Video Games – Page 3 – Syndication Server

Neowiz announces Lies of P DLC, and it’s not Wizard of Oz-themed

Neowiz announced not just the first round of Lies of P DLC during a recent livestream, but also a full-blown Lies of P sequel

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Neowiz announced not just the first round of Lies of P DLC during a recent livestream, but also a full-blown Lies of P sequel. It’s probably not what you’re expecting from the action game, if the two images director Jiwon Choi shared is anything to go by.

Choi shared the news in a Director’s Letter video, where he thanked players for helping Lies of P sell over 1 million copies in just two months.

If the headline has you scratching your noggin, you probably didn’t stick around in Lies of P until the ending. After the credits roll, we see a scene with the mysterious adversary responsible for the Krat experiments, and he’s outlining the next phase of his plan. That phase involves Dorothy Gale, the red-shod heroine of L. Frank Baum’s classic Wizard of Oz tale, and we even see Dorothy click her heels before the screen goes dark.

The image Choi shared shows a ship with mast and sails in northern seas – unless in Lies of P world, the northern lights light up other skies – and it’s ramming a hole in another, much larger ship, presumably to make boarding easier, though certainly not quieter. Some speculate that Neowiz is tackling Peter Pan next, instead of The Wizard of Oz.

Maybe Dorothy shows up on the ship as well, and who knows, maybe Neowiz is even planning some kind of Kingdom Hearts-style mashup of classic literature, though Dorothy should be wearing silver slippers if that were the case.

Anyway, the other image Choi shared is less evocative. It’s a high-tech lab of some kind with absolutely no other visual clues to go on.

The Lies of P sequel and DLC have no release date, but Choi said the team plans on releasing a hefty patch in December 2023 that balances a few aspects, including blade combinations, and adds new cosmetics.

If you haven’t checked out the puppet game yet, you can grab it on Xbox Game Pass for console and PC.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

Alan Wake 2 writer Sam Lake wants to make a ‘big budget’ fantasy game next

Remedy finally launched Alan Wake 2 13 years after the original horror game, but creative director Sam Lake already has other ideas to explore

Remedy finally launched Alan Wake 2 13 years after the original horror game, but creative director Sam Lake already has other ideas to explore. Lake told GQ that he’d like to work on a dark fantasy next, assuming enough people are interested in the project.

“‘Would I ever do anything else?’ Lake said, restating GQ’s question. “Yeah. I’m still thinking that I will. There will be a time when I retire. It’s just that… this has all been so engaging.”

Lake told GQ he still has plenty of untold stories he wants to pursue. “One was this crazy, huge budget, dark gothic fantasy, which I haven’t used for anything yet.”

Whether he does do anything with that idea is up in the air, but Lake and Remedy are certainly in a better place to explore bold, new ideas than they were when the first Alan Wake launched. Alan Wake was a risky follow-up to Max Payne and a bid for Remedy to avoid getting stuck in a rut, Lake says. The unexpected success attracted plenty of attention and offers to help make Alan Wake 2 and even to bring Alan Wake 3 concepts to life – at a cost.

Lake told GQ that Xbox wanted to partner with Remedy in exchange for the Alan Wake franchise rights, the same way Take-Two bought the rights to Max Payne.

Lake and Remedy declined the offer and made Quantum Break instead. That was not the success Remedy wanted, so the team took another chance and made Control, which earned over half a dozen Game Awards nominations, and Lake told Shacknews’ Lex Luddy that the success inspired him to pursue a more adventurous storytelling style that wasn’t afraid to dig into Finnish culture.

The result was the form of Alan Wake 2 that Remedy released to critical acclaim last week, with the strange, psychological horror and reliance on Finnish folklore standing out as particular high points for reviewers. Remedy has two Alan Wake 2 DLC expansions in the works as well, though Lake’s dark fantasy project is probably going to have to wait. Remedy is also working on Control 2 and a multiplayer game spinoff.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

Avatar Frontiers creative director Magnus Jansen: ‘It’s really a nature experience, a joyful discovery’

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora creative director Magnus Jansen tells GLHF how he and his team approached designing a new, unique Avatar world

Building a game from a movie license comes with risks. Some of the worst video games of the ‘90s and 2000s sprouted from poorly considered tie-ins, where the team or maybe the license holder couldn’t decide whether the final product should be a game or a playable movie that rehashed what everyone already knew. The risk is even bigger if you’re Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment, working with the Avatar license on Frontiers of Pandora and hoping to create something ambitious with a premise that’s much different than the James Cameron Avatar. However, Pandora‘s creative director Magnus Jansen tells GLHF his team had a stroke of luck right from the first meeting with Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment production company.

“A game and a move movie are not the same thing,” Jansen says. “They shouldn’t be. When we met with Lightstorm [Entertainment] all those years ago, it was very clear that Lightstorm – thank God – didn’t want Frontiers of Pandora to be a linear movie game. They didn’t want to recreate the movie. They wanted the game to be everything that a game can be: to be interactive, for the player to have agency, for co-authorship between the player and the pre-authored narrative, and all of the stuff that makes a game a good game.”

Avatar surprised me during the Avatar preview event I attended with how alive and vibrant Pandora felt, and that was Massive’s intent. Jansen says the team starts from the bottom of the evolutionary chain with the fundamental elements of life. First comes the broad strokes of the environment, and then they figure out what grows there, what animals thrive, and how this ecology influences how humans – or Na’vi, in Avatar’s case – live.

Hansen tells me the Massive team took several research trips while deciding how Pandora should look, sound, and feel, including the United States’ Pacific Northwest region, though much of the material was in Massive’s own backyard. He says the inspiration for some of the regions I didn’t get to see in the preview –cooler coniferous zones with fungal labyrinths and carpets of white moss – come from the temperate Nordic forests of Sweden, some of which are just minutes away from Massive’s headquarters in Malmo.

With the environment in mind, Jansen said the designers start creating lifestyles, economies, and cultures. I didn’t get to see much of that culture firsthand, since the preview avoided putting me in contact with Pandora’s three Na’vi clans. However, the careful approach to creating an entire ecosystem shines through in how you handle item gathering.

Stockpiling resources is a mindless task you perform without even realizing it in games like The Witcher 3 or even Genshin Impact, but Massive did something different in Avatar. You walk away with better-quality materials if you take the time to interact with and extract them properly.

Jansen says turning the idea of eco-guardianship into a game was one of the most attractive prospects of working on Frontiers of Pandora.

“The inherent ethos of Avatar with sustainability and the relationship and respect you have for nature – this is a huge thing for me and the team, and it has been since the very beginning,” Jansen says. “ It’s changed the way that we do harvesting. When you pick your resources for food or crafing, and you want the best stuff, it’s about quality over quantity. Instead of going ‘hey, you have to pick 20 of these and make them into one new thing,’ it’s about finding the one you need and, by your knowledge of nature and being in tune with nature, getting the best quality.”

That often means venturing off the main path and taking time to find the right items, but Jansen says the team isn’t adding friction. If you don’t want to engage with crafting or harvesting, you can complete the story without ever touching it. You just won’t get the best upgrades and weapons.

“One of the things I’m super happy about is that we have made a world that’s beautiful and dangerous, but it’s not aggressive. And there’s a difference there because it’s not trying to eat you or anything. If you just want to sort of stop and smell the roses – I don’t think we actually have any roses – but you can. It’s really a nature experience.”

It’s also not what I and most people expected. After the Ubisoft Forward showcase in June 2023, many – myself included – thought Pandora resembled Far Cry with an Avatar makeover. That’s partly unavoidable. Ubisoft kept quiet about the project, sharing hardly any new details since that initial reveal, which Jansen says is ideal. He wants players to enter Pandora like the game’s heroine, completely unaware of what to expect and surrounded by new discoveries and possibilities on all sides. That goal guided every decision Jansen and his team made, even down to telling the story from a first-person perspective to give players a greater sense of “being there” and of Pandora’s scale.

“All of the creature designs, all of the things that we did, the variety, and the push to have so much – not just have the rainforests, but two more regions that are vastly different from each other, not just one clan, but three clans. “All of that is driven by this feeling that it is it’s a roller coaster, a journey of pure joy and joyful discovery.”

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on Dec. 7, 2023, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a surprisingly thoughtful take on open-world games

We spent a few hours with Ubisoft and Massive’s Avatar game and came away impressed with the thoughtful approach to open world game design

Ahead of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s launch in December 2023, I had the chance to spend a few hours with it and get a glimpse of Massive’s vision. I picked stalks, found beehives, contributed to a community fund, and learned how to find my way in the gorgeous, otherworldly forests of Pandora before becoming an airborne terror and raiding an RDA base on a flying lizard. Despite a few stale design elements, Frontiers of Pandora is shaping up to be a more thoughtful take on the usual open-world – and Ubisoft – formula.

My Avatar preview dropped me in the middle of a quest to find honey for a Na’vi ritual, so off I went into the forest, completely devoid of context and quest markers. That last bit s one of the more interesting and promising ideas in Frontiers. You can treat Avatar like any other modern game and have waypoints and quest markers cluttering the screen, or you can shut them off and pay attention to the world around you. Your hunting guide explains where plants thrive and animals roam, and the world – mercifully – only has a handful of places in each main area that match the habitat description.

The bugs that produced the honey I needed build their hives on mangroves, so off I went to the swampy area nearby to hunt them down. Eventually, my kind and patient demoist pointed out that I walked right past where the mangroves grew at a specific point on the riverbank. I can see this freedom potentially being a minor frustration in the full game. Frontiers of Pandora is big, so much so that I actually let out an audible “whoa” when I panned out in the map view. It’s easy to literally miss the tree for the forest in some cases, though you can use your Na’vi senses to get a small pointer in the right direction.

Na’vi sense is essentially the same kind of superhuman power you activate as Geralt in The Witcher 3 or Agent 47 in Hitman, a gamey ability that lets you see things you normally can’t. It should feel trite at this point, like just another standard open-world feature, but Massive roots it and other overly familiar features in a layer of thoughtful design that links your actions more closely with the world.

When you activate your Na’vi sense, for example, you’re tuning into the world around you, while gaining new skill points comes from helping Pandora’s different tribes and learning their customs. When you harvest items, you get higher quality if you know how to treat the resource and harvest it in the correct way. Sure, these are just some extra contextual detail, but it made me feel more connected to Pandora and the story Massive wants to tell.

The demo’s second half included a few side quests, a big combat sequence, and some brilliant platforming segments where you bond with your big flying lizard that’s the Avatar version of Epona. I started climbing the roost and made it pretty high up before my demoist had to point out that I missed the story quest location and the actual intended path.

Avatar’s side quests seem like a varied lot. One was pretty standard and had me tracking down items, one sent me into the forest to investigate the source of a noise causing nearby wildlife distress, while another tasked me with using logic and a few human hacking tools to solve a mystery, and

Where things get a bit less impressive is off the beaten track. Pandora is a beautiful world that I could happily spend a long time just exploring, but underneath the visual splendor, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to explore outside of quests. A handful of randomly generated encounters spawn in certain areas. You might find injured animals you can help or RDA soldiers to fight or even random Na’vi out hunting and gathering. The simple actions like helping the hurt were fine, but when they started repeating surprisingly often, the sameness of them – Na’vi repeating the exact same lines, for example – broke the spell a little.

I wrapped things up with a crash course in Frontiers of Pandora’s combat and an assault on an RDA base. These guns-blazing sequences require more strategy than you might think at first glance. My demoist recommended a stealthy approach to avoid alerting the entire base, so naturally I did the exact opposite, just to see what would happen.

It turns out two dozen heavily armed soldiers have a pretty big advantage over a single fighter with no armor. So I tried a different approach. I used my trusty flying steed in a series of hit-and-run style assaults, dropping on targets before soaring away to safety again, and just about completed the mission before I accidentally ran into a group of soldiers.

I’m not sure if that method was supposed to work. My demoist said no one had actually tried it before. Either way, the freedom to experiment was refreshing, especially for a series of gunfights that could so easily get boring quickly.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on Dec. 7, 2023, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

Upcoming RPGs in 2024 to keep on your radar: Final Fantasy, Bloodlines 2, and more

The slate of upcoming RPGs of 2024 is packed with high-profile video game releases in the first few months, and these are some of the best

The slate of upcoming RPGs of 2024 is packed with high-profile video game releases in just the first few months alone. Final Fantasy, Like A Dragon, and a new Persona game all launch within four weeks of each other, and then we get into some more niche games. SaGa, something new from Vanillaware, Paper Mario, Eiyuden Chronicle – good as 2023 and 2022 were for RPGs, somehow it seems like 2024 might be even better. That goes double if we get some of the long-delayed RPGs in the works, such as Bloodlines 2 and Black Myth: Wukong.

All these and more are some of the best RPGs of 2024 to keep an eye on.

Alan Wake 2 DLC roadmap and expansions

Remedy has some big Alan Wake 2 DLC in the works, including two hefty expansions for the horror game planned for a 2024 release.

Alan Wake 2 might have only recently launched on PC and console, but Remedy already has big plans for Alan Wake 2 DLC, including two full expansions. Sorry Alan, old buddy, your nightmare ain’t over yet. Both expansions for the survival horror game are planned for sometime in 2024, after the update that brings a new campaign to the game in New Game+ mode. You can either buy each expansion separately when they launch or get the whole package with the Alan Wake 2 deluxe edition.

Remedy announced two expansions so far, which is in keeping with their approach to the first Alan Wake and Control. More may be in the works for later, but for now, this is all the Alan Wake 2 DLC we know about.

Alan Wake 2 TV studio door codes and how to escape

Our Alan Wake 2 studio door code guide explains how to get each code, how to reach the basement, and how to escape the studio

Getting out of the Dark Place TV studio and finding the studio door code in Alan Wake 2 feels like a big leap after Saga’s straightforward horror game segments. Alan’s sections swap Saga’s realism and cold logic for dream-like surrealism, and it’s tough to get your bearings after the first big shift. You’ll actually need to play the TV studio part of The Dark Place at least twice and get a unique door code each time that eventually lets you escape again, so if you input the first one and find yourself back in the studio, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s scripted.

Our Alan Wake 2 studio door code guide explains how to get each code, how to reach the basement, and how to escape the studio.

The best Cities Skylines 2 settings for performance

We break down the best Cities Skylines 2 DLC for performance on PC to help you get the most out of the simulation game

Settling on the best Cities Skylines 2 settings for performance is a bit of a tricky task. The simulation game‘s settings themselves aren’t that complex, though the advanced toolset does give you more control than most PC games over how to tailor your experience. The challenge comes from Cities Skylines 2’s launch state, which is not just a mess, but a confusing one. One person’s settings might bump the framerate up to 30 fps, while the same settings do absolutely nothing for another. Quality and upscaling frequently have no measurable effect on performance as well, but since your experience may vary, treat these as a baseline to start from while you experiment.

For reference, I used an RTX 3070 with 16GB of RAM and a 12th-gen i7 CPU.

Meta Quest 3 review: A big leap forward for VR gaming

Our Meta Quest 3 review breaks down what makes the latest VR headset a bit step forward in VR gaming and an improvement over Quest 2

Playing games in VR can be such a hassle. PSVR 2 was a big improvement for Sony, since it required a single wire instead of the original set’s snaking mass of cables stuck to your head. One wire is still one wire too many, though, a tether keeping you tied to the real world, reminding you that you have a massive headset strapped to your face.

The Quest 2 solved this at the cost of losing the visual sharpness of a wired VR set, but the Meta Quest 3 goes a long way toward fixing that. Games look almost as sharp as they do with a premium tethered set.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the Quest 3’s pass-through. The set’s six outward-facing cameras let you see your surroundings in full color, a substantial improvement over the Quest 2’s otherworldly black-and-white. You can almost read your phone screen without taking the headset off, and it tracks your hand movements, so typing or playing a virtual keyboard is a lot easier. Your vision is, admittedly, somewhat blurry, but it’s a small price for the improvement in pretty much every other area.

When you set your playspace boundary – your safety area, so you don’t go wandering into a wall – the camera automatically picks up objects and blockers with impressive accuracy as you look around the room.

Mixed reality is, unsurprisingly, a big part of the Quest 3’s focus, so it’s a bit baffling that there are so few apps that take advantage of it at launch. Sure, the option is nice to have, but it needs proper support to really get off the ground. On the bright side, there are plenty of VR games to keep busy with.

Red Matter 2 was one of the first games I checked out, a sci-fi puzzler that developer Vertical Robot upgraded with 4K textures for Quest 3. The Quest 3 features dual 2064×2208 LCD displays with 30 percent more pixel density than the Quest 2, which is tech speak for “it looks much better.”. I was genuinely surprised by how sharp it looks compared to the bland, blocky faces you see in games such as Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom, which, presumably, didn’t have the benefit of an upgrade for Quest 3.

If, unlike me, you don’t mind the wire, you can also hook the Quest 3 to your PC and bump its graphics capability, which means you can play more demanding games such as Half-Life Alyx and the hit simulator game Microsoft Flight Simulator on Steam, assuming you have a capable PC. Un-wired versions of these would be nice, but I have no idea how possible that even is.

The headset itself feels much more comfortable than its predecessor, thanks in part to its reduced bulk. You can bring the screens close to your eyes or take it further out if you wear glasses. Like the Quest 2, Quest 3 also has a dial that adjusts lens spacing.

VR technology usually goes hand-in-hand with discomfort, but you can easily sit with the Quest 3 stuck to your noggin until its battery drains, which happens to be about three hours into an intensive gaming session. Three hours is more than enough time for most people to spend in VR without feeling ill anyway anyway. We haven’t tested it, but it’d last longer for less intensive apps, such as some of the art or messaging apps.

One unexpected advantage of the comfort and extra mobility is that the Quest 3 actually works as a viable fitness device now. You could easily spend an hour working out on Beat Saber or one of the Quest 3’s dedicated fitness apps. Whether you want to bang drums in Ragnarock or channel John Wick in Pistol Whip, there are plenty of games and apps to work up a sweat with – but you might want to splash out for the optional silicone face pad. That default one gets damp.

Audio springs forth from the set’s side arms and a pair of decent speakers. You get a solid sense of where sound comes from, and while it won’t satisfy those with more particular tastes in audio quality, it’s decent enough that you don’t need to buy a pair of headphones right away.

The Quest 3 is one of the most comfortable headsets we’ve used, and you don’t even sacrifice image quality without the PC cable. While game consoles are seeing dwindling returns and incremental improvements in graphics between generations, VR is likely where we’ll see these huge generational leaps between devices. If Quest 3 is any indication, VR has an exciting future ahead.

Written by Kirk McKeand and Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

Cities Skylines 2 DLC roadmap and expansions

Colossal Order has plenty of Cities Skylines 2 DLC in the works, with small asset packs planned for 2023 and a full expansion in summer 2024

Colossal Order has plenty of Cities Skylines 2 DLC in the works, and some of the simulation game’s expansions are slated for 2023. Like with the original game, CO will release targeted new features in new packs alongside a selection of less expensive DLC with additions such as new radio songs. The Cities Skylines 2 DLC map may look a little sparse compared to the robust selection of expansions for its predecessor, but Colossal Order will continue supporting the game for months and years in the future, including with community mods-turned-expansions.