Industrious Switch fans have started compiling a fan-made list that tracks which Switch 1 games have seen an improvement - or a decline - in performance when running on their new Nintendo Switch 2 consoles. Read more

On the tenth anniversary of the release of free-to-play Fallout Shelter, Bethesda has revealed the management sim game has been downloaded 230 million times across all platforms. Read more

Nier: Automata creators deny characters "were problematic overseas" and blame mistranslated subtitle for censorship rumours Nier miss. Image credit: Square Enix News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 14, 2025 Nier: Automata producer Yosuke Saito and director Yoko Taro have denied that any of their character designs were restricted for Western audiences. As spotted by Automaton, the developers were compelled to comment after a mistranslated Japanese-to-English subtitle intimated Nier: Automata had been subjected to censorship from Square Enix to meet global standards. GODDESS OF VICTORY: NIKKE | Producers' Creative Dialogue Special Livestream.Watch on YouTube In the interview above (skip to 28:12 for the segment concerned), Sony executive Yoshida Shuhei asked the developers about their design process. "Our concept is always to do something that's 'not like anything else'. What I mean is, if Nier: Replicant had a boy as the main character, Nier: Automata would have a girl protagonist. If Western sci-fi is filled with Marine-like soldiers, we might go in the opposite direction and use Gothic Lolita outfits, for example," Taro said. "We tend to take the contrarian route." "There are, of course, certain things that are ethically or morally inappropriate – even if they're just aspects of a character," Saito added, according to the subtitles. "We try to draw a line by establishing rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not. "While certain things might be acceptable in Japan, they could become problematic in certain overseas regions, and even characters could become problematic as well. These are the kind of situation[s] we usually try to avoid creating. As a result, there are actually countries where we couldn't officially release Nier: Automata." This immediately caused consternation with fans but as Automaton points out, this "could be a little tricky to translate, even for an advanced Japanese speaker". When asked directly about the claim, Taro denied it, saying on X/Twitter: "I've never heard of such a thing happening". Saito simply said he thought the things he'd mentioned had been mistranslated, and would clarify this in a future livestream. In the same interview, former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida called Nier: Automata the "game that changed everything", as it was responsible for reviving the Japanese games industry on its release. In a recent interview, Yoshida discussed how during the PS3 era, sales of Japanese games had declined, and increasingly studios there were chasing "overseas tastes". That changed with NieR: Automata in 2017, released for the PS4. "I think Yoko Taro created it without paying any mind at all to making it sell overseas, but it was a tremendous success," Yoshida said.

Wholesome Direct 2025 - everything announced at this year's cosy indie showcase Big hops! Discount shops! Spooky pups! More! Image credit: Eurogamer Feature by Matt Wales News Reporter Published on June 7, 2025 If you're the sort who just can't seem to resist the soothing rhythms of turnip planting and interior design, you've come to the right place. This year's Wholesome Direct - which marks the fifth anniversary of the showcase - has now aired, unleashing a fresh wave of cosy games to stick on your wishlists. We've got vending machine management, adorable puppies on spooking adventures, cheese-based puzzling, geckos, goats, seasonal cemetery exploration, and a whole lot more. So if that sounds like it might help sate your idyllic yearning, read on for all the big announcements from Wholesome Direct 2025. And for more indies, you can check out our round-up of this year's Day of the Devs showcase elsewhere. Leaf Blower Co. Leaf Blower Co. trailer.Watch on YouTube Ever wished your PowerWash Simulator had a little less splosh and a little more whoosh? That seems to be the starting point for developer Lift Games' Leaf Blower Co., a game about making the untidy tidy come rain, snow, or shine, one mechanised gust at a time. It's got a story mode plus a variety to locations waiting to be blown debris-free, and if that appeals, a demo's available now on Steam ahead of its release later this year. Instants Instants trailer.Watch on YouTube Instants is a creativity themed puzzler about the intoxicating pleasures of obsessive scrapbooking. It sees players attempting to sort images into chronological order and then assembling them into a scrapbook to reveal a "heartwarming" story inspired by the way family history can be passed down using pictures. It's developed by Endflame and launches today on PC (via Steam and Epic), and Switch. Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar trailer.Watch on YouTube Stardew Valley might be the face of farming sims these days, but the grandaddy of the genre - Story of Season (formerly Harvest Moon) - never went away, and another entry in the venerable series is looming. Grand Bazaar is actually a remake of 2011 DS game Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, and it's got pretty much everything you'd expect from these kind of things - including turnips to fondle, animals to rear, and locals to dazzle with your impressive root vegetable collection. The main twist is you'll be selling all this yourself by setting up shop in the titular bazar. And if that sounds like something you'd enjoy, it launches for Switch, Switch 2, and Steam on 27th August. Gourdlets Together Gourdlets Together trailer.Watch on YouTube Perhaps you're already a fan of last year's Gourdlets or perhaps you're completely new to its vegetable-themed low-stakes thrills. Either way, there'll soon be a new way to play, thanks to developer AuntyGames' Gourdlets Together. Essentially, it takes the laid-back village-building vibes of the original, slings in a bit of a fishing focus - where earnings can be spent on upgrades or accessories to decorate your island home - then lets you do it while hanging out with friends online. Gourdlets Together launches on PC later this year. Luma Island Luma Island trailer.Watch on YouTube Don't think we're done with the farming sims yet - not by a long shot! Luma Island launched last year, offering an attractive mix of crop whispering, profession-specific activities, creature collecting, exploration, and puzzle-y dungeoneering. And come 20th June, it'll be getting just a little be more swashbuckling, thanks to its free Pirates update, introducing a new profession, new Lumas, new outfits, and a pirate cove filled with mini-games, temples, traps, and treasures. It'll also bring a range of different difficulty modes to suit players of all tastes. Is This Seat Taken? Is This Seat Taken? trailer.Watch on YouTube Think you're a dab hand at the old 'awkward family gathering' seating plan challenge? Well then, this might just be the game for you. In Poti Poti Studio's "cosy, silly, and relatable" logic puzzler Is This Seat Taken?, the goal is to satisfy the demands of a particularly fussy group of chair occupiers to find the perfect spot that'll keep everyone happy - be they on the bus, at the park, or in the office. It's coming to Steam, Switch, iOS, and Android this August, and a Steam demo's out now. MakeRoom MakeRoom trailer.Watch on YouTube Here's one for the aesthetic tinkerers and furnishing fetishists out there. MakeRoom, from developer Kenney, sees players decorating a series of miniature dioramas - from cosy indoor retreats to camper vans and even forests - to fulfil the requests of adorable NPCs. You might, for instance, be tasked with creating the perfect room for cats, or a suitably moody hideout for a vampire. Then it's simply a matter of hanging drapes, plopping down plants, and even crafting furniture to bring these spaces to life and satisfy your clients' whims. It all sounds very much like Animal Crossing's weirdly compelling Happy Home Paradise expansion, so if it's more of that sort of thing you want, MakeRoom comes to Steam on 7th August. Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell trailer.Watch on YouTube The apple bell - whatever an apple bell is - has been stolen, but luckily for apple bell lovers everywhere, renowned detective Ambroise Niflette is on the case. Over the course of Topotes Studio's investigatory adventure, Ambroise - and players - will roam the village of Touvoir, interrogating its inhabitants and searching for secrets, all while using a notebook of steadily amassing leads to reveal contradictions and unmask the culprit. It all sounds perfectly lovely, but the real draw is the delightful art style, which is heavily inspired by miniatures and stop motion. Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell is eventually set to launch on Steam, but first there's a Kickstarter, which is underway now. Let's Build a Dungeon Let's Build a Dungeon trailer.Watch on YouTube First there was Let's Build a Zoo, and now comes Let's Build a Dungeon. But while developer Springloaded kept its focus pretty tight for its debut release, Let's Build a Dungeon goes broad; not only is it a playable RPG creator where you can rustle up your own worlds and quests, it's also claiming to be an entire games industry sim too, where you'll need to manage all the malarky around releasing your game - from attracting funding right through to making a profit at the other end of the process. But if all that sounds too stressful, Springloaded has confirmed - as part of its latest showing - there'll be a cosy sandbox Build Mode too. There's still no release date for Let's Build a Dungeon yet, but it's heading to Steam (there's a demo here), Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Squeakross: Home Squeak Home Squeakross: Home Squeak Home trailer.Watch on YouTube What do you get if you cross adorable mice with classic grid-filling puzzler Picross? Well, this thing, obviously. Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is the work of developer Alblune, and it adds its own twist to the familiar logic-testing formula by introducing a home decorating element. The idea is each puzzle corresponds to an unlockable bit of decor - including furniture, accessories, and stickers - so you'll slowly amass new furnishings and trimmings as you give your brain a work out. Is there an in-game lore reason why puzzles equals furniture? Who knows! We'll soon find out, though, given Squeakross launches for Switch and PC (via Steam and itch.io) today. Monument Valley 3 Monument Valley 3 trailer.Watch on YouTube Ustwo Games' perspective shifting puzzle series Monument Valley has been a big old hit, amassing tens of millions of downloads since its iOS debut back in 2014 - so it wasn't a huge surprise when a third entry showed up on mobile last year. Initially, however, it was locked behind a Netflix subscription, but Monument Valley 3 - which we quite liked despite it offering little meaningful evolution for the series - is finally spreading its wings later this year. As announced during today's Wholesome Direct, it's coming to Steam, Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on 22nd July. Big Hops Big Hops trailer.Watch on YouTube If you immediately thought bunnies, you're wrong. Big Hops is, in fact, a frog-themed action platformer, in which players attempt to help the titular Hop find his way home. Each world he visits on his adventure promises its own self-contained story - involving everything from mountain cultists to desert ne'erdowells - all interspersed with plenty of agile platform action. You can grapple across gaps, hoist levers, rotate wheels, even pick locks - all using your tongue - and it's accompanied by some veggie-based gameplay that lets players introduce the likes of climbable vines and mushroom-based bounce pads into levels. Big Hops is currently raising funds via Kickstarter and a Steam demo's out now. Little Kitty, Big City Little Kitty, Big City trailer.Watch on YouTube Here's quicky for you. Little Kitty, Big City - the feline-focused open-world adventure from Double Dagger Studio - is getting a little bigger. That's thanks to a free content update coming to all platforms this "summer", promising new story content, a new neighbourhood to explore, and new oddball characters to befriend. That's alongside a new cat customisation feature for you creative sorts out there. Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk trailer.Watch on YouTube What's in a name? Well, pretty much everything in this case. Aftabi Games' Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk is, just as it sounds, a cosy, laidback game about managing your own vending machine empire. You'll choose where your machines go and what they sell, and hire staff to ensure they stay stocked, clean, and in working order. There's a heavy customisation element too, as you're free to decorate the areas surrounding your vending machines in order to attract new customers. Kozy Kiosk is officially referred to as an "idle simulation", and can be played both actively and passively. And if that appeals, it launches for Steam today. Winter Burrow Winter Burrow trailer.Watch on YouTube Developer Pine Creek Games' "woodland survival game" Winter Burrow was unveiled during December's Wholesome Direct, but it's back to announce it's now coming to Switch. If you missed its original reveal, Winter Burrow casts you as a mouse who's attempting to fix up their burrow and turn it into a toasty retreat from the cold. That requires exploring the snow-covered world outside, gathering resources, crafting tools, building things, making friends, baking pies, and more. Winter Burrow launches next year and will be available for Steam, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch. Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game Tales of the Shire trailer.Watch on YouTube After multiple delays, cosy hobbit life sim Tales of the Shire is almost upon us, and developer Wētā Workshop is readying for its arrival with a brand-new trailer. It's been described as a game about "finding joy in the small moments", and features all the usual life sim activities - fishing, cooking, gathering, decorating, merrymaking - with a bit of a Lord of the Rings twist. So yes, you CAN decorate your hobbit's hole. Tales of the Shire launches for Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on 29th July. Haunted Paws Haunted Paws trailer.Watch on YouTube If your interests lie at the intersection of spooky mansions and adorable pups, prepare to have your day made. In developer LazyFlock's supernatural adventure Haunted Paws, players - either solo or with a friend - control two brave (and customisable!) puppies as they explore a creepy old house in search of their human, who's been kidnapped by sinister forces. It promises puzzles, lighthearted spookiness, and even a few emotional bits. There's no release date for Haunted Paws yet, but it's coming to Steam. The Guardian of Nature The Guardian of Nature trailer.Watch on YouTube This wholesome, hand-drawn puzzle adventure from Inlusio Interactive is all about the interconnectedness of nature, and sees players embarking on a botanical journey as the lovably be-hatted Henry. Not only does Henry know his stuff about the natural world, he's also able to change his size, meaning players can explore both above and below ground as they solve puzzles to assist nature. The Guardian of Nature launches into Steam early access today, and it's coming to Switch, Xbox, iOS, and Android too. Everdeep Aurora Everdeep Aurora trailer.Watch on YouTube If you've ever thought Dig Dug would be improved if its protagonist was a cat, Everdeep Aurora might be the game for you. It follows the apocalyptic adventures of a kitten named Shell as she explores subterranean depths in search of her mother. You'll obliterate blocks, do some platforming, play mini-games, and converse with peculiar characters as you investigate the dark secrets buried below, all without a hint of combat. Its limited-colour pixel art looks wonderful, and it's coming to Steam and Switch on 10th July. Seasonala Cemetery Seasonala Cemetery trailer.Watch on YouTube From the creators of A Mortician's Tale, the "meditative" Seasonala Cemetery is a "peaceful but poignant reflection on life and death". It's set in an expansive, living cemetery that changes dynamically based on your system's time and date. The summer, for instance, might see the world bustling with vibrant life, while the winter brings quiet and snow. You can interact with NPCs and animals, rummage through nature, learn the history of the nearby city through its gravestones, or simply relax to its ambient sounds. Seasonala Cemetery is out today on Steam and itch.io, and is completely free. Camper Van: Make it Home Camper Van: Make it Home trailer.Watch on YouTube One of (bizarrely) several camper-van-themed games currently in the works, developer Malpata Studio's Make it Home is a pretty self-explanatory thing. You've got a camper van to make your own as it journey across beautiful, idyllic landscapes. Part of your goal is to solve organisational puzzles, but there's laidback interior design too. Camper Van: Make it Home is available today, alongside a demo, on Steam. Lynked: Banner of the Spark Lynked: Banner of the Spark trailer.Watch on YouTube FuzzyBot's Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a cheerily colourful action-RPG, that's part sci-fi roguelike, part relaxed life sim. At its most peaceful, you'll farm, fish, gather materials, and build your base with help from your robot pals, but that's all in service of its more frenetic hack-and-slash action. When you're ready for some proper adventure, you can brave the wilds, battle evil robot forces with a large arsenal of weapons, and search for helpful bots to bring back home. Lynked is already available on Steam, but it's coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S too. Omelet You Cook Omelet You Cook trailer.Watch on YouTube In this chaotic cooking roguelike from SchuBox Games, you're tasked with creating the perfect omelettes to satisfy your customers' increasingly peculiar demands. That involves combining ingredients as they fly by on a conveyor belt, from the relatively mundane to the rather more dubious, in the hope of earning enough money to increase your provisions, add useful relics to your pantry, and, hopefully, please the fearsome Principal Clucker. It all looks wonderfully ridiculous, and it launches on Steam today. Milano's Odd Job Collection Milano's Odd Job Collection trailer.Watch on YouTube Milano's Odd Job Collection (known as Milano no Arubaito Collection in Japan) is coming to the west for the very first time. It follows the adventures of 11-year-old Milano as she's left to her own devices over the summer. Free to do as she pleases, she embarks on a range of odd job - from pizza delivery to milking flying cows - in order to make money and have fun. Milano's Odd Job Collection, from developer Westone, is coming to Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC later this year. Fireseide Feelings Fireseide Feelings trailer.Watch on YouTube If you've got something to get off your chest, what better place to do it than by a roaring fire in a cosy forest glade? Fireside Feelings is described as a "mental wellness experience" promoting empathy, connection, and positivity between players. Situated cosily in your customisable camp, you're able to answer questions on a range of topics, taking part in conversations between people "separated in space and time". Conversations aren't live, and there's no direct interaction with others, but the goal, according to developer Team Empreintes, is to "share experiences, express your emotions, and be a part of a caring community". It launches today on Steam. All Will Rise All Will Rise trailer.Watch on YouTube Well here's something you don't see every day. All Will Rise is a "narrative courtroom deck-builder", in which you and your team take a corrupt billionaire to court, accusing them of a river's murder. That involves accumulating cards and using them to engage in conversation battles, attempting to charm, intimidate and manipulate those you meet around the vibrant city of Muziris. "Obey a dead river god's summons - or defy them," developer Speculative Agency explains. "Pass information to violent ecoterrorists - or maintain your pacifist ideals. Convince a corporate stooge to testify for you - or blackmail him with sensitive information. Your choices will determine the [city's] fate." All Will Rise is currently crowdfunding, but it's aiming to launch on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and Steam. Gecko Gods Gecko Gods trailer.Watch on YouTube It's hard to go wrong with a gecko, which immediately gives developer Inresin's Gecko Gods a bit of an advantage. What we've got here is a "serene lizard-sized puzzle-platformer" set on a beautiful archipelago, in which its tiny protagonist clambers across forgotten ruins, solving puzzles as they go. There are secrets of a lost civilisation to uncover, hidden paths, and more, all of which you'll be able to explore for yourself when Gecko Gods launches for Switch, PS5, and Steam later this year. But if you're an impatient sort, a Steam demo is available now. One Move Away One Move Away trailer.Watch on YouTube If you quite fancied the idea of Unpacking, but thought it had far too much 'taking stuff out of things' for its own good, you might enjoy Ramage Games' One Move Away, which is basically the inverse experience. Here, you play as three different characters, starting with a young girl in the 1980s, gradually learning more about them as you pack their belongings away ready for another chapter in their intertwining lives. All this plays out in first-person across 20 levels, and if that takes your fancy, a Steam demo's out now ahead of a full launch on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Heidi's Legacy: Mountains Calling Heidi's Legacy trailer.Watch on YouTube As you've probably already guessed, Heidi's Legacy: Mountains Calling takes inspiration from the classic children's stories. Which is why it's something of a surprise to learn its protagonist is called Adèle. Regardless, this is a game of grumpy old men, goat management, and alpine wandering, where you'll explore the beautiful countryside with your bleating pals, foraging for herbs, mushrooms, and more in a bid to help the nearby village. You can unlock abilities that open up more of the world, and chat to the locals in branching conversations'll that impact their lives. And as for those goats, they can provide milk, cheese, and wool. "Will you embrace slow living," asks developer Humble Reeds, "or push for bolder change?". Heidi's Legacy is coming to PC "soon". Hotel Galatic Hotel Galatic trailer.Watch on YouTube In Hotel Galactic, you're responsible for the running of a modular hotel on a strange cosmic island, which you'll customise and optimise in order to provide guests with the perfect stay. There are resources to manage, a workforce to build, and more, as you cater to the demands of your ever-growing colony, all with assistance from your ghostly Grandpa Gustav. There's a bit more to it than that, though, and the whole thing's framed by a tale of love and vengeance that's conveyed through some lovely anime-inspired art and animation. Hotel Galactic launches into Steam early access on 24th July, with consoles to follow, and a demo's available now. Out and About Out and About trailer.Watch on YouTube If it's serene forest meandering you're after, then look no further than Yaldi Games' Out and About. It's a "cosy foraging adventure" focused on exploring nature and identifying real-life plants and fungi. You'll cook recipes, make herbal remedies, and help rebuild your community after a devastating storm, all while hopefully learning a bit of botanical knowledge you can take out into the real-world. Out and About looks to be aiming for a 2025 release on PC, with a console launch to follow. And if it's piqued your curiosity, you can test out a Steam demo now. Discounty Discounty trailer.Watch on YouTube Forget the farm life; how about managing your own discount supermarket in a small harbour town? That's the premise of Discounty from Crinkle Cut Games, which sees you designing and organising your shop, managing stock levels, working the checkout, and striking trade deals. You'll make friends, navigate local drama, and expand your empire, but that doesn't mean you have to play nice. After all, can you really become filthy rich without making a few lifelong enemies along the way? Discounty launches for Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on 21st August and, yup, a demo's available now on Steam. Islanders: New Shores Islanders: New Shores trailer.Watch on YouTube We're big fans of developer GrizzlyGames' minimalist city builder Islanders around these parts, so news publisher Coatsink was developing a sequel earlier this year came as a pleasant surprise. It is, if you're unfamiliar, a game about attempting to squeeze as much onto a procedurally generated island as possible, maximising building synergies and minimising penalties to get the highest score. New Shores sounds like a gentle finessing of the formula, rather than a radical reinvention - it's got a sandbox mode as well as a high score mode now, alongside new power-ups called "boons" - but that's okay. The big news is it now has a release date and is coming to Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam on 10th July. Collector's Cove Collector's Cove trailer.Watch on YouTube VoodooDuck's Collector's Cove might be yet another farming game, but it does at least have a unique twist. For starters, your farm is on a boat endlessly sailing the oceans AND it's powered by an adorable sea monster who you'll need to forge a bond with. As you set out on a tranquil adventure across the water, you'll farm, fish, craft, and personalise your surroundings, sometimes stopping off at passing islands to catalogue their unique flora. Collector's Cove doesn't have a release date yet, but it's coming to PC and a Steam demo's available now. Town to City Town to City trailer.Watch on YouTube Fans of minimalist railway game Station to Station might want to pay attention here. Town to City is developer Galaxy Grove's follow-up to that earlier puzzler, sporting a similar voxel art aesthetic and vibe. This time around, you're charged with building quaint picturesque towns by placing shops, houses, amenities, decorations, and more - all in a bid to please your residents and encourage more to move in. Eventually, you'll have multiple towns under your care, helping the whole region grow and thrive. Town to City doesn't have a release date yet, but you can play a demo on Steam. Fishbowl Fishbowl trailer.Watch on YouTube And finally for the big, non-montage reveals, it's Fishbowl, a coming-of-age tale told over the course of a month. Developer imissmyfriends.studio describes it as a "warm and cozy story about living in isolation, nurturing friendships and understanding grief", and it's all focused on 21-year-old video editor Alo as she works from home while mourning her grandmother. As the days tick by, you'll video call loved ones, work to assemble videos, do care tasks, and solve puzzles to unpack your grandmother's belongings - recovering childhood memories as you do. There's no release date for Fishbowl yet, but it's coming to PS5 and Steam.

With the weekend finally in sight (we just need to make it through this year's Summer Geoff Fest first), it's all change on the Epic Games Store. A fresh set of freebies is now available to download and keep, and one of them is Arkane Studios' ultra stylish Deathloop. Read more

Those keen to hear more about Sucker Punch's Ghost of Yōtei will be able to tune in for a gameplay deep dive next month. Read more

PlayStation State of Play June 2025: Everything announced Marvel at a night of sick reveals from Sony. Image credit: Eurogamer News by Connor Makar Contributor Published on June 4, 2025 Another PlayStation State of Play took place tonight, giving as a peak at what's to come on the PS5 and PS5 Pro. The event was stacked with new trailers, including some reveals of entirely new games we've not seen before. Sony even remembered the PS VR2 exists! Whether you're here to double check what you've just seen, or want a catch-up on all the reveals you missed, this article will take you through everything shown off at the June State of Play event. Enjoy! Lumines Arise The show kicked off with a reveal trailer for Lumines Arive, a colourful and very musical way to start the event. It comes from the developers behind Tetris Effect, which was a banger. It's coming this Fall, and you can wishlist in now. Watch the new Lumines Arise trailer here!Watch on YouTube Pragmata Next up is Pragmata, the mysterious Capcom game that we've seen precious little of since its first reveal years ago. This time we got gameplay, loads of third person action goodness and a lovely sci-fi setting. Also, Diana is adorable. The game is set to come out at some point in 2026 to the PS5. Watch the Pragmata trailer here!Watch on YouTube Romeo is a Dead Man Next up is a grisly and cartoonish action game called Romeo is a Dead Man. It's coming from illustrious and brilliantly weird developer Grasshopper Manufacture, with both Suda 51 and Ren Yamazaki working on it. It'll be coming out in 2026... Maybe. Watch the Romeo is a Dead Man trailer here!Watch on YouTube Silent Hill f Now for something totally different with Silent Hill f, a third-person horror title that's certainly ramped the creepy factor up quite significantly. In it we see plenty of horrific mannequins with bloody knives in hand. It's set to come out on the 25th September, 2025 on the PS5. Watch the Silent Hill f trailer here!Watch on YouTube Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement We now go to a lush looking 2D side scroller called Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, which has just been revealed. A sequel to a beloved indie and spiritual successor to classic Castlevania games, it'll be coming out in 2026 on the PS5. Check out the Bloodstained trailer here!Watch on YouTube Digimon Story Time Stranger Up next a gameplay trailer for Digimon Story Time Stranger, which looks absolutely killer. In it we see a variety of fan-favourite Digimon and a variety of characters seemingly in the thick of some nefarious medling between the physical and digital worlds. It'll be coming on the 3rd November 2025. Love me some Digimon. Watch the trailer here!Watch on YouTube Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles Now for a blast from the past with Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. It'll include two versions of the original game, a classic version which is a faithful recreation, and an enhanced version with improved graphics and more. It'll be coming to the PS5 and PS4 on the 30th September. FF Tactics is back!Watch on YouTube Baby Steps Next up is Baby Steps, which is a fun exploration game where you've gotta control your leg movements as you climb a mountain. Now we finally have a release date! It comes to PS5 on the 8th September. This is a must-watch for those who like a chuckle.Watch on YouTube Hirogami Now for something whimsical. Hirogami allows you to transform into a variety of creatures through the power of folding. It's coming to PS5 on the 3rd September. A neat reveal! Check out the new trailerWatch on YouTube Everybody's Golf Hot Shots To the green we go with Everybody's Golf Hot Shots, with courses in 10 different regions around the world, each with weather effects and night time variants. Those who pre-order get Pacman - rad! It comes to the PS5 on the 5th September. Check out some golf right here!Watch on YouTube Ninja Gaiden Ragebound Here's a retro throwback. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound got a new gameplay trailer, and is coming on the 21st July on PS5 and PS4. A big win for lovers of the classics. Watch the trailer here!Watch on YouTube Cairn The Game Bakers are back at it again with Cairn. A new gameplay trailer just dropped, showing a perilous and scenic climb up a massive mountain. Like all Game Bakers titles, the trailer has a rad music track. It's coming to PS5 on the 5th November 2025, but you can download a demo today! A moving trailer for you to watch right here!Watch on YouTube Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection Get over here! A reveal trailer for the Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection just dropped, and with it a blend of retro titles you'll be able to play with this new collection as well as some lovely retro arcade footage. It contains Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Mortal Kombat 4, and more. It's coming to the PS5 and PS4 in 2025. Moooooortal Kooooooombat Traaaaaaailer.Watch on YouTube Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater Here's a big one! We got a new gameplay trailer for Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater. Loads of memorable locations, gadgets, and moments on display in the stunning new engine. This isn't a dream - it's Snake Eater!Watch on YouTube Nioh 3 A rad new reveal comes via Nioh 3, which got a fantastic new gameplay trailer at the State of Play. It releases in early 2026 on the PS5. A demo is available right now too, so give it a try! If you love some challenging and bloody action, you should watch this Nioh 3 trailer!Watch on YouTube Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow Finally some PSVR love! A new reveal trailer for Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow was shown off, giving us a glimpse of loads of stealth, robbery, and action. It's coming to VR in 2025. Some VR rep at the State of Play!Watch on YouTube Tides of Tomorrow Another new game got a trailer, this time Tides of Tomorrow. A very bright first-person action game set in a flooded dystopian world. It's coming 24th February, 2026 on the PS5. Loving the look of this trailer, give it a watch!Watch on YouTube Astro Bot new update An update to Astro Bot is up next, containing five new challenge levels, new guest bots, and an announcement that the Astro Bot DualSense controller is coming back this year... With a twist! Here's a look at what's coming to Astro Bot!Watch on YouTube Sea of Remnants Pirate time! A reveal trailer for Sea of Remnants was just shown off, giving us a peak of sailing, navigating various islands, and facing the mythical creatures of the deep. It'll be coming in 2026, you can wishlist it now. Grab your hat annd cutlass sailor.Watch on YouTube Sword of the Sea Here comes something beautiful. Sword of the Sea got a new trailer, with plenty of fantastic locations presented in vibrant tones throughout. It's coming on 19th August to the PS5, available on PlayStation Plus. Now this is my kind of vibe, watch it and find out why!Watch on YouTube FBC Firebreak Love co-op? FBC Firebreak is a spin-off to Remedy's Control series, and offers plenty of PvE action for those with a taste for the paranormal. It's coming to PS5 and the PlayStation Game Catalogue on 17th June, 2025. Here's the portion of the State of Play featuring FBC: Firebreak!Watch on YouTube New PS Plus games coming this summer A bunch of new games are coming to PlayStation Plus this Summer in a variety of forms. This includes: The original Deux Ex coming to PlayStation Plus Classics Catalogue on 17th June, 2025. Twisted Metal 3 & 4 coming to PlayStation Plus Classics Catalogue on 15th July, 2025. Resident Evil 2 & 3 coming to PlayStation Plus Classics Catalogue this Summer. Myst and Riven coming later this month as part of Days of Play First Light 007 A massive reveal for the show! James Bond took the stage with First Light 007, our first look at the game. It kicks off with some introductory cinematics, but there are snippets of gameplay showing loads of spy action. It's coming in 2026 to the PS5. It's Bond, James Bond... TrailerWatch on YouTube Ghost of Yotei A short one here. Ghost of Yotei is getting a gameplay deep dive in July. Stay tuned for more info!Watch on YouTube Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls Trying not to freak out over here. Arc System Works just revealed Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls. A 3v3 fighting game featuring plenty of beloved Marvel characters. It's coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. It's 11PM at night and I'm trying not to scream. Mahvel Baby!Watch on YouTube

Elden Ring Nightreign has now had 3.5 million players, less than a week since its release. Read more

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 now shows you microtransaction ads when you swap weapons "Actively witnessing Call of Duty become the Krusty Krab." Image credit: Eurogamer / Activision / u/whambampl News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 1, 2025 Eagle-eyed Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players have spotted a new feature on the weapon selection menu. Right at the top there now sits advertisements promoting premium weapons and skins, so players get exposed to ads for microtransactions in-game. As some players point out, it's not an advert in the classic sense, and no one's trying to flog you a cheeseburger or a pair of jeans every time you swap a weapon. Nonetheless, it's a new and insidious addition that we haven't seen in Call of Duty games before. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Opening Scene and Gameplay (4K).Watch on YouTube "One of the unwelcome changes I’ve noticed with Season 4 is that they’ve now inserted a new ad spot at the top of the list of your weapon specifics builds," wrote one player. "So now every time you toggle between weapon builds you get to stare at ads for $20-$30 skins. I’m sure the Activision developer who suggested this terrible feature is very proud of themselves. "This change is especially unneeded because you could already toggle from Builds to Shop on any given weapon and apparently not being thrown directly in our faces didn’t make them enough money. Many of us payed [sic] $60-$100 for a feature game and don’t want to be bombarded with additional ads." "Actively witnessing Call of Duty become [SpongeBob SquarePants'] the Krusty Krab," replied another. Season 4 brings new ad spot in game for weapons byu/whambampl inblackops6 To see this content please enable targeting cookies. "Well guys looks like COD can suck a fat one," replied someone else. "This ad mess is ridiculous. They make huge bank already for them to even do this should be illegal. I've never been done with a COD this fast ever. But she's getting deleted. You can't scrounge people for money and not have a decent game. I'm not asking for a great game, just not a buggy game." In a separate thread that's been upvoted almost a thousand times, one player opined: "I wouldn't even be mad if this was just in warzone, a free game, but putting it in a pay-to-play premium title, with how expensive they're getting?" "Agree 100%, it really feels like one of those free cell phone games from a tiny indie studio begging you for money at every turn. Pathetic for a full price, stand alone game from a huge developer," replied another. Earlier this year, in a update shared on social media, developer Treyarch said it recognised cheaters "are frustrating and severely impact the experience for our community" but insisted it was addressing the issue, and will continue to do so "throughout 2025". At the same time, it confirmed 136,000 ranked play accounts were banned for cheating across both Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone.

UPDATE 6.07pm: FromSoft has issued a follow up suggestion for players still struggling with matchmaking on Elden Ring Neightreign. In a post on X/Twitter, the developer said: "If you have difficulty matchmaking on PS4 & PS5, please check your NAT type. NAT type 3 may affect matchmaking on PSN. "Check your NAT type with the following steps: Home > Settings > Network > Connection Status > Check Connection Status. "Thank you for your support." Original story follows. ORIGINAL STORY: If you're jumping into Elden Ring Nightreign this weekend and are struggling to find a Player 2 - and/or a Player 3 - you're not alone. In a brief statement posted to official Elden Ring social media accounts about an hour ago (Saturday, 31st May), developer FromSoftware is recommending players "restart the matchmaking process" if they're struggling to find a co-op partner. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Elden Ring Nightreign For Dummies: Basics For EVERYTHING You Need to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask).Watch on YouTube "Nightfarers. If you encounter issues finding other players when launching an expedition in To see this content please enable targeting cookies. It may not quite fix the issue for all players, however; as one commenter asked in the replies: "How often am I supposed to restart it? Yesterday I spend [sic] several hours restarting it on PS5 to not even play one match…" Finding a co-op partner is pretty important for Nightreign players. As Ed wrote yesterday, he wouldn't recommend Nightreign as a solo game at this point as it's clearly not the intended way to play. However, it seems FromSoftware is aiming to respond to the current backlash to make solo play more feasible, with the studio previously stated it was considering a two-player option post-launch, acknowledging it was "something that was overlooked during development". "FromSoftware's multiplayer spin-off is an exhilarating rush and a celebration of the studio's prior achievements Souls veterans will devour," Ed wrote in our Elden Ring Nightreign review.

CWA negotiates new contract for ZeniMax including "substantial" wage increases and a credits policy for QA staff "This agreement shows what's possible when workers stand together and refuse the status quo." Image credit: Microsoft News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on May 31, 2025 The Communications Workers of America (CWA) says it has reached a "historic tentative contract agreement" with ZeniMax Media staff at Microsoft. In a statement, the union calls the deal a "first for the video game industry", and revealed it had been negotiating for a first contract for "nearly two years". "QA workers from across the country continue to lead the charge for industry-wide change," said Page Branson, Senior II QA Tester and ZeniMax Workers United-CWA bargaining committee member. "Going toe-to-toe with one of the largest corporations in the world isn’t a small feat. This is a monumental victory for all current video game workers and for those that come after." Xbox currently has more first-party games coming to PlayStation 5 this year than Sony.Watch on YouTube The new contract is said to set "new standards for the industry" and includes "substantial across-the-board wage increases as well as new minimum salaries for workers". It also includes protections against arbitrary dismissal, grievance procedures, and a crediting policy that "clearly acknowledges the QA workers' contributions to the video games they help create", as well as a previously announced agreement on how artificial intelligence is introduced and implemented in the workplace. "Workers in the video game industry are demonstrating once again that collective power works. This agreement shows what's possible when workers stand together and refuse to accept the status quo," added CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. "Whether it's having a say about the use of AI in the workplace, fighting for significant wage increases and fair crediting policies, or protecting workers from retaliation, our members have raised the bar. We're proud to support them every step of the way." BREAKING: We have reached a historic first tentative contract agreement with Microsoft! cwa-union.org/news/release...[image or embed]— CWA (@cwaunion.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 5:04 PM To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Members can expect contract explanation meetings over the next few weeks, and a ratification vote is expected by 20th June. As game development becomes increasingly insecure all over the world, more and more developers and performers are organising collective bargaining. Following news of the SAG-AFTRA strike last year, Equity stated it stood "in solidarity", but would not be authorising a strike. It did, however, recently call on the games industry to improve conditions for performers, and a protest took place outside BAFTA Games Awards as Equity members held placards reading "Union contracts in gaming now". Last month, the US union warned of "alarming loopholes" for "AI abuse" in the latest proposal to end industrial action, while earlier this month, almost 200 Overwatch developers working at Activision Blizzard joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union after the "overwhelming majority" of workers signed up.

Thrustmaster T598 + Hypercar Wheel review: a great value PC/PS5 sim racing wheel and pedals built on novel tech Direct axial drive impresses, despite limited software and a firmly mid stock wheel. Image credit: Digital Foundry Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry Published on June 1, 2025 We've seen an explosion in the number of affordable direct drive (DD) racing wheels over the past couple of years, with Fanatec and Moza offering increasingly inexpensive options that still deliver the precise, quick and long-lasting force feedback that cheaper gear- or belt-driven wheels can't match. Now, Thrustmaster is intruding on that territory with the T598, a PlayStation/PC direct drive wheel, wheel base and pedals that costs just £449/$499. That's on a similar level to the PC-only £459/$599 Moza R5 bundle and the €399/$569 Fanatec CSL DD bundle, so how does the newcomer compare? And what's changed from the more expensive T818 we reviewed before? We've been testing the T598 - and the fancy upgraded HyperCar wheel that's available as an upgrade option - for weeks to find out. Our full review follows, so read on - or check out the quick links below to jump to what you're most interested in. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Thrustmaster T598 wheel base review: direct axial drive vs traditional direct drive Interestingly, the T598 arguably comes with a more advanced DD motor than the more expensive T818 does. It uses a "direct axial drive" versus the standard "direct radial drive", where the magnets are aligned parallel to the wheel shaft rather than perpendicular (see the diagram below). This ought to allow for more efficient torque generation, producing less waste heat, minimising precision-sapping magnetic interference and requiring less copper to produce. It also means the T598 can "overshoot" to deliver more than its rated 5nm of constant torque for short periods. However, this design also requires a physically taller yet slimmer enclosure (measuring 210x210x120mm), potentially blocking the view forward and requiring a different bolt pattern to attach the base to your desk or sim racing cockpit - both of which are slight annoyances with the T598. (You do get an angle bracket to allow for wider and potentially more compatible holes for your cockpit... but this makes the tall wheel base even taller. Table clamps are also included.) Interestingly, you can also feel a slight vibration and hear a quiet crackling noise emanating from the T598 base while idle - something I haven't heard or felt with other direct drive motors and is reportedly inherent to this design. There's a lot going on inside this wheel base - including some genuine innovation. | Image credit: Thrustmaster/Digital Foundry Thrustmaster has written a pair of white papers to explain why their take on direct drive ("axial flux") is better than what came before ("radial flux"). Image credit: Thrustmaster In terms of the force feedback itself, Thrustmaster have achieved something quite special here. In some titles with a good force feedback implementation - Assetto Corsa, Assetto Corsa Evo and F1 23 stood out to me here - the wheel feels great, with strong force feedback and plenty of detail. If you run up on a kerb or start to lose traction, you know about it right away and can take corrective action. I also appreciated the way that turning the wheel feels perfectly smooth when turning, without any cogging - the slightly jerky sensation common to low-end and mid-range direct drive motors that corresponds to slight attraction as you pass each magnet. However, balancing this, the wheel's force feedback feels a little less consistent than others I've tested from the likes of Fanatec or Moza at a similar price point, with some games like Project Cars 3 and Forza Motorsport feeling almost bereft of force feedback by comparison. You also have that slight vibration when the wheel is stationary, which is potentially more noticeable than the cogging sensation in traditional DD designs. The overshoot is also a mixed bag - as the sudden jump in torque can feel a little artificial in some scenarios, eg when you're warming your tyres by weaving in F1 before a safety car restart. I'd say that these positives and negatives largely cancel each other out, and you're left with force feedback that is good, way better than non-DD wheels, but not noticeably better than more common radial direct drive designs. Depending on the games you play, either DD style could be preferable. It'll be interesting to see if Thrustmaster are able to tune out some of these negative characteristics through firmware updates - or simply in later products using the same technology. 1 of 7 Caption Attribution Here's how the T598 looks IRL - from the wheel base itself to the default rim, the upgraded Hypercar wheel and the included dual pedals. Click to enlarge. Apart from the novel motor, the rest of the wheel base is fairly standard - there's a small (colour!) display on the top for adjusting your settings and seeing in-game info like a rev counter, four large circular buttons buttons (L3, R3, Mode and Settings), the usual Thrustmaster quick release lock for securing your wheel rim and a small button on the back to turn the wheel base on and off. There are connection options for power, USB and connecting other components like pedals or shifters on the back too. Weirdly, there's no ability to change settings in the PC Thrustmaster Panel app - it just says this functionality is "coming soon!" - so right now you can only use it for updating firmware, testing buttons and changing between profiles. "Coming soon!" starts to become a little less believable six months after the first reviews hit. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Instead, you'll be using the built-in screen for making changes, which works well enough but doesn't provide any allowance for extra information - so you'll be sticking to the four basic pre-made profiles, referring to the manual or checking suggested setups online rather than reading built-in tool tips. You still get access to the full whack of settings here, and of course this works well for PS5/PS4 users who wouldn't expect a software experience anyway, but PC users may be disappointed to learn that there's no intuitive software interface here. I found the Boosted Media YT review of the wheelbase to offer some good insight into what settings you're likely to want to change from their default values. Thrustmaster T598 Sportcar wheel review: a workable default option The Sportcar wheel rim looks good - but a plastic construction and relatively spartan controls make it "OK" at best. The "Sportcar" wheel provided in the bundle is a little less impressive-looking than the base itself, with a plasticky feel throughout and fairly mushy buttons - though the paddles are snappy enough and feel good to use. The usual PS-style face buttons are split into two clumps up top with L2 and R2, which is a bit odd, with four individual directional buttons in the lower left, start/select/PS in the lower middle and four configuration buttons in the lower right. Those configuration buttons require extra explanation, so here we go: the P button at the top swaps between four different pages, indicated with a different colour LED, allowing the remaining three physical buttons to activate up to 12 different functions. (The Fanatec GT DD Pro, by contrast, has dedicated five-way controls for each of its four functions. This costs more to produce, but allows you to use the controls without looking down to see what coloured light is active.) There are no rotary encoders or other additional controls here, so PC players that prefer more complicated racing sims may feel a bit underserved by this clunky, cost-saving solution. The 815g wheel is at least sized reasonably, with 300mm circular shape that particularly suits drifting, rally and trucking - though all forms of driving and racing are of course possible. The rubber grips under your hands are reasonably comfortable, but you can still feel seams in various places. Overall, the wheel is possibly the weakest part of the package, but perfectly usable and acceptable for the price point. Thrustmaster Hypercar Wheel Add-On review: true luxury An incredible wheel with premium materials, excellent controls and a more specialised shape. Thrustmaster also sent over the £339/$350 Hypercar wheel rim for testing, which is an upgrade option that uses significantly better materials - leather, alcantara, aluminium and carbon - and offers a huge number of extra controls (25 buttons, including four rotary encoders and two pairs of analogue paddles). Its oval shape feels a bit more responsive for faster vehicles (like F1 cars) that require a quick change of direction, but drifting and rally doesn't feel natural. It supports the same PS4, PS5 and PC platforms as the stock option, but there are no legends printed on the buttons to help you. The difference in quality here is immediately apparent, with much better tactile feedback from the buttons and a huge number of additional controls for adjusting stuff like ERS deployment or brake bias. Each control feels well-placed, even if the T-shaped layout for the face buttons is slightly unnatural at first, and the paddles for shifting and the clutch are particularly well engineered. I also found holding the wheel a bit more comfortable thanks to that flattened out shape, the more premium materials and the absence of bumps or seams anywhere you're likely to hold. It's a huge upgrade in terms of feel and features then, as you'd hope for a wheel rim that costs nearly as much as the entire T598 kit and caboodle. As an upgrade option, I do rate it, though it perhaps makes slightly more sense for T818 owners that have already invested a bit more in the Thrusmaster ecosystem. Regardless, it was this rim that I used for the majority of my time with the T598, and the wheel base feels significantly better with the upgrade. Thrustmaster T598 Raceline pedals review: great feedback, but no clutch and no load cell upgrade offered at present Surprisingly good for two add-in pedals, in terms of feedback and flexibility. The pedals that come with the T598 are surprisingly good, with an accelerator, a brake pedal (with a choice of two different spring options) and no clutch pedal. Each pedal's spring assembly can be pushed into one of three positions to change the amount of pre-load - ie make it a bit softer or harder to press and the pedal plates can be shifted up and down. The narrow dimensions of the metal wheel plate meant that it was impossible to mount directly in the centre of the Playseat Trophy I used for testing, but the slightly off-centre installation I ended up with still worked just fine. They connect using a non-USB connection, so you can't use the pedals with other wheel bases. Using the middle distance setting and the firmer of the two springs for the brake, I found the T598 produced good results, on par or perhaps even a tad better than other metal-construction Hall Effect position sensor (ie non-load cell) pedals I've tested such as the Moza SR-P Lite and Fanatec CSL. Braking is the critical point here, as you want to be able to feel when the brake has mechanically reached its threshold and then modulate your inputs from there, and the T598 pedals do allow for this quite easily. They're also not so hard to actuate that you end up having to hard-mount them to a sim rig for good results, and the included carpet spikes are reasonably effective in keeping the pedals in place. Presumably, it ought to be possible to add on a load cell brake pedal down the line to upgrade to a proper (if slightly cramped) three pedal setup. For the F1 style driving that I prefer, the clutch pedal isn't used anyway, so it wasn't a massive issue for me - and we frequently see companies like Moza and Fanatec drop the clutch pedal on these aggessively priced bundles so Thrustmaster aren't losing ground by following suit. Thrustmaster T598 final verdict: a competitive £450 package with potential For PlayStation owners, this is an incredible value pickup that ranks among the cheapest DD options - and PC owners ought to consider it too. For £449/$499, the Thrustmaster T598 is an excellent value direct drive wheel and pedal bundle for PlayStation and PC with some relatively minor quirks. The wheel base is powerful, detailed and responsive in most games, with some advantages over traditional DD designs but also some disadvantages - notably the taller shape and a slight hum/vibration while stationary. Traditional DD designs from the likes of Fanatec and Moza can offer more reliable force feedback that works over a wider range of games, cars and tracks, while also benefitting from better PC software, but there's certainly potential for Thrustmaster to improve here. The included wheel feels a bit cheap, with a predominantly plastic design, spongey buttons and a slightly odd layout, but the full circle shape and full PS5/PS4 compatibility is most welcome. Upgrading to the HyperCar wheel provides a huge uptick in materials, tactile feedback and number of controls, though this does come at a fairly steep price of £339/$350. If you plan to use the T598 for years and have the budget for it, this is a super upgrade to aim for. The included Raceline LTE pedals are the most surprising element for me. These consist of only an accelerator and a brake with only moderate adjustability and a narrow base plate, but they feel great to use, are made from durable metal with HE sensors, and only really lose out to significantly more expensive load cell options. For an add-in for a relatively cheap DD bundle, they're a solid inclusion, and I hope Thrustmaster release a load cell brake pedal for users to upgrade to a better three-pedal setup later. Overall, it's an competitive first outing for Thrustmaster with the T598 and direct axial drive, and I'm curious to see where the company - and the tech - goes from here. With Fanatec still on the rebuild after being acquired by Corsair and Moza's offerings being hard to order online in some regions, Thrustmaster has a golden opportunity to seize a share of the mid-range and entry-level sim racing market, and the T598 is a positive start.

Fans slam Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford's message to "cost sensitive" fans "We are out here struggling, Randy." Image credit: Eurogamer/Gearbox News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 1, 2025 Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has double-doubled down on comments about the cost of Borderlands 4, by inviting "cost sensitive" fans to download Tiny Tina's Wonderlands from the Epic Games Store for "FREE". These latest comments come after Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford made headlines when he told a X/Twitter commenter that "real fans" would find a way to get their hands on a copy of the game, even if it came with a $80 price tag. He later tried to justify it, all the while saying pricing was "not [his] call". In this latest social media post, Pitchford wrote the word "free" four times, each time in blockcaps. 9 Exciting 2025 Open-World Games We Can't Wait to Play.Watch on YouTube "For our real fans who may be cost sensitive, the very awesome and incredibly fun smash hit videogame Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is FREE this week on the Epic Games Store," Pitchford wrote. "Please enjoy this FREE gift by grabbing your FREE copy here, FREE." Aforementioned real fans were quick to respond to this comment, too. "You don't get to just walk back being incredibly tone-deaf to the world around you. We are out here struggling, Randy," said one player, while another wrote: "Dude you need to shut up already. No reason games should be $80 especially if its anything like 3 or that shit ass excuse of a movie." "I'm afraid the industry is moving in that direction and it’s just reality that we'll have to accept," Pitchford insisted. "The price for Borderlands 4 is going to get announced by the publisher soon. My wish, having worked my ass off on the game, is for as many people as possible to get to play it." When another commented: "So Randy, you think making backhanded comments towards your consumers about them being 'cost sensitive' is the plan? Wtf happened to you," he responded: "Backhanded? There are literally people who want to play great video games, have a game-ready PC, but may not be able to spend enough to buy a new AAA game for awhile and this week there’s a free offer for one of the best shooter looters to come out over the last five years…" "Saying 'cost sensitive' as the CEO of a company (In lieu of criticism of an $80 price tag for BL4) when a lot of your fan base is struggling to even pay for the roof over their heads and food on their tables is a crazy sentence to utter," said another player. Just a week before the "real fans" kerfuffle, Pitchford implored we "play the game first and understand the choices [the development team has] made" before passing judgement on changes Gearbox has made to the shooter's head's up display, including the removal of the mini-map. Borderlands 4, as we learned a couple of weeks ago, is now arriving earlier than expected on 12th September, and developer Gearbox recently shared more of its latest looter shooter in a new PlayStation showcase. It showed off a couple of new Vault Hunters, some of its new weapons, new traversal mechanics, its new planet, and more all to whip-up enthusiasm for what creative director Graeme Timmins called "hands-down our best Borderlands ever".

Nvidia's RTX Remix is a remarkable tool that allows game modders to bring state-of-the-art path traced visuals to classic PC games. We've seen Portal RTX from Nvidia already, along with the development of a full-on remaster of Half-Life 2 - but I was excited to see a community of modders take on 2004's Painkiller, enhanced now to become Painkiller RTX. It's still a work-in-progress project as of version 0.1.6, but what I've seen so far is still highly impressive - and if you have the means, I recommend checking it out. The whole reason RTX Remix works with the original Painkiller is due to its custom rendering technology, known as the PainEngine. This 2004 release from People Can Fly Studios was built around Direct X 8.1, which gave it stellar visuals at the time, including bloom effects – specular lighting with limited bump mapping and full framebuffer distortion effects. Those visuals dazzled top-end GPU owners of the time, but like a great number of PC releases from that era, it had a DX7 fallback which culled the fancier shading effects and could even run on GPUs like the original GeForce. RTX Remix uses the fixed function DX7 path and replaces the core rendering with the path tracer - and that is how I have been playing the game these last few days, taking in the sights and sounds of Painkiller with a new lick of paint. It's an upgrade that has made me appreciate it all the more now in 2025 as it is quite a special game that history has mostly forgotten. To fully enjoy the modders' work on the path-traced upgrade to Painkiller, we highly recommend this video.Watch on YouTube Painkiller is primarily a singleplayer first-person shooter that bucked the trends of the time period. After Half-Life and Halo: Combat Evolved, many first person shooters trended towards a more grounded and storytelling-based design. The classic FPS franchises like Quake or Unreal had gone on to become wholly focused on multiplayer, or else transitioned to the storytelling route - like Doom 3, for example. Painkiller took all of those 'modern' trappings and threw them in the garbage. A narrative only exists in a loose sense with pre-rendered video that bookends the game’s chapters, acting only as a flimsy excuse to send the player to visually distinct levels that have no thematic linking beyond pointing you towards enemies that you should dispatch with a variety of weapons. The basic gameplay sounds familiar if you ever played Doom Eternal or Doom 2016. It is simple on paper, but thanks to the enemy and level variety and the brilliant weaponry, it does not get tiring. The game enhanced its traditional FPS gameplay with an extensive use of Havok physics – where a great deal of the game’s environmental objects could be broken up into tiny pieces with rigid body movement on all the little fragments, or environmental objects could be manipulated with ragdoll or rope physics. Sometimes it is there for purely visual entertainment but other times it has a gameplay purpose with destructible objects often containing valuable resources or being useful as a physics weapon against the game's enemies. So, what's the score with Painkiller RTX? Well, the original's baked lighting featured hardly any moving lights and no real-time perspective-correct shadows - so all of that is added as part and parcel of the path-traced visuals. The RTX renderer also takes advantage of ray-traced fog volumes, showing shadows in the fog in the areas where light is obscured. Another aspect you might notice is that the game’s various pickups have been now made to be light-emissive. In the original game, emissives textures are used to keep things full bright even in darkness, but they themselves emit no light. Since the path tracer fully supports emissive lighting from any arbitrary surface, they all now cast light, making them stand out even more in the environment. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The original game extensively used physics objects, which tended to lead to a clash in lighting and shading for any moving objects, which were incongruous then with the static baked lighting. Turn on the path tracer and these moving objects are grounded into the environment with shadows of their own, while receiving and casting light themselves. Boss battles are transformed as those enemies are also fully grounded in the surrounding environments, perfectly integrated into the path-traced visuals - and even if the titanic enemies are off-screen, their shadows are not. The main difference in many scenes is just down to the new lighting - it's more physicalised now as dynamic objects are properly integrated, no longer floating or glowing strangely. One reason for this is due to lighting resolution. The original lighting was limited by trying to fit in 256MB of VRAM, competing for space with the game’s high resolution textures. Painkiller RTX's lighting and shadowing is achieved at a per-pixel level in the path tracer, which by necessity means that you tend to see more nuance, along with more bounce lighting as it is no longer erased away by bilinear filtering on chunky light map textures. Alongside more dynamism and detail, there are a few new effects too. Lit fog is heavily used now in many levels - perhaps at its best in the asylum level where the moonlight and rain are now illuminated, giving the level more ambience than it had before. There is also some occasional usage of glass lighting effects like the stain glass windows in the game now filtering light through them properly, colouring the light on the ground in the pattern of the individual mosaic patterns found on their surface. Half-Life 2 RTX - built on RTX Remix - recently received a demo release. It's the flagship project for the technology, but modders have delivered path traced versions of many modern games.Watch on YouTube New textures and materials interact with the path tracer in ways that transform the game. For some objects, I believe the modders used Quixel megascan assets to give the materials parallax along with a high resolution that is artistically similar to the original game. A stoney ground in the graveyard now actually looks stoney, thanks to a different texture: a rocky material with craggy bits and crevices that obscure light and cast micro shadows, for example. Ceramic tiles on the floor now show varying levels of depth and cracks that pick up a very dull level of reflectivity from the moon-lit sky. Some textures are also updated by running them through generative tools which interpret dark areas of the baked textures as recesses and lighter areas as raised edges and assigns them a heightmap. This automated process works quite well for textures whose baked features are easily interpreted, but for textures that had a lot of noise added into them to simulate detail, the automated process can be less successful. That is the main issue I would say with the RTX version so far: some of these automated textures have a few too many bumps in them, making them appear unnatural. But that is just the heightmap data as the added in material values to give the textures sheen tend to look universally impressive. The original game barely has any reflectivity, and now a number of select surfaces show reflections in full effect, like the marble floors at the end of the game's second level. For the most part though, the remix of textures from this mod is subtle, with many textures still being as diffuse as found in the original game: rocky and dirty areas in particular look much the same as before, just with more accurately rendered shadows and bounce lighting - but without the plasticy sheen you might typically find in a seventh generation game. Whether maxed on an RTX 5090 or running on optimised settings on an RTX 4060, the current work-in-progress version of Painkiller RTX can certainly challenge hardware. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Make no mistake though: path tracing doesn't come cheap and to play this game at decent frame-rates, you either need to invest in high performance hardware or else accept some compromises to settings. Being a user mod that's still in development, I imagine this could improve in later versions but at the moment, Painkiller RTX maxed out is very heavy - even heavier than Portal RTX. So if you want to play it on a lower-end GPU, I recommend my optimised settings for Portal RTX, which basically amounts to turning down the amount of possible light bounces to save on performance and skimping a bit in other areas. Even with that, an RTX 4060 was really struggling to run the game well. With frame generation on and DLSS set to 1080p balanced with the transformer model, 80fps to 90fps was the best I could achieve in the general combat zones, with the heaviest stages dipping into the 70s - and even into the 60s with frame generation. The mod is still work-in-progress, but even now, Painkiller RTX is still a lot of fun and it can look stunning if your hardware is up to it. But even if you can't run it, I do hope this piece and its accompanying video pique your interest in checking out Painkiller in some form. Even without the path-traced upgrade, this is a classic first-person shooter that's often overlooked and more than holds its own against some of the period's better known games.

People Can Fly cancels two projects and confirms it will once again have to "scale down" its teams "We wish to express our deepest regret and sadness over how these events have unfolded." Image credit: People Can Fly/Square Enix News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 1, 2025 People Can Fly has cancelled two projects and "scaled down" its teams. In a statement posted to LinkedIn this afternoon, CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski said it had been a "difficult decision" but attributed the suspension of Project Gemini and Bifrost to the publisher "not present[ing] us with a draft of the subsequent content rider to the Publishing Agreement", and the Group's cash flow, "which showed a lack of prospects", respectively. "Today we made a very difficult decision to suspend the development of project Gemini and project Bifrost - the relevant current reports have been released to the market," Wojciechowski wrote. "The suspension of the Gemini project is a consequence of the fact that the Publisher has not presented us with a draft of the subsequent content rider to the Publishing Agreement covering the terms and conditions of further milestone on project Gemini and the lack of communication from the Publisher as to its willingness to continue or terminate the Gemini project. "Project Bifrost was suspended due to the above and the analysis of the Group's cash flow, which showed a lack of prospects for securing organisational resources and funds necessary to continue the production and release of this project. "As a result, we have to significantly regroup as a studio and scale down our teams, which hurts the most," Wojciechowski added. "We wish to express our deepest regret and sadness over how these events have unfolded and our sincere gratitude for everyone's contribution up to this point." Wojciechowski did not specify which publisher he thought had failed to "communicate", but the studio has worked with several publishing partners, most recently Square Enix, Krafton, and Sony. It's also working on Gears of War: E-Day. In December, People Can Fly the Outriders developer announced its second round of layoffs in less than a year, this time affecting "more than 120" people. The move accompanies the cancellation or downsizing of several projects, with the studio blaming "external market pressures".

Phasmophobia June's update reworks the Journal, Media, and brings a "total overhaul" of evidence collection Ghost-it Note. Image credit: Kinetic Games News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on May 31, 2025 Kinetic Games has confirmed Phasmophobia's next content drop, Chronicle, will release on 24th June, and it'll be its "biggest update yet". As well as introducing a "total overhaul" of how evidence is collected, the team said Chronicle will expand investigations with three new evidence types, a completely redesigned Journal, reworked levelling and progression, a refreshed Main Menu UI, and "many eerie surprises still lurking in the dark". Phasmophobia - Console Launch Trailer.Watch on YouTube But at the "heart" of the Chronicle update is the debut of the all-new Sound evidence. An entirely new haunting paranormal proof type can be captured through the new Sound Recorder, bringing "a new dimension to gameplay, revealing subtle clues that might otherwise be drowned out by terrified screams". Available in the customary three upgrade tiers, players will be able to record audio from ghost events, Spirit Box responses, and Paranormal Sounds like those detected by the Parabolic Microphone. It's this new evidence type that's necessitated a Journal upgrade, too. The Photo tab will be rebranded as "Media", and keep all your photos, videos, and new sound recordings in one place. Importantly, you'll have to fill your journal with all these unique media types, including "EMF spikes to ghostly interactions and fleeting glimpses of otherworldly forms", to complete a "perfect" investigation. Image credit: Kinetic Games "Chronicle will also introduce a revamped media quality system," Kinetic teased. "The first evidence capture of any media type will be marked as 'Unique', granting extra cash and XP rewards at the end of each contract. Any subsequent captures of the same evidence type will be classed as 'Duplicates', offering smaller rewards. The new system will also add tier bonuses based on the equipment used and adds all media captures into the Reward Multiplier, making every shot, sound, and sight count even more toward player’s final payouts." Don't forget that this year, Phasmophobia will also rework Grafton Farmhouse, following Bleasdale Farmhouse's recent overhaul. Before then, though, we'll also get to see the new levelling and progression system and Main Menu UI when Chronicle arrives at the end of June. The ghost-hunting sim has sold two million copies on console since it came out of early access last October, bringing the total sales across all platforms to 22 million. The development team recently outlined the road ahead for the spooky sim in 2025, confirming map reworks, new ghost-hunting equipment, "thrilling seasonal events", and a brand-new location, too.

Nacon enters the direct drive sim racing game - and hands-on impressions are positive On the back of securing the WRC license. Blog by Reece Bithrey Contributor Published on May 31, 2025 Nacon, new custodians of the WRC series, has gotten into the sim racing game with a new direct drive racing wheel and accessories under RevoSim branding it announced last year. The wheel base, rim, load cell brake and accelerator form the RS Pure bundle, which looks to compete with the likes of the Fanatec Gran Turismo DD Pro, Moza R9 V3 and Thrustmaster T598 at a upper-mid price point of £699. We went hands-on with the bundle at a recent press event in Paris and found it had some merit, though the direct drive (DD) space has become increasingly competitive over the years with the likes of Logitech and Turtle Beach joining the fray over the last couple of years. As well as the obligatory starter bundle of wheel rim, wheel base and pedals, there are a number of accessories, including a hybrid shifter that supports both sequential and h-pattern options, a clutch pedal add-on and a load cell handbrake for navigating tighter turns. The wheel base itself has 9Nm of torque, which is a touch more than the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race's 7.2Nm, although slightly behind the Logitech Pro Racing Wheel's 11nm of force. In addition, the rim itself is on a quick release, so it can easily be swapped out with the other options in the range - though third-party rims aren't supported as is sometimes the case. Here is a closer look at the pedal set. The pedal set is in steel and brushed aluminium for a solid construction, coming equipped with a 100kg load cell sensor for precise input. You can also choose how heavy, or light, you wish the brake to be with colour-coded elastomers supplied with the kit. I tested out the RS in a few different configurations at the Paris event, starting with a desk setup and a round rally-style rim in WRC Generations. That outing revealed some small issues with the pedals' ability to grip onto carpet, as I found they had a tendency to slide under harsh braking as I clung onto dear life at the mercy of a Group B Peugeot 205 T16. The force feedback was strong and informative, picking out the nuances of a rally stage with its hidden dips and crests, while pedal inputs were strong, although there was perhaps a little too much weight to the force feedback for my liking. I felt unable to flick the car into corners on a Monte Carlo rally stage as I wished to, although if the feedback wasn't necessarily set to be so high, this would have come easier. For the most part, though, I enjoyed my time with it, and the unit felt responsive with accurate feedback and a pleasant feel in-hand. I also used the bundle in a sim-racing cockpit, this time in F1 24 taking a few laps around spa. The heavier load cell brake pedal typical of F1 racing took some getting used to, requiring a lot more force to push the brake down all the way than I anticipated. However, I can certainly see the appeal of having such a heavy feel, so you can dial in advanced techniques such as trail braking. My lap times around Spa weren't necessarily the best on the day, but I could still feel the edges of kerbs and the car's movement to a good degree. There isn't a more Formula-style rim available just yet, but I hope that Nacon plans to add it for folks who want to go full-on with the immersion. It can make a bit of difference. And this is the main basis of the 'starter kit' as it were. General build quality from my initial impressions also seems excellent for the price point Nacon is targeting, with an all-metal wheel base alongside a metal wheel and plush synthetic leather rim. The main rims also have a good selection of buttons, and you can even control presets, force feedback and input mapping in an associated smartphone app. Compatibility is purely for Windows at the moment, although I heard rumblings at the event that Nacon was talking to Xbox and PlayStation for console compatibility. Nothing seems to have come from that yet, so I wouldn't bank on it being available any time soon - and it may come via new hardware rather than a software update. For what's on offer here, the £699 price tag for the complete bundle including rim, base and pedals is reasonably compelling - though we'll wait for our full review to deliver a final verdict on a wider range of racing scenarios, software support and the wider ecosystem.

What we've been playing - co-op adventures and unfolding ideas A few of the things that have us hooked this week. Image credit: FromSoftware Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Additional contributions by Christian Donlan, and Ed Nightingale Published on May 31, 2025 31st May Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week Bertie has mixed feelings about Split Fiction, Ed discovers he really likes Elden Ring Nightreign but wants more from it after the campaign, and Donlan appreciates a game unfolding before him. What have you been playing? Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive. Split Fiction, PS5 Split Fiction. I'd quite like to read a dual-perspective fantasy and sci-fi story, actually. Wait, did I just describe Star Wars?Watch on YouTube I've been eager to try this for a while. I was fond of It Takes Two and the reception around Split Fiction has been enormously enthusiastic. Also, I love that there's a studio like Hazelight dedicating itself to making co-op games - not just games that can be played in co-op but games that require it. It's weird that it should be an unusual thing these days, but it is and I'm totally here for it. I like it - I like the game. In parts, I love it, and I think I'd expected this reaction more. The parts I love: its fluidity. This is a colder, technical thing to praise, but it makes the game so invitingly touchable and toylike because of the way it responds and moves. Big tick. Two: the set-up for the game works superbly in that having two writers' stolen stories to choose from, Hazelight gives itself a potentially bottomless source of ideas to hop between without lingering in one for too long. It's perfectly fine for one world to contain only one idea, which many of them do. And who doesn't want to play on a level where you surf around on a sand shark? But what I struggle with also relates to this. There's a thinness, sometimes, to the game; a feeling that ideas are cycled through so quickly they're not given enough time - or developer investment - to breathe or be developed as fully as they could. You kind of skim through them and it can lead to repetitiveness as the game bumps back into ideas it's already used, or a sense of pointlessness as it scrambles to come up with ideas it hasn't used before. Look, overall, brilliant: it's a joyous collection of co-op ideas delivered with tip-top technical nous, and not a small amount of charm and style. But I'm waiting for it - and really willing it - to take off. -Bertie Elden Ring Nightreign, PS5 All aboard the Souls train!Watch on YouTube I've been having a very Soulsy time of it recently. Last week I wrote about how Sekiro was causing me existential fury, and I'm pleased to say I broke through that to finally beat the game and see the credits, and that I don't have to play it any more. In its place, I've been playing another tricky game: FromSoftware's new Elden Ring spin-off Nightreign. Go it alone and it's one of the studio's most challenging games; but with others it's an exhilarating experience, as I wrote in our review. And despite finishing the game for the review, I still want to carry on playing it. I still haven't mastered each of the eight Nightfarers and I'm keen to play it more with friends now it's officially been released. But I do feel the game has finite appeal. Once the Nightfarers are beaten and all the character stories have been completed, Nightreign - as much as I loved it - doesn't have the replayability other multiplayer games do. Yet what FromSoftware has created is so heavily structured, it could easily add more building blocks to extend the game. There's DLC on the way at least but there's potential for a full live-service game of seasonal events on its map, with additional bosses and characters and costumes. It doesn't have to be a free-to-play, microtransaction mess, but just give it some regular support. Nightreign is something I'd happily play for months if it was regularly refreshed. Of course, this would likely be at the expense of whatever big new single-player game Miyazaki is working towards, and there's still The Duskbloods coming to Switch 2 next year to satisfy any lingering multiplayer desires. At the least, I love that FromSoftware has the capability and flexibility to experiment with this sort of spin-off. It might not be to everyone's taste, but it's left me wanting more. -Ed Öoo, PC Öoo. What does that mean in ghost speak I wonder?Watch on YouTube Here's the latest game by the creator of ElecHead, that brilliant and ingenious blend of puzzling and platforming. ElecHead was all about electricity. This time it's all about bombs. At least in the current Steam demo it is. You're a caterpillar who can create bombs, and those bombs? Early on they can send you shooting upwards to catch high ledges. But maybe they can shunt you across gaps too? Uh-oh, what do you do when the walls and ceilings have spikes, and what do you do when there's a big frog blocking your path? The pleasure of a game like this is partly the sense of watching an idea unfold itself, as the designer slowly discovers all the possible consequences and wrinkles and inversions. It helps that the game looks so beautiful and dinky and strange, with those progress-blocking frogs, yes, but also walls that seem to have the folds of brain tissue. I am playing the demo very happily and I suspect I'll replay it many times before the final game is out. It's lovely to be at the start of something like this, where the ideas are new, but the contours of thought behind it all seem to be warmly familiar. -Donlan

Geralt, the hero of The Witcher series of games, nearly had a considerably different face. He actually did, briefly, but the game's community disliked it so much CD Projekt Red panicked and changed it back. The problem? Anatomical correctness. The community didn't think Geralt was alien-looking or ugly enough. The year was 2010 and CD Projekt Red was ready to debut its brand new Witcher game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, to the world. A couple of leaked videos preceded the formal announcement but when a clutch of screenshots was eventually released, it debuted a different looking Geralt to the one people were used to from The Witcher 1. Whereas Geralt had previously had the proportions of a triangle, roughly, which angled to a point on his nose and didn't seem to involve a chin of any kind, he now had much easier-on-the-eye proportions and looked like an actual person. He was even, dare I say it, handsome. It simply wouldn't do. Some of this was to be expected. The transition from Witcher 1 to Witcher 2 included a transition for the game's engine, moving from BioWare's Aurora engine, which once powered Neverwinter Nights, to CD Projekt Red's internally made engine Redengine. A facial design that worked well in one engine wouldn't necessarily work in both. Geralt fights a baddie in The Witcher 1. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red "The problem was that The Witcher 1 was heavily stylised," CD Projekt Red art director Pawel Mielniczuk explained to me. "From an art point of view, it was a much simpler visual fidelity than was in The Witcher 2 and Witcher 3. It was based on this Aurora engine from Neverwinter Nights - low poly, you know - so the character looks great there but the face of Geralt in The Witcher 1 wasn't very anatomically correct. It was making a good impression. "When we got to The Witcher 2, we had a better engine - larger budgets for polygons, more artists to sculpt nice faces, and we actually got better at making characters, already being a studio that released one game. And Geralt's [existing] face just did not match the style of the rest of the characters," he said. "It was not realistic human proportions." The solution was clear: redesign Geralt's face. "Let's make Geralt from scratch - nobody will notice that," Mielniczuk said, and laughed at the memory. "So we made it at the very beginning of The Witcher 2 production and we released it with this first bunch of screenshots to see what the response was, and the response was horrible! Our community just smashed us on the forums - there were almost riots there." Geralt's redesigned face, unveiled in the debut screenshots released for The Witcher 2. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red Sadly I can't find those riots on those company forums now; 15 years of chatter has buried it. But Mielniczuk told me the comments there were to the effect of: "True Geralt: he's supposed to be ugly and inhuman!" CD Projekt Red backtracked as a result of the backlash, and it would take a further two years of tinkering, and testing and re-evaluating, to get Geralt's look right for the game. "And was a hybrid of The Witcher 1 Geralt and a real human," Mielniczuk said. By the time The Witcher 3 development came around, in around 2011-2012, the opportunity once again presented itself to tinker with Geralt's face, but this time the studio resisted. "With The Witcher 3, we actually used exactly the same model from Witcher 2, added more polygons, updated textures, but we did not touch it," Mielniczuk said. Geralt as pictured at the beginning of The Witcher 2. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red That's not to say Mielniczuk didn't want to alter Geralt's face for the third game. He was the lead character artist on The Witcher 3. He hand-sculpted both Ciri and Yennefer's face, and he could see glaring issues with Geralt's. "If you look at the profile of Geralt: he has this incredible profile but the tip of his nose is a completely straight line from his forehead, kind of Greek proportions, and it was not fitting his face, so we wanted to fix that. But we did not," he said. "We made a decision, 'Okay, that's Geralt, he's recognisable, people are loving our character. We pass. We cannot make this mistake once again.'" Which brings us around to The Witcher 4, which is now in full production and we know will include Geralt to some degree. The new game will also move the series to a new engine, Unreal Engine 5, so once again there's an opportunity for a Geralt-face redesign. Will CD Projekt Red take it? Even the box art changed quite considerably over the course of the game's development. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red "It's such a grounded character right now I would really not dare to touch it," Mielniczuk said. "And in general, it's a very successful character because his face is recognisable, probably also because of these features of inhuman proportions in the upper part of the body. So no, I wouldn't update anything, just textures, normal maps, adding more details on the face, make it realistic through the surfaces, but not through the anatomy and proportions." But there is one thing that might tempt Mielniczuk to update Geralt's face, or rather one person, and that's Henry Cavill, the former star of The Witcher Netflix TV show. Mielniczuk is a big fan of his. "Henry was just perfect," he said. Then he added, laughing: "If I would do something to the face, I would be easily convinced to scan Henry and put him in The Witcher 4!" I spoke to Pawel Mielniczuk as part of a series of interviews looking back on The Witcher 3, a decade on, through the eyes of the people who made it. You can find that full piece on Eurogamer now.

What worked in The Witcher 3 and what didn't: looking back on a landmark RPG with CD Projekt Red "We learned a lot of lessons down the road." Image credit: CD Projekt Red Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on May 31, 2025 Do you remember what you were doing when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released? It came out on 19th May 2015. I remember because I was inside CD Projekt Red at the time, trying to capture the moment for you - a moment I'm unlikely to replicate there or anywhere else. I recall sitting in the studio's canteen in the small hours of the morning, after a midnight launch event in a mall in Warsaw, chewing on a piece of cold pizza and wondering out loud what would come next for the studio, because at the time, who could know? One era was ending and another was about to begin. Would it bring the fame and fortune CD Projekt Red desired? Today, more than 60 million sales of The Witcher 3 later, we know the answer is yes. The Witcher 3 became a role-playing classic. It delivered one of the most touchable medieval worlds we've explored, a rough place of craggy rocks and craggier faces, of wonky morales and grim realities, of mud and dirtiness. And monsters, though not all were monstrous to look at. It was a world of grey, of superstition and folklore, and in it stood we, a legendary monster hunter, facing seemingly impossible odds. The Witcher 3 took fantasy seriously. But the decade since the game's release has been turbulent for CD Projekt Red. The studio launched its big new sci-fi series in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077, and though the game has now sold more than 30 million copies, making it monetarily a success, it had a nightmarish launch. The PS4 version had to be removed from sale. It brought enormous pressure, growing pains and intense scrutiny to the studio, and CD Projekt Red would spend a further three years patching and updating - and eventually releasing an expansion - before public opinion would mostly turn around. Today the studio returns to safer ground, back to The Witcher world with the new game The Witcher 4, and as we look forward to it we should also look back, to the game that catapulted the studio to fame, and see what has been learnt. The Witcher 3 is at version 4.04 today, a number that represents an enormously long period of post-release support.Watch on YouTube It all began with naivety, as perhaps any ambitious project should. It's easy to forget that 14 years ago, when The Witcher 3 was being conceived, CD Projekt Red had never made an open-world game before. The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 were linear in their approaches. It's also easy to forget that the people making the game were 14 years younger and less experienced. Back then, this was the studio's chance at recognition, so it aimed high in order to be seen. "The Witcher 3 was supposed to be this game that will end all other games," Marcin Blacha, the lead writer of the game, tells me. Simply make an open-world game that's also a story-driven game and release it on all platforms at the same time. How hard could it be? "When I'm thinking about our state of mind back in those days, the only word that comes to my mind is enthusiastic," Blacha says. "It was fantastic because we were so enthusiastic that we were full of courage. We were trying to experiment with stuff and we were not afraid. We were convinced that when we work with passion and love, it will pay off eventually." Every project has to begin somewhere and for Blacha, the person tasked with imagining the story, The Witcher 3 could only begin with Ciri, the daughter-of-sorts to The Witcher's central monster hunter character Geralt. As Blacha says, "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters." It's a decision that would have major repercussions for the rest of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red. Blacha didn't know it then, but Ciri would go on to become the protagonist of The Witcher 4. Had she not been the co-protagonist of The Witcher 3 - for you play as her in several sections during the game - who knows if things would have worked out the same way. It's an understandable progression as it is, though there is still some uncertainty among the audience about Ciri's starring role. But Ciri's inclusion came with complications, because the Ciri we see in the game is not the Ciri described in the books. That Ciri is much closer to the Ciri in the Netflix Witcher TV show, younger and more rebellious in a typical teenager way. She might be an important part of the fiction, then, but that doesn't mean she was especially well liked. "People were thinking that she's annoying," says Blacha, who grew up reading The Witcher books. CD Projekt Red, then, decided to make a Ciri of its own, aging her and making her more "flesh and bone", as Blacha puts it. He fondly recalls a moment in the game's development when reviewing the Ciri sections of the game, and saying aloud to studio director Adam Badowski how much he liked her. "I didn't know that she's going to be the protagonist of the next game," he says, "but I said to Adam Badowski, she's going to be very popular." Once Ciri had been earmarked for inclusion in The Witcher 3, the idea to have her pursued by the phantom-like force of the Wild Hunt - the members of which literally ride horses in the night sky, like Santa Claus' cursed reindeer - came shortly after. CD Projekt Red had introduced the Wild Hunt in The Witcher 2 so it made sense. The outline of the main story was then laid down as a one-page narrative treatment. Then it was expanded to a two-page treatment, a four page treatment, an eight page treatment and so on. At around 10 pages, it already had the White Orchard prologue, almost the entirety of the No Man's Land zone, and a hint of what would happen on Skellige and in Novigrad. When it was around 40 pages long, the quest design team was invited in. CD Projekt Red made their Ciri older than she is in the books. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The quest design team's job is to turn a story into a game, and this was a newly created department for The Witcher 3, created because the old way of writers designing the quests wasn't working any more. "We were struggling a bit with making sure that every written story that we have prepared is also a story that we can play well," Paweł Sasko says. He joined CD Projekt Red to be a part of that quest design team. The quest design team carves up a narrative treatment, paragraph by paragraph, and expands those into playable questlines for the game. "It's basically something between game design and a movie scenario," Sasko says. There's no dialogue, just a description of what will happen, and even a one-paragraph prompt can balloon into a 20-30 page design. Among the paragraphs Sasko was given to adapt was a storyline in No Man's Land concerning a character known as the Bloody Baron. The Bloody Baron storyline is widely acclaimed and has become synonymous with everything Sasko and CD Projekt Red were trying to do with the game. It's a storyline that probes into mature themes like domestic abuse, fatherhood, and love and loss and grief. More importantly, it presents us with a flawed character and allows us time and space to perhaps change our opinion of them. It gives us layers many other games don't go anywhere near. When Sasko first encountered the storyline, there was only an outline. "It said that Geralt meets the Bloody Baron who asks Geralt to hunt a monster and look for his wife and daughter, and for that, he is going to share information about Ciri and tell Geralt where she went. That was pretty much it." And Sasko already knew a few things about what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to show No Man's Land as a Slavic region bathed in superstitions and complex religious beliefs, one that had been ravaged by famine and war. He also knew the tone of the area was horror because this had been outlined by Blacha and the leaders of The Witcher 3 team. Says Blacha: "My opinion is that a successful Witcher game is a mix of everything, so you have a horror line, you have a romance, you have adventure, you have exploration. When we started to think about our hubs, we thought about them in terms of a show, so No Man's Land, the hub with the Bloody Baron, was horror; Skellige was supposed to be an adventure; and Novigrad was supposed to be a big city investigation." But there were key missing pieces then from the Bloody Baron sequence we know today. The botchling, for instance - the monstrous baby the quest revolves around. It didn't exist. It was an idea that came from Sasko after he read a Slavic bestiary. "Yes," he says, "the botchling idea came from me." The Bloody Baron. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red He wanted the botchling to be the conduit through which more mature themes of the story could be approached - something overt to keep you busy while deeper themes sunk in. It's an approach Sasko says he pinched from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, after deconstructing his work. "What he's doing is he's trying to find universal truths about human beings and struggles, but he doesn't tell those stories directly," Sasko says. "So for instance racism: he doesn't talk about that directly but he finds an interesting way how, in his world, he can package that and talk about it. I followed his method and mimicked it." This way the botchling becomes your focus in the quest, as the Baron carries it back to the manor house and you defend him from wraiths, but while you're doing that, you're also talking and learning more about who the Bloody Baron - who Phillip Strenger - is. "I wanted you to feel almost like you're in the shoes of that Bloody Baron," Sasko says. "Peregrination is this path in Christianity you go through when you want to remove your sins, and that's what this is meant to be. He's just trying to do it, and he's going through all of those things to do something good. And I wanted the player to start feeling like, 'Wow, maybe this dude is not so bad.'" It's a quest that leaves a big impression. An email was forwarded to Sasko after the game's release, written by a player who had lost their wife and child as the Baron once had. "And for him," he says, "that moment when Baron was carrying the child was almost like a catharsis, when he was trying so badly to walk that path. And the moment he managed to: he wrote in his letter that he broke down in tears." There's one other very significant moment in The Witcher 3 that Sasko had a large hand in, and it's the Battle of Kaer Morhern, where the 'goodies' - the witchers and the sorceresses, and Ciri - make a stand against the titular menace of the Wild Hunt. Sasko designed this section specifically to emotionally tenderise you, through a series of fast-paced and fraught battles, so that by the time the climactic moment came, you were aptly primed to receive it. The moment being Vesemir's death - the leader of the wolf school of witchers and father figure to Geralt. This, too, was Sasko's idea. "We needed to transition Ciri from being a hunted animal to becoming a hunter," he tells me, and the only event big enough and with enough inherent propulsion was Vesemir's death. Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt, breaks Vesemir's neck. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red But for all of the successful moments in the game there are those that didn't work. To the team that made the game, and to the players, there are things that clearly stand out. Such as Geralt's witcher senses, which allow him to see scent trails and footsteps and clues in the world around him. Geralt's detective mode, in other words. Sasko laughs as he cringes about it now. "We've overdone the witcher senses so much, oh my god," he says. "At the time when we were starting this, we were like, 'We don't have it in the game; we have to use it to make you feel like a witcher.' But then at the end, especially in the expansions, we tried to decrease it so it doesn't feel so overloaded." He'd even turn it down by a further 10 to 20 per cent, he says. There were all of the question marks dotted across the map, luring us to places to find meagre hidden treasure rewards. "I think we all scratch our heads about what we were thinking when trying to build this," Sasko tells me. "I guess it just came from fear - from fear that the player will feel that the world is empty." This was the first time CD Projekt Red had really the player's hand go, remember, and not controlled where in the world you would be. Shallow gameplay is a criticism many people have, especially in the game's repetitive combat, and again, this is something Sasko and the team are well aware of. "We don't feel that the gameplay in Witcher 3 was deep enough," he says. "It was for the times okay, but nowadays when you play it, even though the story still holds really well, you can see that the gameplay is a bit rusty." Also, the cutscenes could have been paced better and had less exposition in them, and the game in general could have dumped fewer concepts on you at once. Cognitive overload, Sasko calls it. "In every second sentence you have a new concept introduced, a new country mentioned, a new politician..." It was too much. More broadly, he would also have liked the open-world to be more closely connected to the game's story, rather than be, mostly, a pretty backdrop. "It's like in the theatre when you have beautiful decorations at the back made of cardboard and paper, and not much happens to them except an actor pulls a rope and it starts to rain or something." he says. It's to do with how the main story influences the world and vice versa, and he thinks the studio can be better at it. Ciri and Geralt look at a coin purse in The Witcher 3. This is, coincidentally, the same tavern you begin the game in, with Vesemir, and the same tavern you meet Master Mirror in. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red One conversation that surprises me, when looking back on The Witcher 3, is a conversation about popularity, because it's easy to forget now - with the intense scrutiny the studio seems always to be under - that when development began, not many people knew about CD Projekt Red. The combined sales of both Witcher games in 2013 were only 5 million. Poland knew about it - the Witcher fiction originated there and CD Projekt Red is Polish - and Germany knew about it, and some of the rest of Europe knew about it. But in North America, it was relatively unknown. That's a large part of the reason why the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 was made at all, to begin knocking on that door. And The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red hoped, would kick that door open. "We knew that we wanted to play in the major league," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communications and PR, stealing a quote from Cyberpunk character Jackie. That's why The Witcher 3 was revealed via a Game Informer cover story in early 2013, because that was deemed the way to do things there - the way to win US hearts, Platkow-Gilewski tells me. And it didn't take long for interest to swell. When Platkow-Gilewski joined CD Projekt Red to help launch the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 in 2012, he was handing out flyers at Gamescom with company co-founder Michał Kicinski, just to fill presentations for the game. By the time The Witcher 3 was being shown at Gamescom, a few years later, queues were three to four hours long. People would wait all day to play. "We had to learn how to deal with popularity during the campaign," Platkow-Gilewski says. Those game shows were crucial for spreading the word about The Witcher 3 and seeing first-hand the impact the game was having on players and press. "Nothing can beat a good show where you meet with people who are there to see their favourite games just slightly before the rest of the world," he says. "They're investing their time, money, effort, and you feel this support, sometimes love, to the IP you're working on, and it boosts energy the way which you can't compare with anything else. These human to human interactions are unique." He says the studio's leader Adam Badowski would refer to these showings as fuel that would propel development for the next year or so, which is why CD Projekt Red always tried to gather as many developers as possible for them, to feel the energy. It was precisely these in-person events that Platkow-Gilewski says CD Projekt Red lacked in the lead up to Cyberpunk's launch, after Covid shut the world down. The company did what it could by pivoting to online events instead - the world-first playtest of Cyberpunk was done online via stream-play software called Parsec; I was a part of it - and talked to fans through trailers, but it was much harder to gauge feedback this way. "It's easy to just go with the flow and way harder to manage expectations," Platkow-Gilewski says, so expectations spiralled. "For me the biggest lesson learned is to always check reality versus expectations, and with Cyberpunk, it was really hard to control and we didn't know how to do it." It makes me wonder what the studio will do now with The Witcher 4, because the game show sector of the industry still hasn't bounced back, and I doubt - having seen the effect Covid has had on shows from the inside of an events company - whether it ever will. "Gamescom is growing," Platkow-Gilewski says somewhat optimistically. "Gamescom is back on track." But I don't know if it really is. Michał Platkow-Gilewski cites this moment as one of his favourite from the Witcher 3 journey. The crew were at the game show PAX in front of a huge live audience and the dialogue audio wouldn't play. Thankfully, they had Doug Cockle, the English language voice actor of Geralt, with them on the panel, so he live improvised the lines. Watch on YouTube Something else I'm surprised to hear from him is mention of The Witcher 3's rocky launch, because 10 years later - and in comparison to Cyberpunk's - that's not how I remember it. But Platkow-Gilewski remembers it differently. "When we released Witcher 3, the reception was not great," he says. "Reviews were amazing but there was, at least in my memories, no common consensus that this is a huge game which will maybe define some, to some extent, the genre." I do remember the strain on some faces around the studio at launch, though. I also remember a tense conversation about the perceived graphics downgrade in the game, where people unfavourably compared footage of Witcher 3 at launch, with footage from a marketing gameplay trailer released years before it. There were also a number of bugs in the game's code and its performance was unoptimised. "We knew things were far from being perfect," Platkow-Gilewski says. But the studio worked hard in the years after launch to patch and update the game - The Witcher 3 is now on version 4.04, which is extraordinary for a single-player game - and they released showcase expansions for it. Some of Marcin Blacha's favourite work is in those expansions, he tells me, especially the horror storylines of Hearts of Stone, many of which he wrote. That expansion's villain, Master Mirror, is also widely regarded as one of the best in the game, disguised as he is as a plain-looking and unassuming person who happens to have incredible and undefinable power. It's not until deep into the expansion you begin to uncover his devilish identity, and it's this subtle way of presenting a villain, and never over explaining his threat, that makes Master Mirror so memorable. He's gathered such a following that some people have concocted elaborate theories about him. Lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk tells me about one theory whereby someone discovered you can see Master Mirror's face on many other background characters in the game, which you can, and that they believed it was a deliberate tactic used by CD Projekt Red to underline Master Mirror's devilish power. Remember, there was a neat trick with Master Mirror in that you had already met him at the beginning of The Witcher 3 base game, long before the expansion was ever developed, in a tavern in White Orchard. If CD Projekt Red could foreshadow him as far back as that, the theory went, then it could easily put his face on other characters in the game to achieve a similar 'did you see it?' effect. The real villain in the Hearts of Stone expansion, Gaunter O'Dimm. Better known to many as Master Mirror. There's a reason why he has such a plain-looking face... | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The truth is far more mundane. Other characters in the game do have Master Mirror's face, but only because his face is duplicated across the game in order to fill it out. CD Projekt Red didn't know when it made the original Witcher 3 game that this villager would turn into anyone special. There was a tentative plan but it was very tentative, so this villager got a very villager face. "We just got a request for a tertiary unimportant character," says Mileniczuk. "We had like 30-40 faces for the entire game so we just slapped a random face on him." He laughs. And by the time Hearts of Stone development came around, the face - the identity - had stuck. Expansions were an important part of cementing public opinion around The Witcher 3, then, as they were for cementing public opinion around Cyberpunk. They've become something of a golden bullet for the studio, a way to creatively unleash an already trained team and leave a much more positive memory in our heads. Exactly what went wrong with Cyberpunk and how CD Projekt Red set about correcting it is a whole other story Chris Tapsell told recently on the site, so I don't want to delve into specifics here. Suffice to say it was a hard time for the studio and many hard lessons had to be learned. "The pressure was huge," Platkow-Gilewski says, "because from underdogs we went to a company which will, for sure, deliver the best experience in the world." But while much of the rhetoric around Cyberpunk concerns the launch, there's a lot about the game itself that highlights how much progress the studio made, in terms of making open-world role-playing games. One of my favourite examples is how characters in Cyberpunk walk and talk rather than speak to you while rooted to the spot. It might seem like a small thing but it has a transformative and freeing effect on conversations, allowing the game to walk you places while you talk, and stage dialogue in a variety of cool ways. There's a lot to admire about the density of detail in the world, too, and in the greater variety of body shapes and diversity. Plus let's not forget, this is an actual open world rather than a segmented one as The Witcher 3 was. In many ways, the game was a huge step forward for the studio. Cyberpunk wasn't the only very notable thing to happen to the Witcher studio in those 10 years, either. During that time, The Witcher brand changed. Netflix piggybacked the game's popularity and developed a TV series starring Henry Cavill, and with it propelled The Witcher to the wider world. Curiously, CD Projekt Red wasn't invited to help, which was odd given executive producer Tomek Baginski was well known to CD Projekt Red, having directed the intro cinematics for all three Witcher video games. But beyond minor pieces of crossover content, no meaningful collaboration ever occurred. "We had no part in the shows," Pawel Mileniczuk says. "But it's Hollywood: different words. I know how hard it was for Tomek to get in there, to convince them to do the show, and then how limited influence is when the production house sits on something. It's many people, many decision makers, high stakes, big money. Nobody there was thinking about, Hey, let's talk to those dudes from Poland making games. It's a missed opportunity to me but what can I say?" The debut trailer for The Witcher 4.Watch on YouTube Nevertheless, the Netflix show had a surprisingly positive effect on the studio, with sales of The Witcher 3 spiking in 2019 and 2020 when the first season aired. "It was a really amazing year for us sales wise," Platkow-Gilewski says. This not only means more revenue for the studio but also wider understanding; more people are more familiar with The Witcher world now than ever before, which bodes very well for The Witcher 4. Not that it influenced or affected the studio's plans to return to that world, by the way. "We knew already that we wanted to come back to The Witcher," Platkow-Gilewski says. "Some knew that they wanted to tell a Ciri story while we were still working on Witcher 3." But, again, with popularity also comes pressure. "We'll have hopefully millions of people already hooked in from the get-go but with some expectations and visions and dreams which we have to, or may not be able to, fulfil," Platkow-Gilewski adds. You can already sense this pressure in comments threads about the new game. Many people already have their ideas about what a new Witcher game should be. The Witcher 4 might seem like a return to safer ground, then, but the relationship with the audience has changed in the intervening 10 years. "I think people are again with us," Platkow-Gilewski says. "There are some who are way more careful than they used to be; I don't see the hype train. We also learned how to talk about our game, what to show, when to show. But I think people believe again. Not everyone, and maybe it's slightly harder to talk with the whole internet. It's impossible now. It's way more polarised than it used to be. But I believe that we'll have something special for those who love The Witcher." Here we are a decade later, then, looking forward to another Witcher game by CD Projekt Red. But many things have changed. The studio has grown and shuffled people around and the roles of the people I speak to have changed. Marcin Blacha and Pawel Mielniczuk aren't working on The Witcher 4, but on new IP Project Hadar, in addition to their managerial responsibilities, and Pawel Sasko is full-time on Cyberpunk 2. It's only really Michał Platkow-Gilewski who'll do a similar job for The Witcher 4 as on The Witcher 3, although this time with dozens more people to help. But they will all still consult and they're confident in the abilities of The Witcher 4 team. "They really know what they're doing," says Sasko, "they are a very seasoned team." "We learned a lot of lessons down the road," Platkow-Gilewski says, in closing. "I started this interview saying that we had this bliss of ignorance; now we know more, but hopefully we can still be brave. Before, we were launching a rocket and figuring out how to land on the moon. Now, we know the dangers but we are way more experienced, so we'll find a way to navigate through these uncharted territories. We have a map already so hopefully it won't be such a hard trip."