Dark Souls 3 is out. Well, it’s out in Japan. We’ve had review code for a few days now, but Bandai Namco has asked that we don’t release our review of the international version until April 4th. In the meantime, we have permission to talk about the earlier parts of the game. Within 15 hours of...
Dark Souls 3 releases in Japan tomorrow. If you need to live vicariously until it comes our way on April 12, the Japanese launch trailer is out—in English, helpfully. There are a number of new and properly monstrous enemies on show. Miyazaki must have been dredging the darkest trenches of his mind to come up with this...
Fallout 4’s Boston wasteland isn’t pleasant. It’s full of malevolent, mutated wildlife, warring factions and lung-torching radiation. Still, that’s not a huge problem if you can save your progress every minute or so, as the more careful among us often do. That’s why Bethesda is releasing a Survival mode, which removes the ability to save...
In some ways, Obsidian’s next RPG feels like a sequel to a game we haven’t played or a story we’ve never read. Tyranny, which is built on a modified version of the tech used Pillars of Eternity, doesn’t depict the beginning of an epic struggle between good and evil. Instead, it takes place in the aftermath of such a conflict,...
We should have known that whatever The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen was working on next, he wouldn’t do something so mundane as telling us what it is. McMillen enjoys making us dance like puppets, so the teaser for his new project, The Legend of Bum-bo, raises more questions than it answers. The Legend of Bum-bo is another...
Diablo wasn’t the first real-time RPG. Games like Ultima VII preceded it by years, as did console ancestors like Castlevania II, Zelda, and stuff like Xanadu. But Diablo birthed the ARPG as we know it today—its hotbars, levels of generated dungeons, and other features that still stick. At GDC last week, co-founder of Blizzard North,...
Fallout 4’s official modding tools won’t be out until next month, but that hasn’t stopped Abbalovesyou experimenting in bizarre new directions. Thanks to the Be The Dog mod, you can now play as Dogmeat or any other dog found in the Wasteland. You even get a dog-size Pip Boy. It is slightly peculiar that instead of a deep bark you...
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is 10 years old. Let that fact sink in along with the crushing sense of your own mortality. On March 20, 2006, thousands disappeared into Cyrodiil—a world populated by NPCs with potatoes for faces, distant landscapes that resemble mudslides and bored big-name voice actors. No, Oblivion isn’t a looker these days. It couldn’t...
David Brevik announced at GDC last week that he planned to release the original Diablo design pitch at some point in the future. He hasn’t kept us waiting for long because here it is: a modest, eight page .pdf about a turn-based roguelike RPG called Diablo. Things obviously changed before the game hit shelves – Diablo is a realtime...
That man up there is not Ryan Barnard, former game director on Ubisoft’s The Division, but for all we know that’s how he strutted out of the building on his final day at work for the company. Which is to say, the game director of Ubi’s surprisingly massive (and Massive Entertainment-developed) MMORPG has left to join Hitman...
