Genshin Impact has been nothing short of a revelation since its initial release roughly four years ago, to the point where it’s legitimately once of the biggest games in the industry right now, and soon it’ll be opening the gates for an even larger audience to dive into its offerings.
At Gamescom Opening Night live, miHoYo announced that Genshin Impact is finally coming to Xbox Series X/S on November 20. The developer made the announcement with a new trailer, which also showcased Natlan, another major nation that the game will be adding with an upcoming update. Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of what it will bring.
Notably, miHoYo hasn’t announced the game for Xbox One, even though on PlayStation it is a cross-gen title. It also remains to be seen whether we can expect Genshin Impact to release for Switch as well- or perhaps its upcoming successor?
Genshin Impact is currently available on PS5, PS4, PC, iOS, and Android.
Towerborne is indeed coming this year as previously planned, but its release plans have still changed quite significantly. As recently announced, the co-op action-adventure title is now set to release in early access first, and in the wake of that announcement, Microsoft and developer Stoic Studio have revealed more details.
For starters, disappointingly enough for those on Xbox, Towerborne’s early access release next month is going to be limited to Steam only. A specific release date is unknown, with Stoic and Microsoft only confirming that the game will release in Xbox Game Preview at a “later” date.
Additionally, it’s also been confirmed that upon its full release next year, Towerborne is going to be a fully free-to-play game, even though a Founder’s Pack will be offered with the early access version.
“The Founder’s pack lets us do two main things: one is that we can slowly see where problems are and get attention onto those areas quickly,” says game director Daniel McLaren. “The second thing, it invites a group of people that are really invested in the game, that believe in Stoic. They want to be a part of shaping the future of Towerborne.”
Towerborne is in development for Xbox Series X/S and PC. It launches in early access for Steam on September 10.
Part God of War, part Soulslike, The First Berserker: Khazanis a game that many have had their eyes on for a while, and after announcing a 2025 release window, Nexon has now further narrowed the timeframe within which to expect the action RPG.
With a new trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live, the publisher confirmed that The First Berserker: Khazan will launch at some point in early 2025, though a specific release date is currently unknown. Ahead of that, later this year, the game will also get a closed technical closed beta test. The test will be available for players on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and will run from October 11 to October 20.
Check out the game’s newest trailer below, which also offers more glimpses of its action-packed combat, the cel-shaded visuals, and some of the many enemies players will be locking horns with. The game is also has a playable demo available at Gamescom for attendees.
Another upcoming game for Game Pass may have been leaked. Prominent leaker eXtas1s has claimed on Twitter that Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment’s all-terrain driving aim Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is coming to Game Pass this month.
The leaker claims the game will be available for subscribers on both PC and Xbox. Though a specific date for its arrival is unknown, it is supposedly set to arrive this month. Previous leaks have claimed that Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is also set to arrive for Game Pass on August 8, so if that is true, it’s possible that both titles get announced together.
In our review of the game, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “When it comes to the joy of off-road driving, few games can capture the feel as expertly or effortlessly as Expeditions: A MudRunner Game.” Read the full review through here.
Well more than a decade after its original release, Shadows of the Damned is set to make an unlikely return with its upcoming remaster, Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered, and though even such a release would have been difficult to imagine until not that long ago, developer Grasshopper Manufacture believes the upcoming remaster may even potentially pave the way for a sequel- given a certain level of success, that is.
Speaking in a recent interview with Gematsu, when asked about whether Shadows of the Damned might see entirely new instalments following the release of its upcoming remaster, director and Grasshopper Manufacture founder Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) stated that should the remaster sell well enough and be well received, the studio could consider the idea of a sequel.
“If the remaster sells well enough, and if it seems like enough people really want it, then some sort of continuation of the series would absolutely be something we would at least consider working on in the future,” Suda said.
Considering the fact that Shadows of the Damned was a fully dead and buried IP until quite recently, fans will take even a slight chance of a sequel. Of course, for that, the remaster will need to make a big enough mark.
Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered is due out on October 31 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Pokemon developer Game Freak is looking to expand significantly, by the looks of at. Spotted by DenFamiNico Gamer (via Siliconera), the Japanese company is set to hold a new recruitment campaign at the end of the month through which it’s lookin to hire in a large number of open positions.
In total, the company is looking to recruit in a total of 37 open positions, across disciplines ranging from programming and design to art and more. Several of the open positions specifically mention that they will be focused on development of Pokemon titles, with some being dedicated to new internal IP, others to research and development, and more.
As of March earlier this year, Game Freak had a total of 207 employees, so adding 37 new roles to that would represent growth of nearly 18 percent for the studio. It’s worth mentioning, however, that several of the new positions are set to be contract roles instead of permanent ones.
With the Nintendo Switch’s successor set to be announced (and presumably released) in the coming months, it’s no surprise that studios focused on developing Switch titles are ramping up and expanding, especially amidst insistent reports that the upcoming console will support 4K and thus require more complex development pipelines.
After Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s controversial launch in 2022, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo had to issue an apology for the technical state of the launch, before assuring later that it was looking into ways to improve the state of future releases while still maintaining a packed release schedule. Earlier this year, reports claimed that the company was looking to take serious steps to avoid the technical issues that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet faced at launch.
You can find a full list of Game Freak’s open positions below:
Planner
Planner (scenario/setting creation)
[Contract] Sound Planner (Pokemon series development)
Character Model
Effects
Background Model
Cutscenes
Section Director
Lighting Artist
Human Motion
Pokemon Models
2D Art Designer
2D Art Designer: Background
[Contract] 2D Artwork Designer (Pokemon series development)
Project Manager
[Contract] Assistant Project Manager
Game Programmer
Game Programmer: Communication System
[Contract] Game Programmer: Characters (New IP)
[Contract] Game Programmer: Events (New IP)
[Contract] UI Programmer (New IP)
[Contract] Communication Game Programmer (Pokemon series development)
[Contract] Unity Engineer (Assigned to R&D Department)
[Contract] Animation Programmer (Assigned to R&D Department)
[Contract] Infrastructure Engineer (Server)
[Contract] Information Systems: Windows Infrastructure Engineer
After shining the spotlight in Life is Strange: Double Exposure’scast of core characters with a couple of its previoustrailers, with the newest look at the game, publisher Square Enix and developer Deck Nine have instead turned their attention to some of the locations that you’ll be visiting in the game.
Specifically, the trailer focuses on Caledon University, a Vermont’s premier institution for Arts and Sciences, where protagonist Max Caufield finds herself a student in Double Exposure. In addition to touching on the tragedies and supernatural oddities that Max will be grappling with at Caledon, the trailer also offers brief details on some of the many locations within its campus that players will frequent.
That will include a fine arts building brimming with all manner of art to peruse within a church repurposed as a gallery, an observatory where you can make use of a snazzy telescope to stargaze to your heart’s content, a bar where students and professors gather to relax and mingle, and even secret societies to learn more about. Check out the trailer below for more details.
Life is Strange: Double Exposurelaunches on October 29 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A Nintendo Switch version is also in the works, but doesn’t yet have a release date.
I‘ve played my fair share of horror games, and I like to think that at this point, it takes plenty for me to be scared, but I can confidently say The Mortuary Assistant is legitimately one of the scariest games I’ve played in some time. Is it a spotless gameplay experience? No. Can it occasionally feel held back due to issues with controls, visuals, and the like? Definitely. But is it going to scare the absolute, ever-loving crap out of you? You know, it’s more than just a little likely that it will.
In The Mortuary Assistant, you play as Rebecca, a young woman who’s been hired as an assistant as the River Fields Mortuary, a creepy mortuary that is the subject of some rumours, though not enough to deter Rebecca from pursuing her professional goals. But what starts off as a seemingly ordinary job turns into something much more sinister, when her boss locks her in the mortuary at night, telling her that a demonic entity is haunting the facility and has attached itself to Rebecca. The only wait out now is to go about her job, figure out wat kind of demon is haunting her, and try and get rid of it before it fully possesses her.
"Is The Mortuary Assistant a spotless gameplay experience? No. Can it occasionally feel held back due to issues with controls, visuals, and the like? Definitely. But is it going to scare the absolute, ever-loving crap out of you? You know, it’s more than just a little likely that it will."
It’s a straightforward premise that still manages to have enough layers to it to remain interesting in several ways. From a narrative perspective, The Mortuary Assistant’s immediate narrative ropes in multiple other threads to keep things interesting, from the shady history of the mortuary itself, to Rebecca’s traumatic past and how it is informing the horrors that she’s now experiencing, to the constant tension brought about by the impending threat of the demonic presence itself. The game does a solid job of feeding bits and pieces of new information to you, and piecing them together to gain a deeper insight into Rebecca’s past or the mortuary’s backstory remains consistently engaging.
It’s not the story, however, that serves as the star of the show here. No, what makes The Mortuary Assistant worth your time is just how ridiculously scary it can be, and in more ways than one. It starts off with subtle things such as creepy whispers or windows and doors banging shut or shadowy figures that are briefly visible in the corner of your eyes, but as the game progresses, things quickly become increasingly sinister and downright evil.
Horrifyingly animated monstrosities can pop up anywhere in the environments, you can come across creepy writing in various places, corpses can just get up and start shambling away- The Mortuary Assistant has a healthy roster of different kinds of scares at its disposal (several of which are new ones that have been added with this definitive edition re-release), and not only are the overwhelming majority of them legitimately petrifying, the game also does an excellent job of rarely letting you feel comfortable about whether or not you’re ready for what nightmares you may face next. Admittedly, some of the scares do repeat sometimes, which means they end up losing their impact (especially when they’re more deeply tied to the story). Given the fact that this is a game that encourages multiple replays, that repetition can potentially be an issue.
"Horrifyingly animated monstrosities can pop up anywhere in the environments, you can come across creepy writing in various places, corpses can just get up and start shambling away- The Mortuary Assistant has a healthy roster of different kinds of scares at its disposal."
But The Mortuary Assistant isn’t just a straightforward walking horror sim. What sets it apart from your regular indie horror hit is its core gameplay structure. You are, of course, working at a mortuary in this game, which means you’ll be spending plenty of time getting bodies out of cold storage and embalming them (which, as you might imagine, is inherently disturbing in and of itself, especially given how actively involved you are in every step of the process), and while you’re doing that, you’re also tasked with not only figuring out what kind of demon you’re being haunted by (where the game feels somewhat similar to multiplayer indie horror sensation Phasmaphobia).
Every part of both of these critical processes is also highly technical. Embalming a body is a multi-step process that has you moving throughout the facility as you work with different kinds of equipment and items, from identifying the physical marks on a body and draining blood out of it to sewing their jaws shut and more. Just as involved and technical is the process of investigating and identifying the demon that is haunting you, and ensuring that you’re not getting any steps wrong in everything you do is always critical. The involved nature of Rebecca’s work, the attention you’re required to pay as you attempt to discover what demon is haunting you, and the game’s incredible knack for consistently keeps ramping up scares all combine together to make for some great gameplay tension. Every step of the way, The Mortuary Assistant is trying to get you to slip up under its terrifying pressure.
That’s not to say that the gameplay is devoid of any and all issues, however, chief among them being the controls. I never played this game on PC, but I’m assuming it would have felt much better to control with a mouse and keyboard. With a controller, simple things such as moving and looking around feel clunky and frequently inaccurate, and everything from picking up and using objects (which you’ll be doing a lot of) to interacting with things in the environment can feel a bit clunky. Just as problematic is the general UI and the menus, which struggle with issues ranging from issues with readability to occasionally unresponsive inputs.
"If you’re looking for a game that can legitimately terrify you while also delivering genuinely engaging gameplay, even with its aforementioned issues, this one is well worth looking into."
That lack of polish rears its head in audio and visual side of things as well. The Mortuary Assistant is a decent looking game, especially for a low budget indie title, but it does suffer from several noticeable technical issues, from muddy textures and frequently choppy animations to audio glitches and more. The game’s strengths in other areas admittedly make it easier to overlook such issues, but there’s no denying that they can drag the experience down a little bit.
Two years ago, The Mortuary Assistant released on PC, and though it wasn’t an overnight sensation by any means, it did catch the attention of a fair few people, but hopefully, it’ll see much wider success with its console release. It is definitely let down by its technical issues, and the moment to moment gameplay can feel a bit clunky because of the controls, but at its core, The Mortuary Assistant is a really good horror game. If you’re looking for a game that can legitimately terrify you while also delivering genuinely engaging gameplay, even with its aforementioned issues, this one is well worth looking into.
In spite of the legacy of the Baldur’s Gate IP and the track record of Larian Studios as a developer, few could have accurately predicted the level of success that Baldur’s Gate 3 went on to enjoy upon its launch last year. Widely regarded by one and all as one of the greatest games of its kind, the fantasy RPG has been showered with endless praise from all corners since the day it exited early access last year- and Larian has still just kept going.
As a single-player RPG, no one really would have expected Baldur’s Gate 3 to be as well supported following launch as it has been, but Larian Studios has maintained an impressive cadence of updates for the game. Over the course of the last year, since its full release on PC, Baldur’s Gate 3 has seen a bevy of hotfixes and six major patches, with a seventh yet to come, all of it arriving for free and adding a host of new features and improvements to what was already an unabashed masterpiece.
Here, then, we’re going to take a look at some of the biggest ways Baldur’s Gate 3 has grown, improved, and evolved in its post-launch period, and we’re going to do that by going over each of its major patches one by one. Without further ado, let’s get started.
PATCH 1
Coming within less than a month of Baldur’s Gate 3’s 1.0 release, its first patch was one that wasn’t focused on adding anything as much as it was on polishing. No major new features or bits and bobs were added to the game with Patch 1, but Larian Studios did introduce a whole host of fixes to the experience nonetheless. In total, the first full patch that was released for the megaton RPG has more than a thousand fixes, with several bugs, glitches, inconsistencies, and what have you being addressed. In areas ranging from the UI, character-specific scenes, and balancing, to the visuals, loot, and more, Baldur’s Gate 3’s first patch smoothed over wrinkles of varying sizes all throughout the experience.
PATCH 2
Less than a week after Patch 1, Larian Studios put out Patch 2 for Baldur’s Gate 3, and though the developer still hadn’t quite got into the swing of adding major new features to the game by this point, Patch 2 did lean more in that direction than the first one did. For starters, significant performance improvements were made across the board, which was much needed. Even with all the universal praise that it enjoyed right out the gate, Baldur’s Gate 3 was still a game with more than a few technical issues in those early days (especially once you got to Act 3), and Patch 2’s performance optimizations brought tangible improvements on that front.
Patch 2 also brought with it what Larian dubbed Withers’ Wardrobe of Wayward Friends, which added the ability to remove co-op party members from your campaign, something that couldn’t be done until that point. Beyond that, the patch added several scenes tied specifically to Karlach (including a new epilogue scene), in addition to continuing to make bug fixes, polishing optimizations, and the like.
PATCH 3
Roughly a month later, in the latter half of September, Patch 3 arrived, which went hand in hand with Baldur’s Gate 3 releasing for Mac. Granted, that’s not exactly a platform with a huge gaming audience, but it did open up the game to yet more people, which is always a good thing, especially when the game in question is as good as this is.
Far more noteworthy, of course, was the fact that Patch 3 brought with it the addition of what Baldur’s Gate 3 dubbed the Magic Mirror, an item that players could interact with in their camp in order to change their cosmetic appearance and other aspects of your character to their heart’s content. That entailed changing your hair, facial features, pronouns, voice, and the like, which players had been requesting to see in the game ever since its launch. That in and of itself made Patch 3 quite a well received step forward for the game- and yes, it, too, brought plenty of additional polish and bug fixes.
PATCH 4
After adding new and heavily requested features to Baldur’s Gate 3 with its second and third post-launch updates, with Patch 4, Larian Studios decided to focus once again on optimizing and polish rather than adding anything. Coming more than a month after the third patch, Patch 4 arrived with over a thousand fixes, similar to the very first post-launch update that the game received. From combat to story scenes, from character and class specific balancing to visual bugs, from crashes to UI issues, there was plenty that Patch 4 addressed. On top of all of those fixes, it also added new accessibility options, such as a colour blind mode with multiple settings, as well as support for AMD FSR 2.2.
PATCH 5
Arriving at the end of November, Patch 5 was by far the most packed patch to be released for Baldur’s Gate 3 up to that point. In addition to continued layers of polish, with its fifth major post-launch patch, the RPG added a host of new features, some of which were quite significant. Chief among the additions was an entirely new playable epilogue. Set several months after the main story, the epilogue brought with it well over 3,000 new lines of dialogue, new cinematics, and more, all of it meant to serve as a final goodbye to all of the characters.
Then there was the new Honor Mode, a higher difficulty setting that brought with it more difficult boss fights, the introduction of Legendary Actions, save scumming and several known exploits being removed (only from the new mode), permadeath, new rewards, and more. On the flipside, there was also the new Custom Mode, which as its name implied, allowed players to customize a variety of different aspects of the gameplay experience to suit your particular tastes.
Add to that some noticeable UI improvements, support for dynamic resolution scaling on PS5, more performance improvements in Act 3, and much more, and Patch 5 was easily the biggest update to be released for Baldur’s Gate 3 at the time that it came out- and still is, in fact. Speaking of which…
PATCH 6
Arriving in February earlier this year, more than two months after Patch 5, Patch 6 was clearly coming at a point where Larian Studios was gearing up to move on from Baldur’s Gate 3. Though the studio was, of course, continuing to further polish the experience with hotfixes as and when they were needed, with the majority of major features that Larian wanted to add in the game already being in the game, the pace with which patches were being released slowed down significantly. Not that anyone was complaining- Baldur’s Gate 3 is a ridiculously massive full featured game as is.
Even so, Patch 6 wasn’t completely without highlights of its own. It added new cinematics and scenes to the game to further strengthen the bonds and relationships between the core characters, as well as new idle animations for party members when they were in camp. By this point, with Baldur’s Gate 3 available on all the platforms that could possibly run it, the game’s post-launch support was clearly close to wrapping up by this point.
PATCH 7
Patch 7 is Baldur’s Gate 3’s next big patch, and is currently in beta, which means it won’t be too long before Larian Studios releases it in full- and once again, it’s going to be a big one, with plenty of major features set to be added. One in particular that many have been waiting for is official mod support, following which following which players will be able to create, share, and download community mods, all through an internally integrated Mod Manager.
Also on the way are new, evil endings, which are described as appropriately darker conclusions to the story for players who have made choices to reflect the same throughout their playthrough. That will, of course, involve new cinematics, new story content, new music, and more. Then there’s dynamic split-screen support (which will merge screens when players are close to each other), improved multiplayer banter, new Honor Mode mechanics, the addition of existing Honor Mode mechanics in Custom Mode as options, and much more.
Patch 7 is set to launch for all players at some point in September.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Larian Studios has done a phenomenal job with Baldur’s Gate 3. From its lengthy early access period to its full release to the excellent way it has been support post-launch, right from the off, it has been a labour of love for Larian, and the studio has left no stone unturned in ensuring that the acclaimed fantasy RPG can be the best possible version of itself. And incredibly enough, in spite of the fact that Larian has already gone above and beyond in consistently adding to and supporting a game that was already humongous with more than a year’s worth of free post-launch support- in spite of that, there’s still more to come.
Hotfixes will, of course, continue to arrive, which means more optimization tweaks, performance improvements, bug fixes, quality of life upgrades and what have you are certainly on the way. Beyond that, however, Larian says a couple more significant features are still set to be added to the game as well, including a photo mode and cross-platform multiplayer.
Presumably, Larian Studios is approaching the end of the road with Baldur’s Gate 3, and once it is done, the studio will be deserving of all the plaudits in the world not only for the game itself, but also how well it has been supported following its release. Hell, even many mainly multiplayer, so-called live service games can learn a thing or two from Larian.
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