Creative Assembly shared a little more footage of Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with parts of the team talking about the game’s development. They’re not yet ready to discuss release dates, but you can sign up to the closed beta here, which will take place later this year.

As was recently teased, Armageddon is an early focal point for the game, the planet that is repeatedly the nexus of the war between Orks and the Imperium – And yes, Yarrick and Ghazghkull Thraka will be able to face off. It’s not clear if that’s the latest war for Armageddon, or if the team are choosing one of the earlier wars as a starting point to grow from.

One of the key areas that Creative Assembly is working to capture is the vast scale of the built up planets. Hive worlds, mining worlds and other parts of the Imperium’s galactic industrial complex will be represented, and then beyond that you have different planetary biomes. Heading down to the planet for battle, and vast hive cities can tower over the battlefield.

For the first time, CA is having to represent not just a continent or two, not even just a single planet or world, but entire solar systems and sectors for the first time. Solar systems can have multiple planets that you will fight across for supremacy. Naturally, with such a broad canvas, they’re able to claim that every playthrough will pan out differently.

Four factions will be playable to start with – Space Marines, Orks, Eldar and the Astra Militarum (AKA the Imperial Guard) – and you’ll have the ability to customise your troops, choosing colours, emblazening uniforms and armour with particular iconography and also affecting their gameplay style. Change a combat philogophy, arm them with tactical abilities, signature traits and arcane wargear.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is in development for PC, and coming to PS5 and Xbox for the first time in the series’ history.

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Following on from the announcement that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be Xbox console exclusive, Xbox execs have made some clarifying statements about what this means going forward.

Speaking with Gamertag Radio Xbox Chief Content Officer Matt Booty explained that this is not a hard and fast rule, but much more nuanced.

“We know that exclusives are important, that’s why we’ve got Gears [of War: E-Day] coming in 2026, Clockwork [Revolution] in 2027.” Booty said, but also noted that “If we’ve promised something to players already, we are going to honour that promise.,” Booty stated, adding exclusivity will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

This follows up the statement on Xbox Wire that, “As part of our focus on the return of XBOX, we also announced that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives. These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan – we’re committed to investing in and growing XBOX both on console and beyond.”

We can break this down into three buckets:

• Live service and multiplayer-first games will all be coming to PS5 in addition to Xbox and PC.
• Any game already announced and confirmed for PlayStation 5 will still be coming to PS5.
• Everything else will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Got that? Let’s look at some examples.

Call of Duty will obviously never now be an exclusive – and it’s not clear how this statement relates to Activision anyway – given that it’s heavily multiplayer focussed and has long-standing promises about multi-platform availability.

Halo: Campaign Evolved and Fable were previously announced for PS5, and so they will still come to PlayStation. For the future of Halo, Microsoft will need to decide if it’s a live service or multiplayer-first series, but there’s now precedent for a remake or remaster to then not have a cross-platform sequel – Gears Reloaded and E-Day.

State of Decay 3, which is heavily co-op and online similar to a Grounded 2 makes sense to be cross-platform, but then Senua, which is a single-player action-adventure game would surely have been a prime candidate to be Xbox exclusive. But maybe that gets an exclusion because the first game launched first for PlayStation 4?

And, look, The Elder Scrolls VI will be on PlayStation because they want it to sell bucket loads after the middling reception to Starfield, but now there’s a seed of doubt about it, isn’t there?

In general, I think I’m in favour of Microsoft going back to having exclusives. It does feel odd having Halo and Gears on PlayStation, but there do need to be good reasons for people to stay with Xbox as a platform (or PC) for it to remain viable. So this is a good move for the platform as a whole, but let’s not pretend that it isn’t just like in 2023 when the former executive team struggled to explain what the plan really was.

Source: Xbox, Gamertag Radio via VGC

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It seems Microsoft’s decision to make Gears of War E-Day an Xbox console exclusive really was a last-minute thing, and the game does exist on PS5. An official Xbox podcast, which is also a YouTube show, had the Gears of War E-Day trailer with the PS5 logo at the end.

Spotted by ResetEra user Jessie.Bristol, the video was quickly taken offline and made private, but not before screenshots were taken.

Microsoft have said the game is only coming to Xbox and PC.   A statement on Xbox Wire read, “As part of our focus on the return of XBOX, we also announced that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives. These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan – we’re committed to investing in and growing XBOX both on console and beyond.”

You can read more about Microsoft’s return to exclusivity here, and for everything about Gears of War E-Day, click here. 

Source: ResetEra

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In an industry pestered by calls to “think of the children”, Tarsier’s games are useful reminders that children can be utterly depraved in ways no coddling adult would ever dream. Later in Reanimal, the developer’s latest, strictly ‘co-optional’ horror game, two kids rip an eyeball out of a massive, sunken horse skull and shove it into what I sincerely hope is the eyesocket of a slumbering whale. Somehow, this is necessary to advance.

It’s the kind of thing that would only occur to children, because children do not reason like ‘we’ do, those disgusting creeps. They sense that they exist in a world that isn’t for them: a world of baffling laws, high shelves, and everyday monstrosity; a world they’re required to ‘grow into’ by means of repeated shedding and sprouting and subjection – milk teeth and pubic hair and doing your goddamn chores. So they instinctively come up with ways to screw with the system, twist its horrible logic against itself. Why not push a horse’s eyeball into a whale?

While we’re at it, why not use a plunger to extract a discarded human skinsuit from a toilet, revealing a key that has no earthly grounds for being there? Why not wear the head of a pig you found in a closet? It’s no madder than anything else in this universe. I relish Tarsier’s tales of little nightmares surviving and vandalising the larger nightmare of existence. I’d love to see this developer’s take on Peter Pan. That said, I don’t think Reanimal is their greatest escapade. It’s a tentative departure from the dollhouse puzzling of Little Nightmares that never quite finds its own centre of gravity.

Reanimal is the story of an orphan boy and girl – the latter controlled by the computer in single player – who are searching for their friends in a cyclopean charnel daydream of bogeymen and minefields and rancid, anguished animals. Each chapter sees you rescuing one friend from some enormous, forbidding structure, rearing up at you on approach care of an elegantly scripted, semi-manual camera.

You’ll travel much of the intervening waste by motorboat, the boy steering while the girl aims her lantern from the bow. The boat gets pretty crowded, but your NPC passengers typically stay behind while you explore on foot. In general, the partner AI is solid, seldom forgetting to help out when, say, you need two pairs of hands to open a door or turn a wheel. The camera keeps track of both playable characters effectively enough that I can imagine this being a decent co-op play, though I wasn’t able to sample co-op before writing this review.

Reanimal’s world is older, shabbier, and less hopeful than that of Little Nightmares. There are fewer gleeful callbacks to the tumbling toybox of Tarsier’s old gig LittleBigPlanet. The proportions and atmosphere are closer to Playdead’s Inside, all cracked fog and vaporous stone. The architecture is more naturalistic, less of a witch’s cottage, more appropriate to your size. But you are still a child, which puts certain objects and surfaces beyond reach, while conferring a degree of passive protection against larger creatures who can’t chase you into the crevices. This is still a world in which you hide without intending to, and such ‘adults’ as you encounter react to you with hysterical outrage. You are a spider peeking out from between their toes. You are a moving dust mote in a setting that inclines toward paralysis.

The kids themselves are leaner and harder, more direct and less poetic of method, happy to wrap a marauding seagull around a crowbar, shiv a calcified mutant child, or smash the fingers of a ghoul. There’s a dedicated attack button, and later on, various ‘special weapons’. You will throw spears from the motorboat, rotate and fire a ponderous coastal turret, shoot a bazooka, hurl a grenade, and even drive a tank.

This isn’t any kind of combat system, mind. The flashes of Resident Evil are infrequent, with the game mostly driven by stealth, platforming, and gentle lock-and-key puzzles. With the exception of the tank – a cathartic endgame rush – the weapons feel like disposable puzzle props. There ain’t any ‘gunfeel’ to write home about, either. The turret has to be electrified and activated, after gaining access to another structure. It takes two of you to heft that bazooka, and you only get one shot.

I do think Tarsier have lost their way by flirting with combat, mostly because it accompanies some repetition. Harpooning explosive mutants from your boat is irritating busywork, a process of nosing forward and waiting for the lock-on icon to appear. But the presence of firearms is justified inasmuch as Reanimal is more wartime phantasm than grim fairytale.

The war element sneaks up on you, admittedly. Across the first two thirds of its seven hour runtime, the game digs into a familiar vein of industrial decrepitude, cowled in negative space that is fitfully pierced by searchlights, winking red buoys, and those ever-so-delicate patches of brighter ground that indicate a path through wreckage. There is a mill made up of pipes and locker rooms housing computer monitors that drizzle lines of red and white code. There are carparks doused in volcanic ash. There is an orphanage of clapboard and chains and underground streets, entered by clambering through the face of a clock.

The settings are dingy projections, channelling primal fears and slowly revealing something about your fey handful of orphans. The same is true of the creatures. The first major antagonist is a lanky, lumpen abductor who spends half his time peering under tables, the other half engrossed in putrid domestic routines, gathering and ironing suits of human skin. You look at him and you fear becoming him. It’s best to keep an eye on the skinsuits, as well: some flop down from branches to chase you through the long grass.

Later, you face a many-elbowed abomination with a pitch-black maw that recalls the watering well shown during the game’s opening. These visual reciprocities are load-bearing pillars. While there’s the suggestion of a world map here, with a critical path that loops between locations, Reanimal isn’t a consistent work of geography but a spiral of symbols. In particular, animal symbols. The game explores the figure of the animal as both a thing to slaughter and a thing to sacrifice, with the predictable implication that you are next on the chopping block – an anxiety you can poke at, by having your kids wear pig head hats.

The visual composition is exquisite throughout, each piece of architecture carefully framed to foreground exits and puzzle pieces, without recourse to overt yellow-paint condescension or some kind of magic highlighting vision. That said, I do feel that Tarsier’s designers need to break out of their groove. Reanimal’s landscape fits together with a smoothness that feels too practised, bordering on enervating. The segmentation of scenes and the foreshadowing can be rather by-the-numbers. For example, a monster happening to leave the room just as you enter, not quite seeing you, a few scenes before the moment when you finally have to confront or escape it.

And then the shells start to fall. Over the last third, Reanimal sheds its Silent Hillian pallor and veers a bit randomly into World War parody, with areas made up of trenches, stripped trees, and Futurist gutted cityscapes. In some ways these closing chapters are the heart of the game. Reanimal’s zoological body horror appears to take heavy inspiration from the agony of animals during the World Wars – beasts of burden splintered and thrashing in the mud, lashed to artillery cannons or caught on the wire, entangled and transformed into vengeful, howling machines.

Assuming I’m diagnosing the inspirations correctly, I think the animal metaphors here work well. That sheep from the trailer is a hell of a thing. I’m less sold on the invocation of the World Wars in general. The game doesn’t do anything very imaginative or probing with that colossal archive of pain and atrocity; it kind of just throws more bodies on the pile. It also leads to a closing act that, at worst, feels like a mopey Medal of Honor, in which you dart between shadows to avoid snipers, and navigate bunkers while being hounded by crawling grenadiers.

The Little Nightmares series continues in the hands of Supermassive. Nic (RPS in peace) called their Little Nightmares 3 “a heartbreakingly competent cover act of the series previous entries” with “a few truly brilliant moments, but a comparative dearth of imagination.” Not having played LN3, I get the sense that Reanimal is the more impressive game, inasmuch as it’s clearly trying to shatter the mold, but for every ghastly surprise there’s a moment of either aimlessness or overfamiliarity. It’s a game tottering through the mist of No Man’s Land with an armload of flapping skins and a porcine helmet, not quite sure of its destination.

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Sony Santa Monica has revealed their next project, and the next chapter in the God of War saga, taking the rather unexpected direction of letting you play as someone other than Kratos. How about… Kratos’ dead wife?

That’s right, the rumours were true and the next God of War game lets you play as Kratos’ dead wife, Faye, aka Laufey the Just (portrayed once more by Deborah Ann Woll), who is surprisingly nimble for someone we last saw being barbecued. In fact, it opens with Kratos and Atreus laying her to rest in the woods, but as her spirit floats off, she awakens not within the Norse afterlife, but somewhere completely different. This is the Everywhen, the afterlife of the gods, where all magic comes from and where it returns to.

But she doesn’t get a greeting befitting of a god. No, the plantlife starts to attack her, and she soon comes face to face with Sekmet from the Egyptian pantheon of gods, and Begtse, the god of war from Tibetan mythology, who have her thrown into captivity. There she meets a talking gelatinous cube called Phranque (Jack Quaid), and the ribbons of a sword called Rue (Perlina Lau), which is a turn for the even more bizarre. They are the ones who reveal that this is the afterlife of the gods, as opposed to one specific mythology, and spur Faye on to rediscovering control of her powers and breaking out.

Wwith Rue’s sword in grasp – for better or worse, given the repeated warnings about this – she unleashes some fantastic fighting abilities, including a ribbon-whipping move, the ability to punch someone’s soul of their body with the Golden Hand of the Jötnar, and then stab that a bit instead, and great finishers. She’s fast and nimble, able to combine ground attacks with aerial ones.

Here’s more on how Santa Monica has created the character of Faye for her very own game.

There’s some truly titanic battling from this point in the reveal, really showing the scale and scope of what the PS5 can achieve in the battle with Begtse.

It looks excellent and we can’t wait to see more!

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PlayStation has announced the last title in the God of War Norse Saga.

Showcasing 20 minutes of gameplay footage, we got to see Kratos’s wife become a new playable character. Faye finds herself in the afterlife of the gods.

We’re quickly introduced to Sekhmet from the Egyptian pantheon of gods, as well as a man who looks like a Chinese mythological figure. The armor of surrounding characters also appears inspired by disparate cultures, implying we’ll see a mishmash of mythologies represented.

 

God of War, Sony Interactive Entertainment

A basement-dwelling ogre, Brandon’s a fan of indie games and slice of life anime. Has too many games and not enough time.

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New details on God of War Ragnarök have been revealed by its writers, including that an early version that had Kratos end up in Hel early within the game.

Narrative director Matt Sophos and story lead Richard Gaubert were interviewed on the MinnMax podcast about their work on the game, including Kratos’ fate and the amount of puzzle assistance from side characters.

Be aware, God of War Ragnarök story spoilers follow.

Most interesting is Sophos’ discussion on the possibility of Kratos dying. Players of the previous game will be aware of a prophecy that Kratos will die, and yet this is ultimately something he overcomes.

“The earliest, earliest draft of an outline that we had come up with that we took to Eric [Williams, director]… Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game,” said Sophos.

“He was going to die and it wasn’t a permanent death… [but] he would get pulled out of Hel essentially by Atreus but now 20 years have passed. There was going to be a big time jump.

“That was a version of it, but it didn’t ultimately feel right.”

That’s partly due to its similarity to previous games, where Kratos dies and must escape the underworld.

“As we were developing the story, we knew that we wanted the story to be one about letting go and changing,” Sophos continued. “Knowing that Norse mythology is all about fate and prophecy, we wanted to say ‘that’s bullshit, nothing is written that can’t be unwritten, as long as you’re willing to change or make changes in your life then you’re not bound to fate’.

“When we landed on that and we knew that that was the story we wanted to tell, we knew that Kratos couldn’t die because then it would be like ‘are we just going to say that Kratos couldn’t change?’ and then that would suck.”

Of course, Thor does kill Kratos in that battle but immediately brings him back to life in a fun gameplay twist. This, however, was not related.

Elsewhere the pair discussed the amount of puzzle assistance provided by side characters, something that was widely criticised after release. However, the team was not aware of this until the game shipped.

“We just didn’t get it tuned well enough,” admitted Sophos. “And it didn’t get exposed to us really until the game came out, because even when we had playtests we never saw feedback about the characters talking too much.”

“It wasn’t until the game came out and it was like ‘shit, if we’d known that we would’ve responded’,” added Gaubert.

It doesn’t seem like a patch is in the works to address this.

You can watch the full interview with Sophos and Gaubert below to hear more about cut content and a possible romance between Kratos and Freya.

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Creative Assembly has reached out to Total War: Warhammer 3 fans, promising that details about “new content” are on the way.

Total War: Warhammer’s game director, Rich Aldridge, opened up about “why we are where we are” in a new video update, and gave a brief – but frank – assessment of the team’s progress to date, as well as reveal that we’ll find out more about the studio’s post-launch content in April 2023.

“We knew that we needed to get Immortal Empires to you in the best possible state, and that’s where we focused all of our efforts last year,” Aldridge said at the start of their five-minute statement (thanks, PC Gamer).

“Looking forward, I think we’ve got a really exciting year,” Aldridge added. “There’s going to be new content, bug fixing, quality of life improvements, taking on-board everything that you’re reaching out and telling us. I daresay some of this is going to hopefully be on your Wanted list, but I also think there’s going to be a few nice surprises there, too.”

The team is reportedly “finishing up with [its] final touches” on that first unspecified “piece of new content” and will be sharing it with the community this “passion project” “come April”.

“A lot of steps are needed in creating a DLC, and I’m sure you’re aware of that,” Aldridge explained. “Starting with the creative spark, development, but much goes on behind the scenes. Everything that we need to get looking and feeling just right before we can showcase and release it to you all.”

Alridge further added that the studio plans to “deliver two more exciting experiences also later this year – so one in summer, and one in the winter” – and confirmed that patches will also be rolled out in between this new content, too.

“We want to be as concrete as possible, but in doing so, we need to be in that position before we can communicate it to you. We don’t want to disappoint, we want to excite. We’re passionate about what we make, and we want to make great content for you to enjoy for years to come.

“We’re moving as quickly as we can on this, so please do bear with us even if it doesn’t always look that way at times. I’d really appreciate that.”

Developer Fatshark has delayed Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s upcoming Xbox Series X/S release, saying it has made the decision to spend the next few months solely addressing fan feedback after the game “fell short” of expectations.

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