Compared to the PAXes or even MAGFests of the world, Awesome Games Done Quick is itsy bitsy. Around 2,000 speedrunners and fans mill about in Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Grand hotel, with a theater where speedruns take place serving as the obvious centerpiece. Other attractions – like an arcade, a game room with consoles and PCs, and a small artist alley – exist, but they feel more like brief breaks from the 24/7 speedrun deluge than fully fledged alternatives. The entire event spans just a handful of rooms across two floors. Some might view this as a downside, but I find it refreshing.
There’s an intimacy to AGDQ that makes it feel uniquely cozy. If you make a friend, you will run into them again. Runners and hosts are accessible and friendly. Vocal audience participation during runs is common. The vibe is slumber party, with some audience members going so far as to wear pajamas to late-night runs.
In my few days attending, I’ve also come to appreciate the event’s focus: There’s one main thing pretty much everyone is here for, so we all have a shared destination and set of hyper-specific discussion topics. The standard model of a video game convention (or comic convention, or anime convention) lends itself to sprawl and bloat. They can even be actively unpleasant to attend – squirming seas of people shuffling between halls, attempting to extract amusement from vast selections of activities that rarely rise above the level of Fine.
AGDQ, in its current state, lacks unnecessary flab. This makes sense, considering that it began as a group of 20 friends in founder Mike Uyama’s mother’s basement. It was not born as a convention, even as it has since bolted on some of the format’s more common trappings. But that was 2010 and this is now; AGDQ attracts tens of thousands of concurrent viewers across Twitch and YouTube, and the organization behind it now employs over 100 people.
GDQ, meanwhile, is now far more than just one event, with AGDQ joined by Summer Games Done Quick, as well as a series of smaller charity marathons hosted by satellite organizations like Frame Fatales and Black In A Flash. Every non-event week, meanwhile, GDQ hosts regularly scheduled “Hotfix” programming, with two themed shows each weekday as well as weekend specials. There’s more to speedrunning than GDQ, but it has, in many ways, evolved into a one-stop shop for the average person’s speedrunning needs.
What does this growth mean for the event that started it all, though? GDQ director of operations Matt Merkle doesn’t plan to shy away from further expansion and experimentation.
"We've already actually expanded,” he told Aftermath. “The artist alley is a new addition. We just started that last summer. We have amazing artists supporting the event – the stuff they do for us to advertise the event. We wanted to bring them into the event and let people purchase their works. ... I think it's been fantastic. The community really loves that artist alley, and we'll continue to grow that as we get into bigger hotels that can support it."
But Merkle is cognizant of the fact that he’s in possession of bottled lightning.
“Obviously speedrunning is gonna be the primary focus of the event for the foreseeable future,” he said. “But we'll always continue to experiment with different things. Over the summer, we had a live concert, which was really cool to do for the first time. ... We definitely continue to experiment so that when people come back to the event year after year, they have something new to experience on top of the stuff that they know and love."
The show’s format, Merkle added, helps it nimbly avoid some of more traditional conventions’ biggest pitfalls.
“The event lasts for seven days rather than three or four, so you have plenty of time to experience the entire event – to go around and enjoy yourself,” he said. “We don't focus on panels as much as other conventions, so people aren't focused on just getting in lines and waiting for the panel they want to see most or something. Because we control the growth and ensure that there's always plenty of space and time to do everything, it makes it so you don't feel rushed, you don't feel cramped. You feel that you have space to do what you want and hang out with your friends."
Even as AGDQ continues to grow and attract more attendees, Merkle wants to preserve the show’s unique vibe.
“Intimacy is a core part of it,” he said.
That intimacy – and a rigorous set of rules – means people feel safe at AGDQ. This comes through whether you’re in attendance or watching along from home. What other video game event, after all, boasts “trans rights” as its rallying cry? Merkle recognizes the importance of maintaining that core component of the event as well.
“If you’re harassing anybody in our community or making people feel uncomfortable, we don’t want you here,” he said. “I think the community has come to expect that type of vibe at this event, and that’s why we have so many people that feel safe to come to these events. … We take it seriously.”
Last week, Warframe’s hotly anticipated Old Peace update launched, kicking off a saga that digs into the very foundations of the nearly 13-year-old game’s lore. Of course, like clockwork, servers immediately took a tumble, resulting in crashes, outages, and chat issues. But why has this pattern become so predictable with online games? Especially when developers are well aware that a storm of their own making is on the horizon?
During a Game Awards-adjacent event celebrating The Old Peace’s launch last week, I asked creative director Rebb Ford.
"You've gotta spin up capacity,” she told Aftermath, referring to the practice of paying money to a distribution partner for additional servers ahead of or during moments when many players will be trying to access content. “You're allowing so many connections. We're an always-online game, right, so every time a player does something, there's a server call. There's something that needs to be verified server and client side. … Login, mission complete, anything that needs to talk to us to say 'You did this, you did that’ – it happens to us at a volume level that's very hard to account for."
In The Old Peace’s case, Digital Extremes was ready for a stampede the moment it opened the gates, but not quite ready enough.
"We actually didn't fall over as much as I thought we would,” said Ford. “That's when we realized 'Oh, we didn't think this was gonna be bigger than TennoCon [Warframe’s annual convention that often drives record player numbers].' We spun up IRC servers, we spun up things just to deal with volume. But sometimes you just cannot be prepared enough when you didn't predict it to be the third-best day in the history of the game. That was an error on our part, but it's not so much a tech error; it was an anticipation error. We fixed it very quickly."
The ability to quickly rectify server issues is also the result of preparation – in some cases years of preparation.
"One of our most important things to do is make sure people can get the content as fast as possible,” said Ford. “With Warframe, when we have the build or the update, we release it to our distributing partners, and we do something called a pre-heat of our CDN, or content delivery network – which is basically us saying 'People shouldn't all be fetching the game data from one node.' Because that will take forever. It'll get congested. So we distribute it, and this is through years of network partner shopping, working with really good network partners. We have content servers in 16 or 17 central population hubs."
The pre-heat, Ford explained, ensures that the whole network doesn’t hinge on a single point of potential failure.
“So sometimes you'll be going in the Philippines instead of being routed to our deploying headquarters, which is Ontario,” she said. “We pre-heated our server structure across the globe so that people can fetch [new content] quicker, and that takes a lot of load off.”
But that’s only one stair in what Ford characterized as a winding staircase of individual, overlapping needs.
"So that's the first point of failure: Can you download the game at all?” she said. “Second point of failure is: Can you login at all? When that happens, that all comes to us through login capacity. That one, you just have to spin up more capacity. Then you have the question of 'Can people play missions?' So you can kind of see the staircase: Can you download the game? Can you login to the game? Can you play the game? And each one of those is a slightly different sector of stability."
In Warframe’s case, elements can function independently, but if they’re not all working in conjunction, players quickly begin to see the seams.
“A lot of people can be logged into the game, and that's cool, but if you can't play, [then there's a problem],” said Ford. “It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Can you chat? You don't need chat to play the game, but chat servers run independently. Those were hit the hardest [on Old Peace launch day], and we fixed it fairly fast by spinning up more capacity."
Games are complicated, as is the process of distributing them to millions of different computers with as many hardware configurations as there are stars in the sky. You will not be surprised to learn, then, that many other things can also go wrong.
“We have issues where we release new code in this build, and then maybe one piece of code fires every second on a heartbeat,” Ford said. “And sometimes we find these heartbeats, and we're like 'What is pinging the servers every second on the second,' and we're like 'It's the new title system we put in,' for example. ‘It's checking against server-client to issue you a title, but it's doing it in a way where we were unsure because it's checking all this indexed stuff.’"
Warframe has been around for over a decade and regularly pulls in tens – or in Old Peace launch day’s case, hundreds – of thousands of concurrent players. Nonetheless, said Ford, Digital Extremes still frets about The Ramifications as though it were a much smaller company.
"We still feel very young and scrappy, and we're like 'Can we even afford $600 more per month in capacity?'” she said. “That's the kind of question we ask ourselves on launch day. And then we're like 'Just do it! Just do it!'"
Warframe’s servers weren’t quite able to withstand the sheer weight of years’ worth of anticipation on launch day, but Ford was relieved that they didn’t go down for “hours and hours,” which would’ve necessitated a suitably less jubilant speech at the launch event in LA.
"It's exciting. It's thrilling. Everyone did an amazing job,” she said. “We asked our team to do the impossible with this update, so even though those little hiccups happened, we had two speeches prepared – funeral or the celebration – and we undoubtedly got to do the celebration."
Japanese gaming publication 4Gamer recently caught up with Makoto Shibata and Hidehiko Nakajima to talk about the upcoming Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake. The pair were asked why they decided to remake the game and the answer was simply that fans were pleased with the other remasters of Maiden of Black Water and Mask… Read More »Koei Tecmo talks about why it decided to remake Fatal Frame 2
Climbing has always been a fundamental pillar for communicating verticality and freedom of movement in video games. Still, it was only a couple of years ago that it began to take center stage in this medium.
The connection between climbing and playing games goes to the very essence of the sport. In 2009, climber Kelly Cordes wrote about The Fun Scale, a concept that he heard in 2001 from another climber. The scale separates the fun you have with certain activities into three types: Type I fun, which is pure, immediate fun, or, in his words, "enjoyable while it's happening." Type II fun is "fun only in retrospect, hateful while it's happening" (every Dark Souls fan knows this type of fun). Type III fun is horrible in the moment, and it isn't even fun in retrospect, but it might give you a sense of achievement.
Although some fights in the Elden Ring DLC were definitely Type III Fun... Source: Steam
The Fun Scale has become a fundamental concept in game design, and almost every game attempts to balance the three types to achieve a satisfying flow between difficulty and reward, tension and release.
In previous generations of consoles, climbing meant finding weak spots in giant enemies in Shadows of the Colossus, hiding places in Assassin's Creed, or secret tombs in Tomb Raider.
Everything changed with the arrival of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch in 2017, where the protagonist Link could try to climb any surface in the game world. The result was impressively effective; the feeling of freedom and accomplishment once you reached the top of a mountain was unmatched. It also added an extra degree of danger to the protagonist's adventure. If Link ran out of stamina during his climb, he would let go of the wall and fall into the void, usually resulting in his death.
Climbing is also a great way to add verticality to a game. Source: Press Kit
However, climbing remained a means to an end, a transitional action on the way to the place where the adventure resumes. Besides planning your route, climbing in Breath of the Wild, as in most video games, consisted of mindlessly pushing the joystick forward, erasing all the complexities and challenges that the real-life sport offers.
In the ensuing years, a series of events would raise the public's interest in the sport in ways never seen before.
In 2018, the documentary Free Solo, directed by Elizabeth Chai and Jimmy Chin, was released. The story of climber (and absolute madman) Alex Honnold's quest to climb El Capitán without any protective equipment, such as a harness or ropes, had us all on the edge of our seats for its entire 96-minute run. The film received numerous awards, including Best Documentary Feature at the following year's Oscars.
The inclusion of the sport in the 2020 Summer Olympics also helped bring the unorthodox sport into the mainstream, with more than 30 climbing gyms opening per year in the US and a 58% increase in visits to climbing gyms in the UK since 2019.
PEAK takes advantage of all the collaborative and cooperative elements of real-life climbing. Source: Press Kit
Since Breath of the Wild, there has been an interest in video games with more realistic climbing mechanics, perhaps responding to the desire of climbers to see the challenges they encounter on the wall reflected in the games they play. Games such as PEAK, born from the collaboration between indie studios Aggro Crab and Landfall, which has sold over 10 million units to date, or White Knuckle, which combines the need to climb with the need to escape from a monster chasing you from below, have dominated conversations in the gaming world in recent months.
I decided to reach out to the developers of some of the upcoming climbing video games to try to understand the effort to create a game that simulates, or is inspired by, this particular sport.
Climbing, Translated
New Heights, by Wikkl, took on the challenge in 2023 of portraying the mechanics of climbing a real wall as realistically as possible. I spoke via Zoom with the studio's co-founder, Guido Boogaard, to ask him about his vision for this new trend and whether it is possible to translate a sport into code.
New Heights. Source: Press Kit
SUPERJUMP
Where did the interest in making a realistic climbing video game come from?
Guido Boogaard
Can you guess?
SUPERJUMP
I guess you climb.
Guido Boogaard
[Laughs] Yes, I climb. But seriously, it started as just a sketch, because there was nothing before. Now there are more [games about climbing], but in the past, all the climbing was automatic. If you think Breath of the Wild, it's quite enjoyable, but it's all automatic.
Which is a shame, because climbing itself is a puzzle game. I mean, climbing in real life is a puzzle game; it's a very video game-like sport. I do other sports, and climbing is one of the most similar to a video game.
So I thought, why hasn't this puzzle been translated into a computer game? And then there's the audience issue. Climbers are generally millennials and young people, so they are more likely to play video games.
But then I realized that making a game is incredibly difficult; I'm literally still working on the climbing system.
SUPERJUMP
Thinking about what you said about the audience, why do you think climbing has become so popular in that sector?
Guido Boogaard
There's the puzzle aspect, but I also think it's popular because you can do it with your friends, and it's not... Well, it is competitive, but in a different way.
It's also not a team sport, like soccer or hockey, where you have to be much more committed. And maybe people are more interested in nature than before, because of all the electronic, almost dystopian, stupidity we're getting into. So maybe it helps with that. It helps me, at least.
Nature in New Heights is beautifully rendered in a realistic style. Source: Press Kit
I like being in nature, which completely contradicts the fact that I'm making a climbing video game. But I want to translate this interest into my other interest, which is computer games.
SUPERJUMP
Looking at the game, it's very easy to imagine myself doing all the different movements, applying all the different pressures. How did you manage to translate the feeling of climbing in real life into a video game?
Guido Boogaard
It's very complicated. First, in real life, you have a lot of control. Just standing up and walking is incredibly difficult for a human, which is why children learn it when they are already one year old. So [in the game] we have to make it a little easier than in real life.
So the character will do their best to get into the position you want them to be in. That's the first thing. The second thing is to calculate whether you can actually do that, whether you are in a position that allows for this movement. So if you're above a hold, you can push; if you're below one, you can pull. It's pure vector math. An incredible amount of vector math.
We calculate everything we can, and it's going to look a little rough at times, because if you look at climbing in real life, it's a little rough.
Total Freedom
Cairn, from The Game Bakers, was one of the most anticipated video games of 2025, before it got delayed to January 2026. It combines realistic climbing simulation, survival elements, and an intimate narrative. Its Marketing Manager, Lauranne Caudaro, and the game's Creative Director, Emeric Thoa, kindly wrote to me in response to a few questions I asked them.
Source: Press Kit
SUPERJUMP
What were the inspirations for combining climbing with survival?
Emeric Thoa
Cairn is the last entry in what we call our freedom trilogy. In Furi, you fight to "live free," and in Haven, you fight to be "free to love whoever you want."
This latest entry concludes the trilogy with a powerful theme: overcoming your limits and achieving total freedom. That's what alpinism is in real life, too. Why do people climb mountains? What makes them feel the need to risk their lives to reach the summit?
It's always been fascinating to me, and it makes a great video game pitch in my opinion. It's simple, but extremely concrete. You're at the bottom, and you see the goal.
The survival mechanics work along with the realistic climbing simulation to immerse you into the ascent. You need resources for the ascent (climbing gear, but also food and water). But it’s not a 100% “collect and craft” survival game; survival supports the main mechanics, which are climbing and planning your route.
SUPERJUMP
The game has a mix of stylized graphics and realistic mechanics. What was the process for deciding the game's level of realism?
Emeric Thoa
Stylized art directions are a part of our studio’s DNA. It helps our games stand out from other games, but it also means the graphic style never gets old. That’s why we asked comic book artist Mathieu Bablet to join the team and work on Cairn.
Amidst the different climbs, you can enjoy the tranquility of your camp. Source: Press Kit
The stylized art direction drives home the fact that Cairn is a realistic simulation, set in a fantasy world. It reinforces the idea that Cairn (like all our games) is a journey into a different world.
SUPERJUMP
I was wondering if anyone on your team does outdoor or indoor bouldering, or if the realism of the climbing is achieved only by studying.
Emeric Thoa
The whole team has tried climbing. We went to a workshop in Chamonix, in the French Alps. There, we did rock climbing on the cliffs, learned climbing techniques, talked to mountain guides, and to Elizabeth Revol, who’s an alpinist who did several 8000m climbs. We also hiked, all the way up to 3840m high at Aiguille du Midi, face to face with the summit of Mont Blanc. It was a lot of fun and a lot of learning to apply in the game (and a good deal of sore muscles too!)
SUPERJUMP
Do you think that the proliferation of climbing games is happening naturally? Or is it following a trend (IRL or in video games)?
Lauranne Cauduro
Climbing is definitely trending, and going back to what Emeric was saying, climbing gives you a very clear goal; you see a summit, and you have to reach it. I think this translates extremely well in terms of gameplay, and games like Peak, Celeste, or Bread and Fred are great examples! But it’s still a very fresh idea, there’s not that many games really focusing on climbing, and definitely none that do it like Cairn, with a focus on realistic climbing and climbing at the core of the experience!
Far From the Summit
Another reason behind the success of these types of games is "kinaesthetic design." This game design technique allows developers to make the player mimic the actions of the characters on-screen, resulting in more immersion. It's not rare to finish an ascent in PEAK with sore hands, tired from holding the controller triggers in order not to fall, just like a climber has to hold a grip on the mountain wall.
Been there. Source: Cairn Press Kit
However, if the past years in the video game industry have taught us anything, it's that there's always room for reinvention and innovation. This emerging genre of climbing video games is far from having exhausted all its potential.
Developers seem to have found an activity that perfectly suits the sensibilities of a considerable niche of players, mixing challenge with personal rewards that go hand-in-hand with self-improvement beyond simply leveling up.
This past November, Frontier Developments provided a general outline of updates coming through December 2025 and into early 2026 for Elite: Dangerous, including the intriguing arrival of operations, a repeatable multi-step encounter for up to four players that blends ship combat and FPS combat that’s slated to arrive early this year. We now have a […]
The fact that ARC Raiders’ use of generative AI development tools for its creation, particularly for its voice work, is a sticky wicket for many shouldn’t come as a surprise in the age of rising slop tides. Still, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Soderlund is not backing down and continues to defend the decision in an […]
You may not believe this, but I didn’t really want to write this column about Final Fantasy XIV because it is entirely based on a game of telephone that is going to disappoint someone down the line. Let’s take a moment to recap. Back a couple of weeks ago, Naoki Yoshida (producer and director of FFXIV) gave […]
Eidos’ iconic Thief franchise returns later this week with Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow. PlayStation LifeStyle spoke with Vertigo Games Principal Designer Nick Witsel and Eidos-Montréal Creative Director Steven Gallagher to learn more about the PS VR2 game. It arrives on PlayStation 5 tomorrow, December 4, 2025.
“Step into the shadows in Thief VR. You are Magpie, a cunning thief orphaned by Baron Northcrest and shaped by the streets. Use VR mechanics to steal, evade, and outsmart the City’s forces. Your goal? A relic in Northcrest’s vault, which uncovers a far greater artifact with a powerful legacy,” says the official description.
Check out our discussion with the duo below, plus some exclusive concept art from the stealth game.
(Photo Credit: Vertigo Games)
PlayStation LifeStyle: One of the reasons why the original Thief games were so innovative was the freedom players had in how they chose to approach gameplay. How does Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow give players agency in how they choose to play and engage with enemies?
Nick Witsel: Indeed, Thief’s approach has always been about providing players with obstacles and a multitude of methods to overcome them. Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow continues this tradition. Levels are provided with multiple paths to your objective, where you need to cleverly figure out which way works best for you. Guards pose the biggest threats, and while you have plenty of tools in dealing with them, everything carries risk. For instance:
Using your blackjack requires that you get close and also leaves you with an unconscious body that might be found.
Throwing an object to create a distraction could result in unwanted attention from other guards.
You could unlock a nearby door and go around, but you might be spotted while picking the lock.
And it’s in weighing these options and deciding what to do that you immerse yourself into the role of the Master Thief.
VR adds a real tactility to the action, especially getting to use the different tools, and sneaking around feels very natural. How does that immersion help the stealth gameplay?
Steven Gallagher: VR is awesome for peeking around corners or over walls, but it’s especially good at quickly checking your surroundings without needing to stop focusing on whatever sneaky business you’re up to. Let’s say you’re trying to quickly pick a lock and slip through a door before a pesky guard you can hear nearby spots you. This is a vulnerable position for a thief to be in with your back to potential danger and unable to quickly check if you’re alone.
Playing a first-person stealth game like this on a screen like a TV or a monitor, you’re usually forced to just hope for the best or disengage and turn your body to be sure you’re still safe. VR, however, allows you to naturally look around as you would in real life while keeping your hands and intention focused on what you’re doing. I find being stealthy in Thief in VR to be a very intuitive way to play, which is a big reason why it’s so enjoyably immersive.
(Photo Credit: Vertigo Games)
The Thief lore is surprisingly rich, as fans know. What was Maze Theory’s approach to the game’s story and getting to view this world in a new, more up-close way?
Witsel: Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is a game made by fans of the franchise. There were a lot of elements we wanted to cover, whilst also ensuring new players wouldn’t feel lost. Telling the story from Magpie’s perspective, who is relatively new to the City and still has plenty to learn, allows us to introduce players to the setting in a natural way, while also allowing us to involve some familiar faces and voices to guide their way.
It was so exciting to hear Stephen Russell in the trailer. How was it working with Stephen to get Garrett’s sense of humor into this game and bring back such a beloved character?
Witsel: He’s still got it. Garrett was back. It was like this big puzzle piece that completed the picture. It’s been an incredible privilege to work with him.
(Photo Credit: Vertigo Games)
Thief veterans will know what to expect, but what’s your best advice for newcomers who are checking this out first because it’s in VR?
Gallagher: I guess remember that you’re a thief, not a fighter. You can defend yourself if the worst happens, but it’s better to be one step ahead of trouble so you don’t find yourself in it. The immersive nature of VR gives you all you need to be a master sneak thief, so stay sharp, keep your eyes open, and stick to the shadows. They’ll never see you coming.
The original PSVR hardware led to a lot of ports that weren’t as good as the PC counterparts. What impressed the team the most about PlayStation VR2 hardware?
Witsel: The OLED lenses are fantastic at conveying the strong and moody atmosphere of Thief’s lighting. Light and dark play a crucial role in the experience, so we can definitely recommend the PSVR2 Headset for this game.
Walton Goggins has arrived in Fallout 76. Yep, you read that right! Prime Video's Fallout TV show is crossing over with the video game franchise that birthed it in a pretty major way.
Goggins's iconic TV character The Ghoul is hosting a new bounty hunting feature, which is available in the game now (ahead of Fallout season 2).
That bounty hunting feature dropped in a big new update, Burning Springs, which also adds a new region to the north-west area of the map.
This new region, Ohio, has been inspired by Fallout 3 and New Vegas, to make sure it thematically resonates with the vibe of Fallout season 2.
One of the key points of interest in this new region is Highway Town, where you’ll find The Ghoul doing some shady business in a bar called The Last Resort. He has a huge stack of bounties to hunt, and you’re gonna help him do exactly that.
To get ahead of the game on this one, Radio Times Gaming travelled to New York City to chat with two of the key developers of Fallout 76 about this exciting new development. So, how did they end up getting The Ghoul himself?
Fallout 76 creative director Jonathan Rush told us: “So, it kind of happened organically. You know, with the new region, we wanted to figure out what the tentpole feature of the new update would be, and something that captured the spirit of that region and also the broader strokes of player feedback came to be bounty hunting, right?”
Rush continued: “And so, who better to host a bounty hunting feature than Walton Goggins? As The Ghoul. I mean, there's nothing better. So yeah, Walton Goggins, of course, being a big fan of Fallout, being a big fan of the games, this was a very, very easy fit to have this character be in this update.
“It was great getting the script written out. There were some writers on our side and a writer on the show side, and they were collaborating there and getting the script into a good place. And, of course, that all comes together once Walton Goggins has that, as like a starting point, and he then really crafts that into his own character, which is The Ghoul.”
What was it like, then, actually seeing Goggins in the booth delivering lines as The Ghoul? “It's amazing,” Rush admitted. “It was amazing watching him record these lines. I found it just astonishing, seeing how quickly he could just transform into The Ghoul, and you're not hearing Walton Goggins anymore. You're hearing The Ghoul. To me, that was just magical.”
Jumping into the game ourselves, we tried to exhaust the dialogue options with The Ghoul to see what has brought him to Appalachia. After some probing, he did obliquely refer to a bounty that he followed out here, but he doesn’t get into details.
“We don't really explain why he's there,” Rush told us. “He's simply there being The Ghoul. He's The Ghoul, as we would expect. He's The Ghoul, doing something that The Ghoul would do, with bounty hunting.
“And so, taking it even further than that for this patch, for this update, didn't really seem wholly necessary. That's not to say that, perhaps, down the road, we learn more, or maybe we don't. But that's part of, I think, the allure, it's the mystery of The Ghoul.
During our couple of hours of playtime with the new update, the bounty system revolving around The Ghoul proved to be very playable and enjoyable indeed.
There are two different types of bounties you can pick up from The Ghoul — there are smaller ‘grunt hunts’ that you could happily handle on your own, and there are larger ‘head hunts’ that function more like raid battles, with other online players joining you to take on a more powerful enemy as a group.
In both of these bounty types, there was a lot of humour to be found in the gameplay. The first grunt hunt we took on was just a scientist wandering around (very Fallout season 1 vibes), who didn’t put up much of a fight. This, in itself, was quite comical as we turned our very well-armed level 300 characters against him.
One of the most memorable head hunts that we faced featured a very powerful old lady in a suit of souped up power armour. This was much trickier, even with a whole group of level 300 players. It’s a very good sign that, every time someone started a head hunt, I immediately wanted to drop what I was doing and join in with the fun.
Certainly, The Ghoul feels right at home in Fallout 76, and it makes sense in the Fallout timeline that he would be alive and active at this point in the overarching story. Bring it on!
Pathea Games, the studio behind the 'My Time At' titles, just unveiled their most ambitious game yet, an open world steampunk fantasy action RPG titled The God Slayer. It's only the latest Chinese developer to go full triple-A action RPG after Game Science (Black Myth: Wukong), Leenzee Games (Wuchang: Fallen Feathers), Ultizero Games (Lost Soul Aside, although that one didn't turn out so well), and S-GAME for the upcoming Phantom Blade Zero. You can read an overview of The God Slayer in our dedicated article. Here, we're publishing an exclusive interview with Pathea's Business Development Director, Yongjin (Aaron) Deng, who […]
Nearly ten years ago, I wrote an opinion piece about HDR gaming being the most groundbreaking feature of the upcoming PlayStation 4 console refresh, then known as 'PS4K' and later released on November 10, 2016, as the PlayStation 4 Pro. Initial information suggested that it would deliver HDR support, unlike the base PS4 model; however, Sony later rolled it out for regular PlayStation 4 consoles as well. These specifics aside, the article's core foundation was the belief that HDR gaming was poised to be the next big thing in computer graphics, even more so than 4K (Ultra HD) resolution. There […]
The Colosseo is wide open and one of its stars is arriving in season 20 of Overwatch 2. Say hello to the game's 45th hero, Vendetta.
Before players get a chance to try out Vendetta in her hero trial next week, I spoke with Blizzard devs in a group interview last week to get the first details about hero 45, who is now confirmed to be the game's first melee-based DPS character.
Image via Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch has history with some of its characters using melee abilities, like Reinhardt's hammer, Genji's slash, or Orisa's Javelin Spin, but as the first fully melee-based Damage hero, Vendetta's kit is all about getting up close and personal with her giant sword to deal damage and wreak havoc on Supports.
"What you'll find with Vendetta, not only is she quite deadly, she's also quite mobile," associate game director Alec Dawson said. "This is a dive-oriented hero, through-and-through. She wants to play alongside Winston, she wants to jump into the backline and wreak a bunch of havoc."
Vendetta uses her massive sword, Palatine Fang, to deal a three-hit melee combo up close, but she needs to move quickly to do so and remain in the fight. That's why two of her abilities are movement based, Whirlwind Slash and Soaring Slice, while the rest are for dealing damage once she's in close proximity to her prey.
Whirlwind Slash is her Left Shift ability that she uses to lunge forward and slash in a circle, while Soaring Strike sees her throw her sword into the air and then jump to it, and she can then follow up with her primary strike for a big overhead slash to the ground.
"I was absolutely over the moon being able to work on this character," senior character modeler Bryan Bedford said. "I'm a classic Tracer main going all the way back to OW1 beta, and so this hero is the ultimate dive hero. If you want to get into a backline and cause chaos, she is the character for you."
Image via Blizzard Entertainment
Vendetta "operates more on a strategy level" compared to other dive heroes, according to Bedford, especially considering her Warding Stance ability that operates on a resource meter. She can use this to hold up her giant sword to block damage, but also from the stance she is able to fire a projectile ability called Projected Edge that will use up about one-third of the resource.
Her final ability, Sundering Blade, is her ultimate, where Vendetta will charge up a massive attack in three phases that will slash downward and cleave through armor and overhealth in the area of effect.
In the interview, the devs mentioned that there are definitely similarities to OW1's DPS Doomfist in Vendetta, and while she won't have the same sort of big burst damage combo as the DPS-turned-tank, she will have similar plays where you want to single out an out-of-position hero to try and take them out. Her passive ability Onslaught enables her to gain movement speed and attack speed when dealing damage, and will likely help this a ton.
With her kit in mind, Dawson said characters with strong crowd control abilities like Ana's Sleep Dart or Cassidy's Flashbang should be able to help counter her in the backline. The devs said if she gets stuck out of position, she can quickly be dealt with, especially with something like a Discord Orb from Zenyatta.
"She's kind of this high risk, high reward personified, more than a lot of our cast," Bedford said. "Once she's in the enemy backline, if she gets stopped or stalled for any reason, she's not a tank, so unless she has saved some of her mobility resources to get back out, she can get shut down."
Vendetta may not be popular with everyone as a strictly melee character, but as a hero who's very high skill and "hard to master," as the devs explained, she'll likely be a big hit with players who love to dive and can manage her resources and cooldowns to get in, deal damage, and get out safely.
Image via Blizzard Entertainment
OW2 players will be able to judge the DPS character for themselves when Vendetta's hero trial begins next week on Nov. 26 and she launches in the full game when season 20 drops on Dec. 9.
007: First Light is a big risk for a medium-sized publisher (IO Interactive)
GameCentral interviews the CEO of IO Interactive about 007: First Light, Eminem in Hitman, and what’s gone wrong with the video games industry this generation.
Ever since Covid and the decline of E3 there’s been far fewer opportunities to interview developers and, in particular, publishers than there used to be. Part of that is due to the increasing rarity of physical events but there’s also a sense that companies would now rather say nothing than risk something that could adversely affect their sales.
So it’s always a welcome surprise when a publisher approaches us and actively wants to talk about the current state of the games industry. Hakan Abrak is CEO of Danish publisher and developer IO Interactive and the reason he wanted to get in contact is that IO are featured twice in this week’s Partner Preview showcase from Xbox.
Not only are they promoting 007: First Light, including support for Xbox Anywhere and Xbox ROG Ally, and the inclusion of the Aston Martin Valhalla, but they also announced that Eminem will be the next Elusive Target for Hitman: World Of Assassination – or rather Eminem will be hunting down his alter ego Slim Shady.
According to Abrak, he wanted to inject some positivity into the games industry, as it suffers from continued worries about investment, layoffs, the influence of AI, and the unhealthy machinations of bigger publishers in general.
He was impressively open about all these issues and more, and clearly very enthused about the launch of 007: First Light next March.
GC: So, the Xbox showcase hasn’t happened yet, but I gather you’ve got a couple of games that are going to be featured?
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
HA: We are very busy working on different games, First Light being one of them, and obviously we are still going on supporting Hitman. But we just thought, without making it sound like we are beating our own chest; we just wanted to show a bit of a light in the industry where there’s a lot of tough news lately.
So, we’re an independent triple-A developer and we are still trying to carry the torch of trying to make ambitious triple-A games. And in the context of the Xbox Showcase today, we just wanted to contribute with some positive news.
GC: I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a report this week showing that people still prefer single-player games to multiplayer. And I wonder if a lot of the problems that’re going on today, are because companies are making the games that they want to be successful rather than the games that people actually want to play.
HA: Interesting question. So in terms of making games that the player really wants, I think it’s about risk assessment. It’s a lot of risk, right? So, when you’re taking big risks, I think for a lot of the big corporations, they have to think about… this IP has worked before, so should we do a new IP and take a bet on some of the trends they see in the indie space or mobile space? Should we turn that into a mechanic in triple-A or should we try to think that it’s a sure bet to do another iteration within a big IP? And I think for a while that was maybe the least risky thing to do. But I think we are in a place where that’s not even a sure thing to do for a lot of these corporations.
I don’t think it’s a sure thing anymore just to take a big IP and iterate on that, thinking it’s going to be worth your triple-A investment. And I think things like that are changing. And I think after Covid, where we saw these huge surges of everybody playing everything, staying home and playing, all of a sudden people are a bit more selective again, now they’re not just sitting at home and playing.
And the traditions of growth in the industry have changed and all the investment has been thrown at new companies that maybe grew faster than the culture could carry it, to do solid games. That’s why I think a lot of investors are also pulling a bit back. So it’s a complex thing, but it is risk adverse for big companies and when you are thinking about some of the indie productions that have success now, I think maybe they can afford… they have to maybe be a bit different. They have to take some risks, they have to be creative with some of these things.
So I think that’s very exciting to follow. And you also see a lot of companies killing big services because it’s a very hard space for them; it’s where they thought maybe that was a way to get sustainable business. But that has been shown to be very difficult as well.
007: First Light is nominated in The Game Awards most anticipated category (IO Interactive)
I think for IO Interactive, we are not a big supertanker. We are not a small indie either. We are in that independent triple-A space and we have to be very careful. We are very ambitious with our scope, but we have to be careful what we do. But I think not being ambitious, or taking some risk, is also very dangerous for a company like us and what we have done, when we’re thinking about single-player… It’s a very interesting angle you have there, right?
Yes, I’ve seen the report, people still want single-player and every time there was a myth about single player’s death – like, it’s five times more than multiplayer – that’s always been disproven. And when we look at what we have done with Hitman, we are going on as single-player as a service, as we call it, for 10 years now.
And it’s unthinkable, like what we have done and achieved. That was maybe unthinkable 15 years ago, with Hitman, because Hitman has always been very successful for us, but nevertheless it’s always been a niche product. But the way we have built these campaigns and collected three games in one, and we have these elusive targets, or we have escalations, we have these living, breathing expansions of the universe that we’re doing, that has led us to having around 85 million players playing World Of Assassination.
We have north of 25 million copies sold and we have more than 1 million active users every month, still 10 years after the single-player game was first launched. So, I think there’s other ways of attacking this than just trying to make your own battle royale. We are not too big not to have to think out of the box, but we are able to pull off very high quality games at the same time.
GC: It always amazes me how quick the industry is to copy some things and how absolutely adamant it is to ignore the success of other things. Why has no one tried to copy you with Hitman? Why does no one ever try to copy Nintendo? No one ever seems to learn from past mistakes, either their own or others’. It’s worrying that so many of the decisions in the industry are based on what will please an investor that knows nothing about games and is only looking for short-term gain. Especially when you see so many layoffs, so many people’s lives being sacrificed for nonsense reasons.
HA: It’s very tough. It’s very tough. And I think all industries go through ups and downs, and I think this is the maturity of the gaming industry, where investors thought it was a gold rush through Covid. Now it’s a bit more of a nuanced picture. So the future… there’s very great questions of being risk adverse and bandwagon-ing versus putting a lot of money after being original.
Why do people not copy Nintendo? I think there’s something Nintendo does that’s difficult to copy, in terms of being very innovative with their gameplay mechanics, within their known IPs and being able to keep them relevant like that is a great ability.
Somebody who comes close to that is Sony. But where they’re copying a bit is to be less of a, ‘Here is your console in your living room.’ I think some of the things they’re doing with the distribution and the consumption of games, with Portal and these handhelds and whatnot, might actually change some behaviours and have more casual gamers play a broader range of games. But you still need to have a strong platform for how you approach gameplay.
GC: What also worries me is there’re so few independent companies left in the industry, with a question mark over EA and Ubisoft now too. Are we looking at a future where only two or three corporations own everything? Or maybe we’ll see an end to giant-sized third party publishers and instead medium-sized ones like yourself will be seen as a more viable way of connecting with an audience and innovating without so much corporate pressure.
HA: I hope so. I mean…
GC: I get the impression that you guys like making games, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that was true of some of the corporate execs I’ve spoken to over the years. I can see that look in your eyes where you’re passionate about what you do, but when I talk to one of these corporate drones, that light is not there.
HA: I think there’s something about if you want to make a game for everyone, you’re making a game for no one. You have to have some soul and take a risk, you have to take some chances. And I know we’ve only done our own IPs, throughout the years – Mini Ninjas, Kane & Lynch, Freedom Fighters, and Hitman obviously being the most successful of those. This is the first time we’re doing a licence game, a big IP. This is probably the only IP in the universe that we’ll work on that is not our own, because somehow, subliminally, it feels like we’ve been training for this for 25+ years! [laughs]
But one of the things that was very important for us, is to leave our fingerprints on it as well, to put part of our soul into this, in terms of an original Bond origin story, it’s extremely important for us. So, having a financial foundation is important to be able to do games. So that part is important, but what’s really, really important is to make amazing games.
And this is kind of the pinnacle point for us. We have this new IP, a fantasy project, we are working on; Hitman is going strong; and then there is maybe a start of something great with Bond. We have spent six years on this. This is by far most ambitious project we’ve done. The game is done, you can play it from start to end.
GC: Oh good. I half expected you to be announcing a delay when you organised this.
HA: [laughs] I mean, we are obviously polishing and bug fixing, but the game is coming out spring next year and it’s just amazing to be here after six years of journey. And we are single-player as a service, we can do multiplayer. We still are looking for edges and still thinking out of the box and pouring everything we have into these things.
And hopefully companies like Remedy can keep taking risks and make mistakes and take risks again in the future. Larian Studios hopefully will do that and keep going strong. The indies of today will hopefully be the agile triple-A companies of tomorrow and still do games with soul. That’s what I wish for the industry.
Hakan Abrak is a CEO that actually likes games (IO Interactive)
GC: We’re running out of time now but I’m sure you’ll be glad if I skip over MindsEye. [laughs] But… are you genuinely optimistic about the future of the games industry? In all my years of covering it, I’ve never seen companies being so recklessly destructive as they are now. The layoffs and the acquisitions, and the obsession with live service games… none of that has stopped, we’ve just got used to it. And yet it’s all still as poisonous now as when all this nonsense started three years or so ago.
HA: It is very tough right now. It looks very bleak right now. This is not the first big crisis that the games industry has been through though. There was a point where games, when they were mass produced, all of a sudden they were just like slap-on products. So we had a dip before. But I think it’s such a strong industry for creators and creation that this will not go away.
It ought to be a bright future, a future that will continue, but as every industry that gets a slap or two through a maturity phase… that’s what we are going through as well. There are big questions in the future.
Now Bond is 100% organic, as I call it. It’s not AI and whatnot, but we don’t know what kind of games the indies of today will be able to create tomorrow. So I think creativity will prevail and because you and me, as gamers, we will look for something that feels different and that is original.
And I think these things will have a way of balancing themselves. Live service games have become stale, they’ve become samey. In the name of taking less risk it actually imposed a lot more risk, including unfortunately on human lives losing their jobs.
But I think there’s examples, and hopefully we can be one of the examples, without sounding too brash about this, but we are definitely trying to show another way. And I think there are other studios, upcoming and a few veterans left, that I think can maybe be examples moving forward, hopefully.
GC: That’s great. Well, thank you very much for your time. Thank you.
HA: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Hitman has been IO’s bread and butter for decades (IO Interactive)
Like the old saying goes: "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
As if fished out from some old bin at a yard sale, Kingdoms of the Dump feels like a lost classic that somehow flew under your radar for years. Perhaps a childhood favourite, discovered by chance at a used game store, a blind purchase of a dusty cartridge with the promise and allure of adventure, nothing but a cover image to stir the imagination.
We all have such tales of childhood revelry, where a passion for the medium burgeoned into a flame. Long drives home looking at the manual in the back seat, late nights lost in a magical world, bathed in the glow of the CRT TV, your hand gliding across the static of the screen.
If there is nostalgia in these words, then this is the cartridge for you.
Creators Roach and Everdredd are no strangers to the world of the used and discarded. Working as janitors for the past 13 and 9 years, respectively, the two envisioned a magical world of garbage, born of grime and waste.
"They say 'write what you know,'" said creator and director, Roach.
Source: Press Kit.
Roach and Everdredd were neighbors as kids, and they began creating games early. From crude board games to a Pokémon knock-off on business cards, to eventually working with RPG Maker on the PSX, it was a passion that lingered into adulthood.
"I wanted to create a children's book as a commercial side project. Pulling from my job as inspiration, we started to work on creating the concept of the Lands of Fill, and what would eventually become the Kingdoms of the Dump. I became so enamored with the world we were creating, it wasn't long before I turned back to what I knew best: creating games. It was easy to convince Matt (Everdredd) to expand it into a full outline. The story came to us almost fully formed in our minds, and while we would spend the next decade shaping it into what it is today, the initial concept was so strong, much of it remains intact."
But the two knew they would need a team to reach the vision they had created. RPG Maker had its limitations, and there were the vast visuals to think of and music to accompany it. So they created an RPG Maker proof-of-concept to recruit their team.
"Maybe fifteen years ago? My composer bobbyghostly sought me out on AOL instant messenger, after seeing some of my screenshots in an rpgmaker forum. We collaborated on Eagleland (an Earthbound fan game) together after that, and he made some seriously impressive work that unfortunately never saw the light of day. I immediately had him in mind when I was developing the KotD prototype, and he made the midis that were used in it. So he has been on board from the beginning."
Roach and Everdreddwould go on to recruit William Kage, known for his stellar SNES-inspired albums and sound fonts. They even had a guest track by Hiroki Kikuta of Secret of Mana and Koudelka fame, bringing a touch from those golden years, from whence melodies still echo in your head.
"William Kage was brought on in 2017 when we moved out of the prototype phase and into pre-production. I had seen him at MAGFest showing off his SNES sound fonts and kept him in the back of my mind. Later, I pitched the vision to him via email to see if he would be interested in joining forces. The balance would be kind of a Mitsuda/Uematsu split ala Chrono Trigger. We've been working together ever since."
DM404, Cosmocha33, Evgenij, and Francis Coulombe joined as their art team, bringing an authentic SNES aesthetic. Their combined efforts are both rich and detailed, making a landfill a thing of beauty.
"Solar Mongoose, our programmer, was found on reddit and before long we brought in the "Dreamsloth" devs from Duelyst II to lend more muscle getting the game finished."
And so the two janitors were now a small team, and with that, "The Sanitation Department" was formed, and The Lands of the Fill came to life.
Source: Press Kit.
Kingdoms of the Dump revels in its garbage influence. From the environment, characters, and even down to game mechanics, it uses every bit of its source material creating an imaginative and unique world. It's a world filled with scrap dragons, toxic sludge snails, warrior roaches, and a fridge with something left inside too long that now hungers. A giant washing machine looms over the countryside, oozing bubbles unceasingly, home to the Laundromancers of the Kingdom of Detergos. An ornate, bookshelf tower rises high into the sky, where the Librarians of Book's End seek what is overdue. Cardboard Knights guard the Castle of Garbagia, nestled between mountains of trash, tires, and exports of moldy vegetables.
"We've spent many years creating the Lands of Fill in over-detail. I think players will be surprised how in-depth it all is."
Source: Press Kit.
Roach and Everdredd mined their concept down to the very bottom of the dumpster, finding inspiration in their everyday work. Every item, bug, mashed-together object, and mysterious thing better left unknown, was potential for the Lands of Fill.
"'Garbage Juice' is the Elixir of the game, that's what all the Janny's call the liquid that collects at the bottom of the dumpster. Something truly foul to us is one of the best healing items in the game."
Even their breaks would surprise them with inspiration.
"I remember writing a serious council scene, and I was at work in the breakroom. And there's a pile of junk in the corner, a green bean bag, a water cooler, and a cardboard box with a globe on it. Boom. We had the whole council right there. From a sad pile of trash to some of our core side characters."
They wouldn't be the only trash-inspired characters. Kingdoms of the Dump follows Dustin Binsley, the trashcan squire, on his quest across the Five and Half Kingdoms of the Dump to rescue the trash-picked King and defeat the Toxic Grimelin Army. He will be joined by his best friend Ratavia (a thief rat), Walker Jacket (the most feared librarian in Book's End), Lute (a broken instrument and understudy to Walker), Cerulean (a wizard of the wash), and Musk (a stinkbug and master of infiltration from the Buggarian underworld). Together, they will journey across the kingdoms to hopefully prevent all-out war.
"It could, you know, come off as just a goofy thing, the whole idea. It could get really stupid if you let it. My favorite joke in the whole game is that it treats the concept completely seriously. It's got a garbage coat of paint but it's full of soul inside."
Source: Press Kit.
Alongside that coat of garbage, Kingdoms of the Dump is designed to evoke a 90s JRPG flavour, a trait it pulls off so well it feels less like tribute and more like time-travel. But the creators didn't want to be constrained by the limitations of the SNES.
"Our goal was always to capture the spirit of the times, not to be overly hung up on the restrictions. The SNES was all about doing clever things with what they had, and we try to keep true to that."
What emerges is something new that feels like your memory of that time and those games.
Source: Official Website.
Unrestricted, Kingdoms of the Dump knows what to pick from its dumpster diving. It incorporates many fan-favourite elements of JRPGs and combines them in one package. It's narrative-based, featuring turn-based combat with tile effects and timed hits. Field exploration features jumping and climbing, adding layers to exploration and moving around hazards and enemies. Players can quickly toggle between the characters on the field to use their unique abilities, like scraping junk and metal enemies as Dustin, shooting as Walker, and climbing ropes as Ratavia. Lastly, there is a large Mode-7-inspired world map to explore by land, sea, and air.
Something new from something old.
Source: Official Website.
Trash is a funny thing. What we see as garbage is the amalgamation of things that were once special to someone. It's made up of once-cherished possessions, wrappings for a gift, things used so much they eventually broke, scraps of that which nourished us, things that just helped us through a day, and the lost things never to be found. It is like a book at a yard sale with a message of love scrawled inside, or that favourite game someone outgrew. It was a Super Nintendo cartridge I had found as a kid, later sold away; a cartridge that made my love of storytelling and this medium grow and set me on a writerly path.
Source: Kickstarter
What makes Kingdoms of the Dump special is that Roach and Everdredd took the old and discarded, making a world that reignites its purpose and beauty, and they deliver it in a package reminiscent of the old. Those games that are special to us, those pixels and stories created memories that last forever.
"Classic JRPGs and Super Nintendo games are what Matt and I grew up playing as kids, so we knew the power they had. I remember us renting "Final Fantasy III" (6) and "Mario RPG" from Wow! Video for weeks on end, playing through the entirety of the games that way. Now the idea that others could be picking up our game, and be inspired and go on to create something of their own one day... how cool is that?"
David Baszucki, the CEO of Roblox, has been known to say some pretty outlandish things, but his recent interview with the New York Times might have ended up being a carpet bombing of poorly considered answers, as he tried to spin problems into “opportunities” and speak positively about tech additions that are anything but positive. […]
December 2nd is coming awfully fast — just two weeks now! — and the excitement for World of Warcraft player housing is hitting a fever pitch, especially with many testers exploring the system in beta. It’s great to see the creativity of this community spring up around the system, and I look forward to even […]
For many people, the absolute pinnacle of a career is the seat at the top of the table, to be president or CEO of a big international company. What people seldom think of is what happens after you step down. For Sohei Niikawa, who was president of Nippon Ichi Software until three years ago, it’s a chance to start over. This do-over, as he calls it, is one step towards his vision for a happier world.
On a crisp November’s day, Niikawa sat down with me to discuss not only his first game as an indie developer, Etrange Overlord, but how he got here and, most importantly, what comes next.
“So in Japan, we’re calling it a ‘Sushi Lane Musical Action Adventure’,” he tells me, after watching the trailer together. “For the West, we’re calling it a ‘Revolving Lane Musical Action RPG’.”
These sushi lanes carry various power-ups and special weapons to our heroine, Étrange von Rosenburg — a duke’s daughter who was wrongfully accused of treason, condemned to hell and sentenced to death. Waking up after her execution, she finds herself beset by demons. Unperturbed, she sets about conquering Hell so that she can live her best afterlife.
It’s a light-hearted dark comedy that fits perfectly with the franchise Niikawa is best known for: Disgaea.
Sohei Niikawa was producer and writer for most of the Disgaea series to date.
The Disgaea series is set across various Netherworlds, and sees antihero demons embark on humorous stories between rounds of tactical RPG action. Disgaea 7 Complete, which was released earlier this year, is the latest edition of this, and we gave it a whopping 9/10.
“The thing that I really like about Etrange Overlord,” Niikawa said, “is the main character. She has a very free spirit. There’s a lot of overlap between her and I, with me also having begun my own sort of second life after leaving my previous company.
“I’m working really hard in a lot of ways because I want her to be popular.”
Étrange von Rosenburg front and centre in Etrange Overlord
Niikawa-san continues, “This will be the first title that I’m releasing since I started working independently from NIS.” This do-over, as he calls it, also has him starting from scratch as he claims to be in a relatively weak position within the games industry right now. He is, after all, an indie developer releasing the first game he wrote under his new pen name, Roman Kitayama, and his new company, Super Niche.
“I’m working really hard in a lot of ways because I want her to be popular.”
Naturally, that hasn’t stopped him from adding an impressive roster of names to Etrange’s credits.
“In Japan there’s a famous developer called Gemdrops, and the president of this company happens to be the same age as me.” This president famously worked on Niikawa’s first game, Rhapsody: a Musical Adventure. “As soon as he knew that I had left the company, he reached out to me saying he would like to make a game, and so that’s how Estrange Overlord came about.
“This will be the first time we’re making games together in about 30 years! Essentially, Etrange Overload is kind of a mix of that Rhapsody title we first worked on together and Disgaea.”
And this isn’t the only pedigree going into Etrange. “The character designer for the game is actually Shinichirou Otsuka, who’s very famous for his work on the RE:Zero series,” Niikawa adds.
Famous names
The talk of famous names turned our conversation towards Roman Kitayama, the name Niikawa used to pen Etrange Overlord. I asked what this name meant and why he chose it.
“So of course, in Japanese, ‘Kitayama’ can mean a ‘Northern mountain’. And the first place where I built my home was a northern mountain.”
But these are not the kanji Niikawa picked for himself. And in true Japanese fashion, there’s some wordplay at hand. Instead of the obvious 北山, Niikawa chose 喜多山 for Kitayama.
“That’s a really uncool name, dad…”
The Yama bit (mountain) is the same, as a nod towards his home. “But for ‘Kita’, I purposefully used the kanji for both ‘to enjoy’ or ‘to be excited about something’ as well as the kanji for ‘a lot’. So, it means ‘to have a lot of enjoyment’.”
The Roman bit is a bit more complicated. “In Japanese, the phrase romantic doesn’t refer to romantic comedies etc, but more of a classical, romanticised idea — that sense of dreams or the kinds of things that that interest us or excite us.
The problem, however, is that as cool as Niikawa thinks his new name is, the younger generation may disagree.
“My daughter tells me that’s a really uncool name, dad…”
Current games
In the spirit of our regular What We Played column, and because it’s interesting to know what games fuel game makers, I asked Niikawa to name the last game he played that really stuck with him.
The problem, of course, is that Niikawa is working so hard on writing novels and designing games that he can only play games in short bursts — ”I really like games that are very replayable, and I only need to play them for 5–10 minutes, here and there.”
“Solitaire is the game I’m playing most right now! To be honest with you, I never played Solitaire until this year. I’m like ‘Wow, Solitaire is really fun!’ So I’m actually doing a little bit of experimenting on my own right now to see if maybe I can make a game that’s like Solitaire but with a little bit of me in it?”
Starting over
Returning to Niikawa’s career arc, the idea of a career do-over by starting his second life at the same time as Etrange is a beautiful way to look at things.
“I want to take both my failures and my successes from my time at NIS into my second life,” he explains. “I’m in a very interesting situation where it’s kind of like I’m playing a roguelite.
“I’ve jumped in, I’ve built up experience and then I got game over. Now I’m starting over from the beginning, but I get to utilise my experience to drive me forward.”
Those experiences are clear, both in terms of game design and running a company.
“I’m starting over from the beginning, but I get to utilise my experience to drive me forward.”
In terms of game design, the tone is the most obvious thing he is carrying through. The mix of dark underworld vibes with light-hearted tone and at-times slapstick writing is something of a signature for Niikawa.
“There’s a couple of reasons for that,” Niikawa explains, when I asked what draws him to the theme of lighthearted darkness. “One is that there’s not too many other people that tend to do that, but then the other part is just simply because I like it.”
Ultimately, Niikawa says, games are entertainment, and he wants his games to bring people joy. This, he says, drives how he builds his games. They have to be both kind to the user and easy to understand. The problem is that if they’re too difficult to get into, the player won’t get to the bit that makes the game interesting.
“What really gives you a good idea about whether you’re going in the right direction is when somebody sits down to play your game and gets a game over. Do they still want to continue playing despite that?”
“I think what becomes important there is how interesting the story is and how interesting the mechanics are, but also is there a sense of ‘If I just keep going or keep trying a little bit more you know can I get a little bit further?’
“So whenever I’m working on a game I tend to pay close attention to those first two hours of gameplay to see if it meets those requirements: is it kind of the player and is it easy to follow?”
Legacy
It’s difficult to look forward all the time, especially with such an impressive past. We are, after all, we’re all human. And as creators, it’s easy to get caught up in past projects. Not so for Niikawa. When asked if there were aspects of past projects he would revisit, his answer was instant.
“I don’t really think about it that much, to be honest! I don’t focus on the past. I just think about what I’ve learned so far and I build on it to keep making things better.”
So, what does Niikawa think about his legacy, if he’s not one to look over his shoulder?
“For NIS, I feel like the company itself is my legacy. I genuinely think that had it not been for Rhapsody and Disgaea, it wouldn’t exist as the company it is now. I take great meaning from having worked at NIS America and helped to build that company.
“But moving forward with Super Niche, I want my legacy to be more focused around not just games necessarily but all kinds of forms of entertainment.
“I’m 52 years old. I don’t know if I’ll live to be 70 or 80, but honestly right up till the end I want to keep making new content.
“And that could be multiple things — not just games but light novels, manga and board games. There’s a lot of different things that I’d like to work on.”
“I’m 52 years old. I don’t know if I’ll live to be 70 or 80, but honestly right up till the end I want to keep making new content”
Niikawa’s love for entertaining people really shines through as he picked up a Super Famicon cartridge that had been repurposed as a business card holder.
“This is actually an Indie game that’s in development right now,” he tells me. “There’s a man named Yoshitsuna Kobayashi who worked with me on the very first Disgaea, and he’s the person putting this video game together.
“He’s actually already quit the games industry once, but I’ve always thought he is a genius game creator and if he were to disappear from the industry I think it would be a huge blow. So I’ve kind of invited him to sort of come home, as it were, and work with me on making games in the future.
“And I look at that as a very meaningful activity. My greatest desire is actually to fill the world with more and more interesting pieces of media, whether it’s my own works that I’m invested in doing or helping someone else put their work out to the world as a producer.
“Really, behind all of that is just the idea that the more positive things that we can put out into the world for people to enjoy, the better. If people can enjoy them, and if that helps the world become a more peaceful place, nothing could make me happier.”
The Steam Frame, a new VR headset Valve just announced alongside a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, is both a simpler and more complex virtual reality kit than 2019’s Valve Index. While it lacks the Index’s fancy finger-tracking controllers, the hybrid headset can run Steam games straight from its own onboard storage, aided by controllers that adopt a more conventional gamepad (or Steam Deck)-style layout. The Frame’s goal, therefore, is to let its wearers play as many VR and non-VR games as possible – with its ARM-based Snapdragon chip posing both challenges and opportunities to spread that compatibility into Android VR games as well.
Six Days in Fallujah was originally announced in 2009. It is a first-person shooter based on the 2004 conflict in Iraq. It was met with much opposition because it is based on modern real-world events. This may not seem like a big deal in 2024 but things were slightly different in the years following 9/11. […]The post https://thegamefanatics.com/real-warfare-with-six-days-in-fallujah/ appeared first on The Game Fanatics,.
