Рубрика: Gamezone

We’re in a golden age of ARPGs if you haven’t been paying attention, but that doesn’t make them any easier to balance. Since its launch, Diablo 4 has been criticized for its awfully gentle take on the Burning Hells; and though smacking loot pinatas until they stop moving doesn’t have to be all that hard to be fun, lead live game designer Colin Finer is ready to kick things up a notch.

“We had heard a bunch of feedback from Season 7 that you could just AFK and just get everything for free, and that wasn’t something that we felt like was true Diablo,” he said in an interview with PC Gamer.

“It’s a tricky balance, right? Because to feel rewarded for something, you have to overcome a challenge. And if there isn’t enough challenge, then it just feels like you’re getting candy for free, and you don’t really feel that satisfaction of overcoming a boss.”

The PTR has yielded a lot of feedback about the game’s current difficulty level that Finer said the team is aware of, but noted that nothing on the test server is final and that the live version of Season 8 should feel “a little bit more difficult than Season 7.”

“We definitely have a sort of double or half it approach when it comes to balancing these things, especially on the PTR. So we doubled a lot of the numbers … since then, we’ve heard a ton of feedback, we’ve played it ourselves, we’ve gotten a lot of data, and we’re actually dialing back quite a bit, and we think we found a pretty happy middle ground.”

Finer said the team has been careful not to ante up the difficulty too quickly to avoid making the game “a slog” that’s “just slowing the players down,” adding that “we think that that little tick of difficulty is really going to help the overall game feel much more rewarding.” While there were a bunch of bosses getting one-shot in the PTR, Finer said they’ve addressed a “a lot of one-shots” for the live version of the patch.

I don’t doubt that it’s difficult to tune a game with as many builds and legendary items as Diablo 4 has, and it’ll probably remain a moving target long after Season 8 comes out. Here’s hoping the team’s ambitions for Season 8 please those looking for a deadlier dungeon crawl.

Diablo 4 is on sale for $27.49 through April 28 on Steam.

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist ’80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

Sometimes I buy obscure old games for what I like to imagine are grand, noble reasons. A niche developer makes an unusual puzzley twist on the RPG, and I must learn more. A great idea turns up 20 years too early on hardware that could barely run it, and I just have to know if it works anyway. An ancient dungeon crawler dares to combine horror with extensive map-making, and I need to see it for myself.

And then there are times like this, where I see the words “Initial D typing game” and just know it’s going to be so daft I have to experience its particular brand of absurdity with my own eyes.

No setting could be more unsuited to the typing game treatment—not even Sega’s The Typing of the Dead felt as forced as this. The ’90s street racing manga and anime adaptation of Initial D are full of achingly cool people driving hyper-tuned cars I will never see outside of old arcade games and Tokyo Xtreme Racer. It’s about as effortlessly stylish as anything could ever hope to be. Which means it’s also on the exact opposite end of the cool spectrum as “accurate touch typing” and “being the sort of person interested enough in typing games to have them shipped from the other side of the planet.” (Hi).

I expected to have nothing more than a bit of a laugh with 2000’s Initial D: Ryosuke Takahashi’s Fastest Typing Theory, to confirm it was a silly idea and a fun curio for my shelf I’d soon put away forever. A brief run through practice mode quickly corrected my casual attitude. This game is as deadly serious about the typing tutor part of the package as it is showing off nighttime drifting around hairpin corners.

There are separate sessions for each hand, colour coding to show correct finger placement and their corresponding keys, and a full dual-handed test too. When I’m done I’m shown my clear time, tracked to the hundredth of a second, as well as how many slip-ups I made and my five most commonly fumbled keys. I’ve been judged in three specific areas, none of them drifting a tuner Toyota Trueno, and found deeply wanting.

Seeing my weaknesses laid out in this way wounded my writer’s pride. I type all day and night. I’ve worn keyboards out, haphazardly stuck them back together, and then typed some more. So when some decades-old game has the gall to tell me I’m anything less than amazing at the one thing I do all the damned time, you bet I’m going to take it personally.

I think Ryosuke Takahashi’s Fastest Typing Theory did this on purpose. I took my white-hot umbrage and poured it into the main “Battle” mode, ready to unleash my lightning-fast reflexes against the game’s five opponents, unaware that I was so wounded by its mild accusations I was about to dedicate an entire afternoon to showing an ancient piece of typing software who’s boss.

Rather than try to meaningfully integrate the races with my frenzied keyboard mashing, these sprints instead follow a video > typing > video > typing pattern, the compressed action pausing in certain places to allow for some burning hot key pressing action.

The short and low resolution clips used to sell each “race” aren’t exactly up to modern technical standards, but as they’re all directly lifted from the ’98 TV series Initial D: First Stage (as is the fabulous Eurobeat soundtrack and numerous snatches of dialogue), they’re still enough to drum up some genuine excitement. Watching another one is my reward for typing well, and I’m soon caught up in clearing the latest word off the screen, always afraid I’ll take a second too long or fumble too many keystrokes, every error chipping away at my health bar until I crash out.

At first I assumed the text I’m asked to type out would lean towards racing/car terminology in a vague attempt to justify the licence, so I was surprised to see the Japanese names of countries, rivers, and short words that would translate into “periodic table”, “shampoo”, and “hamster” turn up instead.

Weird, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I was doing pretty well in no time at all, actually. My typos were down, my speed up, and my initials were plastered all over the game’s arcade-like high score table. I soon had a string of breezy victories to my name and confidently clicked on the next race without giving it much thought.

It felt as though the game had suddenly slammed the accelerator to the floor. By the end of the fifth stage I’m desperately typing out full sentences, sometimes with punctuation, and swearing like I’m facing the final boss of a soulslike. No more single words to quickly clear away for me. Oh no, now the challenges demand perfect inputs like “AREHAHASIRIKONNDEKO-SUWOYOKUSITTERURAINNDAYO” and “ITUMADENETEYAGARU.OKIRO,DENNWADA.”—and that’s if I’m lucky.

I’ve had less stressful hospital appointments.

Just as it’s on the verge of becoming truly unbearable the game throws out something that could be translated as “Count Dracula can’t handle the sun” just for fun. I end up swearing again, only this time it’s because I’m trying to focus on typing accurately without laughing my head off.

Against all odds, this is a genuinely useful typing tutor. The practice sessions are of real practical use, and the Initial D framework makes it all feel more like play than real homework even when things get tough. The lack of any true link between these two seemingly incompatible halves turns out to be for the best, the unpredictable text forcing my eyes to focus on the screen and trusting my fingers to do the rest. I am a better touch-typist for playing this, and I got to see some great ’90s drifting, too. I’m not sure if my freshly honed skills will transfer to Tokyo Xtreme Racer, but I’m still counting them as a win.

The month of April has turned out to be a flashpoint for the isometric ARPG community. It’s packed with updates: Path of Exile 2, Last Epoch, Diablo 4, and No Rest for the Wicked all have big new shinies out this month, and while it’s natural to compare them, brawling over which is better obscures the bigger picture: This great genre now has tons of great games, each with its own particular merits.

Let’s start with Last Epoch, whose Tombs of the Erased update just dropped a few days ago. It’s got an overhaul to the Sentinel class, a new and very spidery faction, tons of new monsters, new endgame systems, and crucially for a lot of players, tons of buffs. Almost nothing got nerfed this time around, and it shows.

I’ve been blasting for a couple days here and there, and despite not having much time to grind I’m cruising through empowered monoliths and having a ball.

This puts it in the path of some very direct comparisons to Path of Exile 2, whose last update was only a couple weeks ago (Last Epoch delayed its launch to avoid overlapping).

PoE2 got tremendous nerfs in that update, and that combined with tough monsters and a perceived lack of loot left the community feeling… well, pretty pissed off. Some major content creators even chose to skip the patch entirely, and the reaction online was decidedly negative.

The two games are opposites in a lot of ways. Last Epoch is a breezy, zippy affair where you can reach the endgame in a couple hours, basically every ability you pick can delete whole screens of monsters, and loot fountains down from the heavens so much so that it’ll overwhelm you if you don’t set a good loot filter.

Path of Exile 2, on the other hand, is crunchy, challenging, and sparse. Every exalted orb that drops in the campaign is a cause for celebration because I can pop over to the trade site and buy a huge upgrade. Monsters overwhelm you, boss fights are tough, and items are thin on the ground. Complicated mechanics abound, not least of which is an entire parry system that the Huntress spear skills were built around, meaning that on release (they’ve since patched in another solution) you had to be a parry god to play the class well.

These two games almost couldn’t be more different and still be in the same genre, but they’re both fun. I had a great time with the Dawn of the Hunt update, and while Path of Exile 2 still needs a lot of simmering, I really like getting my hands dirty and having epic fights with the game’s bosses and slowly piecing together a powerful character.

I’ve also enjoyed running around Last Epoch’s empowered monoliths playing a Heartseeker Marksman firing flaming arrows around like a crazed Yondu.

And there’s more…

Don’t wanna play an ARPG that rotates every few months? Get off the live service hamster wheel and go play Grim Dawn. Another crunchy entry in the genre, it eschews the seasonal release schedule for a more old-school expansion approach and lets you play at your own pace.

Jody didn’t care for Last Epoch when he reviewed it last year, finding it a bit too floaty, and prefers Grim Dawn’s more tactile approach to bashing monsters. Nothing wrong with that!

Wanna turn the old brain off and just farm gear in the familiar, bloodsoaked lands of Sanctuary? Check out Diablo 4‘s new season, which has a developer livestream April 24 and a crossover with Berserk coming up.

I have a complicated relationship with Blizzard’s game—Diablo changed my life, Diablo 2 is still in my top 10 of all time, and I felt such an incredible betrayal with Diablo 3 that it soured me on the franchise, maybe for life. Diablo 4 isn’t for me, but a lot of people love it, and that’s outstanding.

The point here is that there really is something for everyone. Torchlight Infinite still exists, even if its season reveal video last week sounds like it was recorded in a grain silo. No Rest for the Wicked has a huge update coming at the end of the month, Titan Quest 2 doesn’t have a release date yet but looks gorgeous.

None of this is to say that we should just enjoy the breadth of ARPG options and stop giving feedback to developers. Particularly for games like Path of Exile 2 that release in early access, it’s important to make our voices known.

But the genre is thriving, and it’s good that its games offer different things and inspire passionate debate, so long as we save the real vitriol for when a recombinator bricks our bow or the Eternity Cache imprints t1 health regen.

Admit it, we all have an MMO of questionable pedigree that we could happily sink dozens more hours into. Unfortunately for me, mine was Defiance. Yep, the one that ran alongside the moderately popular sci-fi (sorry, SyFy) TV show. Defunct twice over as both a retail game and the F2P relaunch Defiance 2050, it’s now back from the dead once more under new publisher Fawkes Games, and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content.

For those who didn’t play it when it was originally running, I’d describe Defiance as a massively multiplayer Borderlands, with all the looting, shooting and driving around that entails.

While playable solo or with a 4-player group in co-op, the most interesting moments came from big quests and events in the overworld (similar to Guild Wars 2) that pit dozens of players against huge bosses with massive health pools or big swarms of regular monsters to earn high-tier loot drops. Simple and satisfying popcorn gaming, and some of the guns—especially explosives—were fun and messy to play with.

The TV show wasn’t too shabby either. A bit like Deadwood with more lasers. It was about a whole mess of bickering human and alien factions butting heads over a frontier town on post-apocalyptic Earth, the planet ruined by a messy war between humanity and the Votanis Collective, a Covenant-esque alien coalition. It ran for three seasons, with a few in-game live events that ran parallel to the show. Nothing too dramatic, but it made for an interesting setting for a shooter, and you can meet some of the TV characters in-game.

While I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen so far of this re-release, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops, based on the few minutes I’ve played. Most notably, this is a total relaunch for the game under new ownership, which means that anyone who owned the old retail version gets nothing transferred over. This means that cosmetics are pretty limited, and players can only create Human and Irathient characters, while the albino Castithan aliens are for paying customers only. There’s also the usual assortment of boosters and perks available if you put money down, but unless they’ve nerfed the game balance, I don’t see myself wanting any of those.

On the technical front, most things seem fine, but while ultrawide monitors are broadly supported (fittingly enough), I noticed some HUD elements like enemy health bars rendering off-center, which looked a little bit funky. Hopefully that’s a minor kink that can be hammered out. From what I’ve seen, all of the content from the game’s latter years is here in this relaunched version, so expect some pretty tough encounters if you bump into the Volge: giant armored lads with pointy helmets and big arm cannons. I remember them being pretty tough cookies.

The Defiance reboot is live now and free to play, although not on Steam. You’ll have to grab the launcher from Fawkes Games directly here and download the game through it, just like we used to do in the horse and buggy days. Nostalgic, huh?

Over on Bluesky, industry analyst mauronl shared some info from Devolver Digital’s 2024 wrap-up for investors, including lifetime revenue figures for 10 of its games. Sitting at number one, with over $US90 million earned, is the folk-horror Happy Tree Friends dungeon-crawler Cult of the Lamb. Number two, with over $US80 million in lifetime revenue, is Astroneer.

These may be surprising figures coming from the house that Hotline Miami built (it’s number seven, with >$30M in revenue), and the label that published all those Serious Sam games (that series is at number four, >$45M), but the explanation comes in the analysis at the top of the page. “Trend: Gamers are spending more time on known IPs as opposed to new IPs”.

But, I hear you ask, surely Cult of the Lamb is a new IP? In 2022 it was. Since then it’s had multiple DLCs, both free and paid, and if you sort Steam’s list of Devolver DLC by top sellers, four of Cult of the Lamb’s DLCs are the top four. (Road to Elysium for The Talos Principle 2 rounds out the top five.) Successful DLC isn’t just successful because of how many copies it sells, as it can bring in a new wave of players who hear about it and pick up the original—something Astroneer also benefited from with its Glitchwalkers expansion, reviving interest in the exploration-crafting game five years after its original launch.

The trend Devolver identifies isn’t just that people really like post-launch support. The other entries in that top 10 include plenty of multi-game series, like Stronghold, Serious Sam, and Shadow Warrior, suggesting that players are videogame players are in another phase of returning for sequels. Expect to see plenty of those from Devolver in the year ahead, along with all the other things an enfranchised fanbase loves—like ports, spin-offs, and definitive edition rereleases.

Another slide from the presentation highlights that Enter the Gungeon and the surprisingly successful VR game Gorn are both getting sequels, and Astroneer a spin-off called Starseeker. It’s probably too early to declare originality dead, however, given that Devolver just released an oddball survival-horror RPG and has announced a May release date for the game where you look like a thumb and have gone to Hell to arrest Satan.

When the Diablo 4 roadmap appeared it included two instances of the concerning phrase “New IP collab”. Worrying visions of skins that let you dress your rogue up as Jinx or your necromancer as, I don’t know, Skibidi Toilet or something flashed through our heads. Fortunately, the first collab to be announced is much more tonally apt.

Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal will be crossing over with Berserk, a popular dark fantasy manga and anime series with a vibe that aligns pretty closely with Diablo’s heavy metal aesthetic. Even if you don’t know Beserk you’ll be familiar with its look as it’s the thing FromSoftware has ripped off repeatedly, and every fantasy saga where an angsty dude with an oversized sword grumps around owes it a debt.

It could have been a lot worse. Videogame collaborations can go either way, with the injection of the Ninja Turtles and Hellboy into Injustice 2 being super fun and Magic: The Gathering’s Fallout cards surprisingly thematic. Meanwhile, having The Witcher appear in Lost Ark was a clash of tones that did not turn out for the best.

Blizzard hasn’t said what form the Diablo x Berserk collaboration will take, but expect some appropriately edgy cosmetics for your barbarian at least. And at least one comically huge two-handed sword.

PC gaming can be an expensive hobby, so it’s understandable that many players want to give their big black graphics machine a surrounding setup it deserves. I get the appeal of having the neatest, smartest desk, or colour-coordinating your room with your peripherals’ RGB settings. I totally see why you might want all your merch neatly arranged in glass display cases behind you, or have a perfectly aligned triptych of screens to envelop you in Elite Dangerous or Farming Simulator.

I, however, am not one of these people.

My setup is a memorial to my time-poor existence and inability to plan. It’s cluttered with coins, notebooks, stationary, plug adapters, and random parts from toys my daughter has brought through to my office.

My webcam sits atop a box folder, height-adjusted with three paperback books (two Stephen Kings and a Bob Mortimer, thanks for asking). Somehow, my headphones actually have their own stand. But I did not buy the stand, have no memory of where it came from, and the headphones themselves are held together with electrician’s tape. Oh yes, the rolls of electrician’s tape are also on the desk, because I haven’t bothered to put them away.

Does the state of my desk bother me? Well, it’s a little embarrassing to write about, though clearly not enough to stop me from doing so. And like a raccoon, I am generally content amid my filth. Indeed, there are only two occasions when it starts to get on my nerves: when I’m trying to find something and can’t, and when I see another gaming setup that’s far nicer than mine.

Because of the way the modern internet works, the latter happens quite a lot. My social media feeds are often bombarded by Twitch streamers, game developers, and just regular gamers who have setups more elaborate than the bridge from the starship Enterprise. Expertly matched furniture, carefully selected wall art, maybe a few (well looked after) plants, and of course, all their Kirby plushies and Tifa figurines perfectly arranged behind them.

When I witness setups like these, I worry that I’m the grubbiest gamer on the planet. But in such moments of existential crisis, I turn to the comforting swamp that is r/ShittyBattleStations. Created in 2011, this subreddit is dedicated to freaks like me, all proudly posting images of their mucky, messy, or outright bizarre gaming setups. You won’t see any magenta backlights or IKEA Kallax units here. Often you’re lucky if the person posting owns a chair.

There are three things I love about r/ShittyBattleStations. The first I’ve already mentioned: the simple reassurance that I’m not alone. The second is the sheer diversity of dire gaming setups on show. At the least remarkable level are extreme versions of my own scenario, gamers who play surrounded by a dragon’s hoard of detritus. Some have desks so jam-packed with stuff it’s impressive they can play games at all, as a rogue twitch of the mouse would surely trigger a domino effect of cascading clutter.

My lived in crap station I come home to every 12 hour shift. from r/shittybattlestations

Many of these above setups fall into categories that are acknowledged by the community. There’s even an automoderator that asks the community to define why a particular setup qualifies as “shitty”, suggesting things like “Incomplete”, “Trash all around” and perhaps my favourite “Not a computer”. However, I’ve seen numerous themes through the subreddit yet to be formalised by the community, so I thought I’d suggest a few below:

The Sir Terry Pratchett award for monitor mania

The Late Author Terry Pratchetts desk. (setup as a display in a exhibition of his work and life) from r/pics

The late Sir Terry Pratchett’s workspace was built around this incredible six-monitor setup. Once, he was asked why he used six screens, to which he famously replied “because I can’t have eight”. This award goes to those gamers for whom no number of screens seems sufficient, and any screen, no matter how old it is or where it has come from, is ripe for incorporation.

The fire hazard

My server setup. I feel like there is a lot to take in here from r/cablegore

This could, admittedly, include setups from various other categories. But there are some setups where your immediate reaction is to reach for the phone to dial the fire brigade. You can definitely go overboard on fire safety, like my dad who used to insist on switching off every plug in the house before he went to bed. But some of the subreddit’s gamers seem downright determined to burn themselves to death.

The ‘wait until you see it’

Found this old photo of my setup from 8 years ago with the stupidest headset holder from r/shittybattlestations

Among the more immediately bizarre battlestations are setups that initially seem fairly unremarkable, but then you spot that one detail that elevates it to the highest tier of shittery. Like this rig that follows the shot of the preposterous headset holder, with the chaser that the PC has two mice. Or this setup where the poster presumably has a rubber spine.

Yet out of all the differently horrible setups on the subreddit, my favourite type of shitty battle station is probably the most common. The PC gamers for whom the lack of furniture is no obstacle. The subreddit is filled with pictures of deskless PC gamers playing on shelving units, chests of drawers, piles of cardboard boxes, storage tubs, or just an amalgamation of stuff. Some players forego not just a desk, but also a chair, setting up their rigs straight on the floor.

shittybattlestations from r/shittybattlestations/comments/1h1iybr/hopefully_will_only_need_it_until_i_get_my_desk

It’d be easy to laugh at these floor-gamers and improvised tabletops, and indeed, some of the posts are pretty darn funny. Mainly though, with the exception of setups that are gross or outright dangerous, I find them strangely endearing. Many of these players are in temporary living situations, or forced into an unusual gaming setup by life events like injuries. Some of these arrangements are kinda ingenious, while others seem borderline torturous, making you wince for the poster’s knees or spine.

But it seems no amount of inconvenience or discomfort will stop some people from PC gaming, and that makes me weirdly proud. While I wouldn’t encourage anyone to adopt any of these setups—PC gaming should, ideally, not come with a risk of sciatica or burning your house down—ultimately, where you play your games doesn’t matter. It’s what you play that counts. If you’re willing to forgo something as basic as a desk to get your game on, going to extraordinary, even painful lengths to conjure an alternative, that probably shows more dedication to your hobby than the shiniest rig on the planet.

Say the name “Havok,” and I instantly picture the yellow sawblade in the company’s logo. For PC gamers of the 2000s, that logo was a promise: Wonderful things await.

But do younger PC gamers know what the name signifies? And do the rest know that the Irish middleware company, made famous through its use in games like Max Payne 2 and Half-Life 2, is still working its physics magic in big, recent games like Elden Ring and Helldivers 2?

Perhaps not, and if not, Havok GM David Coghlan suggests a funny reason for the diminished name recognition: SSDs.

“The logo appears a little less in splash screens these days, as splash screens are sort of being done away with,” Coghlan said on a recent call with PC Gamer. “The speed of hard disks meant that you needed something to occupy the player while the game was loading, and as we’ve moved to faster SSDs, now the emphasis is on trying to get the player in the experience as early as possible.”

Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw the Bink Video tornado. What have we done in the name of progress!?

“I suppose we just want to make sure that people don’t forget that Havok is out there powering many of the franchises that they play and love,” Coghlan said.

And people did forget. When Havok started posting new tech demo videos this year—one of them is embedded above—commenters were excited to see that the company was back. But it never went away.

Havok has been owned by Microsoft since 2015, and its tech is still used in lots of games, including Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Destiny 2, Doom Eternal, and Rainbow Six Siege. It was used in Astro Bot, which won a gazillion GOTY awards last year.

Havok’s software helps game developers with physics and cloth simulation, as well as NPC behavior. And although I do buy the idea that splash screens going out of style reduced its notoriety, Coghlan agrees that it’s also just harder to impress gamers with a tech demo these days.

Even the most basic and janky real-time 3D physics simulations were mind-blowing back in the 2000s. Max Payne 2 was worth playing just for the ragdolls, and after Half-Life 2 came out, with its Gravity Gun and sawblade-flinging, Havok became firmly associated with the cutting edge—we looked for the name on game boxes.

Today, however, you’re not going to blow anyone’s mind with a box stacking puzzle, and even the destruction in the new tech demo below—cool as it is—doesn’t quite stir up the same excitement it would’ve back when videos of bouncing balls and floating rubber duckies were shown to rapt E3 audiences.

But that doesn’t mean Havok has run out of math to do; we might just have to look deeper to be impressed by it. The company continues to make its simulations of objects, fluids, particles, and cloth more efficient, allowing game devs to pursue more complex scenes and systems. And, Coghlan noted, Havok’s work to make physics simulations harder to break allows developers to give players a longer leash.

“If I think about the early days of physics, strange things could happen, like the key that opened the door could slip through a crack in the polygons, and then the developers have to get conservative, because they don’t want to allow players to get themselves into trouble,” he said. “And a lot of what we’ve been focusing on is to give developers the ability to actually put an awful lot of choice in the hands of the player, let players tackle things in a pretty open ended way.”

Coghlan also highlighted a lesser-known aspect of Havok’s offering, which is related to NPC pathfinding.

“We’re seeing a significantly greater range of NPCs in terms of scale, in terms of movement types, in terms of movement capabilities,” said Coghlan. “And a lot of our focus is on enabling developers to do a lot of the behind-the-scenes computation that a creative developer then will use to put together a really interesting, challenging set of NPCs and enemies for the player to interact with.”

Havok recently introduced a new pricing structure. At $50,000 per product at the low end, the software still isn’t intended for no-budget garage studios, but Coghlan hopes the price will open it up to ambitious mid-sized teams.

“I think what we’re seeing overall is a little bit of an evolution in the games industry, where more mid-sized teams—teams that might have, say, 10s of employees—actually have quite a lot of ambition,” he said. “You know, it’s possible for teams to pick up one of the commercial engines, like Unreal or Unity, and actually be pretty ambitious in terms of what they want to achieve.”

I can back that idea up anecdotally, as I happened to speak to such a team very recently: Neon Giant, a Swedish studio of a little over 20 people that’s making a first-person game it calls “ludicrously ambitious.” (I don’t know whether that particular studio and game are using Havok.)

Wherever the physics middleware is used next, I wouldn’t mind seeing the logo pop up again. Maybe now that every game seems to need 10 minutes to compile shaders at first launch, developers will find a new place for that little yellow sawblade.

We still don’t know the real name of Gloomwood’s doctor protagonist, but I’m beginning to suspect it might be ‘Jekyll’ given what he gets up to in the game’s new Research update. This latest addition to New Blood’s Thief-inspired immersive sim folds in some game-changing abilities, which you essentially steal from Gloomwood’s enemies in the grisliest manner possible.

As explained in the update’s Steam blog, the research update introduces the lab. The update’s trailer implies this where you’ll attempt to synthesise a cure for the plague that afflicts Gloomwood’s Victorian gothic world. But the more immediate function of the lab is ethically murkier, letting you research serums that can transform you into several of the game’s monsters.

A crucial tool in this operation is the new bonesaw, used to chop up felled foes before you stuff the body parts into your suitcase and lug them back to the lab, where—after the appropriate “research”—you’ll reduce these body parts into powerful, mutative serums.

Currently, your good doctor can transform into three of the game’s nonhuman creatures. Injecting some goatman goo into your veins will turn you into a “walking tank”, while a dose of bat barber blood will let you jump extra high and then slow-fall so you don’t take damage.

Finally, a shot of crowman juice will enhance your movement speed, helping you flee from alerted enemies (or perhaps get the jump on them).

New Blood also says these various serums will allow you to “blend in with your new…friends”. Presumably, this means you can use them as disguises to slip past the matching monsters unnoticed. Does it count as social stealth when the creatures you’re sneaking past are rabidly hostile monsters? Answers on a postcard please.

Seriously though, this is a radical enhancement of Gloomwood’s possibility space, one that would seem to shift the needle from its original ‘Thief with guns’ premise toward the more exotic magical powers of Dishonored. Admittedly, Gloomwood’s abilities have more limitations attached, you have to work a bit harder to acquire them, and they are one-shot serums rather than consistent powers. Also, New Blood notes that these abilities are optional, and you’ll still be able to skulk through the game as a normal, everyday gunslinging doctor.

The research update also brings an overhaul to the doctor’s journal, which features new art, sound and animations. There’s a video of that below. It’s pretty swish.

Players will be able to commence research once they reach the game’s mirror realm. But New Blood says this is only a temporary situation, with research shifting to later in the game as of the next update. New Blood doesn’t say when this next update will arrive. But since the studio updates the game every few months, we can probably expect another chunk of Gloomwood to turn up sometime in the summer.

When Bit Reactor’s game director Greg Foertsch confirms to me that Star Wars Zero Company has permadeath, I can’t help but grin. In retrospect, it might be a bit odd for me to get so psyched about the shadow of mortality, but this one choice says so much about what kind of game—and what kind of Star Wars—Zero Company is going to be.

We’ve been calling this game “Star Wars XCOM” for a long time now, thanks to the studio’s deep bench of former Firaxis developers. But at this point we’ve been bitten by an awful lot of supposed spiritual successors that really are just turn-based tactics games. XCOM is that, but it’s more as well.

XCOM isn’t just about directing your soldiers around a battlefield, but being invested in their emergent little stories. Caring who succeeds and who fails, and risking something when you send them out into the firing line.

If anything, Zero Company seems ready to take that idea even further. Soldiers you create can be customised to the class and appearance you want, but appropriately for Star Wars you can also choose their species. Then the game also has authored characters—the crew seen in the trailer and art—who turn up already armed with personalities, backstories, and roles in the story. But not only will they have a degree of customisation too, they’re not exempt from permadeath, and if they are lost in some Outer Rim skirmish, that will actually affect how elements of the story play out.

I should say, there’s optional permadeath—the difficulty settings will allow you to turn it off if the idea of watching your favourite Jedi fall to blaster fire doesn’t float your boat. A key goal of Zero Company is to bring new players to the genre. One part of that equation is accessibility—providing those difficulty options and not overwhelming players with abilities and unlocks early on, so that “if you want to play it just for the story, great… but if you want to play it for the pain, then you’re welcome to play it for that too,” as Foertsch puts it.

The thing he’s keen to hammer home—as he was when I spoke to him last year—is that appealing to new players doesn’t mean sacrificing depth for the hardcore strategy fans. “I don’t think it’s a choice in that sense,” says Foertsch. “You can absolutely do both.”

That’s backed up this time by Orion Kellogg, executive producer at LucasFilm Games—one of the people linking Bit Reactor to the wider Star Wars ecosystem.

“For Lucasfilm Games, this is our strategy game,” says Kellogg. “So we’re not saying, like, ‘Oh, can you make it less strategy-y?’ We want this to be a strategy game first and foremost, and it is, and that’s why we’re working with Bit Reactor.”

The other part of the equation is the story. Foertsch promises something more “immersive” and “cinematic” than we’re used to for the genre, and the inclusion of a fully customisable main protagonist—called Hawks—suggests an RPG-like sheen to the adventure.

Set during the Clone Wars, Zero Company follows essentially the Star Wars equivalent of a black ops team, making surgical strikes into enemy territory. It’s definitely a darker, more serious tone than you might expect from a Star Wars game—more Rogue One than A New Hope, and certainly not a million miles away from XCOM’s grim sci-fi narrative.

For Star Wars fans, there are deep cuts right out of the gate. The crew of premade characters includes a Tognath Jedi (remember that guy with the tubes from Rogue One? One of them), and there’s an Umbaran in full battle armour, as last seen in one of The Clone Wars’ most beloved story arcs. You can even recruit astromechs to your team.

The trailer’s brief combat footage shows off battle droid enemies, including B1s and B2s—that part’s certainly not surprising, though I continue to think that those are the perfect choice of bad guy for any Star Wars videogame.

It’s a strong hook to tempt everyone who played Jedi Survivor or Outlaws to try a genre they might not be used to. But the goal is also that if you are here for the strategy first and foremost you’ll feel just as welcomed in.

“It could be your first Star Wars,” says Kelsey Sharpe, creative executive at Lucasfilm. “I would love to find out that there is some hardcore strategy player out there who’s like ‘a Star Wars game? All right, fine, I simply must play this turn-based tactics game’ and then Star Wars: Zero Company is their introduction to the Star Wars universe. Because if we’ve done our jobs, it should be a great introduction to Star Wars.”

Much like last year, when Bit Reactor was sharing its ambitious goals with me before it had even announced a title, I am a little skeptical. Completely accessible to newcomers yet rich and deep for genre veterans, and both a treat for Star Wars fans and those who’ve barely touched the franchise alike… setting out to please everyone is ambitious, and it’s a lot easier to promise you can do it all than it is to deliver.

But I’m also optimistic, because I’ve come out of this chat and this brief look at the game feeling like Bit Reactor is making all the right choices. The XCOM-lover in me hears about permadeath and customisation, and sees that clean combat UI and polished action, and feels like a proper successor could be looming. And the Star Wars nerd in me sees a genuinely fresh take on an iconic point in the timeline, with the kind of pulls that point to an interest in the wider texture of the setting, not just snagging people’s attention with obvious and overused touchstones.

After years of build up to this reveal, I do wish they’d showed and discussed more of the substance of what we’ll be playing—and with a release date currently set for 2026, we’ve still got a while to go before we can actually sit down and try it. But this is an exciting first step into the spotlight for Star Wars: Zero Company, and while my hope may not be very new at this point, I’m still pinning it on this being one of the most promising XCOM successors we’ve seen in years.