Category: Video Games

Playground Games has announced that the Rally Adventure expansion will be the second piece of major DLC for Forza Horizon 5.

Announced on Forza’s YouTube channel, the expansion arrives on March 29 and includes a whole new rally career mode. A brief trailer for the expansion (below) also showed off new gameplay and teased some features that players can enjoy in the Rally Adventure DLC.

Playground also revealed some new customisation options coming to Forza Horizon 5, promising that players can “build a rally monster”.

Get your tires muddy. The Forza Horizon 5 Rally Adventure is here. pic.twitter.com/cSQz1AWVYy

— Forza Horizon (@ForzaHorizon) February 23, 2023

The first expansion was announced last June and reintroduced Hotwheels to the Forza Horizon world. The over the top toys were added to the game’s open world Mexico map and let players race through all sorts of ridiculous settings, like a loop-the-loop in a volcano.

In our 10/10 review of the base game, IGN said: “Forza Horizon 5 is the result of a racing studio at the peak of its craft and the best open-world racing game available.”

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

While Cal Kestis was part of a crew in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – exploring the galaxy in the Stinger Mantis ship with his mentor, Cere Junda; its captain, Greez, and (eventually) his former bitter enemy turned bestie, Nightsister Merrin – once he was boots on the ground planetside, it was largely a fairly lonely adventure. Outside, of course, of the companionship of the ever adorable BD-1.

That changes in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor thanks to the addition of Bode Akuna, a new character in Jedi Survivor, played by Noshir Dalal, who can be seen in the reveal trailer lending a hand to Cal both in a cutscene and in gameplay where he executes a cool tandem finisher on a Scout Trooper. But Bode’s presence as a companion character goes far beyond just cool finishing moves. It’s actually part of a system that Respawn has dubbed “Character-in-Gameplay.”

Characters-in-Gameplay is a term used internally at Respawn to differentiate between NPCs that accompany Cal in actual gameplay segments from characters that stayed behind at specific narrative hubs. As Senior Game Designer Jason Zhu explains it: “There was a desire for NPCs to be used as guides in the levels, and while talking it through, one thing led to another until people started wondering, ‘Why don’t we have NPC’s travel and fight alongside Cal?’”

The team then evaluated whether implementing such a system was feasible with the tech they had, and ultimately decided that it was worth the time and effort to create a system that allowed for companions to join Cal in battle. There was even a precedent already set back in Fallen Order – the boss battle against Malicos where Merrin supports you throughout the battle. That served as the jumping off point, and the character-in-gameplay system is largely an expansion of what players saw during that boss battle.

When he’s accompanying Cal, Bode will actively participate in the fight. He can attack and kill enemies on his own, draw the attention of some enemies to take pressure off the player, and you can command him to help you out by doing some sort of special move on a single target to disrupt them.

To give a specific example, Narrative Technical Designer Joanna Robb said, “When you see a good opportunity, you can give Bode the signal to perform the attack, and he’ll use his jetpack to ram the enemy with a brutal dropkick, and then he quickly follows it up by slamming down a shock grenade to stun other nearby enemies. It’s a great way to send a tough enemy flying, taking them out of the fight briefly, or you could run them down with a sprint attack to get a quick hit in.”

Robb goes on to say that there are also a lot of custom behaviors for Bode that help make him a dependable ally. Bode will respond to your own abilities and attacks with a technique of his own. If you force push an enemy, Bode will fire a charged shot that deals a ton of damage. You can even force grab a Probe Droid, toss it at a group of Stormtroopers, and Bode’s shot will essentially detonate the droid causing a big explosion that takes out the group of enemies all at once.

“We don’t necessarily tutorialize all of these behaviors, they are just designed to give you these emergent moments that are totally your own, but feel almost choreographed like you’re in one of the movies,” said Robb.

Outside of combat, Bode will follow you through the world, using his jetpack to reach places that Cal’s force powers typically allow him to reach via double jumps, wall runs, and so on. Robb said that one of the coolest parts about making an AI companion that can travel such complex spaces is how it pushed the team to develop a new Motion Matching animation system for Bode.

“He needs to be able to think very quickly about where he should go and how to get there, and the Motion Matching system allows the animations to drive his movement, which makes him much more responsive and dynamic than our other AI characters. It really makes him feel like he’s on the same level as Cal as a character with agency in the world, not just a combatant who happens to be on your side,” explained Robb.

Don’t expect Cal to always have someone covering his six, though. According to both Robb and Zhu, the prevalence of companion characters is really driven by the story. If you’re spending time exploring all of a planet’s side content, Bode will stick around on the Mantis. Robb added that, “There’s a nice rhythm to it. When the plot is reaching a peak, the companion will give extra momentum to both the narrative and gameplay.”

As far as whether or not there will be more companion characters than just Bode, Robb did say that Bode will be the first character that Cal would team up with, but rather than talk about characters that would be joining Cal as a combat companion, she preferred to rule one out.

“I’m sure many fans of the first game are dying to know if everyone’s favorite member of the Mantis crew, the stowaway bogling that Cal adopts, will also be a Character-In-Gameplay, and I regret to say that they will not,” said Robb.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit

The detractors of Xbox Game Pass are running out of goalposts to move. One of the last remaining legitimate gripes against Microsoft’s game-subscription service is that it’s been more like basic cable rather than HBO. In other words, plenty of good stuff, but very little content that’s truly top-shelf. But just two months into 2023, that argument seems toast too. Take a look at the roll that Xbox Game Pass has gotten started, and how long it’s set to keep going:

• Hi-Fi Rush (January 25) – Many pixels’ worth of well-deserved digital ink have been spilled writing about Tango Gameworks’s viral, shadow-dropped hit. Microsoft didn’t just release a first-party game out of nowhere, it released a much-needed amazing first-party game out of nowhere. IGN gave it a 9 out of 10, and fellow critics agreed, with a Metacritic rating of 88 on Xbox and 89 on PC.

• Just four weeks later, Atomic Heart (February 21) hit Game Pass as it earned an 8 out of 10 from IGN. This highly anticipated first-person shooter has captivated gamers for a few years now, and its release did not disappoint. It’s a third-party game available on PlayStation, sure, but it’ll cost you $70 over there.

• Those two have started the year strong for the service, but fast-forward a mere 10 days (March 3) and Game Pass keeps another potential $70 in your pocket when Team Ninja’s promising new Soulslike, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, marks another big third-party game doing the day-one thing for subscribers.

• Still in March (on the 28th), Sony’s own first-party baseball sim, MLB The Show 23, won’t cost Game Pass subscribers another dime for the third consecutive year. This is extra cool for an annual sports game, where many players don’t purchase it every year. Game Pass subscribers don’t have to worry about that.

• We move to April (specifically April 18), when Minecraft Legends will see the light of day on all major platforms – but only Xbox gamers can just download it from Game Pass without swiping their credit card for an additional charge. Another dub.

• Meanwhile, May will be only a day old when Redfall, the next major game from the decorated developers at Arkane Austin (makers of Dishonored 1 and 2 along with Prey) hits Xbox Game Pass on May 2.

These are merely the top-shelf highlights. I’m leaving out Game Preview stuff like Valheim (March 14), leftovers like Ghostwire: Tokyo (which should hit Xbox Game Pass on or shortly after March 25, when its year-long exclusivity deal with PlayStation should expire), and enjoyable single-A fare like Cities Skylines Remastered and Shadow Warrior 3 Definitive Edition (both of which hit Game Pass last week).

Finally, if Starfield does make it out by the end of June – which I know many gamers doubt at this point, given the relative radio silence from Bethesda, but I still believe it’s in play – then Xbox Game Pass will have delivered quality and quantity, big games and small, across a wide variety of genres in the first half of 2023. It’ll do that even without Starfield, really, but obviously The Next Game From the Makers of Fallout and Elder Scrolls would put quite a bow on the first six months of the year. Xbox Game Pass is unquestionably riding the hottest streak yet since its birth in 2017, and the big winner is us.

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.