The humanoid shmear, Xûr, is now live in Destiny 2 for the weekend until next week’s reset. If you’re looking to get you some shiny new Exotic armor or weapons for your Guardian, look no further.
Each week, Xûr has a random assortment of Exotic armor, one for each Guardian class, as well as a random Exotic Weapon and an Exotic Engram available for purchase. In addition to his Exotic wares, he’s got a random collection of Legendary weapons and armor to deck out your Guardians.
We’ve rounded up all the info on Xûr for the week including where to find Xûr, which Exotic weapons and armor are available, as well as which Legendary weapons you should pick up, either for PvE or PvP.
Where Is Xûr Located Today?
Xûr’s location can be found at Winding Cove in the EDZ on September 15 through September 19. To reach him, travel to the landing point at Winding Cove. When you arrive, make for the rock cliffs at the far end of the cove and look for a cave winding up to a platform next to some Fallen. There you’ll find the retail monster who inspires us all.
Xûr can be found atop a rocky cliff in the Winding Cove in the EDZ.
What’s Xûr Selling Today?
Xur’s Exotic offerings this week.
Exotic Engram
Trinity Ghoul – Exotic Combat Bow
Young Ahamkara’s Spine – Exotic Hunter Gauntlets
10 Mobility
19 Resilience
3 Recovery
14 Discipline
9 Intellect
6 Strength
Total: 61
Crest of Alpha Lupi – Exotic Titan Chest Armor
7 Mobility
17 Resilience
11 Recovery
2 Discipline
2 Intellect
30 Strength
Total: 69
Getaway Artist – Exotic Warlock Gauntlets
3 Mobility
18 Resilience
13 Recovery
10 Discipline
2 Intellect
20 Strength
Total: 66
Titans most definitely have the best exotic armor roll this week with a very high stat total on their chestpiece and sky high Strength. Warlocks also have a piece that’s worth checking out, especially since it’s got such delightfully low Mobility!
Exotic Weapons
Xach week Xûr sells Hawkmoon.
Hawkmoon – Exotic Hand Cannon
Paracausal Shot
Fluted Barrel
Alloy Magazine
Snapshot Sights
Textured Grip
Not an amazing Hawkmoon roll this week, so you’d be best served to wait and see if he offers a better one down the road.
Legendary Weapons
Xûr’s Legendary Weapon offerings this weekend.
Iota Draconis – Fusion Rifle
Chambered Compensator/Extended Barrel
Enhanced Battery/Liquid Coils
Ensemble
Harmony
Charge Time Masterwork
Interference VI – Grenade Launcher
Confined Launch/Linear Compensator
Spike Grenades/High-Velocity Rounds
Grave Robber
Swashbuckler
Velocity Masterwork
Hoosegow – Rocket Launcher
Confined Launch/Quick Launch
High-Velocity Rounds/Impact Casing
Underdog
Quickdraw
Blast Radius Masterwork
Tears of Contrition – Scout Rifle
Extended Barrel/Smallbore
Accurized Rounds/Flared Magwell
Triple Tap
Explosive Payload
Extrovert
Handling Masterwork
Seventh Seraph SI-2 – Sidearm
Corkscrew Rifling/Full Bore
Steady Rounds/Flared Magwell
Hip-Fire Grip
Elemental Capacitor
Range Masterwork
Extraordinary Rendition – Submachine Gun
Chambered Compensator/Polygonal Rifling
Extended Mag/Steady Rounds
Firmly Planted
One For All
Stability Masterwork
Hollow Denial – Trace Rifle
Corkscrew Rifling/Hammer-Forged Rifling
Projection Fuse/Tactical Battery
Lead From Gold
Repulsor Brace
Extrovert
Stability Masterwork
My top picks this week are the Tears of Contrition scout rifle with Triple Tap and Explosive Payload (can’t go wrong with those) and Interference VI with Spike Grenades and Swashbuckler (even if Grave Robber is a bit of a waste).
Warlock Legendary Armor
For Warlocks, Xûr is selling the Simulator set which includes:
Xûr’s Legendary Armor for Warlocks this week.
Simulator Gauntlets
17 Mobility
2 Resilience
14 Recovery
2 Discipline
11 Intellect
20 Strength
Total: 66
Simulator Chest Armor
10 Mobility
22 Resilience
2 Recovery
16 Discipline
15 Intellect
2 Strength
Total: 67
Simulator Helmet
2 Mobility
28 Resilience
2 Recovery
10 Discipline
20 Intellect
2 Strength
Total: 64
Simulator Leg Armor
18 Mobility
2 Resilience
10 Recovery
24 Discipline
2 Intellect
7 Strength
Total: 63
Simulator Bond
Everything is worth considering this week for the Warlocks, except the boots, which have high Mobility combined with a low stat total. The other three pieces are all worth checking out though, including the helmet, which combines low Mobility and high Resilience, even if the stat total isn’t amazing.
Titan Legendary Armor
For Titans, Xûr is selling the Simulator set which includes:
Xûr’s Legendary Armor for Titans this week.
Simulator Gauntlets
6 Mobility
20 Resilience
7 Recovery
14 Discipline
16 Intellect
2 Strength
Total: 65
Simulator Chest Armor
22 Mobility
10 Resilience
2 Recovery
12 Discipline
6 Intellect
14 Strength
Total: 66
Simulator Helmet
12 Mobility
14 Resilience
6 Recovery
20 Discipline
2 Intellect
10 Strength
Total: 64
Simulator Leg Armor
22 Mobility
2 Resilience
10 Recovery
15 Discipline
2 Intellect
14 Strength
Total: 65
Simulator Mark
The only really worthwhile roll this week for Titans are the gauntlets — everything else has far too high Mobility for any of my punchy brethren to really get excited about.
Hunter Legendary Armor
For Hunters, Xûr is selling the Simulator set which includes:
Xûr’s Legendary Armor for Hunters this week.
Simulator Gauntlets
7 Mobility
2 Resilience
24 Recovery
12 Discipline
20 Intellect
2 Strength
Total: 67
Simulator Chest Armor
2 Mobility
18 Resilience
12 Recovery
10 Discipline
11 Intellect
10 Strength
Total: 63
Simulator Helmet
2 Mobility
28 Resilience
2 Recovery
23 Discipline
7 Intellect
2 Strength
Total: 64
Simulator Leg Armor
10 Mobility
2 Resilience
18 Recovery
6 Discipline
14 Intellect
10 Strength
Total: 60
Simulator Cloak
Hunters got what’s probably the best roll this week overall with the gauntlets, which have a high stat total and spikiness in all the right places.
The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City is an officially DC-licensed augmented reality board game that blends physical and digital media to draw players into the depths of Arkham Asylum and beyond. Created by Infinite Rabbit Holes, the team behind 2008’s “Why So Serious?” ARG campaign for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the game blends AR content on your iPhone or iPad with the physical elements, and includes over 40 minutes of animated and live-action story scenes. There’s seven chapters that average about 8-10 hours of
collaborative gameplay, encouraging players to either binge straight through them or play over
time with the in-app save progression!
The game comes in a collector’s edition box stuffed with over 100 elements, including top secret Arkham Asylum files, classified Gotham City police evidence, custom game boards and pieces, artifacts, and buildings designed in Gotham City’s Gothic, Art Deco style. Gotham City becomes increasingly active as you delve deeper into its mysteries, allowing players to see life buzzing in its streets. By downloading the free companion app, your device interacts with the game’s physical components to deliver animated and live action story scenes, an original music score, and a surprise or two from the Clown Prince of Crime himself. In the future, Infinite Rabbit Holes says the game will grow beyond the initial chapters with the introduction of expansion packs for the board game itself, and downloadable content for the app.
The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City is packed with familiar characters and locales from the Batman universe for fans of the franchise. Those who are newcomers to either board games or alternate reality games, will discover The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City’s emphasis on its ease of playability, especially with friends (since board game players are biologically driven to snag anyone the least bit interested in board games, then convert them fully).
Panic in Gotham City has already received awards and positive reviews from players.
Pocket Gamer’s review states, “every piece is meticulously made and gorgeous enough to collect, and the combination of physical and digital elements does its job extremely well when it comes to player immersion.” The Nerdist says it “delivers puzzles and exploration worthy of Batman’s world.” Tabletop and puzzle YouTuber Chris Ramsay, whose YouTube channel has over 7 million subscribers, says “with Infinite Rabbit Holes, the world has never experienced AR quite like this before.”
Grab The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City for yourself and recruit some detectives to your side, or put your head together with a veteran group. Either way, good luck. You’re matching wits against the Joker’s madness-tattered brain.
Hey, that Nintendo Direct we had yesterday? Pretty cool, right? But unless you watched the Japanese version of the Direct, you probably missed one of the coolest hidden gems to come out of the show: a little game called Stray Children.
Stray Children appeared exclusively in the Japanese Nintendo Direct. The game follows a young boy who is sucked into a TV into a world made up entirely of children, where he goes on a strange adventure. We don’t know too much about the project just yet, but it seems to be an RPG, and something about the way the boy is interacting with the monsters he encounters looks familiar…
Yup, if you’re watching the trailer and thinking it looks a bit like Undertale, you’re not wrong. You see, developer Onion Games is a Tokyo-based indie run by Yoshiro Kimura, who was a game designer on a 1997 game called Moon: RPG Remix Adventure. Initially, Moon was only ever released in Japan, and was a strange “anti-RPG” that was in many ways ahead of its time. But the unique ways it questioned the formula of traditional RPGs ultimately inspired many of the themes and ideas in Toby Fox’s Undertale nearly two decades later. And the success of Undertale in turn inspired Onion Games and Kimura to return to Moon in 2021 and release the game worldwide for Nintendo Switch.
Just in case it wasn’t crystal clear: yes, #StrayChildren will be localized and released outside Japan!
Our release date is still TBD, but please don’t worry!
Now, with Stray Children, Kimura and his studio appear to be exploring something like a spiritual successor to Moon that has learned from a number of other, similar games in the same tradition. Thus far, it doesn’t have a release date either in Japan or in the West, but Onion Games is reassuring that this game won’t be locked to Japan the way Moon was for so long. And an English version of the trailer is expected soon. So while we wait eagerly for Deltarune Chapter 3, keep this little gem of a game in the back of your mind.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Remedy has long been a studio that wears its influences on its sleeve. From the hard-boiled police files of Max Payne to the New Weird foundations of Control, movies, TV shows, and books have long served as inspiration. This is no different in Alan Wake 2, which blends horror and detective fiction in creatively unsettling ways. We talked to Remedy to find out why these genres work so well together, discuss some of the game’s cultural touchstones, and how they bleed their way into the survival horror story, characters, and gameplay.
“A really great detective mystery in my opinion is when you can put yourself in the shoes of the detective and pay close attention to things, look at the connections, put it all together”, says Principal Narrative Designer Molly Maloney. “What makes really great horror in my opinion is when you wish you could look away, but you can’t. It’s that balance of I don’t want to look, but I need to. So detective and horror I think are a great mix because you wish you could look away, but you really need to pay attention. And the delicious dance of those two feelings.”
Alan Wake 2 – Saga Gameplay Screenshots
Remedy’s Creative Director Sam Lake concurs: “There is this aspect of horror as a genre having a lot to do with detective fiction, because usually, the premise is something strange is happening, which is very close to a crime has happened. And on one part we are afraid to find out, but we are driven to find out.”
The genres of detective fiction and horror have long been bound together within book spines and film reels. Like twins separated at birth, they are rooted in the same emotional DNA: suspense and fear of the unknown. Both suspense and the suspension of disbelief are something Game Director Kyle Rowley is seeking to build in Alan Wake 2.
On one part we are afraid to find out, but we are driven to find out.
“The game starts out very grounded and we’re this investigator investigating these things, it sets the tone of like, “Okay, this isn’t quite right.” And then we can basically use that to start layering on top this actual more supernatural horror.”
Much like the genres it draws inspiration from, Alan Wake 2 is a game split into two halves. Saga and Alan are two sides of the same coin, each trying to work their way out of the nightmarish surroundings they find themselves in. Saga is heads, using her FBI-trained brain to sniff out clues to solve a series of ritualistic killings. Alan is tails, a rat caught in a hellish, surrealist maze of his own making. Two such distinct styles demanded two different approaches to tone, however. For the former, there was plenty of source material to riff on.
“One of the first things that came to us when we were thinking about creating a concept of an FBI agent coming with her partner to investigate these murders was season one of True Detective”, Rowley reveals. “The kind of dynamics between the two detectives there and how they work together to solve that case was something that’s very compelling to us. And then obviously just stylistically wise, again, it’s got a lot of ritualistic elements to it that we could lean on quite well.”
“Moving into The Overlap as Saga when you’re pushing through the forest and that first Overlap with the intense reds and the blending of the worlds, that felt like a deleted scene out of True Detective season one to me”, adds Maloney.
“Silence of the Lambs is another example for sure in this”, says Lake. “Twin Peaks as well. We are still drawing from that idea and from Lynch’s works overall.”
We didn’t want it to feel very modern, it needed to feel like it was a place lost in time.
Rowley agrees, “I think Twin Peaks and David Lynch works are still important for us. But then also just from an art direction perspective, we looked at a lot of Coen Brothers works like Fargo. We didn’t want it to feel very modern, it needed to feel like it was a place lost in time.”
There’s one influence that towers over all, however. David Fincher’s disturbing 1995 thriller, Seven. Maloney explains: “When I look at Saga I see a lot of Seven. She is a consummate professional, she’s very talented at what she does. She’s here with her partner, Alex Casey, trying to solve this increasingly impossible seeming series of mysteries. I mean, it’s not that they’re being funny, but there’s a pleasant back-and-forth that really reminds me of Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, didn’t feel dissimilar.”
“Seven is definitely a good example of the merging of detective fiction with horror”, Lake adds. “Serial killer stories overall often come really close to a horror film while being very much a detective story as well.”
Seven is perhaps where these worlds collide most prominently in film. In Alan Wake 2, this overlap can be found in a place literally called The Overlap – areas where Bright Falls reality merges with nightmare New York. For Alan’s Big Apple, there needed to be a whole new dossier of reference material, albeit, again, with some overlap. This posed a new challenge for Rowley and the team.
“For Wake’s Nightmare in New York, we wanted it to feel more grimy, more rundown. It rains a lot. And so things like seven, how they utilize rain to heighten different moods, we utilize weather not just as a visual thing. We also want to use it actually narratively to as things escalate, there’s more water, there’s more rain.”
We go all the way to Taxi Driver for the visuals of wet asphalt and neon signs
“We are drawing from many various things in the Dark Place”, explains Lake. “It goes back to say visuals of what does this kind of a pop culture New York feel like? And we go all the way to Taxi Driver for the visuals of wet asphalt and neon signs being reflected there.”
Scorsese’s masterpiece brings the most sordid layers of 1970s New York bubbling to the surface. But Alan Wake 2’s New York is far from one rooted in reality, and one that plays on the horror and uncertainty of the unknown.
“We weren’t really going for anything like body horror or zombie horror”, says Rowley. “We were very much leaning on what we established in the first game, which was slightly supernatural psychological horror. So more focused on for us, the building of atmosphere, the sense of dread that comes from not just the world that you’re in and what we do on an audioscape level and an atmospheric level to make you feel that, but also on a narrative level.”
Sam Lake expands on other influences: “The dreamlike nature of the Dark Place, Inception plays a role. Him struggling to understand and remember, I feel Memento is a great detective story kind of trying to understand and trying to piece together what has happened. Him being the narrator and kind of not a reliable narrator from the perspective that he doesn’t have the full picture. Even Fight Club I think is this kind of a pretty anxious horroresque, urban story and a psychological thriller.”
It’s not just film and TV that Remedy looks to for inspiration, either, but, of course, video games. The Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences are clear to see, but there are some interesting teases from Maloney.
I’m really inspired by Daniel Mullins and some of the work that he’s done with Inscryption and Pony Island.
“I’m really inspired by Daniel Mullins and some of the work that he’s done with Inscryption and Pony Island. And I think that, without giving too much away, there’s a later scene with the case board that has moments of that. I feel like his influence maybe was seen there.”
Alan Wake 2 is set to be a game that surprises. Not only is it radically different from its predecessor, but appears to be lulling the player into a false sense of security. You may think you know the cliches and twists that come with detective fiction. You may think you’re well-versed in the rhythm of scares associated with survival horror. But you’ve never experienced a story in either of these genres written by Remedy before.
Simon Cardy actually thinks season two of True Detective isn’t that bad. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
Spider-Man 2 is a big moment for both the popular superhero video game series and the PlayStation 5. As a PS5 exclusive, Spider-Man stands to be able to leverage the platform’s technology in ways that previous games in the series have not. As part of our big Spider-Man 2 hands-on preview, IGN had the opportunity to sit down and interview several members of the development team, where we asked the team about all the ways the upcoming sequel is leveraging the PS5’s tech.
Our interviews are broken up into two parts: the first is an interview with Mike Fitzgerald, the Director of Core Technology at Insomniac, and Jeannette Lee, who is the Project Director for Spider-Man 2, which dives a bit more into the technical side of developing Spider-Man 2. The second interview is with Doug Sheen, the Senior Programming Director at Insomniac, who talks a bit more about the programming side of things.
‘A culmination of everything we’ve learned developing for PS5’
IGN: So, being developed from the ground up for the PlayStation 5, what have you managed to push further now that you’re developing just for next-gen?
Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology: For us, this is really a culmination of everything we’ve learned about developing for this console. We did Spider-Man Remastered, Miles Morales, and Ratchet and Clank. And so as our fourth title for the PS5, we’ve really gotten to leverage everything we’ve seen in developing those games. Our performance mode for this title has ray tracing on by default. We’ve really expanded ray traced reflections throughout the game. It’s on the water and the oceans and really gives a more realistic picture everywhere.
We of course use the SSD and the storage solution on the console…In the first couple of Spider-Man games, we really used it to get rid of the loading screens, but now you see it getting used to offer faster traversal through the world. When you come off those slingshots in the open world, I think you’re going about three times as fast as we could in the first game…and our fast travel and character switching…It just really opens up that space and lets you do more. I mean on top of that we have characters that are more detailed and lifelike that help us tell better, more nuanced stories.
Jeannette Lee, Spider-Man 2 Project Director: We also have the DualSense controller with the haptics, which adds a layer of immersion that is really awesome that we get to play with. So you saw in our demo [with] the particle accelerator [and] having to hit that sweet spot. In addition, there’s all of our cool 3D audio technology, so you get to hear that iconic Tony Todd Venom voice…it’s spooky.
IGN: What did you do with the audio specifically?
MF: Well, I’ll just say our audio team has been working with 3D audio pipelines now for a little while on this console, and they’ve really figured out how to do it really well, and they approach designing all these missions and the soundscapes for these missions in a new way with ambisonics [a full-sphere surround sound format] and positional audio for even more of the objects that are in the scene. So if you’re in the middle of that Emily-May Foundation area and you have people up on different balconies and behind you, you can hear where everything’s coming from to even greater effect than in our past games.
You can hear where everything’s coming from even to greater effect than in our past games.
IGN: So back in Miles, you were talking about a temporal solution that allowed you to offer different graphical options. So how have the graphical options been?
MF: So really the foundation for how we decide to render things is we like to have our resolution be dynamic and then we have a pretty robust temporal anti-aliasing solution that lets us scale that up and down… do different dithering effects with materials and things in the scene. And what that means is we get to leverage the players’ preference about how they want to play the game and also make sure we use all the features of their display in the console as well. So whether you have a VRR television, whether you like playing at 60fps or 30 or 40, if you have 120hz TV, we really get to tailor everything to best utilize that tech.
IGN: After we did our tech piece about Miles Morales, we actually included a third graphic option. So we had performance and visual before and then I can’t remember what it was called off the top of my head, but that sort of became standardized in the industry. I see everybody having the free setting fourths just came out and they have those similar ones.
MF: So I think I want to say for those titles, we had Fidelity Mode, which had the full 4K and ray traced reflections, and then we had a Performance Mode which turned the ray tracing off and rendered at a lower resolution. And then we were able to add I think around launch, if not just after, the Performance RT Mode as we called it, which was trying to be the best of both. And for this game we’re really able to deliver that as a baseline performance mode. There’s no mode of this game that has the ray tracing turned off, no need for it. We’ve really figured out how to deliver what we feel like is the right Spider-Man visuals and we want to make sure every player is seeing that.
IGN: The character faces and the models and the expressions that come through with the actors really convey the emotions that they’re feeling. What have you added in Spider-Man 2 that’s really something that you’re proud of?
MF: I think in this demo here there’s one cinematic where Miles and his mother are having a conversation before you go off and do some Spider-Man stuff, and Bobby, our animation director, was pointing out that there’s not a lot of dialogue in that scene. So much of that story is told from their faces and the way they’re emoting and reacting to things from each other. And that’s really new for us in this game.
We’re scanning faces with more fidelity and we’ve built out more of our processing pipelines to handle that in more detail. Certainly our models are more dense than they have been in the past. There’s some scenes in this game that have four, five, or six main characters on the screen at the same time. That’s really challenging for my team to optimize and get running in frame sometimes, but it really opens us up to tell more complex stories with these characters.
Insomniac is “blown away” by the ways in which it can bring the symbiote to life.
IGN: So do you have more city areas now?
JL: Brooklyn and Queens? Yeah.
IGN: Can you tell me a little bit more about how they’re sort of their own characters and how you’ve made them unique?
JL: Well, the great thing about them is you sort of have your tried and true skyscrapers in Manhattan, and once you get to cross the river, which is experienced on its own, hopefully use the Web Wings to do that and experience the speed at which you can do that…So you get to visit May’s house and explore Queens and get that more sort of neighborhood feel and its lush trees. And then for Brooklyn, you get Miles’s high school stomping ground, and that really comes across in some of the activities and the adventures you can have in these neighborhoods.
MF: It’s cool. Queens has a very residential feel to it that’s a little different from parts of Manhattan. Brooklyn has its own landmarks of course. We’re excited for players who know Brooklyn and are familiar with the area to find unique buildings that they recognize from our New York in the same way.
“I’m blown away by some of the ways we were able to bring the symbiote to life.”
IGN: Can you tell me a little bit more about the character models and what’s happened with them as characters over the last… it’s been nine months… in the story’s timeline?
JL: So the great thing in this story is we have these established characters, you hopefully love them, and they’re at different points in their lives. Miles is facing what does after he graduates high school and wondering what the next step in his life as he becomes an adult and decides what he wants to pursue. And for Peter, he’s struggling after the passing of Aunt May and how to constantly balance those duties of paying the bills and being a Spider-Man. And once we add in the symbiote and Kraven showing up into this story, we really get to experience the way in which those challenges manifest and affect Spider-Man, both of them.
So hopefully when you played, you saw how the black suit is maybe affecting our normally quite wholesome Peter Parker. And you got to experience how Miles is able to approach the conflict in his life right now that maybe not having as much confidence about knowing what he’s doing next.
IGN: What’s something in the game that you’re particularly proud of to see? Actually for the first time rendered in the engine, actually on the screen in front of you?
JL: I’m blown away by some of the ways we were able to bring the symbiote to life. The symbiote powers that Peter has in the black suit have a very visceral and powerful feel to them both visually and while you’re playing. I think that experience is going to sort of put you in the mind of wondering, “Do you want to take that black suit off or do you want to give into that power?”
MF: I think that I’ll expand on that a bit. Just the process of understanding what the symbiote would look like and how it would behave pretty much took the entire development of the game. I think it impacts everything else. If you make it look too watery, well then Venom’s kind of weak. You make it too solid and it’s like a weird octopus and it needs to be gooey and we don’t have ways to animate these crazy ways that this substance might behave throughout the game. So it really went from animation tools, animation techniques, material treatments from a technical art team, how environment was laying things out. And it’s really just super multi-disciplinary to bring it into a cohesive form.
IGN: Did you do anything to improve the hair technology? Last time we talked about hair and all that stuff and well, the reason I brought up the faces is because the lighting that’s going on in the game, it’s still very impressive. Would you see the light hitting the character just and lighting on the side of the face, can you tell me a little bit more about that technology or how it’s changed?
MF: Well I’ll give credit to our lighting department. We have a whole team of folks who, especially in those cinematics, are very carefully constructing lighting rigs to light the characters from the right way for every individual shot. If you could see it without the camera changing, you’d be surprised at how much changes between every shot to get it just right, just right. We definitely expanded on it from a tech point of view. Certainly in the demo you saw Kraven who has a luscious… well hairy…
JL: He’s hairy everywhere!
Kraven the Hunter will definitely have a lot of hair.
MF: But it’s more affected by physics and wind and feels a lot more cohesive. I think MJ’s hair, as you’ve seen, is down and that is not to be understated from a challenge point of view. I think in games you so often see female protagonists and characters with hair that’s up because….
JL: That’s way easier to animate and deal with.
MF: And to have it low and over the shoulders it needs to behave correctly as she turns her head. It was a challenge, but I think it was a fun challenge.
IGN: Just put it in a bun because that’s far fewer triangles.
MF: That’s what you see a lot.
JL: She’s got beautiful red hair we want to, well, show it off.
IGN: Given that this is technically the third entry into the series, how do you keep it fresh? How do you innovate gameplay-wise to keep the interest?
MF: Well, I think we know we have a really strong foundation from the first couple games and we’re not trying to change for change’s sake. There’s a lot that people love about these games that make them Spider-Man games. It’s about understanding what that is and then finding ways to try something different and make it new. And as you add new things, you got to make sure they fit together in the right way.
JL: And I think our team is also normally very excited at the opportunity to continue to innovate. I think we want to satisfy people, make sure they’re happy with their experience. We’re not straying too far from something that they know and love, but we want to surprise them and we want to give them new toys. So in a lot of ways it’s almost like what will be cool? Could we add something like this? Or something like that? And we also have an open and collaborative team and I think that goes a long way. Some of the best ideas come from the most unexpected place on the team and you end up with these really delightful moments that bring that sort of fresh perspective and change to something like the third game in a sort of series.
MF: Well hopefully you got a sense with the Web Wings, how it’s not about, okay, we have wings now and that’s the new mechanic. It’s about how do they fit with swinging. How do they add to each other to create new fun ways of going around the city and really build up even what was great about the first game or the first two games as you’re adding something new for the third game.
I read in an article that you couldn’t get the licensing rights for a building, so you had to replace it. Were there any other sort of licensing challenges that you faced?
JL: What we really try and do is work with [Sony Interactive Entertainment] and all of our Sony family to make sure the best sort of expressive version of our New York City. I think that sometimes doesn’t quite work out how we want to, but it also sometimes gives us an opportunity to highlight things a little differently. We also get to put little Marvel Easter eggs in the city that maybe don’t exist in real life. So it’s sort of threading that needle of, “Sure that real life building isn’t there, but neither is Avengers Tower.”
MF: That’s true.
JL: We get to put Avengers Tower in our game as opposed to maybe a real-life building.
Can I find any, I don’t know, iconic bar locations where other Marvel characters may be hanging out.
JL: You’ll have to play.
MF: You’ll have to explore New York City and Marvels New York, see what you can play. Certainly adding Brooklyn and Queens added a lot of new opportunity to add more Marvel stuff.
I saw a lot of people theorizing that one of the locations in the trailer was maybe where Logan was hanging out. That’s all I really have for you both. Is there anything else that you want to say to everybody about Spider-Man 2?
MF: I’m just excited for people to play and I hope they have a great time. A lot of care and love and effort went into this game from a whole lot of people who’ve been working really hard on it and I’m just excited to see all of that realized for players.
JL: We love seeing the reactions of the players and we want people to have a great time. So every time we release anything, it really does give us good energy to hear people’s thoughts and feelings and excitement and it really does keep this going. So I hope everyone is satisfied and they love what we did.
‘The most complex things I’ve ever had to make’
What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever programmed in your life?
Doug Sheen, Senior Proframming Director: [The web swinging.] It is most definitely the deepest and largest system with the most impacts on player experience and number of things that we need to account for and just the general… how people are really looking at the game, what they’re expecting of the game, what they want to see out of it in terms of input, in terms of flow, in terms of animation support, in terms of everything else. It’s definitely the most complex thing I’ve ever had to make.
Wow. What about the gliding?
DS: The gliding wasn’t as complex necessarily, but to get it right took a lot of feel and so for us, there was a lot of making sure it integrated with what we already had that was really great. And so we had the traversal that flowed and went through the city and people really loved from the first two games. And I think making sure that we were building on that with the next one, the Web Wings really allowed us to integrate that in, figuring out a way to balance that and make sure that it kind of integrated, didn’t take over, didn’t subsume everything, but was something that people could use.
And then just making sure we got all the mechanics of it, of getting that feeling of flight, making sure that we were getting that underlying element of physics to it so that it felt right to people, but also then getting the gameplay element on top so it would control correctly, integrate correctly, get all the extra little bits that could influence it so that players could really feel like they were a master of the system.
The gliding wasn’t as complex necessarily, but to get it right took a lot of feel
This is the biggest city you’ve ever built and you can auto-swap between these two characters. What’s being utilized to make that possible?
DS: We have a lot of great streaming tech that we’ve been developing through a lot of the games that we’ve made in terms of being able to load different parts of the city. We’ve got our whole team working on different elements of it. And I think that the greatest thing for us on the tech side with the PS5 was the SSD and the pipeline that’s in there with all the hardware decoding and all that kind of stuff. And so the ability for us to be able to just bring in massive amounts of data so quickly means that even though you can go so much faster in this game than you could in the previous one, the PS5 can keep up no sweat with just all of that data and allowing us to have all of that there.
And so we built systems. We had something that was like, what if we made the fastest fast travel it ever was? And so they had the idea of what if you just went from the map and dropped it right into that location? And we tried it and we were able to just quickly get something up and running. We’re like, if we polish this, it’s going to be awesome.
And so it’s a new experience. It’s something you don’t really see in other games. And it’s something that we can really literally only do on PS5 right now because of how fast the hard drive is. We don’t know where you’re going to be. You could just exit the map whenever you want. And so our ability to make that jump is something new.
We do the same thing when you’re swapping characters. We’re jumping to somewhere else in the city as the other character catching up on what they’re doing, what they’re up to at the time. And so being able to make that jump and make it quickly and all the underlying tech with streaming and all the different things, all the layers of stuff that we stream in and what we keep in memory and what we don’t is a big part of that structure. And those layers are a big part of what allows us to be so fast.
Spider-Man 2’s New York is the biggest city Insomniac has ever built.
Was part of learning how to harness that technology utilizing what you learned on Ratchet and Clank, and then implementing that in this engine?
DS: Yeah, I think so. Everything we do here builds on other parts and makes our next game better. And so we had a lot of streaming stuff and everything from building open world games and then we go into Ratchet and all of a sudden we’re like, well, now we want to just jump instantly. And so you get those things, you hit the crystal, you jump from world to world, and we want to drop and reload the next thing and figure out the mechanics of all of that. And so then we say, well, how can we use that? How can we use that in the next game? So when we came into it and we looked at what the team was doing on Ratchet, and we looked at what we could do in this game, we said, well, they can jump. We can jump. We’ve got all this technology. And so just moving it forward in that way definitely inspired us and allowed us to keep building.
You kind of touched on technology. So overall it’s the third entry into the Spider-Man franchise since the original. How are you innovating? How are you pushing things further?
DS: One of the great things about having the last two games is that it gives us a lot of confidence, a lot of knowledge about what works. And so we can take that and we can start to push forward into new places. And one of the things that we really wanted to give players the ability to do was have more tools that they can use strategically. And so a lot of what that means is that we have a slotted ability. So we learned something from Miles with some of his Venom abilities. It’s like how do we take those to the next level? How do we push those further?
And so having things like the symbiote abilities for Peter that kind of come in that you can use strategically. That you can use as kind of a power move that didn’t exist in the previous game as a way that we can really allow players to express themselves. To have solutions to problems that might’ve existed in the last game that they didn’t have good solutions for and had to use just base systems.
This is really the first one where we have two Spider-Men in the game at the same time. And so allowing them to have those divergent abilities that are a little bit different that you have to know what you’re getting into with each one, that you can solve different problems a little bit differently in combat, goes a long way towards what we can do.
By introducing the parry mechanic and that defensive mechanic, we were able to really leverage that. It was really amazing to see what that did for our boss fights. So if you played the game today, you got a little taste of what the lizard fight might look like, and being able to have that one-on-one fight and have them force you to pay attention to read the fight, to understand what the boss is doing, and to know which defensive move you have to use at the time to know when to use your offensive moves. And the fact that every one of our bosses can respond to all of those abilities that the players have means that you’re getting a better fight, you’re getting a deeper fight, a more mechanically sound fight that is really allowing players to have those intimate fights that are really climatic.
They still have great narrative driving every single one of them, but just the mechanics and the gameplay of it also is really, really satisfying and really gives us the opportunity to do that in a much better way.
And then traversal, it’s just adding things like the gliding with the Web Wings, adding things like the slingshot and just making sure that those all integrate together. One of the things that we do in this game is we double the size of the city. So we’ve now got Brooklyn and Queens there, but Brooklyn and Queens, they’re not built like Manhattan is, they’re a lot lower, they’ve got a lot more trees, a lot of things like that.
And then you’ve got the river in between and we say, well, how do you traverse all of that? You can just swing, but it doesn’t always work. It’s not always the optimal way to do it. And so having the opportunity to bring in the Web Wings, bring in the slingshot, gives you a sense of, oh, there’s a different personality to my traversal as I go around the city and go around the different places and have that experience as something that is really new and really interesting and gives each of those two new boroughs kind of a new feel to how you experience it while still being Spider-Man
One of the great things about having the last two games is that it gives us a lot of confidence, a lot of knowledge about what works.
Without cheating and saying, Spider-Man. What’s been your favorite comic book video game in the last 10 years?
DS: Well, 10 years is tough. I am partial to the original Arkham Asylum game. I think that mechanics and level design wise, it’s just beautiful. It’s so great that first one. I think that the other two were great in their own way, but the novelty and the newness of it was so good with the original Arkham Asylum. And so for me, that game was just absolutely fantastic.
We’re sitting here today, we’re playing Spider-Man 2. It’s a six-[week]-old build. We talked a little bit about how Ratchet [and Clank] learnings will help you improve Spider-Man 2 and utilize that technology. Can you see anything already in Spider-Man 2 that you can utilize for your future projects?
DS: I don’t want to talk too much about future projects. I will just say that we are always building on what we have. Part of what makes our games great is that we are always hanging onto what we’ve done before.
Why? What else you got?
DS: There’s some other game that we’ve talked about. I don’t know.
Part of what makes our games great is that we are always hanging onto what we’ve done before.
Can you dive into more about the city? You have the three different areas to go into. Tech-wise, there was that photo that sort of blew up of New York’s Times Square then versus now. So what sort of enhancements are we seeing in the screenshots that you’re putting out? If you could just break that down.
DS: Sure. I don’t want to talk too much for Mike Fitzgerald, who’s our core director, but I can talk a bit about what they’re doing. It really comes down to we’ve got our distant building system, which is our imposter system that we draw, and that’s been upgraded to have new LODs and things that we stream in. That’s again, the PS5, allowing us to swap that stuff out on the fly.
We’ve done a bunch of work in terms of lighting. Our lighting engine has gotten a lot of passes and changes. We’ve done a lot of work on what our street lighting looks like and how that works and what the material responses are. We’ve gotten a better handle on ray tracing and more things being able to be ray traced and supported and built up through that. We’ve got new things [like] our sky boxes in this game look ridiculous, and the way that our sky renders and the way that the light comes through in that and the work that they’ve done to make sure that our open world looks really amazing at all the times of day that it shows up.
And so we’ve got additional things with what we’ve done with foliage, what we’ve done with just the way that we leverage procedural generation to get stuff looking great. So there’s all kinds of elements, not to mention just how our characters look, how everything else looks that come into play to bring it together and make it really look next-gen. I feel like even looking at the Remastered game when we’ve played, when I’ve been playing Spider-Man 2 for so long, and I go back and look at some of the old games, I’m like… I don’t realize how much of a jump it is until you see it next to each other. When you really A-B test it, you’re like, wow, this is a huge jump. In terms of fidelity, in terms of execution, in terms of just how clean everything looks.
DS: Yeah, I mean, it’s great that as a character, he’s getting some more exposure. I would say that we made our choice long ago about who was going to be one of the main, who our main villains were going to be, who was going to be there at the beginning of production. When we first started talking about this game, we knew it was going to be Kraven, and so we didn’t really talk about it with Sony Pictures or anything like that, but it’s definitely more of a happy accident that just getting more exposure for the character. And I think we do a great job with him in our game, and I think his arc and his interaction, the characters and everything is a really fun journey.
It was really important for us to tell the right story for how the symbiote impacts Peter’s life.
Can you specify a little bit more about how the Peter-only missions differ from the Miles-only missions? DS: I mean, in both cases you’re obviously Spider-Man, but the big ones, it’s going to come down a lot of times to who is in the right place or what their struggle is. And so there’s going to be some, like we showed in the demo in May where you play as both and they’re together. There’s going to be some where Peter is following up with his friends or people that he knows or some other lead. And so I think that it really is about the narrative and how the story carries through and where those characters are positioned and what they’re placed at. That really drives it a little bit. So without giving too much away about the story, both characters have a really strong arc and we invest a lot into their story for each of them. And so I think playing the game, you’ll definitely see that each of them is in the right place. But beyond that, you just get a chance to play as both. They have their own abilities. We present opportunities to the player to leverage their unique abilities as you go through each of those missions. And I think that it ends up being, it always ends up feeling like the right Spider-Man for the mission.
Can you dive in a little bit more about the Rogue’s Gallery? We talked about Kraven. Venom’s obviously a character, and then it’s not Eddie Brock. That was a big story that IGN talked about. How did you land on utilizing a different Venom as the antagonist?
DS: I don’t want to get too much into where we end up going with Venom for the most part, but I will say that it was really important for us to tell the right story for how the symbiote impacts Peter’s life. And when we look at what that is, we obviously show early or at the end of the first game and hear that there’s some connection with the symbiote and Harry and how they’re trying to heal his sickness.
And so what we really wanted to focus on was making sure that it felt like how the symbiote was interacting with Peter and what that took him on and the journey that he had to go through, and how that symbiote brings something out in him that maybe he hadn’t exposed or hadn’t really thought about much. And so for us, we let that drive our choices, and Eddie Brock is a fantastic character and everything, but for us it was really about figuring out how the symbiote and Peter interacted and how that impacted his life, and making sure to keep focused on that element.
Destin Legarie is IGN’s Director of Content Strategy
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 takes everything Insomniac learned from its previous two Spider-Man games and finds new ways to raise the bar of superhero game design. No frame is left untouched. No character model is left with subpar lighting. Simply put, after playing for 3 hours, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 looks set to continue Insomniac’s winning streak.
Spider-Man 2: First Preview Images
We were dropped a ways into the game on level 25 versions of Miles Morales and Peter Parker. Each is dealing with their own difficulties in life, with Peter trying to pay a mortgage and help cure his friend’s disease while Miles is simply trying to write his College entry essay but Spider business keeps distracting him from the task at hand.
Besides the personal battles being fought by Peter and Miles, there are also other factors at play that will push them further to the edge. Parker has donned the symbiote suit known as Venom and it’s affecting his personality in ways he doesn’t realize. And Kraven is doing everything he can to upset the peace in New York by attacking Peter, and forcing Doctor Connors to transform into an even more powerful version of his alter ego, the Lizard. The Doctor Connors storyline is particularly bittersweet, as you’re really hunting down a father who wants nothing more than to return to his family, but now he’ll be doing so with a few Spider-Man and Kraven-inflicted injuries.
This fight will actually take you across a large portion of New York City that Insonmiac boasts is two times larger than the previous games. Taking full advantage of the PS5, Spider-Man 2 will allow you to travel across the city faster than ever, not only because of the zippy new web slinging animations, but also because of the Web Wings that you can access at any time with a press of the triangle button. Web wings are a lot of fun to use versus swinging, but they will lose momentum over time, so you will still need to use your webs, unless you’re in a wind tunnel. The wind tunnels will let you go to specific places in the city extremely fast by flying incredibly quickly to that destination on the air currents. But in addition to all of these traversal options, you can also simply swap to Peter or Miles on the fly instantaneously, a la swapping between Trevor, Franklin, and Michael in Grand Theft Auto 5.
I had the opportunity to ask the Insomniac team about how the PS5 SSD allowed them to accomplish instant travel, and faster web swinging. Mike Fitzgerald, Core Technology Director at Insomniac, clarified a few other details, including that the slingshots where Peter or Miles will pull back on two extended webs and catapult themselves forward allows Spider-Man to travel three times faster than in the first game. And that characters are “more detailed and lifelike that help [them] tell better more nuanced stories.” Insomniac also noted that the Dual Sense controller is being used in some unique ways, like a mini-game that we got to play in the reactor that will force you to pull the triggers with just enough pressure to move onto the next segment. And they outlined that the audio team took the time to develop the soundscapes for missions so that 3D audio can be fully utilized. Ambisonics and positional audio were used for objects in the scene, making for a more realistic audio experience making for clearer indications of the player versus a target location.
More noticeably on the Graphics side of things, Spider-Man 2 will only have two visual modes, Visual and Performance. The third mode was removed because no matter which you choose, Ray Tracing will be turned on by default. The baseline for Performance mode will be what was previously referred to as Performance Ray Tracing mode with a better framerate and resolution simply because the PS5 can handle it. Fitzgerald clarifies, “There’s no mode in this game that has the Ray Tracing turned off because there’s really no need for it. We figured out how to deliver what is the right Spider-Man picture and visuals and we want to make sure every player is seeing that.”
The visuals of Spider-Man 2 are impressive. The character models are more expressive when delivering their lines, resulting in more believable performances from the actors that will in turn do a better job of pulling at your heartstrings. The ray-traced reflections add more depth and realism to the world. Breakable environmental additions make it feel like you’ve succeeded in unleashing havoc in an arena after a devastating combo.
But my favorite improvement in Spider-Man 2 is the heavily reworked combat. Now both Peter and Miles have a wide array of abilities and gadgets at their disposal, but more on that in a moment. While exploring in the open world there are several different mission types to explore, meaning that yet again we will have no shortage of side missions to get lost in. Personally, I will always favor the combat arenas, and I spent so much time enjoying them that I lost track of time and never got to experience the aforementioned Lizard boss fight for myself. I was too busy trying to perfect my combat skills in the arena, gawking at the ray traced reflections on everything, staring in awe at the sheer amount of traffic, pedestrians and puddles in every scene, or stopping an assault-in-progress as it popped up on my mini-map. That was the best part. New York is covered in cool things to do as Spider-Man, and while I could have pursued the main storyline with my limited time, I was just having too much fun doing all of the other little things that pulled my attention away. Insomniac also noted that there will be missions that only Miles or Peter can complete, so it sounds like my quest to clear the map is going to be filled with variety.
But to dive into combat a bit more, the enemy density is really ramped up and will sometimes offer you a bit more of a challenge than you may expect. In Spider-Man you could maybe get away with only using your main attacks, but in Spider-Man 2 I found that more often than not I absolutely needed to use my Venom abilities and gadgets in the combat sections. The one small critique I have is that the not-dodgeable parry indicator color is red, and that’s the same color as other things you need to dodge like a bullet from a rooftop sniper. It took a bit of getting used to, but by the end of my demo window I was parrying and unleashing my gadgets and Venom abilities with ease.
The cherry on top of an already impressive gameplay session was when they let us get a sneak peek at some of the new costumes that Peter and Miles will be able to wear when web-slinging around the city. In total Insomniac says there are 65 suits to unlock, and that each has different variations bringing the grand total to 200 different combinations you can wear. In the build we saw, Miles had a 2099, 10th Anniversary, Boricua, and Encoded suit while Peter had the classic Black suit, Webbed Black suit from the Sam Raimi films, Secret Wars Civil War Suit, and Apunkalyptic suit available for wearing. And for the suit tech upgrades your classic Health, Damage, Focus, and Traversal perks were available, with the latter option focusing on things like speed with your web wings. Gadget-wise we only had access to web grabber and upshot attacks that would pepper opponents with bursts of electricity. Miles also has access to Venom abilities like Chain Lightning, Power Overwhelming, or the Venom Smash Jolt. Those attacks and gadgets are very easy to execute by simply holding L1 for Venom abilities, and R1 for fast gadget access. It makes combat incredibly fluid, and will force players to pick and choose the strongest combination of eight to pair together as you patrol the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
I had high hopes for Spider-Man 2, and this preview did nothing to stifle my optimism. I cannot wait to see what the rest of Spider-Man 2 has in store. For our final thoughts, swing on back to IGN when Spider-Man 2 launches this October.
Spider-Man: The Complete Playlist
Here are all the games featuring Marvel’s famed webslinger so far. Log in to track which ones you’ve played or give you tingles.
On September 11, most of the over 4,000 employees at Ubisoft Montreal returned to office in Montreal’s Mile End for the first time in three years. But hardly anyone seems happy about it, and many are furious at what they’re calling broken promises from Ubisoft leadership.
Since Ubisoft Montreal announced that employees would be returning to the office beginning September 11, the studio’s intranet has been lighting up with posts ranging from mild concern to outright anger. IGN has viewed a number of comments on the situation across multiple Ubisoft internal postings, including over 270 comments on the announcement post alone – almost all of which were negative.
Many of the comments list numerous issues employees have historically had working from the office before as reasons not to return: noisy calls in an open office, increased expenses, and a lack of sufficient equipment or accommodations. But the anger also runs deeper than the inherent problems with returning to the office. Amid a wider company culture of layoffs, game cancellations, and abuse allegations, this mandated office return seems to be the final straw for a number of employees who feel that Ubisoft management’s indifference to its workers has gone on long enough.
Broken Promises
Ubisoft’s overarching return to office plan across all its studios was first kicked off in the summer of 2021, roughly coinciding with widespread availability of the first vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic. But in Montreal, where Far Cry 6, Roller Champions, For Honor, and multiple Assassin’s Creed games were made, employees tell IGN that the company’s publicly touted plan simply…never happened.
Instead, they say they were reassured repeatedly over two years that they could remain 100% remote long-term, with many employees making major life decisions or even accepting job offers assuming they could work from home for the foreseeable future. IGN has viewed a number of documents circulated on the company intranet over the last few years that seem to back up this belief. In one example, Ubisoft promises a “hybrid, flexible working environment” where “100% remote work will be possible depending on various criteria, such as productivity and impact on the team, as well as the nature of the work being done.”
But now that’s changing. Beginning September 11, 2023, Montreal employees are expected to work a minimum of two days a week out of the office. The requirement is mandatory for all employees, with exemptions only made for employees with explicit needs “once all other solutions have been explored.”
The announcement immediately sparked anger within the studio, with posts on the company’s intranet listing numerous issues employees have historically had working from the office before as reasons not to return: noisy calls in an open office, transit costs, and a lack of sufficient equipment or accommodations for specific accessibility needs and working styles. A handful of employees brought up the quality of the Montreal office specifically, mentioning past issues such as leaks, rats, bugs, and dearth of typical office perks such as free coffee. Several raised health concerns, citing ongoing fears about the spread of COVID-19. And many developers accused Ubisoft of breaking its promises around 100% work-from-home, with multiple employees saying they had either accepted a job at Ubisoft or made a major life change (such as buying a house outside of Montreal) believing it was a permanent policy.
One key theme in many comments is a broader lack of trust in the company to provide good working conditions and keep its promises over time. It’s been three years since the company was rocked with allegations of a toxic work environment, but some employees have publicly claimed these allegations have yet to be sufficiently addressed. On top of that, the company has now done multiple rounds of layoffs just this year amid much wider financial cuts, cancelled a number of both announced and unannounced games, and seen multiple others release and underperform. With that much chaos so readily apparent externally, it’s unsurprising that a Montreal return-to-office renege is serving as the final straw for many.
Several employees have gone as far as to speculate that the change was effectively a soft layoff on the part of Ubisoft in an effort to assuage said recent financial woes. By introducing an unpopular policy, they suggested, Ubisoft could push employees to quit and reduce headcount without having to pay severance or deal with other potential financial drawbacks of a mass layoff.
“The blog post cited things like ‘Ubisoft culture’ and ‘collaboration’ as the reasons we needed to return to the office, but never once explained what problems a lack of these things had caused, or what steps had been taken to alleviate them before turning to RTO as the solution, or what kind of changes management expects to see as a result of RTO and how we are to measure the success of this plan,” one employee told IGN. “The lack of substance about why we are doing this and how can we know if it’s working has led a lot of people to believe the reasons we are being given are lies and the management are afraid to say the real reasons out loud.”’
An Imminent Exodus?
While employees are being encouraged to speak with individual managers for accommodations, Ubisoft’s internal documentation has implied that exemptions “will only be considered once all other solutions have been explored.” Meanwhile, multiple employees IGN spoke to have attested that Ubisoft’s system for finding these solutions isn’t working well thus far. One said that employees who have been using standing desks or other specific equipment from home are unable to get what they need in-office without “a fight and 20 doctor’s notes”.
What’s more, the accommodations system seems to be bottlenecking quickly due to a flood of requests, and not enough people to fulfill them. Another person noted that Ubisoft leaders appear to be delegating responsibility managing employee frustration to middle managers, who seem largely powerless to address the anger.
IGN reached out to Ubisoft for comment on this story, and received the following statement in response:
Like many companies in entertainment and tech, we are asking our colleagues to come back to the office for key moments identified by each team. We are convinced that the synergy, in-person discussions, rapid iterations, and a sense of belonging that happens more in person will help us be more effective and agile together, and achieve our business goals.
First announced early in June, the hybrid mode goes into place on Monday, September 11, and we are accompanying our colleagues through these changes, giving them additional flexibility over the next eight weeks or more to adapt. Open and ongoing conversations in addition to extensive individual accommodation and arrangements are currently underway to ease this transition and the impact on everyone’s well-being, which remains our priority to continue to deliver great games.
While it remains to be seen how the unpopular return to Ubisoft Montreal’s office will impact the studio long-term, one possible model can be found over at Blizzard. Like Ubisoft, Blizzard has similarly been embroiled in a series of very public upheavals over its work culture, seen a wave of employee collective action, and laid off hundreds over the last few years. And then, like Ubisoft, Blizzard instituted its own similarly unpopular forced return-to-office earlier this year. So what happened to Blizzard? Well, according to Blizzard developers on social media, the RTO policy resulted in a mass exodus of talent so impactful that at one point that the company was creating “crisis maps” of what it could and could not ship with the people it had left.
Mortal Kombat is a series known for its Easter eggs, but this latest nod to pop culture may be its best yet.
Mortal Kombat 1 is out now and so players are getting to see all the Fatalities at their disposal (check out IGN’s list of Fatalities for more). Kameo fighter Shujinko has one unexpected Fatality that mimics perhaps one of Quentin Tarantino’s most famous action heroes: The Bride from Kill Bill.
As showcased by IGN’s social team, Shujinko can perform Kill Bill’s ‘Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique’, which involves hitting a number of pressure points on the body before a fatal blow.
In Kill Bill: Vol. 2, The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, finally gains her revenge by performing the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique on her ex-boss, Bill, played by David Carradine. The Bride learnt the technique from legendary Kung Fu master Pai Mei. Who in Mortal Kombat looks like Pai Mei? Shujinko!
Mortal Kombat development chief Ed Boon had fun with the Fatality, too.
The developers at NetherRealm have done a fantastic job recreating the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique as it was shown in Kill Bill, although, as you’d expect, Mortal Kombat’s version ends in a more gruesome fashion than the original does.
Now, players are now calling on the studio to secure The Bride as a DLC character. Beatrix Kiddo would be a great fit for the gory fighting game, but whether director Quentin Tarantino would give his blessing to such a move remains to be seen.
If you’re interested in the weird and wonderful Mortal Kombat 1 Fatalities, check out IGN’s compilation video, below. Once you’re done with that, give IGN’s Mortal Kombat 1 review in progress a read.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Big daddy Dale is back and is joined by Cardy and Mat to talk about some of the biggest trailers from this week's PlayStation State of Play. We've got your Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Your Spider-Man 2. A bit of Baby Steps. All the good stuff. Plus chat about random films old and new and, finally, ABBA get the respect they deserve.
What do think of ABBA? Get in touch at ign_ukfeedback@ign.com
WASD is a calming indie-led oasis, a gaming weekender nestled in the heart of East London that’s a less corporate and infinitely more chill take on the often sweaty games convention. It’s a place where developers proudly demo their passion project themselves while players hang out and chat. While you can get hands on with big hitters like Tekken 8 and Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, WASD is really about discovering the weird and the wonderful. If you’re not heading to WASD this week, here are six indie bangers you’ll absolutely want to have on your radar.
Nivalis
In one of the more ambitious indie offerings on the show floor, Nivalis transports players into a blocky neon- drenched dystopia. Visually, it’s very much Cyberpunk 2077 x Minecraft, but as I’m handed the deed to a noodle bar in Nivalis’s bustling metropolis, I’m also told there’s a serial killer prowling the streets. From fully voiced quest givers to the ability to place furniture as you see fit, there’s grin-inducing, genre hopping delight to be found in this sci-fi restaurant sim. As your stature grows, you can eventually purchase your own club, buy an awesome house and even determine the fate of the city’s entire nightlife.
It’s clever mix of life sim and story-led adventure has more than a whiff of Dave the Diver to it, and apparently you can even fall in love with your customers if you’re into that. Will Nivalis’ noodley systems have the umami spice necessary to pull off its lofty ambitions? That remains to be seen, but even if it only delivers half of its promises, Nivalis is still an appetising proposition.
So to Speak
Video games are a masterclass in making players feel productive. From epic open world adventures to more tedious tasks, no matter how much I grumble I always find myself motivated to complete quest after quest. What if you could harness that virtual motivation to help you learn a language? That’s the concept behind the Japanese language learning game, So to Speak. When creator Erik Anderson went to Japan he struggled to decipher street signs, finding himself carefully deconstructing each alien Kanji symbol until he began to figure out his unfamiliar surroundings. Using a clever mix of visual clues and drag-and-drop head-scratchers, this pixel art puzzler turns that IRL puzzle-solving element into its core mechanic. It’s a surprisingly effective way to learn, beating the painful experience of slowly repeating words ad nauseum. While my WASD demo left me far from fluent, it’s clever deconstruction of kanji left me feeling like I’d actually achieved something when I headed to the deguchi ( that’s Japanese for exit, mic drop suckaaass).
Hexarchy
The sun is shining. You open up Civilization for a quick go after a long day and suddenly it’s pitch black and six hours have passed. If the very notion of losing days of your life to a 4X strategy game has you trembling in fear, Hexarchy may just be the bitesize alternative of your dreams.
Combining the best of Civ with the fast-paced deckbuilding of Hearthstone, this mercifully snappy strategy lets you clear an entire game in just one hour. Part board game, part streamlined strategy, you use cards to advance your civilization with each new turn, allowing you to progress from age to age in record time. It’s a delightfully slick and complete feeling game, making the genre’s once intimidating time commitments a thing of the past.
Project Diagnosis
I thought I knew a lot about medicine but it turns out doctors actually use tiny spaceships to heal their patients, and most of them are secretly working with the FBI. This isn’t the rambling of a conspiratorial sub reddit, but the concept behind Oxymoron Games’s Project Diagnosis. Approached by a shady government agency, our protagonist needs to administer treatment to her sickly patients while also uncovering the extra terrestrial mysteries behind their eyebrow-raising injuries. Part heal-’em-up, part detective sim, Project Diagnosis effortlessly flits between carefully choosing dialogue that prompt patients to talk about their otherworldly encounters and navigating odd mini games that see you fly a pointer through circles to administer futuristic medicine. Wrapped up in a slick, silhouette-esque art style and with solid writing tying it all together, Project Diagnosis’ bizarre mash up is a unique twist on the point-and-click genre.
Ultros
Even from across the crowded show floor, Ultros is a game that immediately catches your eye. Looking part edgy ’90s Image Comics, part ’70s psychedelia, this entrancing sci-fi adventure uses its unique art style to stand out in the increasingly crowded metroidvania genre. As I munch on larvae and leap across the screen, each new animation fills the screen in a burst of saturated colour, sending me gleefully exploring the next utterly bizarre-looking environment.
While most metroidvanias make combat feel slow and punishing, here encounters are refreshingly fluid and fast paced, seeing your mysterious hero slide under enemies and counter attack, chaining combos with a zippy cadence. As you unlock new combat abilities at each Saiyan Space Pod-esque save point and your battle performance gets graded after each encounter, there’s a pleasingly Platinum Games-esque feel to Ultros. With a pulsating and predictably hypnotic soundtrack from Hotline Miami composer El Huervo, Ultros is quite simply, a vibe. Well worth a look if you’re looking for something to fill that Hollow Knight-shaped void.
Change: a Homeless Survival Experience
Inspired by creator Danny Hayes’ chats with homeless people he met across five years, this rogue lite sees players attempting to survive on a city’s unforgiving streets. Begging for change and attempting to make it through life on procedurally generated sidewalks, Change hammers home just how challenging life can be when you’re homeless. With different traits affecting how you handle what life throws at you, the ultimate goal is to find a job and get a house – as you beg for change and attempt to survive. Yet with spiteful people damaging your morale, police interference and random muggings robbing you of your earnings, the truly unpredictable nature makes no two runs the same. Much like Lucas Pope’s seminal Papers, Please, this emotional and immersive work helps create a surprising amount of empathy despite its humble pixel art visuals, and manages to be both enjoyable to play while also hammering home an important message.
Honourable mentions
After something to scratch that Disco Elysium itch? Check out mediaeval talk-’em-up, Esoteric ebb, a world filled with piss-taking dwarves, grumbling goblins and villagers who cringe whenever you insist on calling their favours “quests”.
Ever imagined that your culinary creations are actually battle-ready monsters? Well firstly, that’s a bit weird, mate, but even more bizarrely, there’s actually a game that’s made exactly for you. Cook ‘em before you fight ‘em in Gladieaters, which combines kitchen mini games with creature battling in this endearingly weird Cooking Mama X Pokémon extravaganza.
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