It’s good to be back in the Zone! I’m Blake from Ironwood Studios, and I’m here to show you a little more of what’s happening out in the wilderness of Pacific Drive.
Life inside the wall is extremely dangerous, you’ll have to rely on a trusty station wagon when you venture out from the old auto shop. Be sure to fill up on gas before you head out on each trip into the Zone: letting your tank run dry out there is a good way to meet a bad end. Explore twisted landscapes and long-abandoned facilities as you scrap and scrounge for resources to keep your car running long enough to make a safe return. Make it back in one piece and use your haul of collected materials to repair and upgrade your wagon before you head back out for more.
As shown in our newest trailer, you’ll encounter all sorts of strange Anomalies, most of which aren’t too friendly. There are warped towers that arc out heavy bolts of electricity at anything that accidentally wanders too close, and underground hunks of metal ripping across the ground, shredding both earth and your tires. When collecting supplies you’ll want to stay close to your car, one of those menacing flying junk piles could sneak away with it without you noticing. You’ll need to closely observe and understand these Anomalies to figure out what you need to build to survive the next encounter. Kit out your car with gear to resist their attempts at ending your runs, and upgrade car panels from bare sheet metal all the way up to specialized armor plates that protect against the worst of the Zone’s elements.
When it comes to modifying your car, it’s not just about the fortifications. Add new racks to your car and strap them down with extra gear for the road: fuel tanks, wind-power generators, and automatic parking brakes. You’ll want every little edge you can get when you’re out in the Zone. Everyone needs extra space to store their junk on the roof rack, but you can also mount a controllable spotlight, a lightning rod to keep your battery charged when it gets a little extra stormy, or classified gadgets based on the experimental tech you find out on your runs.
As you chart the Zone, each expedition brings you deeper and deeper behind the walls. Your journeys will take you across challenging terrain, each area home to its own suite of nightmarish Anomalies. With these new risks come new rewards: certain resources can only be found in dangerous places. Just make sure your car is equipped for the task: if you’re heading into the muck of the marshes, you’ll want to change to some wheels that can handle mud and water. If you’ve got to cross an eternally-dark valley, some roof-mounted lights to illuminate the way forward are going to be pretty important. And if you’re like me, maybe you find yourself getting caught by lightning a few times too often – a high-tech engine upgrade solves that ‘can’t get out of here fast enough’ problem pretty quick.
Speaking of terrible weather and strange cataclysmic events in the Zone, we need to talk about the Zone Storms. These sweeping maelstroms rip apart the map, re-shaping the wilderness, and doing massive damage to anything (or anyone) caught out in them. Radiation is a common concern while trundling through the forest but once a full-force Zone Storm hits, it’s better to try and outrun it completely than to be blasting through the trees, hoping your car holds up as you watch your dashboard melt to pieces around you. Keep that gas pedal floored and the car pointed at the Gateway—each successful return is one step closer to escaping the Zone.
Scavenge resources, explore abandoned facilities, upgrade your garage and your ride — then go deeper into the wilderness to solve the mysteries and urban legends of the Zone. The utopian hope of strange new technologies might be gone, but their remnants still linger.
Pacific Drive was first announced during one of Sony’s State Of Play streams a couple of months ago, my initial thoughts were, ‘Hey, that spooky first-person driving game has some cool sci-fi vibes about it that makes it look like Control on wheels,’ and, ‘Man, I want to find out more immediately.’ Well, thanks to a recent press presentation, I have found out more about Ironwood Studio’s survival roadtrip game, and it’s a lot more roguelike-y than I was expecting. Here’s everything I learned.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has the largest file size of any first party Nintendo Switch game, even coming in larger than its predecessor Breath of the Wild.
As spotted by Reddit user Bob (below) and confirmed on the Nintendo eShop, the base file size of Tears of the Kingdom comes in at 18.2 GB.
While this is still a small number in comparison to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series games, which can often use upwards of 100 GB of storage, it’s enough to put Tears of the Kingdom atop the list of first party Switch games.
Breath of the Wild was once the largest first party Switch game by a long shot at 14.4 GB, though other Nintendo first party titles have since brushed shoulders with it such as Xenoblade Chronicles 3 at 14.38 GB and Fire Emblem Engage at 12.68 GB.
The Settlers was first released. The series is still going strong at Ubisoft, but its original creator Volker Wertich is returning to the genre with Pioneers Of Pagonia, a similar city-building sim. The game is currently in development at indie studio Envision Entertainment and it’ll be entering early access on Steam by the end of this year.
Pikmin 4 is set to release exclusively for Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2023. The latest entry in this series about tiny plant-like aliens exploring a strange planet introduces several new elements, including Ice Pikmin and a roly-poly dog named Oatchi. Pikmin 4 is now available for preorder (see it at Best Buy).
No special, deluxe, or collectors editions have been announced for Pikmin 4, so the standard edition is your only option.
Pikmin 4 Trailer
What is Pikmin 4?
Pikmin is a series of real-time strategy games that date back to 2001, when the original title appeared on the Nintendo GameCube. This fourth entry has been a long time coming, with Shigeru Miyamoto saying back in 2015 that it was “very close to completion.” Seven years later, it’s finally set to release in July.
This installment introduces a new Ice Pikmin that can free enemies and the environment to help your alien flora navigate the strange planet they find themselves on. The plants aren’t alone this time around, either, as they get help from a rotund dog called Oatchi, who can smash through barriers and carry Pikmin on its back while swimming across ponds and puddles.
Overall, it looks like good fun for fans of the series or anyone interested in picking up a colorful, cartoonish strategy game.
Other Preorder Guides
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.
Despite the many rumours we’ve had over the past few years surrounding potential Metroid Prime remasters, the official reveal of the game during Nintendo’s recent Direct presentation was still one of the standout moments of the show.
Metroid Prime Remastered is already available digitally, but there’s also a lovely physical copy headed our way very soon indeed. All the details you need on how to get your hands on it for the best price (including a discount on the digital version) can be found below.
Video games can use many different styles to create a unique look and feel. For Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to use a very colorful and non-realistic one for many reasons: to set it apart from other games in the genre, to allow us to stylize and exaggerate the animation and color palette, and to approximate the illustrations and punk-fantasy art that inspired the creation of the world in the first place.
Stylized rendering is a powerful tool that highlights that “What to draw?” and “How to draw it?” are two different questions. This is the third time we have visited the surreal world of Zenozoik and its primitive humanoid animal inhabitants, but it is the first time we are approaching the “how to draw it” with a really different technique!
There are many ways we could have gone, and we tested several different styles before landing on the one we used. By choosing what to simplify and what to exaggerate, you get very different effects. One of the more interesting styles we tested was a painterly thick brushstroke look (above). It allowed very expressive shapes, a messy almost impressionistic look, and was certainly very different.
We eventually decided against this style because of the excessive simplification it produced: our artists always wanted to add more small details to characters and environments, details which would not really shine in this impressionistic style.
The rendering style we ended up going for is called hatching, or crosshatching. It is a drawing style that creates shading and conveys lighting by drawing closely spaced lines. The closer the lines are together, the darker the area will appear. This style is often used in traditional drawings, illustrations, and comic books, and gives the artwork a hand-drawn look. This technique allowed us to achieve an illustrated style while still preserving detail.
By separating the lighting information and conveying light intensity and detail mostly with the ink pencil linework, we can treat color as a separate layer. This allows us to use more artificial color schemes which would look strange in a realistic rendering style but feel consistent with the look of an illustration. Violet and orange skies, characters with blue or yellow skin, orange dirt, cyan and green mineral deposits in the mountain walls… we intentionally use saturated colors, or color combinations hard to find in nature to convey this is a different world.
One of the main challenges to make the hatching style work was to make sure that it worked at different distances and different levels of detail. It is not just drawing lines on the surfaces, because what works for small details up close might not work for a mountain at a distance. Also some features must be preserved more carefully, like character eyes which are a focus point and must always remain well defined and sharp. The linework needs to be consistent to seem like it was all done with the same tool.
Finally, while we have designed a very specific look for the game, we still chose to enable configuration options for players to personalize the look. Players can choose a cleaner look or add and remove effects. We even left in a comic book inspired black and white mode, which is not ideal for readability, but is still very cool to play with!
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos will be released on March 9 and is available now for pre-order on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. If you are interested in keeping track of all future news, devs blogs and trailers, don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter or join our official Discord server.
The Wizarding World beckons when Hogwarts Legacy launches on PS5 and PS4 February 10. Crafting the magical grounds of everybody’s favorite magical school is a labor of love by the dedicated team at Avalanche.
Explosions of color and light erupt from students’ wands across Hogwarts, harnessing the graphical potential of the PS5. Players can soar through the open world atop their sturdy broom or loyal mount, tapping into the super-fast SSD loading in the fantastical environment.
Starting this year, it’s now easier than before to find a PS5 thanks to increased console supply, which is great news for prospective Hogwarts students. To help players get a sense of what’s in store, Hogwarts Legacy Jose Villeta, Director of Software Engineering, shares some developer insights on how the Avalanche team tapped into the PS5 to enhance the magical journey.
We’re also excited to announce a brand new, limited edition Hogwarts Legacy DualSense wireless controller coming to the US and UK to celebrates the game’s launch on PS5. Artists Vanessa Palmer and Jeff Bunker at Avalanche Software talk about the design inspiration behind this magical DualSense controller.
Making magic with PlayStation 5
What were your first impressions when first learning about the power and capabilities of the PS5, from a developer perspective?
Since the first day I got early disclosure about the PS5, I knew we had on our hands a great gaming console. My video game career started with the launch of the original PlayStation and to know how much technology advancements have occurred since then was a dream come true. The DualSense controller felt next-generation right away. The fast accessing of assets through super-fast SSD combined with stunning 4K graphics and visuals set a foundation of what we will be able to deliver for our game.
What are the most significant ways that developing the PS5 version of Hogwarts Legacy enhances the overall experience for the player?
As we designed our game, we built it around the following five tech pillars.
DualSense controller
Fast loading times
3D audio
4K graphics and visuals
Activities and Game Help
Each of these pillars contributed to the development of a complete, groundbreaking, gaming experience. We invested and leveraged the power of PS5 around them. From controlling our player avatar on foot or flying on broom to fast traveling to multiple game locations in a large open world to an audio sensory 3D experience to stunning, great looking environments and characters to the mission tracking and immersive gameplay, the PS5 version of Hogwarts Legacy allows the player to be the wizard or the witch wants to be on the Wizarding World universe.
Visually-stunning magic is a cornerstone of the Wizarding World. How does Avalanche tap into the PS5’s capabilities to create visual effects that “sell” the fantasy of the game’s spells?
From the early development days, we wanted to make sure we deliver amazing visual effects for all the spells and magic around the Wizarding World. Leveraging Unreal Engine, next-generation Niagara visual effects system combined with large computing and rendering capabilities of the PS5, Hogwarts Legacy delivered dozens of unique spells, each one with its own casting, impact and area of effect graphical presentation and treatment. We built a visual language for each spell and as you gain experience you get access to more powerful and advanced visual effects.
The DualSense wireless controller offers a unique level of immersion thanks to its haptics and adaptive triggers. What implementation of the DualSense wireless controller are you most excited about in Hogwarts Legacy?
The DualSense wireless controller enabled us to build a unique gaming experience leveraging key technologies like adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, LED light feedback, touchpad usage, speaker audio and tilt controls. The most exciting part of our game is the amazing combat experiences controlling your wand and casting all kind of unique spells. The combination of adaptive triggers with haptic feedback made our combat encounters felt authentic and totally immersive. You feel like you are in total control of your avatar and as you perform combos and finishers you get rewarded with stunning visual effects and enemy reactions.
Hogwarts Legacy DualSense wireless controller
We’ve said it before: The PlayStation 5 DualSense wireless controller is an extension of your wand in Hogwarts Legacy, seemingly putting the magic of the game directly in your hands. We’ve also detailed the DualSense features that will connect you with that magic, from haptic feedback providing unique sensations throughout the game to adaptive triggers that enhance spellcasting. Extending well beyond just spells, the DualSense wireless controller immerses you in Hogwarts Legacy’s 1800s wizarding world like never before, letting you feel the flap of a hippogriff’s wings and sense whispers of the mysterious Ancient Magic.
With that in mind, we were really excited at the prospect of creating a limited edition Hogwarts Legacy DualSense controller. We knew we wanted something special that looked as good as it felt to hold. But when it came time to land on a specific design, that was a much more difficult process to parse.
The Wizarding World franchise has so many elements to pull from, how could we possibly distill this game down into a single controller design? Do we go with a wand motif to represent that connection with the controller? Perhaps we lean into Hogwarts Legacy’s unique Ancient Magic themes? What about drawing inspiration from the four Hogwarts houses, or even “light” and “dark” to represent the choices you can make? But through the many ideas we had to choose from, we always came back to the thing that lies at the center of this whole experience: Hogwarts itself.
With so much consideration and thought being put into this design, I went directly to Avalanche Software Artist Vanessa Palmer and Art Director Jeff Bunker to get some insight into how the design of the limited edition Hogwarts Legacy DualSense wireless controller came to be:
Vanessa Palmer: “We wanted the controller design to combine magic with the decorative elements of the Victorian period. The sweeping magic and stars draw you to Hogwarts itself, creating a blend unique to our game and time period.”
Jeff Bunker: “We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with the PlayStation team on the creation of this new DualSense controller for the upcoming game, Hogwarts Legacy. Our goal was to bring a hint of the in-game experience into the player’s hands…literally. Many themes were considered, from the representation of the different houses, magic wands, beasts or even the sorting hat. But it was clear very early that we should focus on the star of the game, Hogwarts itself. So we centered the iconic castle and incorporated swirling motifs of Ancient Magic into the design, highlighting the player’s special role within the story.
“From the beginning, we had a vision of a simple, clean and sophisticated aesthetic. White, blue, and aqua, amongst a number of other colors, were tried but in the end, we chose matte black as the primary color for the controller, not only because it contributed to our desired aesthetic, but also because it hints at the darker themes that players can expect in the game. To add a touch of authenticity, we incorporated old-gold Victorian intaglio etching into the designs of the castle and Ancient Magic swirls, highlighting the era in which the game takes place.
“It was an exciting and fun process to bring a piece of the virtual world of Hogwarts Legacy into the real and interactive physical world of the controller. We can’t wait for players to get their hands on it and fully immerse themselves in the game.”
At Avalanche, our passion for the Wizarding World is poured into everything we do, whether it’s bringing fans an authentic Wizarding World video game experience or creating a custom controller with which to play it. We hope fans love the limited edition Hogwarts Legacy DualSense controller as much as we do.
Get it directly from PlayStation
The DualSense Wireless Controller – Hogwarts Legacy Limited Edition will be available in limited quantities and exclusively on direct.playstation.com in the US and UK only.
In the U.S., starting at 10AM PT on Friday, February 10, 2023, DualSense Wireless Controller – Hogwarts Legacy Limited Edition will be available for pre-order (while supplies last) on direct.playstation.com with a US launch date of February 28, 2023.
In the UK, starting at 10AM GMT on Friday, February 10, 2023, DualSense Wireless Controller – Hogwarts Legacy Limited Edition will be available for purchase (while supplies last) on direct.playstation.com with a UK launch date of February 10, 2023. Stay tuned to direct.playstation.com for more information.
I thought Voidtrain might be relatively new, but it’s actually been knocking around for a couple of years. It’s been in early access on the Epic Games Store since 2021, and after announcing a Steam release for October 2022, the game got indefinitely delayed. Voidtrain’s Steam page currently has a vague release date of sometime in 2023, but the demo is a good reason enough to check it out while the team is still tightening some loose screws.
While the latest trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gave fans plenty of new things to get excited about, it also appeared to show a classic enemy from the N64’s Ocarina of Time.
The infamous ReDead monster can be seen nestled between a Lizalfos and what appears to be a giant Bokoblin in a gameplay trailer shared during February 8’s Nintendo Direct.
The trailer only showed the ReDead for a couple of seconds, but those familiar with previous Zelda games will understand how it fits into a darker version of Hyrule.
While they’ve also appeared in Majora’s Mask and The Wind Waker, ReDeads are arguably most known from Ocarina of Time, where they haunt Castle Town’s ruined market place following the time jump.
Appearing as zombie-like creatures with spooky wooden masks, ReDeads would release a terrifying scream that paralyses Link before they skulk over and attack.
While ReDeads’ appearance have changed a little over the years to suit each game’s art style, their attacking behaviour has remained the same, meaning Tears of the Kingdom players will likely have to come face to face with one of the Zelda series’ scariest enemies once again.
Pacific Drive was 
The Settlers was first released. The series is still going strong at Ubisoft, but its original creator Volker Wertich is returning to the genre with 
Steam Next Fest. Looking at both