shot off at an enemy close to you, but it comes at the cost of more recoil decreased aim. There’s a lot of fun experimentation to be done with the combinations of weapons alone, which makes for a welcome new level of freedom.

However, some tension and jump scares I encountered in the original game were not as scary in VR. Sure, a few moments still left me in fight or flight mode, such as Lady Dimitrescu chasing me in her castle or when I encountered that one specific section in House Benevieto. But most of the jump scares can be entirely missed if you aren’t looking in the right direction at the right time, which I learned the hard way the first time Ethan encounters a lycan. It doesn’t put a major damper on things, but it can still be a bit disappointing.

Thankfully a lot of the tension and scares from Resident Evil Village come from the combat itself, which there is plenty of. There are a handful of sections where Village throws dozens of enemies at you at once, and the VR changes to combat mean you can now easily drop your gun when you meant to reload it, or forget to cock your shotgun after firing a shell. Similar to what I said in my review of Resident Evil 4 VR, this new combat style comes with a severe learning curve, which can sometimes be frustrating, especially in later sections. But trust me when I say that it’s worth mastering, making the challenge all the more rewarding to overcome once you get the hang of it.

Village VR unfortunately shares some frustrations with the VR mode for Resident Evil 7 as well – most notably, the animations that occur when enemies grab you or knock you down. Not only do they drag out the length of combat encounters, but they also put you into some extremely weird and awkward viewing, especially since you can easily look in another direction while the animations play out.

On the flipside, Resident Evil Village’s puzzles are much more fun to solve and interact with while hands-on in VR. These sections could feel a bit tedious and repetitive in 2D when you are just following cumbersome button prompts, but Village VR has you physically interacting with objects by doing things like flipping a switch to restore power to a room, or moving a statue to solve a puzzle, which makes them feel like more than just busywork.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is facing even more development trouble, as a new report says developer Ubisoft Montpellier is undergoing a major leadership shakeup.

According to a report from Kotaku, Ubisoft Montpellier staff were informed last week that their managing director was no longer with the company. Guillaume Carmona had been absent from the role since the beginning of 2023, and no reason for his departure was given. Carmona had been with Ubisoft for nearly two decades.

Sources also told Kotaku that Ubisoft Montpellier is facing a labor investigation from local government authorities due to a high number of developers experiencing burnout and going on sick leave. A Ubisoft spokesperson told Kotaku that “the Montpellier development team is undergoing well-being assessments through a third-party for preventative measures and to evaluate where additional support may be needed.”

The report also said that creative director Jean-Marc Geffroy and director Benjamin Dumaz have been replaced in those roles by former associate director Emile Morel and Charles Gaudron. Finally, sources told Kotaku that the developers are still struggling to nail down a fun and achievable creative vision for Beyond Good and Evil 2.

Nearly six years after its initial reveal in 2017, Beyond Good and Evil 2 has still not entered full production. We last heard of Beyond Good and Evil 2 in Agust, when the project brought on a new lead writer. The game’s original pitch showed co-op exploration in an ambitious world.

The game resurfaced at E3 2018, revealing a partnership with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord, a production company that allows fans and community members to assist in a project’s development.

This report is the latest surrounding development troubles at Ubisoft, as the company recently canceled three more unannounced games while delaying Skull and Bones for the sixth time.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

While playing Elden Ring can, if you want, be a completely solitary experience, one of its best features is its multiplayer: PvP, PvE, and the esoteric messages players leave for one another that have become something of their own meme culture. Given the unique nature of all these multiplayer interactions, it’s only natural that director Hidetaka Miyazaki has been doing a lot of thinking about multiplayer technology, and how it’s used in games other than his own.

Speaking to IGN following Elden Ring’s five wins (including Game of the Year) at the 26th annual DICE Awards, Miyazaki brought up the subject of multiplayer when we asked him what new technologies, trends, or ideas in gaming he finds inspiring or exciting right now.

“I’m not really sure whether this is the latest trend, but the multiplayer elements that in terms of both technology and the game designs, we keep updating [them],” he said. “So I’m really interested in that as one of the fans and one of the creators. Especially speaking of [Escape From] Tarkov, for example. So I’m basically paying attention to those elements as a creator and fan of the game.

“Other folks in the industry, they keep updating multiplayer network functionality and the game design in order to change the way that the players are involved in the gameplay, and how the players are used as one of the resources for the gameplay. So that’s why I’m paying attention to these elements.”

Escape From Tarkov is a 2017 tactical FPS that melds tactical simulation and FPS with MMO elements, and became wildly popular several years into its early access release in no small part due to a promotion that offered in-game items to those who watched Twitch streams of the game. It remains both fairly popular and in early access now in 2023, and its developers recently had to crackdown hard yet again against a wave of cheaters develper Battlestate referred to as “scum of the earth” in an official post.

‘It’s very simple’

We also asked Miyazaki if Elden Ring’s incredible critical, award-winning, and financial success meant that we’d be likely to see more Elden Ring in the future — but Miyazaki told us that its success was not a factor in deciding what FromSoftware wanted to make next.

“Obviously Elden Ring is a commercial success,” he said. “Everybody’s aware about that, but it doesn’t really affect what we are going to create next. We basically keep creating the game that we want to create, and that’s our policy. It’s very simple.

“It was obviously a good experience for me and the other team members working on Elden Ring. Sometimes we were all super excited about what we were doing. Sometimes we failed to do certain things in the game, implementing something into the game. But whatever the case it was a really good experience and we basically want to keep creating the game which has a very big worldview universe and let the players feel the adventure spirit.”

It’s nonetheless hard to deny how lucrative Elden Ring has been for FromSoftware and Bandai Namco. Just a few days ago, we learned it had surpassed 20 million units sold, and was Game of the Year not just at DICE but at the New York Game Awards and The Game Awards too, and it was IGN’s best game of 2022.

Even if all that success isn’t swaying Miyazaki and FromSoftware, the team certainly seems to like the universe enough to revisit it, as Miyazaki previously has teased at least some form of new content. Elden Ring did already get a Colosseum update recently, but Miyazaki’s quote above seems to hint even more might be on the way.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.