PS5 Pro, due out in November priced $700, has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games.
In an interview with IGN, Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits said he’s hopeful the PS5 Pro will improve Space Marine 2 by default via PSSR.
“What I’m excited about is the AI upsampling of the graphics,” he said. “So I have my kickass AMD machine, a kickass Nvidia machine right there. And the game looks f***ing great. But when I play on the PS5, I play performance.”
Space Marine 2 has two display modes for PS5 and Xbox Series X: ‘Quality’ offers higher resolution, a stable 30 frames per second, and better graphics, whereas ‘Speed’ drops the resolution in a bid to hit 60fps.
However, Space Marine 2 has performance issues on PS5 relative to the Xbox Series X version. According to the tech experts at Digital Foundry, Space Marine 2 impresses on Xbox Series X and S, but “flags” on PS5. Here’s DF’s analysis:
“In testing Space Marine 2 on PC, it’s clear that the game’s encounters with alien swarms pushes the CPU hard – and at least as of patch 1.02, that results in lop-sided performance on consoles in the 60fps speed mode. Series X typically outperforms PS5 by around 10 to 15fps, despite both machines using the same settings and resolution targets. The lowest drops come when taking a flamethrower to the encroaching horde, where PS5 drops to the mid-30s while Xbox Series X is in the mid-40s.”
Willits’ “hope” — he admits he’s not a technical person — is that Space Marine 2 in Speed Mode on PS5 Pro will look better than Quality Mode does on the base PS5.
“So what I hope — and it’s just me, I don’t know anything technical — but what I hope is with the PS5 Pro, with the AI upsampling, that players will be able to play Space Marine 2 in Performance [Speed] Mode, and it’ll look better, hopefully — hopefully, I don’t know — it’ll look better than it does in Quality Mode now.”
It true, it means those who play Space Marine 2 in Speed mode on PS5 will benefit from its higher frame-rate (hopefully locked to 60fps this time, but no guarantees as the issue on the performance side — hitting 60fps — is the CPU limitation) and improved graphics. The game will have a higher resolution owing to the PS5 Pro’s faster GPU (more pixels) and then PSSR upscaling (better upscaling of those more pixels).
But what about a PS5 Pro Enhanced patch for Space Marine 2? Sony has said several games will be patched with free software updates for gamers to take advantage of PS5 Pro’s features (IGN has a list of all the confirmed PS5 Pro Enhanced games so far). These games can be identified with a PS5 Pro Enhanced label within their title.
We’re actually in discussions with Sony to figure out what we want to do.
Willits said Saber has no plans right now for Space Marine 2 to join the PS5 Pro Enhanced list, but did confirm that the company’s engineers are in talks with Sony to work out if it’s something they want to support.
“So we’re actually in discussions with Sony to figure out what we want to do,” Willits said. “Sony’s really happy about the game. Microsoft is happy about the game too! But yes, our engineers are discussing what we can do. We have no plans right now. We’re still trying to figure that out. Again, the PS5 Pro is brand new, our game, we’re just trying to catch up. So we just have to be patient with our official plans.”
Sony is set to host a State of Play broadcast today, September 24, at 3pm PT / 6pm ET, with news on more than 20 upcoming PS5 and PS VR2 games “from studios around the world.” Perhaps we’ll get a clearer idea of what to expect from the PS5 Pro at the show.
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.
For a limited time, Amazon is offering the 2TB SK Hynix P41 Platinum PCIe 4.0 NVME solid state drive (SSD) for only $135. That’s one of the best prices we’ve seen for a 2TB PS5-compatible SSD from a reputable brand. It also happens to be one of the fastest PCI-E 4.0 SSDs on the market right now. This is an outstanding candidate for your PS5 or gaming PC rig.
SK Hynix P41 Platinum 2TB M.2 SSD for $134.99
SK Hynix might not be a brand that the consumer recognizes as much as Samsung or Western Digital, but make no mistake that they are a major player in the flash memory market. SK Hynix is a South Korean DRAM manufacturer and one of the world’s largest memory chipmakers and semiconductor companies. They supply components for many reputable brands you’ve probably heard of, like Corsair and G.Skill.
The Platinum P41 is SK Hynix’s highest end SSD. It boasts sustained read speeds of 7,000MB/s and sustained write speeds of 6,500MB/s. It also boasts random read speeds of 1.4 million IOPS and random write speeds of 1.3 million IOPS. In terms of reliability and stability, the SSDs have been tested and validated through 1,000 hours of stress testing with MTBF reaching 1.5 million hours or up to 1,200TB written. SK Hynix backs it all up with a 5 year warranty. The P41 Platinum uses an Aries controller with 176-layer TLC NAND flash chips, both of which are manufactured in-house.
Of course, in terms of real world performance, the vast majority of users won’t be able to tell apart the speeds between the highest end PCI-E 4.0 SSDs. Some of these SSDs include the SK Hynix P41 Platinum, the Samsung 990 Pro, and the WD Black SN850X. Therefore, it all comes down to the price. At its current price point, the P41 Platinum isn’t just one of the fastest drives on the market, it’s also cheaper than any competitor that can come close to its performance.
This is a great PS5 SSD, but you’ll want to get a heatsink
The SK Hynix P41 Platinum does not come equipped with a heatsink. That’s because this SSD is catered to PC gamers looking to add storage to their desktop computer. Many motherboards come equipped with built-in SSD coolers and will only accept bare SSDs. It’s generally harder to remove a heatsink than to apply a new one. If you plan to use this for your PS5, rest assured that’ it is 100% compatible (in fact, it’s overkill). Although some people have gotten away with an SSD with no heatsink, we recommend you install one for peace of mind. You can easily get a PS5 heatsink for under $10.
X/Twitter will have to comply with a subpeona regarding the identities of several Genshin Impact leaker accounts after a federal judge ruled against the social media platform’s attempt to throw it out.
The news comes from Torrent Freak and Stephen Totilo’s Game File newsletter, detailing the latest in miHoYo’s crackdown on leakers. Cognosphere, the miHoYo-owned publisher of Genshin Impact, filed the subpeona last fall, attempting to force X Corp. to “disclose the identity, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), and e-mail addresses(es)” behind four popular leaker accounts: @HutaoLoverGI, @GIHutaoLover, @HutaoLover77, and @FurinaaLover.
NEW(ish): A court has ruled that X/Twitter must comply with a subpoena issued last fall to unmask the identities of accounts leaking Genshin Impact info
As Totilo notes, three of the accounts are currently suspended. The only one that isn’t, @furinaalover, has deleted all but one of the posts on their X/Twitter account. According to Torrent Freak’s report, Cognosphere believes that one person controlled all four leaker accounts.
In filing the subpeona, Cognosphere argued that the leakers had infringed on its copyright in the publishing of previously unreleased material. X/Twitter, however, attempted to quash the subpeona on First Amendment and privacy grounds, asking the court in a previous filing if Cognosphere’s request was “sufficient to satisfy any First Amendment free speech safeguards applicable to the anonymous speakers.”
X/Twitter asked for a legal process that would ensure the leakers’ First Amendment and privacy rights were not being infinged upon, mantaining “that a Court needs to decide these issues.”
U.S. magistrate judge Peter Kang, however, ruled for the Northern District of California that X/Twitter must comply with Cognosphere’s request, saying that there is “no First Amendment right to commit copyright infringement.”
It’s only the latest in MiHoYo’s handling of leakers. Last February, miHoYo filed a separate subpeona targeting three other other leaker accounts on similar copyright infringement grounds.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
A lot of modern board games are highly strategic affairs, that might see you conquering lands for their resources, or trading and optimizing your way to victory with an economic engine of some kind. But if you’re one of the many who thinks that kind of subject matter is dry and boring, and yearns instead for the lure of exploration and adventure, there’s a whole group of games tailor-made just for you – role-playing board games. Like their pen and paper counterparts, they imagine you’re another person in an outlandish setting, where you’ll either compete or cooperate with your fellow players to overcome quests and challenges. But, as board games, they still have plenty of strategic meat to enjoy beneath their narrative exteriors. Here are our top picks for the best RPG board games: any should be good for untold hours of fun in 2024 and beyond.
Top Role-playing Board Games at a Glance
Don’t have time for reading blurbs? Scroll sideways to see all the games featured on the list below.
Gloomhaven / Jaws of The Lion / Frosthaven
Let’s start with the dragon in the chamber: the Gloomhaven series is widely acclaimed as the best board game ever made, let alone the best role-playing board game. But that’s exactly what it is as you step into the shoes of a series of adventurers, working together, with the roster changing through the game’s labyrinthine campaign as protagonists retire or meet a sticky end in a dungeon. Powered by a compelling tactical combat system that sees you gradually building a deck of multi-use ability cards, each scenario a rising tide of tension as your deck runs down. The original game is currently out of stock, but the prequel, Jaws of the Lion we reviewed offers much of the same gameplay chops in a cut-down, more affordable package, while sequel Frosthaven (see it at Amazon) ups the ante by including an entire town you can explore, build and populate as part of the action. These also make great solo board games, for whenever you find yourself without a game crew.
Dungeons & Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil
Role-playing is a pretty amorphous term when it comes to board gaming, but there’s no doubt that the cooperative adventure system series, based on the world’s most popular pen-and-paper RPG, is a fantastic marriage of the two. Each box comes with a huge stack of tiles which you draw at random to create the dungeon, and each tile in turn is peopled with a random selection of traps and monsters that operate according to simple flowchart routines. The result has an astonishing dynamism, conjuring the sense that you’re exploiting a mysterious labyrinth controlled by a dungeon master. This system powers you through an included narrative campaign. They’re all great (see them at Amazon), but Temple of Elemental Evil, based on one of D&D’s most famous, old-school scenarios, is perhaps the pick of the bunch.
Let’s further muddy the waters by introducing an acclaimed board game adaptation of an acclaimed role-playing video game. Rather than filling in another chapter of Geralt’s exploits, Old World is set years before the events of The Witcher video games and novels, casting players as other Witchers, hunting and fighting monsters, and occasionally each other, to see which of their competing styles can earn the most coin and glory. The different styles feed into a compelling game of deck-building as you seek to create card combos and strategy synergies to boost your power ahead of your rivals, in a race to take down ever more fearsome foes. But there’s a solo mode too, for those who just want to explore this fascinating fantasy world and kill its mythical monsters. See our The Witcher: Old World board game review for more information.
Star Wars: Imperial Assault
Not all role-playing games fit the fantasy archetype, and if you’re a sci-fi fan, you’ll be well-served by this excellent entry that swaps the tombs and traps of its peers for starship interiors and high-tech bases. Set after the events of the original Star Wars film, one player commands the forces of the Empire while the other players work together, controlling a team of plucky Rebel operatives working to undermine the Emperor’s tyrannical rule. The engaging tactical combat system is easily good enough to support one-off scenarios, but the real draw is the game’s campaign, which links a series of battles together into a grand, cinematic narrative, allowing you to fight alongside iconic figures like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Many other famous figures from the big screen are available in the game’s huge range of expansion packs.
Older readers may remember this dungeon-crawling board game from their childhoods, having originally come out in 1989. Now it’s back with new, improved miniatures, but its RPG-on-a-board approach, complete with games master, is still top of the range. Said GM has a booklet with the scenario secrets while the other players take the role of heroes, exploring the dungeon, which the GM reveals as they round corners and open doors, fighting GM-controlled monsters and looting treasure. It’s still perhaps the closest thing you’ll get to a true role-playing experience, full of mystery, narrative and upgrading your heroes, but with family-weight rules and the tactical chops of a board game. Once you’re done with the campaign in the box, there are plenty of additional HeroQuest expansions crammed with new adventures.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Horror board games are another popular frontier for role-playing, but it’s a hard call for board games because the players need a degree of control to make tactical decisions which, in turn, detracts from the horror. This is the best candidate: based loosely on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, players work together to solve mysterious hauntings and horrid crimes, linked to alien worlds and beings beyond our imaginations. The horror comes both from a challenging difficulty level and the bleak narratives that underpin each adventure, with an ongoing series of expansions spinning the yarn into ever-more surprising places. The strategy, meanwhile, is down to your deck-building skills as you improve your character, and staying atop the statistical probabilities offered by the aptly-named chaos bag.
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
Given the appeal of fantasy settings in role-playing board games, it’s no surprise that Middle-earth, the setting that arguably popularized the whole idea of fantasy world-building, gets a look-in. The good news is that it’s a great adaptation, nestled comfortably between Tolkien’s famous stories, so it allows players to feel a part of his epic creation without stepping on his narrative beats. The core of the game sees the heroes building card decks to represent their powers and abilities, but it’s ably supported by lots of novel ideas. Some of these, like the tile scale-flipping to combine overground and underground exploration, are in cardboard while others make great use of the supporting app, such as solving carefully constructed mysteries based on clues drip-fed by the narrative text.
Not all heroes wear capes, so the saying goes, and in This War of Mine, heroism is just desperately trying to keep your friends alive against the odds in a war-torn city. It’s an unusual and powerful setting for a role-playing board game, as it was for the computer RPG that inspired it. During the day, your little band needs to scavenge the resources they need to survive, hoping against hope to find what’s required. At night, you’ll need to barricade your hideout and keep watch for raiders, soldiers and other hostiles who might come for whatever meager scraps you’ve managed to pull together. The mechanics of resource gathering and base-building are supported by a book of narrative text, the whole forming a shocking indictment of the horrors of living in a conflict zone, made personal by the way the board game places you in charge of your survivor’s fate.
Descent: Legends of the Dark
Part of the appeal of having role-playing on a board, rather than a screen on a paper character sheet, is the look and feel of the thing. And in terms of visuals and production values, Descent: Journeys in the Dark is king of the pile with its trays of finely sculpted miniatures and extraordinary three-dimensional cardboard terrain, allowing you to construct swamps and dungeons that pop out of your tabletop in almost magical detail. Thankfully, the game engine underneath all that window dressing is very much up to par, with a supporting mobile app sending your party on a series of quests, complete with narrative and inter-scenario links that see you shepherding the treasures you’ve found to gain access to new powers and equipment. See our Descent: Legends of the Dark review for more info.
Mice & Mystics
Role-playing board games, with their grand tales of adventure and lovely components, are often a magnet for younger players, yet many of them are too long and complex for shorter attention spans. Mice & Mystics aims to bridge the age gap by telling a compelling story of a band of loyal adventurers turned into mice as they try to save a fantasy kingdom from the clutches of a tyrant. They’ll still need to pull what strings they can as they seek to return to human form while thwarting evil and a worrying number of cockroaches. With simple tactical mechanics and lots of whimsical adventure, this is a crowd-pleaser for all ages.
Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon
While most role-playing board games focus on their mechanics, Tainted Grail wants to tell an extraordinary story. It heaps Celtic legends on top of its Arthurian base to create a rich world, but one beset by challenge in which your characters must band together in order to survive. Doing so means finding and managing resources in a satisfying strategic puzzle, but the real focus is the colossal, branching, narrative campaign, ably supported by superbly written and plotted text, which has so many different paths that you can play this monster game multiple times and still not see the same tales told.
How do RPG Board Games Relate to Tabletop RPGs and Video Game RPGs?
“Role-playing game” (RPG for short) as a term began with Dungeons & Dragons, which was the first published ruleset to bring form around an experimental practice of telling narrative, character-based stories using miniature wargame rules. These new creations were distinct enough to need their own term, and role-playing seemed a succinct way to describe the way you inhabited a character very different from your own, in a make-believe world full of challenge and adventure.
These kinds of games, often differentiated from later types of role-playing by the moniker “pen-and-paper RPGs”, sell themselves on their creative and imaginative potential. The sky isn’t even a limit when it comes to what you and your group can conjure up together. But there’s no denying that a lot of players also got a lot of satisfaction from manipulating the crunchier bits of the rules – skill checks and tactical movement – and from seeing their characters gain power and advance. Early pen-and-paper RPGs also needed a Games Master to run proceedings, a role which many players were unwilling to fulfil.
These two factors lead to the creation of board games and video games based on the concept. Either the board and cards or the computer took the place of the Games Master, using either the programmer’s imagination or random factors to create a world for the player(s) to explore, while the strategy-minded were satisfied by the lure of levelling up their character and exploiting the game’s mechanics in order to win.
While role-playing has become an established term for this genre in video gaming, spawning sub-genres such as JRPGs (the J stands for Japanese) and Rogue-likes after one of the earliest computer RPGS, there’s no equivalent term in board gaming. That’s surprising, given that it’s a very popular category in its own right, but the games tend to be referred to as adventure games or quest games rather than role playing. That’s possibly because controlling a plastic avatar on a board, instead of the more immediate gratification of on a screen, divorces players slightly from the action they’re portraying.
Whatever the reason, this plethora of different terms can be pretty confusing for players, never mind anyone to whom they’re trying to describe their exploits! To make matters worse, there’s intense cross-pollination between these scenes. Dungeons & Dragons has inspired both board- and computer- RPGs some of which have, in turn, been adapted back into material for the role-playing game. Many board game RPGs have spawned computer versions, and many computer RPGs have got the board game treatment. It’s turtles all the way down!
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
Stellar Blade developer Shift Up and publisher Sony are being sued…over Stellar Blade. The plaintiff, a Louisiana-based film production company called, yes, Stellarblade, is alleging trademark infringement and claiming its business is being damaged by Shift Up’s use of the name.
The complaint, which has been viewed by IGN, was filed in a Louisiana court earlier this month by Stellarblade LLC and owner Griffith Chambers Mehaffey against Shift Up, Sony, and an unnamed insurance company that the plaintiff claims covers Sony Interactive Entertainment with liability insurance against the very allegations Stellarblade is bringing.
In the lawsuit, Stellarblade and Mehaffey claim that the Louisiana company has existed since 2010, providing “multimedia entertainment services” such as film, documentary, commercial, and music video production services. The lawsuit alleges that Mehaffey has owned stellarblade.com since 2006 and been using it in conjunction with his work since 2011.
Mehaffey notes that when Shift Up first announced its game, it was under the title Project Eve back in 2019 (it was re-revealed in 2021 at a PlayStation Showcase under the same name). However, the name was changed to Stellar Blade in 2022, and not long after in January of 2023, Shift Up first registered Stellar Blade as a video game-related trademark. Mehaffey registered his own trademark for Stellarblade in June of 2023, then send a cease and desist letter to Shift Up a month later.
Mehaffey claims that while previously, his customers were able to find information about his business easily, now people searching for Stellarblade’s work on the internet only find Stellar Blade the video game. Additionally, he alleges the trademarks for his own business are “confusingly similar”, citing the color schemes of both logos and the stylized S.
Mehaffey’s request for relief includes asking that Shift Up and Sony be prevented from using Stellar Blade or any other name similar to it, as well as asking they hand over all materials in their possession with “Stellar Blade” on them so Mehaffey and Stellarblade can destroy them. Additionally, Mehaffey is asking to be paid for damages and attorney fees. IGN has reached out to PlayStation for comment.
Stellar Blade launched back in April of this year, and we gave it a 7/10 on release. Our reviewer said it was “great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Nintendo is continuing its Ask the Developer series of published interviews with game development leads, this time on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. In parts 1 and 2 of this interview, the company reveals a number of tidbits about Echoes of Wisdom, including Grezzo as the elusive co-development studio behind the project and Tomomi Sano as the game’s director, and first-ever female director on The Legend of Zelda series.
Grezzo and Nintendo co-developed Echoes of Wisdom, but in the interview, series producer Eiji Aonuma says that Grezzo had an even greater role than usual on the game. Apparently, Nintendo wanted Grezzo’s take on Link’s Awakening to serve as a blueprint for top-down Zelda games this generation, but didn’t just want to only do remakes. So the team asked Grezzo to pitch ideas internally for a new Legend of Zelda game, marking the first time the studio was challenged to participate in a Zelda project from the conceptual state. According to Aonuma, everyone in the studio participated across disciplines, pitching ideas to Aonuma, and it took Nintendo three days to review all the proposals.
Ultimately, the idea that won wasn’t exactly what Echoes is now, though it was kind of close. The winner was a “copy-and-paste” gameplay style combining the “top-down and side-view” gameplay styles seen in Link’s Awakening.
“These were the two basic elements, and from there, I asked them to think of ways to add some freedom,” Aonuma says. “Having worked on games in the Legend of Zelda series over the years, we started to feel that fans may not continue playing this franchise unless they can think independently and try various things freely on their own, rather than following a set path. Even when it comes to solving puzzles – in a game in the Legend of Zelda series, having the excitement of solving puzzles in your own unique way makes the game ‘Legend of Zelda-like.’ Hence, we need to increase the degree of freedom to achieve that. With this in mind, I asked Grezzo to use those two elements as a foundation for the gameplay and add freedom on top of it.”
What Grezzo came up with was more of a “dungeon editor” game than what Echoes of Wisdom ended up being, where Link could copy and paste objects to create original dungeons. They prototyped this version for about a year, but Aonuma “upended the tea table” so to speak in changing the premise to focus more on copy-and-paste as a gameplay and puzzle-solving tool.
The rest of the interview discusses some of the different ways in which Nintendo and Grezzo had to navigate the challenges of giving a player access to copy-and-pasting over 100 objects in the game anywhere, anytime. That includes challenges with how every object can interact with both top-down and side-view gameplay, and struggles in ensuring gameplay didn’t feel too slow while the player waits for enemies and echoes to take actions against one another.
One particular sticking point, per Aonuma, was placing restrictions on what the player can do with Echoes early on, or in dungeons. Earlier in development, Aonuma says the team tried to put restrictions on Echo use out of fear players would break the game. But over time, they discovered this wasn’t necessary, and gradually lifted these restrictions until the final version of the game had almost none from the start.
All this led to further enabling players to “be mischievous,” which was a key phrase used during development.
We wanted to do some things that were really out there.
“We came up with this key phrase because we wanted to do some things that were really out there,” Aonuma says. “For example, if you roll something like a spike roller along the ground, that’s a lot of work, because it can hit all kinds of things, but if we didn’t allow for this possibility, it wouldn’t be fun. (Laughs) The development team called these kinds of ideas ‘being mischievous.'”
Sano adds that the team created a document explaining what “being mischievous” meant “so that everyone could return to this concept if they weren’t sure how to proceed.”
“There were three rules,” continues Grezzo director Satoshi Terada. “Be able to paste things however, wherever, and whenever you like. Make it possible to complete puzzles using things that aren’t there.”
Sano shares the third. “Being able to find uses for echoes that are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating should be part of what makes this game fun.”
Aonuma concludes by referencing the Myahm Agana shrine from Breath of the Wild, an infamous motion-sensor puzzle where players had to use the Switch controller to move a platform and tilt a ball through a maze to a finish line. However, the puzzle also allowed players to flip the entire platform upside down and roll the ball across a smooth surface to the goal.
“If this kind of solution isn’t allowed, then it’s not fun,” says Aonuma.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Henry Cavill, the world’s most famous Warhammer 40,000 fan, is like so many others enjoying the recently released Space Marine 2.
In an Instagram post, the Superman and Witcher star praised the developers at Saber Interactive for the action game set in Games Workshop’s grimdark universe, although revealed he failed to complete the campaign solo on the Angel of Death difficulty, which is the hardest of the four difficulties available.
As we can see from the photo, Cavill is currently big into Space Marine 2’s PvP mode, dubbed Eternal War. We can see him matchmaking on the PC version of the game, although the actor was smart enough to paste over his username with the word “nope.” Yes, that means you could be playing with or against Henry Cavill in Space Marine 2 PvP and you’d never know it.
Space Marine 2’s PvP, Cavill said, “has real potential to be absolutely awesome,” but he admits he knows nothing about video game development.
“Disclaimer: I know nothing about game development so the kind of dreams I have may be rather difficult to implement!” he said.
Also of note, Cavill is playing as an Ultramarine Tactical class, and he’s got a copy of The Horus Heresy Book Two on his table. The book contains rules and special characters for the pre-Heresy Iron Hands, Salamanders, Night Lords, and Word Bearers Legions, which I’m sure will set tongues wagging among the Warhammer 40,000 community.
It might make sense for Cavill to be submerged in the Warhammer 40,000 universe right now. Games Workshop recently reiterated that Amazon’s hotly anticipated Warhammer 40,000 film and TV series, to which Cavill is attached, will not happen unless both companies can agree “creative guidelines” by December 2024.
In December 2023, Games Workshop said it would work with Amazon for a period of 12 months ending in December 2024 “to agree creative guidelines for the films and television series to be developed by Amazon.” And that agreement “will only proceed if the creative guidelines are mutually agreed between Games Workshop and Amazon.”
“We will update you accordingly,” Games Workshop said, like a Space Marine might tell a Guardsman anxious about a coming battle. That means Games Workshop and Amazon have just a few months to sort themselves out, or the Warhammer 40,000 movie and TV series fans so desperately want might never happen.
If the Warhammer 40,000 Amazon projects move forward, Cavill will be involved. The Hollywood actor is set to star in and executive produce the Warhammer 40,000 franchise across all Amazon Studios productions.
While concrete details on shows and films are likely a way off, Cavill nonetheless sounded excited to be bringing Warhammer 40,000 to life. “I have loved Warhammer since I was a boy, making this moment truly special for me. The opportunity to shepherd this cinematic universe from its inception is quite the honor and the responsibility,” said Cavill. “I couldn’t be more grateful for all the hard work put in by Vertigo, Amazon and Games Workshop to make this happen. One step closer to making a nigh-on lifelong dream come true.”
In February, Cavill touched again on the Warhammer 40,000 Amazon project, saying: “It is the greatest privilege of my professional career to have this opportunity. I can’t say too much, again, it’s early days still. But to have this opportunity to bring it to screen, and be at the tiller so it can be faithful, is key to me.
“This is the stuff I’ve been dealing with since I was a kid. This is the stuff I spend my free time daydreaming about, as an adult as well, and I get to bring it into life. There is no greater reason than I joined the industry than doing something like this.”
Warhammer 40,000 is Games Workshop’s science fiction universe used as the setting for its hugely popular tabletop wargame starring the iconic Space Marines. It’s a grimdark universe in which humanity clings on to survival in the face of terrifying threats within and without the fascist Imperium.
Who might Cavill play across the Warhammer 40,000 Cinematic Universe? Talking to IGN in 2021, Cavill expressed interest in playing one of the Primarchs or Captain-Generals, who are high-ranking key characters from the Warhammer lore.
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.
A Baldur’s Gate 3 mod removes the role-playing game’s traditional Dungeons & Dragons turn-based combat in favor of more action-orientated real-time battles.
PC Gamer spotted the work-in-progress mod from tinybike on YouTube, and described it as a “very very very rough draft.” It does what it says on the tin though, letting players run into Baldur’s Gate 3 combat and cast spells as quick as their fingers will allow, instead of having to wait their turn.
The video shows tinybike exploring the ruins found early in Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate 3 and immediately being rushed by the agitated enemy who awaits. But they, alongside the handful of other baddies exploring the ruins, are quickly taken down with a selection of speedy spells.
Baldur’s Gate 3 combat can be tricky even with 10 minutes between each move to think about things, of course, so it’s difficult to imagine how real-time combat would work proper, especially for some more strategically driven classes like the Rogue. Regardless, mods will seemingly make it a viable option in the future, so those looking to explore Faerûn without a pause button can seemingly soon do so.
Baldur’s Gate 3 mods have increased in prominence thanks to developer Larian Studios releasing an official toolkit for the game, and this was quickly broken to let players make fully custom maps and more.
In our 10/10 review of the game, IGN said: “With crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the new high-water mark for CRPGs.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, you’ll no doubt remember the Chimera. It’s a hulking, spider-like tank that chases you relentlessly, destroying every piece of the building around you before trapping you in a one-on-one battle. It’s the biggest boss fight in the whole game, and was a monumentally complex sequence for developer CD Projekt Red to create.
So, how was this intricate multistage mission put together? We spoke to multiple developers from across several different departments to find out what the joys and complications were. This is how Phantom Liberty’s Chimera encounter was built, from concept to controller.
The thoroughly elaborate design process for the Chimera started with the most simple of propositions: a big boss battle with a big boss tank. Filippo Ubertino, Cyberpunk’s Senior Concept Designer explains:
“I had a very small brief and it was something like this: we want to do a boss fight that will be a spider tank. Internally, we always refer to it as a spider tank, but in fact it’s not a spider because it has six legs, so it’s not really a spider and it’s not actually a tank because it doesn’t have a crew. So Chimera fits better.
In the beginning, we didn’t have this claustrophobic environment in mind. So we also thought about maybe we could have this tank jumping around, but we decided that we wanted something heavier, something scary in a sense, not like a toy jumping around.”
That desire for heft and weight informed the complete look of the Chimera. It almost evokes kaiju-like monsters, further playing into the metaphor of it destroying the model of Night City’s Dogtown district at the centre of its museum home. It was built to impose itself on both the tight confines of its surroundings and the player, who is tiny by comparison, something Paweł Mielniczuk, Art Director at CDPR, expands upon:
“We thought that it would be perfect [to create] this kind of man versus machine, David versus Goliath moment where we have to, as a single person, fight with something so massive and elaborate and powerful. There were a lot of iterations on even an accomplished model. Changing something, replacing things. Adding range, the capability of rotating faster, moving faster, et cetera. Adding grenade launchers. Eventually also adding the drone compartments, which were not part of the original design, but were needed to add an additional phase of combat in the third stage of the boss fight.”
“We didn’t have a perfect gameplay idea at the beginning,” Ubertino reveals. “So we started with [lots of different ideas;] many legs, high legs, something smaller, something bigger. And when one of those sketches was chosen, we were like, ‘Okay, now we need to block it out.’ So we have very rough 3D models so [the gameplay team] can test it in the level. That one was a little bit more similar to the final one. I tried to keep the shape as similar to that block out, even when I started adding details in 3D and making it more believable, more like a real tank.”
But despite being neither a spider nor a tank in the end, the eagle-eyed among you will be able to spot some aspects of the original design that remain to this day. Something that Ubertino found the perfect way to repurpose.
“If you look at the rear section, there’s quite a big door. At the beginning we didn’t know that we were not going to use a crew, so that door was supposed to be the opening for the crew. But we ended up [making the Chimera] a huge drone essentially, and the door is still there.”
Being an automated machine rather than a crewed vehicle allows the Chimera to move in a more animalistic way. Unhindered by the limitations of humanity, its motions are free to be animated in a way that better reflects its natural world influences, as explained by Cinematic Animation Acting Lead David Cordero Iglesias:
“We were mostly relying on scorpions, beetles, things that have six legs, because it’s very important to pick up the balance on how he’s moving, the volume motion that the Chimera showed through the entire sequence.”
Contributing to that animalistic-yet-mechanical feel is the fact that the Chimera is possessed by a rogue AI from beyond the Blackwall. This ‘cyberspace hell’ and the corruption it inflicts is at the core of Phantom Liberty’s storyline – and would also need to be conveyed in the way the metal monster would be heard. As such, noises were engineered to sound like nothing else – an amalgamation of natural, digital, and demonic worlds. It needed to sound like an overwhelming force eating away at whatever it came into contact with, be that the hulking Chimera or the new central character, Songbird – it’s an audio hellscape she, nor the player, can escape.
“We wanted the Chimera to sound mechanical but not fully robotic”, states Lead Sound Designer Krzysztof Popiel. “We wanted it to be something alive, and robotic growls help a lot with this. As the sequence progresses, the vocalisation of the Chimera changes to almost demonic Blackwall sounds.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Michał Pukała, Senior Sound Designer: “I think the coolest and the most interesting thing about Blackwall is that it wasn’t supposed to be futuristic. The descriptors I got from both the narrative director and the lead cinematic designers, they were talking about shamanistic sounds, cyber monsters. Essentially you would need to create sounds of cyber hell.”
Further inspirations for the sound of the Blackwall came from other, non-audio departments working on the sequence. This collaboration was made possible thanks to a completely new organisational system, implemented by CD Projekt Red after the release of Cyberpunk 2077. The Spider and the Fly, the mission in which the Chimera appears, was a big test subject for this new way of working. Members of every design department needed to be in constant conversation with one another to ensure that the visual design and animation all worked in concert with the sequence’s gameplay goals.
This sequence is one of the biggest achievements we did in terms of blending gameplay with cinematics.
“It was a bit tricky from our side because it was the first time in the company that we were divided into what is called content teams”, Iglesias recalls. “It’s like a multidisciplinary team based on every discipline that we want to create this sequence. So everyone participated in the design with their own ideas. We have environment artists, we have animators, we have designers, we have gameplay, we have level design, so everything together to create the best approach to this. It was a very, very, very intricate process.
We needed to have this heaviness, this weight, tons of steel chasing you. But at the same time, later we have a boss fight. So we have to balance it out with gameplay that has other requirements, right? Because this sequence, for me, is one of the biggest achievements we did in terms of blending gameplay with cinematics. We tried all the time to mix those two in several intensities during the whole sequence.”
Blending gameplay with cinematics is something that Cyberpunk 2077 does elegantly. CDPR aims to never fully take control away from the player, even when a scripted scene is playing out in front of them. The Chimera sequence is a finely tuned set piece that demanded a tight relationship between the gameplay and cinematics staff. Managing the balance was a task that largely lay in the hands of Cinematic Designer Michał Zbrzeźniak:
“When the tank is rising up for the first time in this room and he’s shooting at you in the middle of his animation, that makes him go to gameplay. So normally you would have a cut, a fade out and fade in, or maybe something will glitch at the transition from gameplay to scene. And in Cyberpunk, especially in this sequence, we always strived to make it invisible.
So actually almost the whole sequence, except for maybe just the fight itself, is actually a cinematic sequence. There are dialogues being played by the characters. There are even contextual animations played on V where she’s covering her face from the missiles. But the soldiers that are on the balconies actually have gameplay behaviour. But we did it in a way [where] the turret’s swipe is so meticulous that they will die anyway. So it’s kind of a risky mix, but it worked out in the end.”
From here, the mission transports you from the wide open museum space to a tight corridor, made even more claustrophobic by the presence of the Chimera hunting you down. It’s a chase sequence built on the principle of knowing when to pick your battles. The tank is too powerful to take down by yourself, and if you try, you’ll learn that the hard way.
“We kind of try to make sure that it’s impossible to fight with it”, Iglesias explains. “There are several fail states that we create along the whole sequence, but I will say 90% of the players run away the first time because it’s too scary.
It was a bit of a challenge to put this gigantic beast inside the corridor because it’s pretty difficult to make him move anywhere. So we decided that he’s destroying everything on his path [as he chases you]. It was the best way to create this horror feeling. [It’s] funny because I animated everything with the Chimera moving forward and destroying everything on his path, and probably 99% of the players don’t look [backward], which is kind of sad for me.”
Running forwards may be a simple enough task for the player, but was far more complex a conundrum for Zbrzeźniak and the cinematics team to solve:
“So the chase part was a challenge in that regard. We had to align the speed of the tank, which wasn’t an easy task to do because it was completely animation-driven. So any change in his movement would require some animation tweaks. [We also had to] align that with how fast the player can go, because the player can be a bit faster or a bit slower [depending on their character build], and for every type of build it still needs to work and it still needs to feel like he’s right on your toes. But he can never catch you if you are actively running from him.
One of the goals in the sequence for us was to foreshadow as much of the stuff the tank is doing as possible. For example, you shouldn’t be close to it. Being close to it means death. He has a turret that is deadly, he has a laser swipe that is also deadly. So then when you actually fight him, you know what a given attack is because we showed it already through the sequence that precedes it.”
Before the big fight, though, comes a long fall. A floor-shattering descent through concrete and metal, this incredibly complicated transition scene posed some of the biggest technical challenges of the whole sequence.
“That fall was kind of my own personal baby, actually”, states Iglesias. “I wanted to create a bigger action sequence instead of just falling. So I took some inspiration actually from some other places. For example, the Uncharted 4 clock tower sequence. You are trying to grab onto everything you find for your life, right? We have these cables, you are on top of the tank again, and you have to jump out [and grab them].
At the same time, to give this scale, I had another inspiration that I like a lot: Gandalf falling with the Balrog from the Bridge of Khazad-dûm [in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers]. So it’s this massive fall, but you are still fighting and you have this behemoth by your side that you are watching fall with you. In the end, trying to achieve this result of an insane action sequence was very, very difficult from an animation point of view.
What we did is we had an incredible [motion capture] stunt team that we recorded for several days and we divided it into several clips. So you have your fallings – everything is recorded actually in motion capture, which looks insane – but everything is recorded from the ground level. Of course, we’re not throwing anyone three floors down. Later we have to cut and clip everything, cut and paste every single bit, so it makes sense.
It was incredible to work with that, but it was kind of a gigantic puzzle to build all these animation clips while at the same time having this Chimera keyframe animated on top of it and trying to sync everything. This was a very close collaboration with cinematic designers to try and nail that timing together with this insane action sequence.
“For the longest time we couldn’t really make it work”, Zbrzeźniak adds. “We needed to be like, ‘This will work eventually, please trust us, we will make it happen’. But there were some tricks that we had to do there. For example, when V is falling down through the air, when you actually would fall [in real life], you would fall much faster. But we had to kind of fake it a bit to achieve a better effect and to also make it readable because in sequences, especially first-person ones, everything that you see is dictated by your perceivable angle of vision. And so we really had to be careful on what we present [to ensure that]the player even understands what’s happening in that sequence. Achieving that wasn’t an easy task and it went through many, many iterations.”
What looks like a simple fall actually turned out to be the most complicated part of the sequence for the cinematics team. Ensuring that the most scripted of events looks reactive is an art they put a lot of time and effort into perfecting.
We try to never take full control from the player for too long. It’s kind of like a rule, like a philosophy of ours.
“Nothing there is procedural”, Zbrzeźniak continues. “Everything needed to be directed by us and put in a very specific, deliberate place. [We had to make sure that the] destruction that is happening [occurs] at the very precise moment when you’re falling through that concrete floor. The smoke needed to go off at the very precise, specific moment. The pieces of debris needed to clear out for you to be able to see where you’re falling. And it needed to be clear that you fall down on the tank and roll off from it. So putting this specific part of the sequence [together] was certainly the most challenging, but also the most fun.”
While this sequence delivers cinematic spectacle in spades, Cyberpunk is a video game, not a movie. As such it’s important that there are still flashes of interactivity through the most scripted of scenes. Not paying attention? Deadly quicktime events will make you pay the price. Zbrzeźniak explains how:
“We try to never take full control from the player for too long. It’s kind of like a rule, like a philosophy of ours. There cannot be [non-interactive] scenes that are too long, basically. And so on top of it being already difficult and containing multiple elements to piece together to work in perfect sync, we also made it so that you can get hit by the turret if you don’t react quickly. If you don’t manage to grab the cables, you will bounce off them. And if you don’t dodge the spider tanks leg, you’ll get crushed by it.
“We wanted to kind of test the streamers a bit. Sometimes during the scenes they just tend to look at the chat, maybe not pay full attention to what’s happening on the screen. And in this case, and actually we witnessed it several times, they just died in the middle of the scene because they weren’t paying attention. That’s exactly what I’m talking about when we talk about scenes in Cyberpunk. You can never really look away. You can never put down your gamepad and just witness the events.”
The biggest challenge for the player was yet to come, however. After landing, the briefest of respites is granted so that you may gain a bearing of your surroundings. Savour those few seconds, though, because it’s the calm before the biggest storm Cyberpunk has to offer. What was previously seemingly indestructible is now weakened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t put up one hell of a boss fight.
The fight itself tasks you with taking on the Chimera and its many, many different weapons. It’s here that the design of the tank and the design of the gameplay scenario all comes full circle, with gameplay influencing visual design and vice versa. It’s something that influenced Mielniczuk and the art team’s ever-evolving iterations:
“In the early pre-production of Phantom Liberty, the combat was supposed to happen on the street level. So we were thinking about ranged combat, larger distances, a big arena. Eventually, in the process of designing the expansion, we decided that it would be all held inside the buildings and, eventually, in the abandoned metro station.
When we ended up with the design of enclosing the whole arena in the interiors, it completely changed the game. So we needed to adjust a few things, but there was a constant negotiation with the gameplay team. In the beginning, I remembered they wanted to have a really fast and agile robot that runs over the ceiling and the walls, and it’s all over the place. We wanted to have something super heavy, static, slow, inspired by Ghost in the Shell. So finding the compromise, it took us quite a time, but we found it.
The arena’s not too big, not too small. Also, the device itself, which is designed to fight on the medium and long range, now has to deal with us, the small opponent, which is walking, running around their feet.”
Through player testing it was discovered that further tweaks to the tank’s design would need to be made. “There are many weapons on that tank and some of them were added very late,” recalls Ubertino. “For example, we found out that being in the middle of the level, if the character goes too close to it, you can keep shooting [with minimal danger]. So we added this [sweeping] beam just to make the player go far away from it.”
For the sound of the laser, Popiel and the sound team conveniently had the perfect reference point. “We had this case of the laser weaponry in the base game, when you were fighting in Royce’s boss fight, and he was using this laser weapon that can sweep the environment. So with the Chimera, we wanted to do it x10. So basically what we went for here is this constant feeling of the threat, but also it needed to give the player information that the laser gun is winding up to give them a chance to hide behind cover and avoid the damage.”
It wasn’t just the Chimera’s weapons that needed to be tweaked over time, though. Its armour also needed redesigning. Ubertino continues:
“Once we had a blockout, I knew that we needed armour, so I started designing the armour and what’s underneath the armour and which places we wanted to be destroyed. We also worked with weak spots and we wanted to reveal them in a sense. We used the Kiroshi eyes [cybernetic ability] to reveal them, so you just need to scan and you see them. So I didn’t really need to make them yellow or too obvious. It would also be kind of stupid for a weapon to show his weak spots. So using the Kiroshi eyes, it’s a fantastic solution.”
It’s another great example of gameplay and art design working in tandem, and it and other similar combinations all build to the fight’s grand finale. After exploiting the Chimera’s weak spots and disabling it in spectacular fashion, it’s time to deal the killing blow. That finisher, involving the tank’s beating mechanical heart, is the perfect example of every department of the content team coming together.
“This whole boss fight is this story arc of the tank first being indestructible, impossible to defeat. And we wanted this feeling to slowly, over the course of the sequence, to shift and make you as a player feel more and more empowered”, Zbrzeźniak explains. “Finally the finisher, we wanted to do this kind of exclamation point after the boss fight to really make the tank go out with a bang. We assumed that you’re going to be struggling with this guy for quite a long time, and we wanted you to really feel good when you finally destroy it.”
“So we have this Chimera core that resembles a heart,” says Iglesias, “and that was kind of a conversation internally because we said, ‘What looks cooler than having heart beating, heart of your enemy in your hand before you finish them off?’ Later it was super cool because with this multidisciplinary content team, we managed to even make it a piece of loot so later you can craft something out of it. So it is just a very cool ending for it.”
“The gameplay guys [told] me kind of late in the production that they wanted something to be used by the player, and I was kind of lucky in that case because I had just the spot for it”, Ubertino recalls. “So yeah, I got lucky there. There’s a cylinder in the top with a hatch that you can open, take the heart, toss it, and destroy it.”
“We wanted the heart to sound consistent with the Chimera’s approach to sound design, where it needs to sound organic and mechanical at the same time”, adds Popiel. “I think there’s a really cool thing when you just open the hatch and you can actually start hearing the heart beating and then once you grab it and rip it off, you can hear it’s basically dying.”
Teamwork, does, in fact, make the dream work. But, in a level full of towering machines, crumbling architecture, and complex scripting, you’d perhaps expect something explosive to be the biggest challenge the team faced. Well, turns out it’s actually all in the much smaller details, Zbrzeźniak tells us:
“The small thing actually was to make Myers’ rifle be attached to her back when it was necessary. You’ will not believe how many issues we had with this one. Sometimes the rifle was going directly through her head. This was probably the biggest issue for us in this entire sequence, the small rifle from Myers.
If you look at our game, there’s never a situation where characters put guns on their back. It just doesn’t happen. But she has a rifle, and since this is a main story [quest], we didn’t want to create this artificiality where the rifle is just disappearing when she’s putting it away. So we had to come up with a method of her putting the rifle on her back and then taking it out again seamlessly. We had it easier at the beginning because Myers had a pistol, not a rifle, so it was simple. She would just hide it in her pants and that’s it, end of story. But no, it was decided that she needs to have a rifle, and the rifle then needs to be a reward for the player. And it created a bit of a complication for us. But it was all fun and games.”
All fun and games, and months and months of hard work. The Chimera encounter is one of the standout moments of Cyberpunk 2077, a complicated beast at the heart of the Phantom Liberty expansion that wouldn’t have come together without all of the different disciplines at CD Projekt Red combining forces tightly. It’s a mission with as much heart put in as is taken out of its central beast, and as cool as the metal panels that shield it.
Simon Cardy might get himself a pair of mantis blades for Christmas. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
The original Resident Evil 3 hits CD Projekt Red-owned GOG on September 25, 2024.
A post on the platform from GOG itself and publisher Capcom revealed the release comes not long after the original Resident Evil 2 arrived on the platform, much like how the pair of games first launched.
“Capcom’s Resident Evil series has defined and revolutionized the survival horror genre, with the original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3 being standout titles that have captivated gamers worldwide,” the post said. “Now, it’s time to complete the trilogy.
“Just like with Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2, we made sure GOG’s version of the third entry in the series is the best it can be. You can expect a variety of quality of life improvements, compatibility with modern systems, full modern controllers support, and even more.”
Here’s what Resident Evil 3 on GOG offers:
Full compatibility with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
6 localizations of the game included (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese).
Mercenaries Mode included.
Improved DirectX game renderer.
New rendering options (Windowed Mode, Vertical Synchronization Control, Gamma Correction, Integer Scaling and more).
Improved graphics engine initialization and restart.
Improved video subtitles.
Improved options dialog.
Issue-less task switching.
Improved mouse cursor visibility.
Full support for modern controllers (Sony DualSense, Sony DualShock4, Microsoft Xbox Series, Microsoft Xbox One, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, Logitech F series and many more) with optimal button binding regardless of the hardware and wireless mode.
It’s been 25 years since this hulking monstrosity tried to turn us into a Jill sandwich
GOG announced plans to release all three original Resident Evil games back in June, with the release of Resident Evil 3 completing the venture. Picking up the original Resident Evil 4 and onwards on PC isn’t nearly as complicated as the first three games, which were long absent on the platform, so it’s perhaps unlikely any grandiose announcements will be made about more releases.
