Category: IGN

Though Diablo IV recently went gold after a lengthy development, that hasn’t stopped the team at Blizzard from iterating and planning for the future of their upcoming live-service action RPG — a fact that will be on full display during it’s recently announced beta weekend scheduled for May 12th. Hot on the heels of their first two beta weekends, which featured the full first act of Diablo 4’s campaign, the developers have moved quickly to implement a whole host of changes based on player feedback, which includes everything from character class balances to dungeon reworks, and even changes to the fonts used.

Among those developers are game director Joe Shely and associate game director Joseph Piepiora, who I had a chance to sit down with to discuss their beta learnings and the surprise “server slam” weekend — a final beta test that will give players one last opportunity to jump into Diablo 4’s first act early.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback from the previous beta weekends was that dungeons required a lot of backtracking and repeated objectives that took too time to complete, and Blizzard has already moved to address some of this with changes that will be implemented in time for the server slam.

“We took a look at all of the different dungeon objectives to make sure they were as fun as possible,” Shelley explains. “In terms of backtracking specifically, we looked at where [objectives] were spawning in terms of the layout of the dungeon. We also adjusted the way that the dungeons are laid out… so that the layout itself requires less backtracking.”

Piepiora added, “We also made a couple of adjustments to some of our objectives. There’s a few dungeons where players are asked to kill all the monsters inside the dungeon. In an effort to not have players have missed one zombie in a corner someplace, now some of these creatures will start chasing after you.”

The developers also addressed random events, which are supposed to spawn inside dungeons, but hardly ever did in the first two beta weekends.

“There are events that can appear: A tile will, instead of having a regular set of monsters, it’ll have some event where you can engage in a mechanic like Jar of Souls,” Shely explains.

I played Diablo 4’s beta for over 80 hours and can attest to the rarity of events like Jar of Souls, which I only saw once. The event, which occurs randomly, spawns a jar and sends waves of enemies at you, which can be killed to farm souls that fill up the jar until it spawn a special boss who grants powerful loot when killed. “Some people may not have seen [these events] at all because they were very low chance,” Shely admits.

But in the upcoming server slam and in the launch day version of Diablo 4, the odds you’ll get to see these events in action are much greater. “It went from a 10% chance those sorts of events would spawn to like a 60% chance,” Piepiora says. “So yeah, a huge difference for players when they’re starting to go through these spaces — you’ll see a lot more of that content.”

Another major change deploying alongside the server slam beta weekend is a rebalancing of character classes, which unsurpringly target the demonstrably overpowered necromancer with a few nerfs, and offer some important buffs to the druid and barbarian classes.

One of the ways the necromancer is being brought down a peg is via making their summonable army a little less tanky. “We do want players to be interacting with summoning their skeletons and dealing with corpses as part of the routine of playing a necromancer. That’s part of the mechanical mastery of playing a necromancer is managing these skeletons and mages and golems as you’re playing. So we do wanna make sure that players are occasionally need to re-summon in various fights,” Piepiora says.

“To be clear, the necromancer did get buffs as well, as part of their Book of the Dead feature, a number of attribute stats on those effects actually improved,” Piepiora clarified. “We wanted to make sure that there was an interesting wealth of choices for players to makes and that’s the core of a lot of our balance fundamentals.”

I was also able to confirm that the necromancer’s bone spear ability has retained its awesomeness as well, so my fellow necromancers need not fear these balances too much.

For the druid and barbarian classes, which I felt were quite underpowered compared to the other classes, each are getting a slew of buffs, including more powerful abilities and lower cooldowns for both. But more importantly, the barbarian is getting a flat damage resistance increase of 10%. Piepiora told me that although level 25 isn’t exactly reflective of how each class will feel when players reach max level, some of these changes should make the leveling process feel better.

“The manner of the buffs that we provided are really useful for making sure that survivability is increased and these classes feel a little more competitive in the early game,” Piepiora explains. “But there are a lot of mechanics that players haven’t unlocked as part of the beta. Barbarians unlock a weapon technique slot they get to use that makes them double down on their weapon expertise abilities, which makes them do more damage. The druids get to use spirit boons to unlock new, really powerful passive powers from spirit guides. But you didn’t get a chance to see some of those things as part of the level 25/Act I experience.”

In addition to the changes to character classes and dungeons, Blizzard has also implemented numerous other changes, including an overhaul of the fonts used to make reading item descriptions and stats feel more in-world, the removal of the “reset dungeon” button in response to players exploiting the feature, and improvements to The Butcher, a demon who spawns randomly in dungeons with murderous intent, who will now be even more deadly.

As someone who has spent thousands of hours playing and talking about live-service games, I’ll admit I’m impressed by the speed at which these changes have been deployed and that speaks well to the future of the Diablo series as it enters the games-as-a-service fray.

“The [developers] who have been working on getting the game ready to ship, are transitioning to work on future expansions and the live-service [content],” Shely explains. And while Piepiora plays his cards close to the chest about what the live-service team is working on, he teases that, “The team is already engaging in creating really interesting content for players to experiuence after the game goes live and we’re really excited to continue to grow, iterate, and create new and fun opportunities for players to engage with the core Diablo experience.”

The server slam begins on May 12th, closing on May 14th, and will give players an exclusive opportunity to earn an Ashava mount trophy if they can best the beta’s world boss at level 20. But doing so won’t be easy, since powerful loot drops have been reduced to far less generous levels and the new level cap will make the fight more difficult. “It’s really Ashava’s server slam, right? She’s gonna be slamming the server,” Piepiora jokes, “We’re really excited to see players try to throw themselves at this.”

Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.

PlayStation announced that it has acquired Firewalk Studios, and that the studio still hard at work on its first original AAA multiplayer game. This comes after PlayStation and Firewalk Studios announced back in 2021 that they had formed a partnership to publish the aforementioned multiplayer game.

“Building a new studio at scale has been an incredibly exhilarating and relentlessly daunting task. Fortunately, we’ve been supported by great partners throughout,” explained studio head Tony Hsu and game director Ryan Ellis. “ProbablyMonsters helped turbocharge us in setting up the studio, and Sony has been supporting our project and our creative vision from the beginning.”

Great news: @FirewalkStudios is joining the PlayStation Studios family!

Learn more about this talented team and their plan to connect players in new and innovative ways in their ambitious upcoming multiplayer game: https://t.co/30jQNY3qen pic.twitter.com/8wB3pEsbrH

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) April 20, 2023

They continued: “Today we’re taking the next natural step and joining PlayStation Studios. We’ve worked closely with Hermen and the very talented team at PlayStation for years, helping to make our new game even better. To join PlayStation Studios is to formally become part of a family that has produced many of the most storied games of our age, and we are honored.”

Firewalk Studios was founded in 2018 as part of ProbablyMonsters, which was itself founded by former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan. It’s the latest studio to join the PlayStation portfolio. In particular, Firewalk Studios is another studio that is focusing on developing a multiplayer game, which is a direction that PlayStation is more frequently headed. PlayStation recently acquired Haven Studios, which is also creating its own multiplayer IP, as well as Bungie, who is working on a character-focused multiplayer game as well as it’s ongoing work on Destiny 2.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.

When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey

EA has revealed that the next generation Skate game is getting console playtesting, and while the publisher didn’t say when, it did share a ton of other new information about the highly anticipated game.

Revealed in a new episode of The Board Room video series, the team at Full Circle announced that console playtesting would eventually join those on PC, and that they’ll share more information closer to the time.

The developers did share some information on the progression system though, saying it’s currently in early development and making absolutely clear that Skate won’t have lootboxes.

Difficulty will affect rewards gained though, with the hardest of the three levels (which are called Own It, Crush It, and Shut It Down) granting the most rewards. There are also modifiers to the difficulty levels to make things even more (or less) challenging.

The basically philosophy is “do cool stuff, get cool stuff” Full Circle said, so no matter what activity players are doing, they’re always progressing towards new rewards. Though they didn’t say much about them, rewards will seemingly be customisation items, “giving you more ways to show off what makes you uniquely you”.

As for what these activities are, Full Circle breaks them down into four main categories, though that’s not to say more won’t be added later.

Challenges are short solo experiences that rotate in and out periodically, meaning they regularly change and always offer players something new. Pop-ups are dynamic events around the city, Community Events are events where players must play together, and Throwdowns are customisable and user-initiated events that allow players to “gather together, build friendships (or maybe rivalries), practice, or show off”.

Skate, which was originally announced as Skate 4, got its name change in July last year. This is also when EA announced it will be free to play, and asked for playtesters to come on board around the same time.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

As IGN’s AI Week continues, I thought it’d be fitting to look back on the Xbox’s highest-aiming gaming AI project: Project Milo, which would formally come to be known as Milo & Kate before disappearing in a cloud of vaporware altogether. It was unveiled back at E3 2009, meaning that it’s so old at this point that, more than likely, plenty of folks in an entire generation of younger gamers don’t even know what it is. Heck, I lived through it as the Senior Editor for Official Xbox Magazine at the time, and even I couldn’t tell you what it was – because I never saw it running. Few people outside of Microsoft’s walls did.

What it wanted to be was a grand experiment in AI. Take a look through all the stories IGN did on it over the years. You’ll go on quite a ride! The “emotional AI” would have allowed you to interact with Milo and his (or her, if you chose the female version named Millie) dog named Kate. And by “interact” I mean talk to, using Kinect’s built-in microphone array.

This feature is part of AI Week. For more stories, including how AI can improve accessibility in gaming and comments from experts like Tim Sweeney, check out our hub.

AI in games is not particularly novel given that the technology has been used to power games from Half-Life to Chess. But with a new generation of AI tools like ChatGPT quickly evolving, developers are looking at ways AI could shape the next generation of games.

There are still plenty of questions about AI games, especially in terms of how they could impact the labor that goes into making a video game. But while the full grasp of AI’s effect on the video game industry as a whole remains to be seen, there are examples of how generative AI could advance the ways players interact with a game’s characters, enemies, and story.

There aren’t a whole lot of games out right now that take advantage of generative AI, but for an example of existing games with advanced AI, as well as stable experiments that offer a taste of what’s to come, check out the games below.

AI Dungeon

AI Dungeon is more a fun experiment than a proper video game. The browser RPG from developer Latitude lets AI generate random storylines for players to then play around in. Logging into the website, players first choose what kind of scenario they want to experience, whether it’s a fantasy, mystery, cyberpunk, or zombie world. AI Dungeon will then generate a story based on that setting and from there, players can interact with the game like a classic text adventure.

This approach to text AI is not dissimilar from what people are already doing with ChatGPT and other companies, like Hidden Door, are readying similar and more interactive and game-forward takes on the AI Dungeon. But as an example of how AI could affect interaction with a dungeon master, NPC, or enemy in future games, AI Dungeon is worth an experiment.

Alien: Isolation

In 2014, Creative Assembly released Alien: Isolation, a survival game that pits the player against the universe’s most perfect killing organism. The AI used to design the Alien was not new, but shows just how advanced existing AI technology in games already are.

In a deep-dive from GameDeveloper.com, Alien: Isolation took a unique approach to existing AI techniques by essentially making it a PvP game where neither the player nor the Xenomorph is fully aware of each other’s actions or location. However, a second AI, the “director” will periodically give the Alien hints about your location and actions, giving the Alien its edge and advantage, as if in a real-life Xenomorph encounter.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Another well-known game that offers a glimpse of how a more advanced AI could upend gaming is Monolith Productions’ Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor. Also released in 2014, Shadow of Mordor takes a different approach to AI than Alien: Isolation.

Rather than having a ready-made enemy like the Xenomorph hunt you down, players in Shadow of Mordor have a chance of creating their own worst enemy with the Nemesis System. This AI system turns lowly enemies who may have killed the player at some point into strong rivals who grow in rank and power each time they defeat you. And as the game continues, these persistent, procedurally-generated Nemesis will become an original rival character to you, grown completely organically within the game, and not scripted by the developers.

This freedom, like the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, is one way AI could unshackle NPCs and enemies as the technology develops.

Nintendo has released another patch for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet that addresses a ton of more bugs that have plagued the games since launch.

Releasing the notes on its website, version 1.3.0 also includes a slight change to how Friendly Competitions work (entries are now allowed until an event ends instead of when it begins) but mostly focuses on bug fixes.

Trainers who were surprised to catch an egg instead of Walking Wake or Iron Leaves in their Tera Raid Battles will have the issue fixed, meaning they can now catch the distorted Pokémon. The two will also return to Tera Raid Battles for two weeks starting on May 1.

A special Hisuian Zoroark was also released as preorder DLC for the upcoming Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion, but this caused a Pokédex malfunction for some users that displayed a regular Zoroark too. This has now been fixed, alongside another connectivity issue where connecting Scarlet and Violet to Pokémon GO would cause the game to crash.

A ton of issues have also been fixed in Link Battles and regular Battles, such as stat changes happening to even the Pokémon using the move, and Nintendo has addressed “other select bug fixes” too. The full patch notes can be viewed below.

This April update will be just the third released for the games despite several issues being reported following their launch. These included a broken PvE experience in the endgame, a rigged Battle Stadium, duplication glitches, a bizarre method of running at double speed, and more.

The poor performance was also a major factor in our 6/10 review, as IGN said: “The open-world gameplay of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a brilliant direction for the future of the franchise, but this promising shift is sabotaged by the numerous ways in which Scarlet and Violet feel deeply unfinished.”

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Ver. 1.3.0 Patch Notes

Feature Adjustments

A change has been made to the deadline for entries for Friendly Competitions, which are found in the Online Competitions section of the Battle Stadium.

• Before this change: Entries were allowed until the Friendly Competition began.
• After this change: Entries will be allowed until the Friendly Competition ends.

Bug Fixes

Link Battles

• Fixed a bug in Link Battles where selecting Swap in just before the selection timer reached zero could fail to switch in the selected Pokémon and subsequently cause switching — and the battle itself — to act abnormally.
• Fixed a bug in Link Battles where once the remaining time for the battle was under one minute, it would no longer be displayed where it was supposed to.
• Fixed a bug that occurred in Link Battles where, depending on the move being used at the time a Pokémon fainted, the amount of time a Trainer received to select their next Pokémon was reduced.

Battles

• Fixed a bug where the Cud Chew Ability would trigger again once every two turns after it triggered the first time, contrary to what is written in the Ability description.
• Fixed a bug that occurred when Zoroark Terastallized while using its Illusion Ability to disguise itself as another Pokémon. On the Check Status screen, the Terastallized Zoroark’s type would display as the original type of the Pokémon it had disguised itself as, rather than Zoroark’s Tera Type.
• Fixed a bug that occurred when Zoroark used its Illusion Ability to disguise itself as another Pokémon that had already Terastallized. This bug caused Zoroark’s type on the Check Status screen to incorrectly display as the Tera Type of the Pokémon Zoroark had disguised itself as.
• Fixed a bug in Double Battles with moves that cause stat changes for the Pokémon using the moves. This bug caused the stat changes to incorrectly happen twice if the user hit two opposing Pokémon with the move while an opposing Pokémon was behind a Substitute.

Pokémon GO Connectivity

• Fixed the main issue causing the game to crash on the screen used to pair with a Pokémon GO account.

Other

• Fixed a bug affecting Trainers who received Hisuian Zoroark from the Mystery Gift screen as a special early-purchase bonus for The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero for Pokémon Scarlet or Pokémon Violet without first having seen Zoroark in their game. This bug caused Zoroark to be incorrectly displayed as registered in these Trainers’ Pokédexes.
• Other select bug fixes have been implemented.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Longtime Halo senior developer Joseph Staten, the subject of last week’s Unlocked, has announced where he’s going next: Netflix! We discuss what this means for Netflix’s gaming efforts before turning our attention to the newly announced departure of another longtime Halo developer, Frank O’Connor. Plus: Diablo 4’s community interactions continue to impress, and more!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out our interview with Todd Howard, who answered all of our Starfield questions after the big reveal at the Xbox Showcase:

For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

While I have always favored the Fire Emblem franchise as my Nintendo turn-based tactical game of choice, the Advance Wars series has always held a special place in my heart ever since the first time I booted it up on my Game Boy Advance 22 years ago. I’ve always enjoyed how these games encourage me to get creative with my units and strategies. Whether that is hiding my army in the fog of war and taking advantage of the terrain to obliterate my opponents before they know what’s hitting them, or building a massive platoon of tanks and steamrolling the enemy with my oppressive numbers. It’s rewarding to see my plans work out as intended, and though it stings when they fail, I feel like I always learn something about how to improve my future strategies.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp may not have a large variety in its game modes, but the amount of variables you can swap around to your liking makes each battle feel fresh even when replaying maps. The improvements to the visuals and music of the original, in addition to the inclusion of other modernizations like voice acting, animated shorts, and online play, make it a great way to experience these classics for veterans and newcomers alike. My 60 hours with Re-Boot Camp took me through both campaigns, including alternative missions with different characters that unlocked after completing each campaign, warring with AI on a variety of unlockable maps, spending time designing my own maps, and a small taste of online multiplayer.

It took 15 and 25 hours to complete each respective campaign on the classic difficulty setting (the hardest available from the start). Even having turned it up a notch, the difficulty curve for the original Advance Wars is consistently on the easier end thanks to many of the missions mostly serving as tutorials for new mechanics, win conditions, introducing new commanding officers (COs), and more – it’s not until the final missions of each section of the campaign that things pick up. But once you reach the Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising campaign it starts to include a lot more missions with some surprising difficulty spikes due to the introduction of the new Black Hole army COs and their powerful new abilities.

While the missions may not always be difficult, some ended up taking a while to finish due to the scope of battles where you control multiple armies, or tactical errors on my part, like losing my last infantry unit to hidden artillery, requiring me to spend a large number of extra turns to wipe out the enemy army instead of capturing the enemy base in two or three turns. The good news is that if you were hoping for more of a challenge, finishing each campaign unlocks a new Challenge difficulty that has started to push some of my previous winning strategies to their limits, causing me to reassess which CO and strategy to use on each map when given a choice. It would’ve been nice for that mode to be available from the start for those of us who already know our way around this series.

Re-Boot Camp has updated the Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising campaigns with a charming new art style thanks to the use of 3D graphics, a fantastic re-recorded soundtrack, online multiplayer, and a few features like the ability to restart a turn to help newcomers learn from their mistakes, and the option to fast-forward battle animations to reduce the time between turns if you like. The soundtrack is one of the highlights for me, as each CO has a distinct musical theme during their turns which helps each battle feel fresh. Grit from the Blue Moon Army has a bit of a bluegrass style to mirror his laid-back attitude, while the theme from the Yellow Comet’s Sensei uses a piano and saxophone to give an upbeat jazz feel to his turns.

Outside of the updated visuals and new features, Re-Boot Camp maintains its faithful retelling of the wars between the various nations of Cosmo and Macro Land and the mysterious Black Hole Army, meaning if you were hoping to see any of the new additions or changes included in later games like Dual Strike or Days of Ruin, you will still need to boot up your DS for that experience. (The attention to detail in nearly every area of Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp does give me hope that the third and fourth games will get the same treatment next.)

While neither story is what I would call deep, they both have their brighter moments, with the Black Hole Rising campaign being an improvement thanks to the addition of the new COs and their various personalities. In addition to the Orange Star army COs, commanding officers from the other nations get a modest amount of voice acting that helps to show off each of the characters’ unique personalities. The performances aren’t anything to write home about, but that is more based on the lack of quantity than the quality of them. One of the most intriguing additions is the inclusion of a few animated shorts that had me wondering if we might get an Advance Wars animated show down the road now that Nintendo has seen so much success with the Mario movie.

Each of the COs has their own specialty when building armies, as well as a unique power that can help turn the tide in combat. The spirited but inexperienced mechanic Andy is well-rounded with no bonuses or penalties but has the ability to restore health to his units with his hyper-repair power, making him a safe choice in most battles. The straightforward and brawny Max gives a power boost to all direct damage units while his indirect units, like artillery or rockets, suffer a penalty to their maximum range, making him a good option for when you want to punch through an enemy’s defenses and overwhelm them with raw power.

Advance Wars 2 adds new depth to the formula by including Super CO powers. These often add alternatives to traditional CO powers, like utility effects – such as refilling your unit’s ammunition and fuel or increasing your vision range in the fog of war. The happy-go-lucky special forces commander Sami grants large bonuses to her infantry units when she activates her Super CO power, giving them the ability to capture buildings in a single turn, including enemy HQs, to sneak a victory out of even the direst of situations.

It’s important to know each one’s strengths and weaknesses otherwise, even the best-laid plans can come undone. While many battles in Advance Wars can devolve into a contest of who has the superior numbers, using the proper units in the right positions can help neutralize even the largest of armies. One of the most common tactics is to place a more durable unit, like the medium tank, on a bridge to prevent your opponent’s advance and then barraging their army with artillery or rockets to reduce their numbers so you can go on the offensive. Building an army of units that cover land, air, and sea gives a lot of versatility to strategies across most maps, and building to your CO’s strengths will often tip the scale in your favor. Battles waged in the air are best with the use of COs like Eagle or Sensei, who give large boosts to various aerial units, while Grit’s long range makes it easy to overwhelm opponents from the shadows on maps that have fog of war.

At the end of a mission, Advance Wars will grade you based on speed, power, and technique. So the faster you are at claiming victory while efficiently destroying your opponent’s units without losing your own, the higher the rating you will earn, meaning more currency to unlock new maps, music, and COs for game modes outside the campaign. This helps to improve the mileage you will get out of Advance Wars, since its replayability depends on the unlockable content, so the better you rank, the faster you can unlock more of the content to give you more options and extend your play further.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp’s customizable War Room is one of the areas where I got the most replayability out of it, and foresee it earning the bulk of my time moving forward. Being able to take on the role of any CO on a sizeable number of maps against a variety of AI-controlled opponents with a variety of customizable parameters like fog of war, weather, and victory conditions means there is almost no limit to the ways you can make each battle feel different, even when revisiting favorite maps.

And if the included maps start to feel too familiar, the Design Room map editor is another way to make it feel new again and is only limited by your creativity. Anything you see in the campaigns is at your fingertips, so if you want to build a map that’s all water and play an Advance Wars version of Battleship, you can. Afterward, you can share those maps online, so if you have a good group of creative friends, you can swap maps for an effectively limitless amount of content.

The online multiplayer in Re-Boot Camp is one of the biggest letdowns for me in that there’s no matchmaking system at all. That means you can only compete against opponents on your friends list, so if you happen to be the only person in your group of friends who owns it, you’re going to either need to make some more friends or get comfortable only competing against the AI. On current-generation hardware like the Switch, it’s just plain disappointing not to have a matchmaking lobby. Thankfully, it does have the option for local multiplayer on either the same console or with others on their own Switch, meaning that it will surely see some popularity at various conventions and gatherings.

IGN’s Summer of Gaming is returning for its fourth year this June, bringing with it even more trailers and news for the biggest games of 2023 and beyond.

As in previous years, IGN Summer of Gaming 2023 will be a multi-day event filled with tons of content featuring your favorite games and developers. IGN will be also be partnering with developers to share exclusive reveals, interviews and more!

We’re happy to announce that we will once again be carrying and covering Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest as part of our Summer of Gaming programming. Check out IGN on June 8 for the stream and all of our analysis.

You can also look forward to the Starfield Direct and coverage of Xbox’s Showcase, which will be taking place in Los Angeles.

For an idea of what to expect here on IGN, check out everything that was announced at last year’s event as well as our full hub. There will be lots more where that came from at this year’s event!

Summer of Gaming 2023 will once again be a fully-digital event and can be viewed entirely from home. Catch all of the announcements here on IGN, or check out our channels on Twitch and YouTube for more.

Stay tuned to IGN for all the action as the Summer of Gaming returns!

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Magic is everywhere if you know where to look, and you need look no further than Digital Sun’s The Mageseeker. It’s a worthy addition to the growing list of League of Legends spinoffs, this time a pixel-art action RPG puts you in the role of Sylas The Unshackled as he escapes from prison to seek his revenge against those that locked him away since his childhood. It’s faithful to the lore of League of Legends and expands on it in exciting new ways, showing us even more of the spell-stealing rebel. I came away from my time with The Mageseeker enjoying the journey but wishing it had taken a few different paths along the way.

Following in the footsteps of other League of Legends spinoffs like Ruined King and Hextech Mayhem, The Mageseeker brings another batch of characters from their 160+ champion roster to life in a new way. Sylas is depicted in a bigger way than ever before as he helps to lead a rebellion against the tyrannical kingdom of Demacia, where mages are hunted. The story has some nuance and even lightly parallels moments of real-world history where a group of people has been persecuted for being different.

It took around 18 hours to not only finish The Mageseeker on the hard difficulty, but also complete everything necessary for the platinum trophy on PlayStation 5. This included all the sidequests, replaying a handful of missions to gather any collectibles I missed on my first playthrough, and a handful of restarts against a few bosses who gave me a bit of trouble.

You only ever play as Sylas, but The Mageseeker brings along a few other fan-favorite characters like Morgana, Garen, Lux, Jarvan IV, Shyvana, and a few surprises that I won’t spoil along for the ride. I had a lot of fun seeing how Digital Sun envisioned just how powerful these champions could be when not constrained by the need to be balanced in a competitive landscape. Morgana’s Dark Bindings last longer, Lux’s lasers are larger than life, and Shyvana gets to show her true scale when transforming into her dragon form. There are also plenty of Easter eggs and other fun nods throughout the story that are sure to please fans of League of Legends.

In addition to those familiar faces, Sylas is joined by some entertaining original characters who take on different supporting roles throughout the story of vengeance, growth, and rebellion. There are a few standouts, such as Leilani, who forms a strong bond with Sylas early on and serves as the guiding light of the rebellion while Sylas does what must be done on their journey in the hope of freeing themselves from the persecution of the Mageseekers who are out to imprison or eliminate them.

The Mageseeker begins with a literal bang as Sylas borrows the magic of a young Lux to make his escape from his Demacian prison and upcoming execution. Though the first mission seems momentous, it hits a bit of a slowdown early on as Sylas comes into the role of rebel leader. The Mageseeker absolutely nails the feeling of playing Sylas: the way you can repeatedly dash, use your chains to pull yourself to enemies or around the environment, and all the spells you can borrow and use for your own purposes. Anyone who has played a match of League of Legends as Sylas will be right at home when in combat, though the mechanics are intuitive enough that even those who haven’t should be able to pick it up just as easily.

As Sylas, you have the ability to sense and borrow the magical abilities of others and use them against anyone who stands in your way. Including powerful ultimate abilities I gained access to 30 different spells most of which fell into six different elemental trees, nearly all of which played a useful role in various moments as I progressed. Early spells included elemental projectiles to counter enemies with opposing affinities, while the later spells granted large area-of-effect versions or spells for healing, shielding, or imbuing my melee strikes with elemental buffs. Spells stolen from enemies are single-use, but as you progress you gain the ability to craft spells you’ve borrowed and can cast them as you see fit, as long as you have the mana to do so.

Combat starts out simple, but in the later levels, when facing larger groups of enemies and their numerous projectiles, I found that if I wasn’t staying mobile and dashing or pulling myself to enemies I’d lose large chunks of health. While I primarily focused on using spells that either recovered my health or granted me a shield, that was more about my playstyle than out of necessity: there are plenty of options, and the ability to swap out your spells at any of the generous checkpoints placed throughout the stages gives even more flexibility.

In addition to standard spells, Sylas will also gain access to powerful ultimate abilities that, for the most part, enable him to deal massive amounts of damage but also temporarily boost his power. Using Lux’s ultimate, Final Spark, to fire a large concentrated beam of light to disintegrate large groups of enemies is almost as enjoyable as securing multiple kills with the same ability in regular League of Legends matches.

There is plenty of enemy diversity, and they range from elemental mages employed by the Mageseekers that cast spells to hurl shards of ice, heal other enemies, or create cyclones of damaging wind. As well as creature based enemies ranging from fiery frogs named lava gromps that fans of League will recognize who can create fields of fire, as well as other larger beasts that summon homing beams of lightning, like the gorilla-lizard hybrid Thunderbeasts. Levels continually mixed up the arrangements of enemies, adding a nice level of depth that kept me on my toes when it came to deciding which enemies to prioritize.

Most stages are very straightforward and follow a similar pattern of simple platforming using Sylas’ chains or dashes to cross short gaps, a few enemy encounters that need to be cleared before a door or gate unlocks, and a boss that typically incorporates the elements from the rest of the level. I would have liked to have seen some additional elements in the levels, such as light puzzles or optional platforming challenges to make me earn the rewards placed throughout the map, rather than just being given them as a reward for exploring. There are numerous unlit braziers and other objects in the background that could have been used for triggering something magical like a hidden passage or revealing a chest, but I was always disappointed that casting fire spells on them didn’t do anything. It’s a missed opportunity to encourage replayability and creative use of spells.

The bosses, though, are one of the biggest highlights in Mageseeker. While I could get away with whatever spell loadout I wanted in some battles thanks to Sylas’s excellent mobility, others benefited greatly from swapping out my equipped spells to give me an elemental advantage or boost my survivability with heal or shield spells. On the hard difficulty level, many of the earlier bosses would wipe me out in four to six, hits depending on the attack. It became a bit more forgiving once I’d picked up some health and defense upgrades towards the middle of the campaign, only for the steep challenge to return in the final hours of the campaign with an increased volume of more powerful enemies; thankfully this is balanced by the addition of more ways to heal or mitigate damage. This created a new dynamic of requiring me to decide on how best to use my mana, either recovering my health or dishing out more damage with flashy spells

In addition to the main missions, there are two chains of sidequests. One had me assaulting Mageseeker bases using uniquely empowered versions of my spells, giving these levels almost a roguelike feel that offered some of the most fun in the entire campaign, despite how the side missions reuse the same bosses. The other chain of missions is a series of basic arenas that end with some of the more exciting bosses that fans of League of Legends will want to see. Levels are also filled with various collectibles, such as the adorable silverwings, mages to recruit, and notes dropped by characters that help offer more background information on the state of the world or their lives.

The musical score is filled with fast tempos to match the often chaotic battles, paired with relaxing rhythms during your time in base between levels. Each location has its own style, with the music evolving as you progress further, and culminates into an exhilarating melody during the boss battles. The Mageseeker remains faithful to its source material by using various voice lines and sound effects from League of Legends as characters cast their abilities, and while there is limited voice acting, overall it’s still entertaining to hear familiar elements outside of their normal environment.

I did run into a few bugs during my playthrough: I had enemies and bosses become unkillable, lost the ability to use my chains to grapple or borrow abilities, and one peculiar one where a falling rock followed me wherever I went, including the main menu. It was nothing a quit-and-reload or reboot couldn’t fix, but they did pop up enough times to warrant mentioning.