Any fan of tabletop gaming knows the struggle of getting new people to sit down around a table and listen while you tell them about the complex, arcane rules that take almost as long to explain as it takes to play the actual game. It’s tons of fun once you’re all caught up and playing, deep into the weeds of a game like Gloomhaven, but the barrier for entry is high.Developed by Secret Door (a Dreamhaven studio), Sunderfolk aims to bring more people to the (virtual) tabletop, using a unique control interface, easy-to-pick-up gameplay that gradually grows in difficulty, and weapon-wielding animals. These well-armed critters are the players, Sunderfolk seeing two to four setting out on their fantasy adventure at a time. While plenty of the hexagonal, grid-based action takes place on the big screen – be that TV or monitor – players use their phones to direct their characters, animal versions of classic fantasy archetypes like a rogue, bard, or wizard, in turn-based …

It’s not often that you get to see video games when they’re so early in development that they more closely resemble messy amalgamations of cubes and shapes than anything you’d actually expect to grace your screen, but thanks to this yearly trend, we can all be given a glimpse into the unknown.The trend in question is Blocktober, which opens the door for developers and designers to show how their games looked before all the shiny textures and trimmings were put on top. Started in 2017, it encourages creators to share old blockmesh designs used while their games were still coming together – doing so really helps highlight the hard work that goes into bringing projects to life. This year, we’ve seen submissions from the devs behind Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Apex Legends, God of War: Ragnarok, and many more. Santa Monica Studio senior level designer Jon Hickenbottom has shared an early behind-the-scenes look at Svartalfheim’s Nidavellir Port in God of War: Ragnarok, and t…

Metaphor: ReFantazio has a mix of real-time and turn-based combat because director Katsura Hashino wanted it to have battles reminiscent of movies and manga.Hashino explained the reason for Metaphor: ReFantazio’s hybrid combat system in a new interview on the Official Xbox Podcast (timestamped here). In it, he said there are “remnants” of Shin Megami Tensei 3’s ‘press turn’ battle system in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but ultimately the latter’s evolved into something that lets you blitz through weaker enemies without expending time and resources on them, and still slow down for big, epic faceoffs with more important enemies.”If you’re fighting a really weak enemy, you have this option to use a completely action-based system where you can just knock them out of the park and then move on,” Hashino said via a translator. “But if you face off against a more powerful foe, you enter the command battle system. This is going back to the idea of manga and movie-style combat, where you see the main c…

I’ve been sitting with the news that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will only carry over three decisions from Dragon Age: Inquisition for a few weeks now. The more I think about it, the more curious I am to discover Veilguard’s direction and what those choices will mean for the upcoming RPG. Right off the bat, it has to be said that carrying on a series like Dragon Age is far from simple. Not only is it home to rich lore, history, and a myriad of choices across a trio of distinctly different games, but it’s also been 10 years since the last entry came our way. In many ways, the next installment is a juggling act for BioWare, acting as an entry point for newcomers, a re-entry point for lapsed players who have been away from Thedas for a decade, and a continuation for long-time fans who have been eagerly waiting to return. As someone who’s been longing for answers to a lot of questions that past Dragon Age games left hanging in the air, I definitely fall into the latter category. A part …

That famous Halo 2 demo from E3 2003 is finally going to be playable later this year.More than a year before Halo 2 hit store shelves, publisher Microsoft debuted a full-fat nine-minute demo of the game at E3 2003 that made the already hyped shooter an even bigger event. But the entire demo’s mission and ideas like the winding city highways never saw the light of day and were scrapped as Bungie made last minute changes to the game.

Halo 2 – E3 2003 Gameplay Demo Trailer [HD] – YouTube

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There was never any reason to think the scrapped ‘Earth City’ mission would rear its head again – that is, until 343 Industries and Digsite, a team focused on restoring content from the fabled FPS series, announced that the demo’s contents would be making a free comeback in Halo: The Master Chief Collection via Steam workshop.At this weekend’s Halo World Championship Series 2024, 343i revealed the demo would be revived for Halo 2’s 20th anniversary on November 9, alongside a first look at …

The Destiny 2 NES006 quest unlocks the final research upgrades for Failsafe but it’s a time-consuming quest as you’ve got to get a lot of kills. Although, before you even get to the killing part, you need to start the quest by following your Proximity Sensor Alert in one of the Echoes activities in Destiny 2, and this isn’t explained especially clearly. Once you do have the Minotaur weapon specimen in hand, you can go about completing your field research by using several weapons and damage types to kill enemies, so to get it done quickly, here are some tips for completing the Specimen ID: NES006 quest in Destiny 2.How to start the Destiny 2 Specimen ID NES006 quest Destiny 2 Echoes guidesDestiny 2 Planetary Assimilation Pistons
Destiny 2 Encoded Log
Destiny 2 Enigma Protocol
Destiny 2 NES004
Destiny 2 Perfect ParadoxThe Destiny 2 NES006 research specimen quest must first be found by investigating a proximity sensor alert from Failsafe, just like the Destiny 2 NES003 quest. After…

In Helldivers 2’s latest Major Order, high command confirms that the “peaceful and righteous liberation” of planet Claorell was a success. The thing is, the Automatons still haven’t gotten the message and are trying to snatch it back, so your new job is to fend off three big Automaton attacks over the next three days on Claorell. The kicker is that you’d better hold the planet and the Deep Mantle Forge Complex we need for our new Democracy Space Station, otherwise the DSS “will be delayed.” “Any unnecessary delay risks its discovery and attack; already, the Ministry of Truth has identified multiple Automaton cyberattacks on DSS-related servers,” the Major Order reads. “They do not appear to have discovered the project’s nature or location yet – but it is only a matter of time.” This is the first time in the ongoing DSS narrative arc that a Major Order has immediately doubled up on a planet, throwing players a bit of a twist. Great, now do it again, high command seems to…

In another timeline, Blizzard may have its own version of Valve’s PC-dominating Steam store, but in our timeline it reportedly rejected a pitch back to expand its Battle.net launcher into a broader PC gaming storefront.That’s according to a new report from Bloomberg reporter and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels author Jason Schreier, who, in his new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (as PC Gamer spotted), writes that former Blizzard programmer Patrick Wyatt proposed a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games” around 2000, three years before Valve released the Counter-Strike client that grew into the mega-store Steam is today. Mike O’Brien, who’d go on to join Wyatt and Jeff Strain to co-found Guild Wars studio ArenaNet after leaving Blizzard, apparently supported the pitch at the time, but the idea of a Battle.net store never made it past the company’s upper management. You’ve got to wonder if someone in the company’s C-sui…

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2024

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2025

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When it comes to upcoming Switch games still to welcome in 2024, Nintendo’s console has plenty of life left in it. While there’s no doubt that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 were obvious high marks last year, 2024 has its fair share of exciting games from Nintendo itself, as well as many others.Among the new games of 2024, there is still time for (one hopes) Hollow Knight: Silksong, among many other high-profile third-party releases. That’s on top of the upcoming first-party games like Mario & Luigi: Brothership. And that’s assuming Nintendo doesn’t even announce more titles before the year’s through. We’ve also listed some long-awaited Switch ports and upcoming indie games to get hyped for if you’re not really into any of the best Mario games.But before you head to other pages, there’s genuinely something for everyone in our roundup of upcoming Switch games down below. Be it platformers, JRPGs, or the newest cre…

Ghost of Yotei is the name of the official sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, which will put us in the role of a new protagonist in another region of Japan. Revealed as the big surprise closing announcement in the PlayStation State of Play September 2024 showcase, we got our very first look at the upcoming open-world adventure from developer Sucker Punch, and it looked every bit as beautiful as the game that came before it. Happily, we won’t have to wait too long to see it arrive either, with the unveiling of the follow-up also confirming it will be coming our way in 2025. After news that a Ghost of Tsushima movie was in the works back in 2021, there’s long since been a lot of chatter surrounding the possibility of seeing Ghost of Tsushima 2. Luckily, the showcase at last gave us the confirmation we’d all been waiting for, with the announcement trailer showing off impressive vistas, offering story hints, and more. As one of the biggest new games coming our way next year, it’s certainly …