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Utopia Must Fall from developer Pixeljam has absolutely absorbed my attention recently. It's easily one of the best modern arcade shoot 'em ups I've ever played with a great moody atmosphere. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

There are some interesting trophies to unlock in The Precinct, and the Career Limiting Move is one that will require you to drive a vehicle and park it in the Chief's Space. You'll come across plenty of vehicles as you level up as an officer by gaining experience points. This will unlock new police cars to utilize, but for this objective, you can use any vehicle. Park in the right spot, and you will be awarded a new achievement trophy. How to park in the Chief's spot in The Precinct You'll need a vehicle for this job, any will do. Want to use a garbage truck? Well, I haven't tested one of those yet, but the SUV worked, so you should be fine. Having a ******* car will help, since you may need to knock the chief's vehicle from its spot. You'll need to enter the police station's parking area, so drive around it until you find the entrance and head in. Screenshot by Destructoid The parking spot may have an Orange muscle waiting against the wall (as shown in the image above), which is the Chief's car. The spot where it's parked is the Chief's Space/Spot, where you'll have to park your vehicle. If the car isn't there, no sweat, just look for the name plague on the wall that says "Police Chief." The easy way is to roll back, line your car up against the Chief's, and just smash it. Yes, there's no subtlety about what you're doing, but the Chief's car isn't going to create space on its own. The only option is to keep hitting it till the Chief's car vacates the parking spot. Don't worry, he won't mind. If you're really against a little car-on-car violence, then you could simply get in and move the chief's car, instead. But this privilege only comes once you've leveled up sufficiently, so it could take a lot more time than the first method. Once the car has been moved away, carefully park your vehicle in the same spot. It's pretty easy to understand you're in the correct spot since it's marked against the wall. Park up and get out of the car. If the parking is done properly, it will automatically complete the achievement and add the relevant trophy to your collection. The post How to park in the Chief’s Space in The Precinct (Career Limiting Move) appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article

The Parks Fest event has some of the coolest rewards you can earn in Disney Dreamlight Valley, but unlocking them is quite a process, as you have to tackle many tough event duties. One of the many quests you need to complete is Craftily Ever After. Figuring out what needs to be done for the duty is fairly tricky since its name is a vague hint. This quest isn't too tough to get done once you know what it's asking. Here's how to complete Craftily Ever After in Disney Dreamlight Valley. Table of contentsHow to complete the Craftily Ever After duty in Disney Dreamlight ValleyHow to craft Cinderella Popcorn Bucket in Disney Dreamlight ValleyCraftily Ever After reward in Disney Dreamlight ValleyHow to complete the Craftily Ever After duty in Disney Dreamlight Valley Screenshot by Destructoid To complete the Craftily Ever After Dreamlight duty, you need to craft one Cinderella Popcorn Bucket. The title of this duty is a reference to the popular Disney phrase "Happily ever after," which is commonly associated with princesses like Cinderella. It's not a super obvious connection, so it's easy to get stuck on this task. It's a pretty expensive item to make, and it requires lots of specific Parks Fest event items to craft. Here's a full breakdown of everything you need to do to complete this task. Gather all of the required materials for this item. You need four different types of Buttons to craft it.Visit any crafting station around the village. This item must be manually crafted.Navigate to the Furniture section at the crafting station. You're looking for the Cinderella Popcorn Bucket recipe. If you don't see it, you need to collect more Buttons to unlock it. Craft the Cinderella Popcorn Bucket. You'll spend the resources you gathered immediately, so be sure you don't want to hold onto them for something else before making this item.Claim your reward. Open the Village tab under the Dreamlight page to claim the exclusive Craftily Ever After duty prize. How to craft Cinderella Popcorn Bucket in Disney Dreamlight Valley Screenshot by Destructoid The Cinderella Popcorn Bucket can be crafted using Green Buttons, Purple Buttons, Blue Buttons, and Red Buttons in DDV. You need quite a lot of each kind, so here's a full breakdown of all the required materials and how to get each one. ButtonAmountHow to getGreen Button40Rewarded for completing daily and weekly Parks Fest event quests.Purple ButtonFiveCan be crafted using one Blue Button, two Red Buttons, and 100 Dreamlight.Blue Button15Can be acquired by fishing in white ripple spots around Dazzle Beach and Peaceful Meadow.Red Button10Can be foraged from the ground anywhere in the valley. This includes the Plaza, Peaceful Meadow, Dazzle Beach, Glade of Trust, Forest of Valor, Sunlit Plateau, Frosted Heights, and Forgotten Lands. You won't find this Button around DLC worlds like Eternity Isle and Storybook Vale, so stick to classic Dreamlight Valley to find it. If you already crafted this bucket during a previous run of the event and don't want to gather all of the required Buttons to make it again, you can use the Uncrafting Station to disassemble and reassemble this item for the duty. This special machine is unlocked during The Uncrafting Station quest, which is the Cheshire Cat's level seven friendship quest. Craftily Ever After reward in Disney Dreamlight Valley Completing the Craftily Ever After duty gets you two rewards in DDV, which are the Cinderella Popcorn Bucket furniture item and the Cinderella Handheld Popcorn Bucket accessory. The former can be placed anywhere around your village as a decoration, while the latter can be equipped from your wardrobe as an accessory item. The post How to complete Craftily Ever After in Disney Dreamlight Valley appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article

An interesting Genshin Impact fan-art has swapped the recently released character Ifa with his loyal companion Cacucu. Genshin Impact’s playable roster is the main focus of each new update, and it’s no surprise that fans often create their own concepts, which sometimes combine two or more playable units into one. View the full article

Hideo Kojima has recently revealed that Physint, the spiritual successor to his massively popular espionage franchise Metal Gear, will take another five or six years to develop. Even though that’s quite far off, Metal Gear fans should be excited that Kojima is still planning content somewhat related to the iconic franchise—but that’s not all, as the famed game director also touched on his future as a movie director. View the full article

There's no denying that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered's premade difficulty settings feel a bit flawed. While the original Oblivion featured a slider that could incrementally adjust damage dealt and taken, Oblivion Remastered streamlined things to a few bespoke increments. If these were well-tuned, that might be an improvement, but the average player is unlikely to fall in love with any of the options. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The Lego Group has forced an intrepid team of developers to shut down their impressive-looking Bionicle fan project, after eight years' work. Bionicle: Masks of Power was set to have been an open-world action RPG inspired by Horizon: Zero Dawn, featuring the fan-favourite masked warriors from Lego's legendary toy series. Successive trailers for the game had hyped up Bionicle fans for the release, and all looked fine from The Lego Group's side — until, in the last month, something appears to have changed. In a blog post confirming Bionicle: Masks of Power's shock cancellation, its developers Team Kanohi said that they had recently been contacted by The Lego Group and told to shut down the project "in its entirety" and remove the game "from the public eye." The developers said they were not given any further specifics on the decision, but speculated that Bionicle: Masks of Power had grown to the point where it was now "too easy to mistake for an official product." A now-removed Steam page for the game was among the first search results for "Bionicle game," and despite disclaimers that it was a fan project, its developers admit the whole thing may have been a victim of its own success — and beginning to look too legitimate. Indeed, newly-published footage meant as a farewell to the project shows a relatively polished Unreal Engine-powered experience, featuring the Bionicle characters in a lush jungle world. Could Lego finally be preparing its own Bionicle game now, and not want Masks of Power as competition? Or, perhaps, might Bionicle be set to appear within Lego's deep integration within Fortnite, where players can make their own Lego games and worlds using Unreal Engine? Whatever the reason, this looks to be the end for Bionicle: Masks of Power, though its development team has said it will rebrand and continue. "Our plan is to take everything we've learned through creating Masks of Power and use that knowledge and experience as the foundation of a brand-new, original game," the developers said. "Currently codenamed Project Rustbound, our team has already begun brainstorming concepts for a new, original world that we get the chance to build ourselves." This will also come with a new name for Team Kanohi, as it leaves the masked Bionicle warriors behind. And that new name? Unmasked Games. After eight years and some promising progress, we'll be keeping an eye out for what the team does next. View the full article

What is the best Elden Ring Nightreign class? There are eight Nightfarers to choose from in Nightreign. Each class boasts an assortment of unique abilities, stats, and equipment that correspond to a class archetype in FromSoftware's action RPGs. Some excel as defensive tanks, while others sling spells from a distance. With so much variety, finding the right class for you can be a bit of a grind. To help you decide, we've got a full overview of all classes in Elden Ring Nightreign, including their role, main stat, and starting equipment. The best class lets you leap straight into Limveld following the Nightreign release date, even if you don't have any prior experience with FromSoftware's soulslike games. However, even niche classes can excel in the right hands. Here are all Nightreign classes available and how to use them. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All Elden Ring Nightreign bosses and how to beat them All Elden Ring Nightreign skins revealed so far Elden Ring Nightreign release date, gameplay, story, and latest news View the full article

Издательство Microids совместно с разработчиками из Microids Studio Paris и Virtuallyz Gaming анонсировало Syberia Remastered — переиздание культового приключения, выпущенного в далёком 2002 году. Новая версия игры должна выйти до конца 2025 года.View the full article

Культовому ролевому экшену с открытым миром The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt («Ведьмак 3: Дикая Охота») от польской студии CD Projekt Red исполнилось 10 лет — игра поступила на прилавки магазинов 19 мая 2015 года.View the full article

"Bethesda's excitement for Skyblivion is absolutely unreal"View the full article

The Phantom Horse (or Ghost Horse) in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is part of a side quest for the Executioner HeinzView the full article

Solo developer Overboy has announced that Noobs Are Coming, their chaotic over the top arena roguelike, is set for release in 2025 with full Native Linux and Steam Deck support. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Sure, just roll six nat 20s in a rowView the full article

Dead Spells is another take on the popular Dead Rails, but with a bit of a fantasy / magical twist. The game is still relatively new, but there's a lot of stuff to know. If you're looking for a source of information, you've come to the right place with these Dead Spells Trello and Discord Links. Dead Spells Relevant Links Screenshot by Destructoid If you want to mingle with the community and get the latest news about the games, here are some places where you can start: Dead Spells Game PageDead Spells Community GroupDead Spells DiscordDead Spells Trello (we'll add the link as soon as it's available) Kicking things off, the Dead Spells Community Group "Personal Path" has about 11k members. There's actually a lot of engagement within this group, and you can even get a few codes if you scroll down here a bit. Now, if you really want to stay in the loop and get news of updates as soon as they hit, then you need to join the Dead Spells Discord Group. This Discord group is pretty small as of writing this (about 2k members), but it's steadily growing and will likely gain a bunch of new members pretty soon. Here you can talk to other players, get the latest codes, and maybe even talk to the devs about what new features they're cooking. There is also an official Dead Spells YouTube channel, but there aren't really any videos or trailers there yet, so we won't link it until there's actually something useful. As for the official Trello board, there isn't any news of it coming out, yet, but if the game wants to gain traction like Dead Rails, and we're sure it does, it's only a matter of time before an official Trello board is out. That's all there is to it. Have fun playing Dead Spells, and we hope you roll the best class. If you're looking for a similar game, but on water, check out Dead Sails. The post Dead Spells Trello and Discord Links appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article

Many quests you can complete to earn lots of XP in Fortnite challenge you to find and explore certain locations around the vast island. One of these tasks asks you to visit different outposts, which can be tricky to get done if you're not familiar with them. This quest is a fairly easy one to complete once you know where to find these locations, and it rewards quite a lot of XP for fairly low effort. It's worth getting done if you want to quickly progress through the battle pass, so here's how to visit different outposts in Fortnite. Table of contentsWhat are outposts in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic Battle?All outpost locations in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic BattleVisit different outposts in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic BattleWhat are outposts in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic Battle? Screenshot by Destructoid All outposts are fairly small Landmark locations you can generally find situated along roads. Since they're Landmarks rather than main POIs, none of them are marked by name on the map. Instead, the names of each location only appear briefly in the bottom left corner upon visiting one of these locations. All outpost locations in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic Battle In total, there are 15 outposts you can visit around the entire map. All of these locations are quite small and tricky to find if you don't know where they are, so here are the precise locations of each one. An Imperial Outpost is northeast of Canyon Crossing.An Imperial Outpost is north of Outlaw Oasis.An Imperial Outpost is southwest of Crime City.An Imperial Outpost is southeast of Predator Peak.An Imperial Outpost is south of Big Bend.A Rebel Outpost is slightly south of the Resistance Base. A Rebel Outpost is just east of Lonewolf Lair. A Rebel Outpost is near the south end of Flooded Frogs. A Republic Outpost is south of Masked Meadows.A Republic Outpost is north of Masked Meadows.A Republic Outpost is north of Kappa Kappa Factory. A Republic Outpost is south of Seaport City.A First Order Outpost is north of Shining Span.A First Order Outpost is near the southwest end of Pumped Power.A First Order Outpost is north of Magic Mosses. Screenshot by Destructoid Some of these locations have hostile Stormtroopers walking about. To avoid conflict, you may want to use a telephone booth to don a disguise before entering so you can blend in with them. Visit different outposts in Fortnite Star Wars Galactic Battle To complete the visit different outposts weekly quest, you need to venture to five outposts around the island. There are 15 to choose from, so you have plenty of options for getting this task done. You can explore five completely separate locations for this task or return to ones you've already visited if you work on it over the course of a few different matches. It can be a bit tough to determine when you're actually at an outpost since they aren't named on the map. Look for the Landmark location pop-up in the bottom left corner to determine whether you're at one. It only appears briefly when you first enter an outpost, so make sure you're watching for it. If you're looking for more XP after completing this task, there are plenty of other duties worth tackling around the island, especially discovering and completing story quests. Some good ones to complete are Jar Jar Binks’ story quests, Leia Organa’s story quests, Luke Skywalker’s story quests, and Han Solo’s story quests. The post How to visit different outposts in Fortnite Chapter 6, season 3 appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article

What are all the Elden Ring Nightreign bosses? These fearsome foes constitute the most challenging encounters in Limveld, but beating them is also the fastest way to get ahead before night falls. However, when every run is different in Nightreign, you need to be prepared for anything. Several bosses in Elden Ring Nightreign made their first appearance in Dark Souls, and many more can also be found on our list of all Elden Ring bosses. Beating a boss releases their dormant power, offering you a choice of three rewards. This precious loot could include the best weapons and major stat upgrades. Here are all Nightreign bosses confirmed to appear in the soulslike game and how to beat them. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best Elden Ring Nightreign classes ranked All Elden Ring Nightreign skins revealed so far Elden Ring Nightreign release date, gameplay, story, and latest news View the full article

Take-Two Interactive объяснила, почему ******: The Old Country будет продаваться всего за $49,99. Компания придерживается гибкой ценовой стратегии, ориентируясь на баланс между качеством и доступностью. View the full article

Разработчики Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 не исключают вероятности выхода ролевой игры на новой гибридной консоли Nintendo Switch 2. Геймдиректор Гийом Брош назвал подобную перспективу "интересной", но дал понять, что пока ему анонсировать нечего — студия находится в приятном шоке от большого успеха своего детища и пытается реагировать на просьбы фанатов по текущим версиям. View the full article

В сети появился фрагмент прохождения Where Winds Meet. Источником послужила закрытая бета версия китайского экшена. Игру готовят как консольный эксклюзив PlayStation 5 и собираются представить пользователям до конца текущего года. View the full article

Компания Microids внезапно анонсировала ремастер оригинальной Syberia — культового приключения от Бенуа Сокаля. Над обновлённой версией работают Virtuallyz Studio и Microids Studio Paris, а релиз запланирован на четвёртый квартал 2025 года в версиях для PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S и ПК. View the full article

head of Stellar Blade's PC release in June, players have been greeted with the dreaded yet expected message: Some people won't have access to the PC release as it's region-locked in 130 countries... Read more.View the full article

With Tempest Rising and a new Age of Empires 2 DLC, the classic RTS seems to be mounting a comeback. Similarly, the boomer shooter trend is alive and well, maintaining the spirit of the '90s shooters that solidified PC's status as a platform. And now, seemingly, the erstwhile point-and-click genre is returning from the grave. Riven has been remastered. Likewise the original Broken Sword, and Amerzone The Explorer's Legacy. Even Myst has recently been enhanced and expanded. But there's more to come. Another game from Benoit Sakal, the writer and creator of Amerzone, is about to get a full remaster. 23 years after it was originally released, Syberia is back. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Two semi-classic adventure games are free-to-keep on Steam for a limited time Clockwork adventure classic Syberia is free today on GOG View the full article

CD Projekt Red has a reputation for making special games. The Witcher 3, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, is still frequently cited as one of, if not the best, RPG ever made. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 has (thanks to some substantial upgrades) blossomed into one of the deepest, most robust examples of open-world roleplaying. These two games alone have made the studio one of the most famous and respected in the world, not to mention its other, equally fascinating releases. But what is it that CD Projekt Red does that makes its games stand apart from their peers? While there are many elements that come together to ensure a CDPR game’s quality, it’s how the smaller pieces connect to create a coherent and convincing whole that really makes these RPGs sing. The authenticity of that whole is achieved through the story, world, and characters shifting and changing based on your choices. It’s a template that many RPG developers use, but few have succeeded in their ambitions in quite the same way as CDPR has. “When I play other triple-A RPGs or RPG adjacent games, I very often can feel the limitations of their tools,” says Patrick Mills, CD Projekt Red’s franchise content strategy lead. “You can see the ambition of the designer and you see that the ambition is not quite delivered upon. And I think a lot of people who don't know how games are made look at that and they just say, ‘lazy devs,’ or ‘they're bad designers.’ And that's not what it is. I think, a lot of times, it's that your tools just aren't capable of delivering the thing that you want to do.” CD Projekt Red has spent nearly as many hours making tools as it has making games. Almost all of its RPGs have been built using the company’s REDengine, a bespoke toolkit that has been designed, augmented, and iterated upon across four different versions to allow the design team to achieve its very specific ambitions. Those tools have allowed all the pieces of each game to connect, enabling a coherent experience in which players’ actions feel impactful and accounted for. Newer versions of the REDengine have also allowed the studio to get really wild with some of its quest designs. In The Witcher, for instance, there’s broadly three kinds of objectives: exploration and investigation, dialogue-driven drama, and cutthroat combat encounters. By Cyberpunk 2077, the studio had pushed deep into the minutiae of character creation, which opened up the need for a game that supported an even wider range of playstyles, including stealth and hacking – both of which require bespoke systems. Cyberpunk’s Phantom Liberty expansion doubled down on this, resulting in quests that referenced very different genres, such as its famous survival horror-inspired optional finale. Variety, then, has been key to CD Projekt Red’s journey. “I think especially with the RPGs that we're making, which tend to be relatively sizable, it's almost like a necessity, right?” says Miles Tost, level design lead at CD Projekt Red. “You need to find the variety in the gameplay and ways to bend the systems in a way that you create some new and fresh experiences, because otherwise players will just burn out on it.” “With the size of these games, even [with] the best story, people will slowly taper out if the gameplay doesn't keep them engaged and refreshed,” he adds. Whatever the choice is and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness. That’s not to say that stories aren’t an important part of CD Projekt Red’s games. Far from it. In fact the studio has a tried, tested, and proven approach to how it tells a tale in every single one of its quests. They all need a twist. A wrinkle. As Mills explains, killing the bandits who stole from a village is “boring” and “not an interesting story.” But successfully telling the story of a bandit attack isn’t just about turning an unpredictable corner – it also needs to take into account the method in which players explore that story. To anticipate that, CDPR puts every quest through “destruction testing”, in which playtesters attempt to navigate the mission in every conceivable way. With the data from that testing, quest designers are then able to re-tool missions to account for unexpected player behaviour, ensuring they support as many solutions as possible. The result is a more natural-feeling storyline that authentically responds to your choices. Choices in video games are complicated. Cyberpunk’s open-ended nature means that every single body modification purchased, weapon looted, and skill point invested can change the way a player interacts with the world, and so a huge amount of possibilities must be accounted for – everything from stealth to brutality to diplomacy to the inevitable player-divised tactics that take developers by surprise months after release. But such decisions are not the choices that CD Projekt Red is famous for. Rather, the studio is known for its big story-branching choices. For years such decisions were generally considered “BioWare-style”, so synonymous was the design with games such as Mass Effect and the original Baldur’s Gates. But CDPR’s take on them has arguably become the go-to in the public consciousness. That’s largely thanks to their challenge; there’s no clear line between good and evil in either Cyberpunk or The Witcher, and so every choice feels like untying a thousand knots to work out the best option. But there are other factors: CDPR has a tendency to delay the consequences of your actions, meaning you can’t immediately reload a poor choice and try again, which grants each decision a sense of inescapable authenticity. And when the consequences do strike, they feel impactful and far-reaching; choices often result in major character deaths, political upheaval, or roll the dice on romantic encounters. The success of these choices is rooted in careful preparation. “All the sides are presented to you beforehand,” says Paweł Sasko, associate game director. “You had an opportunity to actually assimilate all the information. You understood it well, you get the characters, you know what they are about. So at the moment when you are faced with a choice, you understand the context and you understand the implications of what you're doing.” This thorough approach means that players can have a nuanced relationship with the result of their actions. As quest designer Paweł Gąska explains, “We want the player to see that even a good choice can have bad consequences, and that a bad choice can still be justified because of something else you focused on.” A great example of this can be found in Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion, which sees FIA agent Songbird offer to help cure your terminal condition, provided you help her escape the clutches of her tyrannic employer. Simultaneously her former partner, Reed, asks that you help him bring Songbird into FIA custody, as he hopes that his (admittedly questionable) bosses will do right by her. By presenting both character paths as viable, nuanced options rather than a choice between good and evil, CDPR helps players build authentic relationships and eventually make decisions that reflect their own feelings and values. “Whatever the choice is and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness,” explains Sebastian Kalemba, game director on The Witcher 4. “If this is coherent with the emotional journey we're delivering, [it will allow] the player to feel [that they are] okay with this consequence.” Several of CDPR’s choices have gone down in video game legend. While the branching pathways through The Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron quest and the choice between helping Songbird or Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty are among the company’s best and most well-known, my personal favourite can be found in The Witcher 2. At the end of chapter one you must ally with either Vernon Roche, commander of the Temerian special forces, or Iorweth, the elven leader of the Scoia'tael freedom fighters. Your choice here completely changes the quests, characters, and location of the game’s middle-act. It was a bold, ambitious swing for the studio’s second-ever game, and one it has not attempted since. “The difficulty with that is not so much about being bold, it’s mostly about the resources you invest,” says Tost. “We haven't gotten more afraid over the years of people missing our content. We're very much fine with that happening. But it's also the amount of resources you commit to basically making two different stories, which is almost like two different games.” As quest designers, we can think of good choices, but it's the writers who have to actually elicit emotions in the players. The company’s decision to move away from level-based locations to an open world design made creating branching pathways as significant as that in The Witcher 2 “more difficult to do.” But the idea wasn’t abandoned. The final act of The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine expansion is notably malleable. Similarly, the choice between Songbrid and Reed towards the end of Phantom Liberty results in two radically different pathways. “Phantom Liberty in general was sort of a response to some criticism that we got for the base game, which was that we lost a lot of non-linearity,” Tost explains. According to Mills, CDPR worked on Cyberpunk 2077 “thinking that we understood choice and consequence,” but discovered upon completion of the base game that such choices weren’t landing correctly. “We built choice and consequence into most of our quests,” Mills insists. “We built it into the structure of the game, but it just didn't feel satisfying.” Following a ******* of careful analysis, the Cyberpunk development team came to the conclusion that its approach to choice and consequence had been too subtle. Elements that telegraphed upcoming choices were often missed by players who simply could not spot such small details in the dense ocean of near-photo realistic detail that is Night City. And then, following their decisions, players were not being shown the consequences of their actions in a clear manner. “The Witcher 3 had a structure where you were making your choices, you were visiting Skellige and [Velen] when you made those choices, and then later in following acts, you were actually visiting those places again,” recalls Sasko. “And we could, in a really simple way, show you, ‘Hey, here are your consequences, because you are visiting the same places again.’ It's so simple to do it. In Cyberpunk, the structure is so much more complex. You rarely come back to the places that you have seen.” Sasko discusses his work on The Pickup, a Cyberpunk 2077 quest in which you must acquire a prototype combat robot from a gang holed up in a meat factory. There are a number of ways this quest can be tackled, and the aftermath reflects your approach. “When you come back to the meat factory, there are consequences of your choices,” Sasko says. “But you have to really be there, come and look for it, and most players don't. That's the reality. So the learning [is that] the structure of the game needs to support [revealing the consequences].” It was this learning that led to a “more heavy handed” approach for Phantom Liberty and its branching final questline. But the choice and resulting branch is only worth so much in and of itself. Because no matter how good the choice is, no matter how many options are built into the story, none of it can succeed if the writing surrounding the choice is sub-par. “As quest designers, we can think of good choices, good dilemmas, good themes, but it's the writers who have to deliver the dialogues that will actually elicit emotions in the players,” says Gąska. “It's the cinematics [team] and the animators who have to give [the story] to you in a way that you will actually feel it.” Gąska likens this to the dilemma of a terminally ill person deciding to end their own life. Without any emotion or connection, the question is “just a theoretical thing.” But when the choice is personal, involving people you love and care for, it becomes a heart-wrenching issue. And so the fundamental skill behind creating resonant choices is to craft characters that feel truly authentic. Such authenticity can then inform how choices and consequences are built into the game's design and story. “Our approach is the approach for the way we live, right?” says Kalemba, who explains that he doesn’t believe in foreshadowing the consequences of choices. “You don’t know what's going to happen tomorrow, but there are several choices you have today. And by designing the experience from the get-go this way, we let ourselves do our games as best as possible and ask players to be open and ready for the consequences.” While Kalemba and his team will no doubt draw upon the studio’s prior successes for The Witcher 4, there’s naturally a desire to do something more advanced. Something more impressive. But to do so will require solving a tricky development puzzle. “All of the work we did on [our] expansions was generally more enjoyable than working on the base games themselves,” admits Tost. “All of these unknowns that you had when you were working on the base game are answered and it's a matter of pure creation. I think we should look at how we answer these questions in a timely manner so that we can simulate the process of working on an expansion earlier than by the time we get to making an expansion.” Such an approach is made all the more trickier by tools – CD Projekt Red is leaving its bespoke REDengine behind for The Witcher 4, instead opting for Unreal Engine 5. And so on top of trying to answer those questions, development staff will also be learning how best to maximise the potential of a new and unfamiliar engine. To meet their ambition, the team will need to avoid Mills’ earlier observation of developers fighting against the limitations of their tools. No doubt a close relationship with Unreal’s creator, Epic, will be vital to moulding the engine into a shape that allows CDPR to deliver on its goals. “We want to put player agency in the center,” says Kalemba of those goals. “We want players to be able to really sense these opportunities and to go in-depth when it comes to choice and consequences. “It's the evolution of The Witcher, so more tools at players' disposal to be able to not only play and go with the consequences narratively, but also gameplay wise,” he adds. “We want to give players more tools, more opportunities, to be able to feel that ‘I am the player and I define my experience.’” Simply matching The Witcher 3’s choices and their resulting consequences would be a massive undertaking for CD Projekt Red. But to evolve and advance The Witcher 4 beyond the studio’s past accomplishments no doubt requires something much more complex. As Cyberpunk 2077 proved, even the master of branching stories can trip and fall. Phantom Liberty saw the studio stand back up and dust itself off, but The Witcher 4 will be the true test of how past learnings inform new ambitions. Hopefully Ciri’s next adventure will continue to cement CD Projekt Red’s reputation as the studio dedicated to respecting and fulfilling player choices. Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor. View the full article

A game that finally made me think a Spider could be adorable? Nah, they still terrify me, but A Webbing Journey really is wholesome. Great idea for a game too with some fun physics and web-slinging. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article