The good news is that The Witcher 3, already a very good-looking game, is about to get even more good-looking when its next-gen update is released. The bad news is that, for anyone playing the game on PC, loads of your favourite mods from the last seven years aren’t going to work anymore.
As CDPR explain in a blog post, “updating a game means that we change various files, so the mods that modify those exact files stop working”. And when it comes to making those updates, CDPR have prioritised changes that make the base game better, over keeping older things the same for the sake of mods.
Acknowledging that it has been six years since the last major update to the PC version of the game, though, CDPR say that’s “a long time to get used to one’s favourite mods”, and so in an effort to make “this transition to be as smooth as possible” have compiled a list of some of the community’s favourite mods, tested them and shared which ones work with the next-gen update and which ones don’t.
Some of them work! Sadly loads of them, especially the ones reliant on scripting, don’t. As CDPR say, “Because we are changing scripts in the update due to the addition of a new quest, most of the mods that are based on scripts will error out”. For mod creators concerned about this, a team of “modding experts” from CDPR will be around to “provide help and advice to modders on forums post-release when possible.”
Helping to alleviate this somewhat, though, is an accompanying announcement that the next-gen update will be shipping with some fan-made mods baked into it at launch:
Additionally, we are including several popular mods in the update (they’ll be available depending on the platform). We obtained permissions from their creators, reimbursed them, and they’ll be featured in the credits of the updated game. The mods were reworked and assets optimised as needed, and the game adjusted to run with them. There was even a case when a dev got so engrossed in tinkering when including a mod that he ended up simply remaking that particular aspect of the game. So, in a way, the game comes with some mods already included.
It all started with a question: “How do you get into the church?” The answer, it turns out, is simple: You don’t—at least not yet. Yes, Nier: Automata’s baffling secret door was all just an intricate mod.
If you haven’t been following along, Nier: Automata’s secret door had all the makings of a pantheonic gaming secret. Two months ago, one Nier player, known only as their Reddit handle, Sadfutago, started asking around on niche subreddits about a hidden church. But Nier: Automata, an action-RPG developed by PlatinumGames and released in 2017, didn’t have a location that matched such a description, which led the few people who paid attention to call bullshit.
Eventually, Sadfutago posted video evidence of the discovery, located in the Copied City, a level of Nier: Automata that’s devoid of color and texture, giving it the look of a game in early development. That clip—and subsequent, more extensive clips—sent the community into a tizzy. Some fans thought it was a legit instance of cut or hidden content for Nier: Automata. Others figured it was totally fake, either a hoax or a mod or a viral marketing campaign orchestrated by Nier director Yoko Taro, who’s no stranger to hijinks. (Here’s a thorough rundown of the whole saga.) More still did the one thing the internet does best: Meme it into oblivion.
Well, it turns out the whole area was the work of three modders: DevolasRevenge, who designed the geography and architecture; Woeful_Wolf, who created the tools in Blender; and RaiderB, who wrote the scripting tools. They’re planning on making everything public, but not for a few days, DevolasRevenge tells Kotaku. It’s been quite the week. They’re tired.
“Originally, it was supposed to be a little joke to show people, and we fully expected data miners like Lance [McDonald] and Grojdg to shoot us down in two seconds,” DevolasRevenge says. “But they were questioning it as well.”
The team’s statement.Image: DevolasRevenge / Woeful_Wolf_ / RaiderB
At first, the footage seemed legit. But over the past few days, Sadfutago’s posts have started to include dead giveaways. One of their latest Reddit posts mentioned “Zinnia”—a niche aspect of Nier lore—which indicated Sadfutago, whoever they were, was more knowledgeable than they let on. Plus, the whole church area contained assets from Nier: Replicant‘s more recent remaster, which came out in 2021. It’s a stretch of the imagination that the base version of a 2017 game could include character models from a 2021 game. (This discovery was widely believed to have been made on the game’s 1.00 version—meaning it hadn’t been affected by any post-release patches or updates.)
“Towards the end, I figured most people thought it was a mod,” DevolasRevenge said. “I didn’t mean to mislead anyone.”
DevolasRevenge said that some people “seem to be taking this negatively.” But over on the Nier modding Discord, at least, folks are in largely good spirits. They’re cracking jokes, validated in their assumptions that something was fishy with the church. Some prolific Nier modders are pumped to start working with a new suite of tools. While Nier: Automata modding tools are fairly sophisticated, modders haven’t been able to alter the game’s environment to the degree seen in the church videos.
“This will have quite a large impact on the community,” Meowsandstuff, a member of the Nier modding community and a leading figure in the hunt to prove the secret door wasn’t all it seemed, told me. “While we already had the tools to make similar stuff, from my understanding a lot of the newer things are much more better-developed and user-friendly.”
As part of his sleuthing, Meowsandstuff was designing his own version of the secret church. The architecture of the area was spot-on, but it kept crashing whenever you’d try to walk down the main hallway to the church. He’s now planning on polishing up the progress he’s made so far. He’ll scrap the rest, then use the new tools for a slew of other ideas, including one that renders the Nier: Automata map with the low-key look of the Copied City (which, by the way, sounds dope AF).
“I’m honestly feeling quite refreshed,” Meowsandstuff said. “I wanted to believe it could’ve been something that wasn’t a mod, but now knowing that this is a mod and knowing that we are getting access to the tools necessary to make stuff like this has really energized me.”
Urbek City Builder was released on Steam recently, and being a fan of just about any attempt at a city-building game, I was keen to check it out. What I found after playing for a few days was more surprising than I was expecting!
Outside of efforts from big studios—like Cities: Skylines—modern attempts at city-builders tend to (or, to be more accurate, are forced to thanks to a lack of resources) keep things simple, focusing on specific stuff like transportation networks.
At first glance (and for much of the way through its tutorial), Urbek seems more ambitious than this! It’s a city-builder but you also need to plot out farms, and chop down trees, and mine for coal, and get factories built, which I know sounds like a lot when you throw in worrying about the regular stuff (building houses and roads), but it turns out the actual experience is a lot more chill.
Because while Urbek presents itself as a reasonable complication city-builder, it’s actually more of a simple puzzle game, asking you to crack some basic challenges like spacing out buildings and constructing a certain number of them. Satisfy those basic requirements and everything else you get to do is just pure sandbox fun, especially since this is a game driven by resources, not money.
See how the houses next to the docks look more “coastal” than the others? Nice touch!Screenshot: Urbek City Builder / Kotaku
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I was wondering when I first booted the game up what the deal was with its voxels, since it seemed an odd art style for a genre that’s normally more at home with cartoonish takes on the real world. Playing it soon answers that question, because the main point of Urbek is that you don’t just build a city, you get to watch it evolve in front of your eyes, as your buildings morph and grow as a reaction to what’s going on around them.
Put down a house at the start of the game and it’s little more than a wood cabin. Manually upgrade it (by satisfying some other building requirements, see my light puzzles comment above) and it’s a nicer house. Build a few of them together and it’s a villa. Put a park in the middle of a few more and it’s a condo.
At the press of a button you can zoom right down to street level and wander around, checking out your creation from a resident’s point of viewScreenshot: Urbek City Builder / Kotaku
I know most city-builders have some degree of this, but Urbek’s malleability is so much more fluid and noticeable, it’s wild. Throw in the fact that the game is able to slightly customise its look depending on the buildings and their surrounds—so houses near the water/docks will look totally different to those near a coal mine in a forest—and you’ve got something with the potential to let you get super expressive and creative with your builds, which really is all a lot of people are looking for in this genre in the first place.
Some other cool features include progress not being an unquestionable inevitability, as some upgrades and unlocks require difficult moral decisions that you may not want to make, and the ability to pick a “biome” to build your city in creates different challenges depending on the climate.
Because Stray is out on PC, there are already mods for the game, and because Stray is a game about cats, a lot of those mods are focusing on that.
We’ve featured some here already, like one that lets you change the colour of the playable cat, but this one by Sirgalahad172 is a little less subtle. It takes the cat and replaces it with, as is now custom, CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
The creator says “this mod is intended as a joke as cj needs to be modded in any game that exists XD”, which is fair enough, but I actually really like the story-telling possibilities here. I’ve seen people describe CJ’s stilted appearance here as “horrific” online, but I prefer to think of this—and his other modded appearances—as some wild GTA side mission where CJ is cursed by an evil wizard, and is doomed to spend eternity drifting through other video game genres, experiencing everything they offer that San Andrea’s sprawling landscape does not.
If you want to install the mod yourself you can get it here, but just know that the first few minutes of the game might be a little unsettling, as all the cats from the intro share the same model as the player, so they’ve got CJ’s new body, but not his textures.
While we’re on the subject of swapping the cat out with other animals, here’s another example, even if it’s not strictly a mod. Instead of modifying Stray, this video was actually made in Dreams on the PlayStation 5, and replaces the nimble little ginger cat with…a clomping big horse. Which would make it harder to do all the platforming stuff, I guess, but might also make dealing with the Zurks easier since you could just kick them in the face.
When I first saw Ana, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds publisher Krafton’s attempt to put a face on its artificial “virtual human” technology, I was disappointed to see that this supposed Web 3.0 innovation was really just another pretty, pale girl. She’s airbrushed, but still tangible. She’s biting her tongue, looking at you. And I fear she exists only to be looked at, and not much else.
Krafton released its first images of Ana on June 15. We got two tight close-ups of a vaguely East Asian woman with all of the expected egirl accoutrements, dyed hair and adventurous ear piercings. Ana, who was created with Unreal Engine, has a lightning bolt tattooed on her finger. It’s clearly visible when she puts her pinky up to her lips to stare at you with clear, amorous intent.
Krafton revealed its “virtual human” technology in February with a technical demonstration displaying “motion-capture-based vivid movements, pupil movements enabled by rigging technique, colorful facial expressions, and even the soft and baby hairs on the skin.” The publisher announced its intent to use carefully designed virtual humans not just in its games but in its Esports demonstrations, and in the hope of creating more virtual influencers and singers like “robot” Instagrammer Miquela.
That’s influencers and singers, plural, so Ana is likely only the start of what I can only imagine to be a circus troupe of PUBG robot babes. Robot babes are particularly trendy right now, because we haven’t grown at all since watching the movie Herin 2013. Before that, we got used to the idea of robots being malleable, unemotional women. In other words, “perfect” women.
Back in 2011, deferential, female-coded virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa started to live in our devices and corroborate the popular image of a loving, supportive electronic woman most recently informed by future-focused Y2K media—think Cortanain Halo in 2001, or the virtual popstar in Disney’s 2004 movie Pixel Perfect. In 2016, a man in Hong Kong spent $50,000 to build a robot that looked like Scarlett Johansson, who coincidentally voices the virtual assistant in the movie Her. We really haven’t learned anything from that movie.
We also haven’t learned much from real artificial intelligence experts, who, over the years, have emphasized that female-coded robots alienate human women tech users and reward harmful stereotypes about women being servile and dedicated through whatever abuse they suffer. In 2019, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a publication arguing that “Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness—and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women—provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.” But tech companies like Krafton continue to create within these gender biases, sewing them tighter and deeper into our societal fabric.
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Partially, that’s because of gaming’s conflicted but addicted relationship to sex, and the evil eye of the merciless, always appraising male gaze. Mainstream developers have, on occasion, attempted to move beyond the archetypal video game woman to embrace more realistic depictions (to Reddit’s great disappointment), but character designs of women in video games at large remain recursive: buxom and flexible. I love embracing my inner bimbo as much as anyone else, but when stiletto-heeled women with nipped waists are the only representation we have in video games, it reduces an entire gender into a repressive stereotype.
But even more than they are for pliant women, tech and video game companies are horny for the ill-defined terms “Web 3.0” and the “Metaverse.” Both are meant to invoke the idea of an empowered online individual but, in practice, are usually just ways to rehabilitate and market out-of-date virtues (prioritizing work productivity, individual ownership) for a fresh audience. Perhaps to take cover from quickly crumbling blockchain “innovations” like pay-to-win video games, new Web3 proponents cling to comforting images of technological progress, which includes those ethereal, buxom digital women who might be capable of a roundhouse kick in Mortal Kombat, but would never nag you about your dumbass NFT investment. Criticism isn’t in their source code.
Krafton invoked all the right buzzwords for its Ana news, writing in a press release that “ANA is designed to engage a global audience and help establish KRAFTON’s Web 3.0 ecosystem” that will “attract the interest and popularity of Gen Z” through music and a foray into influencer-dom.
The company declined to answer any of my questions (“Do you think Ana’s design will alienate female gamers? “Is Krafton doing anything to prevent Ana from relying on stereotypes?” “Can you describe how Ana’s design and capabilities might appeal to Gen Z specifically?”), saying in an email to me that “there will be more announcements/details in the coming weeks!”
Ideally, in the coming weeks, we’ll be lucky enough to receive another close-up of Ana giving the camera meaningful bedroom eyes, except with a little more forehead. Speaking on behalf of my generation, we can’t get enough of a poreless forehead.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be wholly pessimistic about Krafton’s intentions. It’s possible that, below her neck, Ana will contain some messaging that indicates she is not another iteration of male developers conquering technology by shaping it into their preferred future—a thin, pale, obedient woman. Who, by the way, also wants to sing with “advanced voice synthesis” and become a social media phenom, which you’d be forgiven for mistaking as the only two career paths open to a beautiful woman.
OK, so maybe I do mean to be pessimistic. It’s eternally frustrating to be a woman excited by video games and the internet only to have their potential routinely diluted to the same tedious tropes a straight man depends on to get off. Making AI women that represent the same qualities Victorians found in the restrained angel in the house is not “Web 3.0,” it’s bog-standard, traditionally sexist. An AI-assisted voice can be represented by any visual, any blob or creature, but the best Krafton can come up with is a woman I’ve seen on advertisements and thinspiration Tumblr since I could go online.
But I should put up with it, shouldn’t I? This is how we live, regurgitating the same images and rewriting the same opinions that no one listens to and yet still finds time to disagree with. I just don’t want Krafton to act like this is the future. Sometimes I feel like we’ve been stuck in history for as long as we’ve been recording it.
In 2015 mega-publisher Electronic Soft released the blockbuster game BloodDeath: DeathBlood, a sequel to 2009’s wildly successful BloodDeath. It would mark the end of both the series and its development studio, but it is not the end of their story.
* Note: If you never caught the original, this is a sequel to a fictional story called “How A Video Game Is Released In 2015″.
Some things in this industry are too big to fail, and so while the key figures responsible for the BloodDeath games would soon leave Electronic Soft, it wouldn’t be long until they were back in the headlines for all the right (and wrong) reasons. What follows is their story.
2016
APRIL: A number of senior developers responsible for the BloodDeath series announce that they have formed a new studio, The Establishment. They claim to have learned a number of valuable lessons from their time with Electronic Soft, with an expensive launch documentary proclaiming “we’re not here to make the same mistakes”. The team say their studio will be focused on quality, pride themselves on a lack of interference from an outside publisher, and most importantly will have a strong focus on positive working conditions, with a promise of “no crunch”.
The “About” page on The Establishment’s website shows the studio is initially comprised of 13 white men, all in their 40s.
“We’re not here to make the same mistakes”, says The Establishment’s Director in a screenshot from the developer’s announcement documentary (that has since been deleted).Photo: Morsa Images (Getty Images)
AUGUST: The Establishment’s first game, KillBood, is announced on Kickstarter, with an initial goal of raising $2 million. Billed by the team as a spiritual successor to BloodDeath, within 23 minutes it has raised over $14 million. Promising an outrageously ambitious set of features, and an “evolving experience we alone are free to tell”, it looks to its millions of backers like the perfect video game.
NOVEMBER: Despite going on to raise over $30 million from fans, The Establishment announce they have signed a major publishing deal with AAAA Games, Electronic Soft’s main rival. It is not made clear what will happen to the crowd-funded money now that they have a partnership with a major global publisher, or what this means for a project that had been sold initially as an experiment free from publisher interference.
2017
MARCH: KillBlood’s Kickstarter page has been updated only once since the campaign’s launch almost a year ago, mentioning that “things are progressing well”, that the team is “actively hiring” for extra positions and that while it’s too early to show anything from the game, fans should rest assured that the project is “looking incredible”.
2018
FEBRUARY: KillBlood is cancelled, with all backers refunded their money. The Establishment simultaneously announce that they have begun work on a major new project with AAAA Games.
2019
JANUARY: Despite promising they had learned their lessons from Electronic Soft’s large and cumbersome studio model, The Establishment—initially based in Montreal—announce the opening of a second studio in Austin to assist in the development of their mystery, unannounced game. They also open a third, in Singapore, mostly for outsourcing work made under horrendous working conditions for rock-bottom prices, but don’t publicise that one as much.
DECEMBER: At The Game Awards, The Establishment steal the show with the announcement of Iron Steel, an action RPG billed as a “true spiritual successor” to BloodDeath, which will be published by AAAA Games. “We want to give fans of BloodDeath what they want”, a representative says on-stage, “and what they want is more BloodDeath”. After an explosive trailer, the crowd erupts. It instantly becomes the most-anticipated release of 2020.
Conceived and developed as a next-gen release (though also coming to PC), AAAA Games executives have insisted on a last-gen console release as well.
2020
March: With Iron Steel still early in development, a global pandemic hits. The Establishment’s offices in Montreal, Austin and Singapore are all closed, with developers sent home to spend the next 18 months working remotely. Having already failed to meet every internal milestone set by AAAA Games, it is estimated these fresh challenges will almost double the time required to finish the game, and result in years of disjointed development, culminating in repeated cycles of brutal crunch. The Establishment’s studio launch video, which proudly claimed “we’re not going to make the same mistakes”, is quietly removed from the company’s site.
May: AAAA Games executives, worried that the game doesn’t have a long-term plan to generate revenue beyond “selling copies”, meet with The Establishment’s management to ensure Iron Steel includes both a multiplayer battle royale mode (for which they can sell skins) and a loot box system (for legal and unregulated gambling).
June: With new, next-gen consoles only a few months away, Iron Steel is the star of a PlayStation 5 pre-release media event, and is surprisingly announced as a launch title by the AAAA Games marketing team. The game’s actual developers, meanwhile, know it is at least another 2-3 years away from being even remotely ready.
A screenshot from Iron Steel’s ill-fated 2021 release date trailer
OCTOBER: Just weeks before the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X’s planned releases, it is unsurprisingly announced that Iron Steel has been delayed into 2021. After posting about the delay, The Establishment’s social media team is flooded with death threats, forcing them to temporarily lock their accounts.
2021
JANUARY: Two separate investigations by video game news websites accuse several senior employees of The Establishment of misconduct during their time at Electronic Soft. One resigns and a second is fired, the latter almost immediately launching a YouTube channel called “Tread On Me”, which covers everything from men’s rights to anti-vaccine tirades to 37-minute long critiques of women in superhero films.
MAY: An online showcase designed to give fans and media their first look at Iron Steel’s gameplay is impressive, but also raises a few questions, with concerns that new additions to the game—like only being able to get new helmets from “Loote Chests” and a bizarrely ill-fitting battle royale multiplayer mode—are diluting the DeathBlood experience. In a staged interview with an overly-enthusiastic content creator, a representative from The Establishment says Iron Steel will be out in time for the holiday season.
JULY: A short presentation of Iron Steel’s character creation suite is shown as part of a larger Xbox presentation, and immediately hits the headlines. It shows that of the 17 skin tones available to players 15 are white, with the other two being “black” and “green”. The single black character skin is locked to a poorly- modelled afro haircut.
NOVEMBER: Four weeks before the game’s planned launch, AAAA Games drop a press release at 11:59pm on a Friday night saying that the game has been delayed into “Early 2022″. No reason is publicly given for the delay. Privately, The Establishment know that despite working around the clock, the game is still years away from being ready. To placate fans, a multiplayer beta is announced for January 2022.
DECEMBER: A surprise cinematic trailer for the game reveals a carefully guarded secret: unlike previous Blood games, which only featured a lone male protagonist (in this case Sir Henry Goreston), Iron Steel features a second playable character with her own unique storyline: Lady Rose. After posting some concept art of the new character to the company’s social media accounts, and mentioning how proud the team are to be able to expand the series like this, The Establishment’s community manager is subsequently harassed on Twitter by gamers, right-wing talk show hosts and two Republican congressmen who have never played a Blood game, but have nevertheless been briefed that this move is “woke”.
A week later, both Iron Steel characters are released as downloadable skins for Fortnite. Fans are starting to get excited.
2022
JANUARY: The battle royale multiplayer beta is a disaster. The game’s performance borders on unplayable. Maps are empty, weapons are unbalanced and new characters introduced for the mode prove wildly unpopular. Fans are vocal with their displeasure through official beta feedback channels, but also in wider online communities. The Establishment thank all players for their input, and promise to make necessary changes, knowing full well there isn’t any time or money left to change a thing.
MARCH: The first specific details of the game’s Loote Chest economy are released. AAAA Games has partnered with a blockchain marketplace to sell weapons and armour as NFTs, which the publisher says they’re doing after “listening to our fans”. They are met with an immediate firestorm of protest before backing out of the deal 24 hours later, saying their reversal was a result of “listening to our fans”.
APRIL: Iron Steel’s social media accounts joke that the game is “destined” for a final release date. It will be out in September. No more delays.
Investigating the game’s numerous delays, a report from a major news website accuses The Establishment’s management of cultivating a “culture of neglect”, with rampant crunch and staff turnover. Senior leadership deny these allegations strenuously, even when dozens more employees come forward throughout the month to support the claims in subsequent stories.
AUGUST: By every internal metric Iron Steel is nowhere near being ready, but it doesn’t matter. AAAA Games leadership, desperate for a boost to their annual profits, have by now decided that the game is finally “finished”. The world’s largest video game website receives a copy of the game four weeks ahead of release, for which they run a preview, a second preview and then an early review. Other websites and popular streamers receive code two weeks before release. The websites investigating The Establishment’s staffing and misconduct allegations do not receive copies.
SEPTEMBER: The game is released, and on the strength of its trailers and marketing has already sold millions of copies from preorders alone. It quickly sells millions more. Iron Steel receives mixed reviews from major outlets, however, with some sites praising its ambition and drive to expand on the now-tired BloodDeath formula with Lady Rose’s new mechanics and alternate storyline. Most are highly critical of its practically unfinished state, however, citing hollow sound effects, disjointed cutscenes and half-implemented features. Performance is also an issue for many, with the PC version crippled by bugs and the last-gen console editions hovering between 9-18fps.
The one thing everyone agrees on, though, is that the multiplayer mode is a waste of time.
SEPTEMBER: In some good news for over-worked developers at The Establishment, despite its overall mixed reception Iron Steel easily hits the Metacritic bonus threshold outlined in their contracts. With most major websites critical of the game having dropped review scores entirely, it’s left to outlets like “GamerSnatch” (97/100) and “SEO Bandits” (99/100) to pad the average and bring in bonus cheques for the creators of the game.
A mobile spin-off is released. It contains all of the main game’s Loote Chests, and almost none of its gameplay.
OCTOBER: A series of urgent patches fail to fix the game’s performance issues on console. They do, however, manage to introduce a stricter and more expensive economy for the game’s reworked Loote Chests.
Despite growing discontent among fans—with the game’s Steam reviews in particular having been bombed to hell and back thanks to its various performance woes— Iron Steel has now sold so many copies that it has become the most successful launch in AAAA Games history.
NOVEMBER: An internal, post-release review conducted by The Establishment finds that the global pandemic had a monumental effect on Iron Steel’s development. The disruptions it caused to workflow, planning, communication and testing were unprecedented, and were identified as being the main culprits for most if not all of the game’s major shortcomings. Allegations of a “culture of neglect” are not mentioned. None of this, or the pressures placed on the team by AAAA Games management, is ever communicated to the public, who continue to attack the “lazy” developers for their “stupid mistakes”.
Reviews on Glassdoor from a rapidly-growing number of former employees begin to reveal the scale of the game’s troubled development, making public the endless cycles of crunch brought on by publisher insistence and poor studio management.
DECEMBER: Continued strong sales mean Iron Steel is now the most successful game in AAAA Games history, bringing in millions for the publisher’s shareholders and executives. It has, however, failed to meet internal sales targets. Tentative plans for a sequel—AAAA Games own the Iron Steel IP, of course—are thus cancelled, leaving The Establishment free to pursue a new publishing deal.
They are courted by Tencent, Amazon, Google and former publishers Electronic Soft. Faced with this uncertain and internally unpopular future, many senior developers quit to form a new company, promising in a launch blog that “we’re not here to make the same mistakes”…
Big thanks to Dimitrije Miljus, Vladimir Manyukhin and Lou LL for allowing us to use their artwork for this piece!
The latest version of Unreal Engine was released on April 5, and game developers are already trying to figure out how to make their wildest dreams into photorealistic reality. Enter Volod, a video game tech artist who has created a cool Superman-style flight demo out of the assets from a The Matrix-themed asset pack Epic Games recently released.
The “City Sample” is a free downloadable asset pack released to help developers understand how Epic Games built The Matrix Awakens tech demo showcased at The Game Awards last year. Among others, the assets include the demo’s buildings, vehicles, and crowds. Both the Matrix demo and its asset pack use new AI, lighting, and rendering systems that are specific to Unreal Engine 5. If you have a gaming computer that won’t explode when you try to install a game engine on it, then you can already start building interesting stuff out of Neo’s San Francisco. Such as the Superman demo below:
Although Volod’s sample uses a faceless character model who bears no particular resemblance to the caped hero, the powerful sense of velocity and the city’s scale really sell me on the fantasy of whizzing around like a superhero. The character’s turns are tight, and trying not to get smushed while trying to navigate the underpass looks a lot more fun to play with than simple flight physics.
Volod told Kotaku that he has a background in designing visual effects for film, and that Epic’s special developers’ license allowed him to experiment with the engine for a year before its public release.
“If I can find an interesting gameplay loop that ties into the flight mechanic, I’d consider putting together [a minimum viable product or] demo and releasing it to the public.” Volod told Kotaku. “But obviously [without the] association to the Superman IP.”
In a Twitter reply, the artist mentioned that their demo experienced “bottlenecks” where objects weren’t loading fast enough while Supes was flying through the city. Despite the technical hiccup with the new engine, it’s impressive that a single person was able to create a realistic-looking Superman-style flight demo within two days of Unreal Engine 5 going live. And that’s just one artist’s fantasy. I’m optimistic that the engine is going to open up interesting cinematic projects to an even wider range of creators than ever before.
Read More:The Matrix Unreal Demo Is A Simple, Weirdly Fun Open-World Game
While projects based on TheMatrix Awakens are just gameplay demos for now, several notable games are currently being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Just last month, CD Projekt Red announced that the next Witcher game will be made in Epic’s latest engine. And the next Tomb Raider game was announced at the State of Unreal showcase. So even if Superman doesn’t officially land in Unreal in the near future, we should still have a ton of near-photorealistic games to look forward to as developers start flexing the new engine’s muscle.
Ghostwire: Tokyo, the cool new Tango Gameworks project about chatting up spirits and fighting ghastly humanoids, has managed to pull me away from Elden Ring. It’s a nice reprieve. Ghostwire is nowhere near as hard as FromSoftware’s latest Souls-like. So rather than roaming a vast, haunting open world and getting absolutely decimated by melancholy monstrosities in the Lands Between, I’m stalking the dark streets and narrow alleys of Tokyo, feeling badass, blasting enemies with magic spells that fly forth from my fingertips. There’s still a challenge to be found here though, and while I’m not ready to give my full thoughts on Tango Gameworks’ new supernatural action-RPG just yet, what I can say is that I don’t worry much when I do get whopped on. That’s because healing in this game rules!
Being an open-world game, Ghostwire: Tokyo lets you pick up healing items like dumpling skewers and strawberry desserts littered around Shibuya’s spooky streets. You can also buy them from various shops operated by yokai called nekomata, two-tailed ghost cats that sleep floating in the air. There’s a limit to how many consumables you can carry at one time–three to start–but that capacity can be increased up to 10 by upgrading a particular skill in the Equipment category. This is a godsend in combat encounters where you’re likely to blast through your consumables.
Naturally, the healing items do the obvious thing of replenishing your health. There are also some known as spectral food that offer unique passive bonuses, such as boosting a spell’s power for a short time. Whether normal or spectral, though, all food and drinks have one crucial additional effect, the one that makes me love this game’s healing system: they increase your maximum health points. That’s right, by simply using consumables, you permanently increase the amount of health protagonist Akito has overall.
I love this because it does two things. The first is tied to how we play games, or rather, how games have conditioned us to play them. What I mean is, if you’re anything like me, you probably hoard many of your potions and other healing items, perhaps imagining some climactic boss fight in which you might finally put them all to good use. When you roll a game’s credits, you come to find out that those items you stockpiled, while useful, went unused for any number of reasons. You can mostly do that in Ghostwire: Tokyo, too, holding onto consumables indefinitely. But since healing items also increase your health points, you’re encouraged to snack whenever you don’t have full health. You not only get some health back, but you’ll also deepen your overall health pool. Sweet!
Secondly, this neat little system also incentivizes you to play more aggressively, and maybe to experiment with other equipment and spells too. Unfortunately, combat in Ghostwire can be boring and tedious. The enemies aren’t that smart, charging you head-on most of the time instead of strategizing to force you to mix things up. But by giving you health and increasing the health bar, healing items encourage you to take that chance charging the slow-but-powerful fire grenade or using some other risky tactic. Or if you wanna get all up in their faces, the game’s plentiful, magical, health-restoring, health-increasing food items mean you can do so without worrying too much about biting the dust. Go ahead, snack up and stay alive!
Using healing items isn’t the only way to increase your maximum health points, either. Much like other action-RPGs, leveling up in Ghostwire: Tokyo is another way to pump up your HP. But folding the concept of increasing your overall health stat into the actual mechanic of healing yourself is a cool idea I’ve not seen before. And it’s something I hope more games try to implement in the future. Not all of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s systems work, but the way it handles healing definitely does.
Necrosoft Games have put together a bundle of 991 things on itch.io that is available now for a minimum of just $10 .
The Bundle For Ukraine’s introduction on the site says:
The people of Ukraine are under attack. As game developers we want to create new worlds, not to destroy the one we have. That’s why we’ve banded together to present this charity bundle to help Ukrainians survive this ordeal and thrive after the war ends. This cause has resonated with creators around the globe, to the extent that our bundle contains almost 1,000 games, tabletop RPGs, books, etc.
Over 700 creators have come together to donate their works and all proceeds from this bundle will go to the following charities:
– International Medical Corps provides medical assistance in the region. They have very low fundraising overhead (1% of income), with 89% of donations going to medical aid and 10% to administration.
– Voices of Children, a Ukrainian organization that helps children cope with the horrors of war, PTSD, readjusting to school, and getting back to being kids. They have also been doing a lot of grassroots impromptu work during the war, such as helping set up shelters. Our hope is that this war will be over soon, and they can begin the work of healing these kids’ hearts.
With so many games, tabletop RPGs, books, comics and soundtracks on offer, I can’t list everything here, but some of the games available as part of the bundle include Celeste, A Short Hike, Towerfall Ascension, Superhot, Skatebird, Kingdom: Two Crowns, Hidden Folks and Super Hexagon. Those are all very good, and that leaves over 900 things to go!
While the minimum purchase price for the bundle is $10 (for $6500 worth of stuff!), given the focus of the proceeds Necrosoft “highly urge you to pay above the minimum if you can afford to do so”. You can check out the full list of games, and purchase the bundle, here.
Over the last few days, a series of mods for the PC strategy game Cities: Skylines have been removed from Steam after users began fearing that they contained all kinds of nasty stuff, from keyloggers to viruses to bitcoin mining software.
The alarm was sounded by this NME story and subsequent Reddit post, pointing out that the uploader of the mods had been banned and that there was a serious risk to user’s computers. As the NME story explains:
In 2021, a modder going by the name of Chaos launched a “redesigned” version of a mod called Harmony, a vital framework project that most mods in Cities: Skylines rely upon to function.
Chaos also then “redesigned” several popular mods for the game, and listed his modified version of Harmony as a core download – meaning that players would have to go and download it for any dependent mods to work.
However, it’s been discovered that an automatic updater was buried in this version of Harmony, which would allow Chaos to deliver malware to the devices of anyone that downloaded it. Other malicious code was used to cripple the performance of other mods, which in turn caused players to download more of Chaos’ mods as they were advertised as solutions to these issues. This was discovered when some of the affected modders who, after receiving reports of slow performance from fans, found the malicious code.
While a scary prospect for any users who had downloaded the individual mods, an investigation by Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order found that while the mods themselves didn’t contain anything as serious as first feared, they were still being deleted from Steam. One because, as claimed, it could leave the door open for the downloading of “malicious software”:
The mod “Update from Github” was removed shortly after appearing on the Workshop. This mod was designed to check for and install updates to mods directly from Github, making changes to existing Workshop subscriptions without the user’s knowledge. This bypasses the Workshop entirely, and to avoid potential abuse (such as downloading malicious software) the mod has been removed.
And another for…pettier reasons (emphasis mine):
We recently banned a few mods from the Cities: Skylines Workshop and want to clear up some of the misinformation surrounding these mods. The mods in question, which have been banned, are “Network Extensions 3” and “Update from Github.”
No keyloggers, viruses, bitcoin mining software, or similar has been found in mods on the Steam Workshop.
“Network Extensions 3”, the mod alleged to contain malware, was banned due to discriminating against specific Steam users. First, it blocked a short list of Steam users from using the mod, but this was later changed to cause what appeared to be buggy gameplay. Blocking users or creating specific restrictions for them violates the Steam Subscriber Agreement and such resulted in the mod being banned.
Just to make this clear: the mod’s creator made a list of people they didn’t like, put that list in the mod then made the mod run like shit, but just for those people.