Month: February 2020

During a panel at PAX East, the first gameplay from the much-anticipated Baldur’s Gate 3 was revealed by developer Larian Studios, which is best known for the acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel. Prior to this showcase at PAX, we were able to sit down with Larian creative director Swen Wincke to discuss the challenges of creating the game, working with Wizards of the Coast, and much more. Read on for our full chat and check out our breakdown of the new intro cinematic.

Mike Mahardy: I know Larian has been pursuing the Baldur’s Gate license for a while now. Is it true that Divinity: Original Sin 2 was kind of like a tryout for Wizards of the Coast? A way for you to say, “Hey, we can handle this license?”

Swen Wincke, Creative Director: I approached them after Divinity: Original Sin (DOS 1). I said, “You should let us make Baldur’s Gate 3. We have a lot of Dungeons and Dragons fans in the office. It’s something that would really motivate them.” They said no, then. Then we were working on DOS 2. In between, I kept on bumping into Nate Stewart at Dungeons and Dragons. He asked me, “What game would you make actually?” I said, “This is what I would make.” He said, “Okay, all right, that’s kind of cool.” But yeah, at the time, the stars were not aligned.

I then got a phone call from him in December before DOS 2 released – so that was in 2016. He said, “Do you still want to do this?” I said, “Yes, I am actually really interested in still doing this.” He says, “Fly over to Seattle.” I fly over Seattle and went to an obscure bar with him. There, he showed me three PowerPoints, which contained everything I’d talked about all this time. He said, “I’ll present this to the board of Hasbro next week. Do you agree?” I said, “Yes.” Then six months later we signed the agreement. We were still working on DOS 2 back then.

Mike: What had changed, with the green light happening then? Was it just the ongoing conversation you were having?

Swen: I think there were a couple of things happening. Management had changed. Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) was doing really well, and DOS 2 happened also. It was in early access at that time, and so people could see what was happening with DOS 2. I think all those things conversed with one another. We took it from there.

Mike: In my mind, as a DOS 2 fan, there was a sense of, “Do they need to do Baldur’s Gate 3?” Because you’ve already done Divinity, which was about as close as video games have gotten to the spirit of DnD. I guess I’m asking: how are you setting Baldur’s Gate apart from Divinity?

Swen: There’s a lot of stuff. In BG3, I think the very first thing that’s already apparent is that everything is cinematic. One of the reasons why we went cinematic for everything—every single dialogue is cinematic—is that we want it to have the party front and center this time, which was not necessarily the case in DOS 2. It wasn’t really as strong as what we’re doing now. What the two have to do with each other, well if you want to have intimacy, want to show relationship building, you can do it really well when you go cinematic.

Then you have the rule set. It’s class based. It’s more limiting in a certain way, so you have to be more creative in how you do their things. You have less things that you can do per turn, because you only have a couple of spells while they build up of course, if you’re playing wizards or a warlock or a sorcerer. What I’m trying to say is, just look at the level-up curve, for instance. The leveling is something that is very slow in Baldur’s Gate. It’s very fast in Divinity.

I mucked it up a few times during the demo today, but we’re also focusing on the idea of “light and dark.” The entire way that it works with “Heavily Obscured” and “Lightly Obscured,” that’s straight from the [DnD] books. That ports very well. It works really well actually. When you compliment it with the environmental interactions that we introduced in DOS – I can douse fire with water, which makes it dark, which is beneficial to me. That’s cool systemic gameplay. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking for.

Mike: Can you delve more into the combat here? What were the biggest challenges in adapting the Fifth Edition rule-set into a video game?

Swen: We were very worried about things like the Fighter and the Rogue, especially at the lower levels, because they have very limited actions to them. That’s why I picked a rogue to demonstrate today, because it actually shows how much stuff you can do, because you start thinking, “What can I do in this world?” You start playing to the strengths of the Rogue. As we were developing, we became more relaxed about that. We were quite worried because we thought we were going to have to invent a whole bunch of extra stuff so that every single turn you would have a choice.

There’s also always that interaction that you can do between the characters. You’re always thinking about, “That guy is going to do that. Then this guy’s going to do that.” And you make combinations like that. That gives you a lot of agency in trying things out as you progress through the game. That was a challenge that worked out well.

Mike: Going from a classless system to one that’s class-based, what are the clear advantages? Was it more of a restraint, or did it actually free you up creatively?

Swen: Classes communicate really well to the player. So you are thinking “My cleric will do this. My fighter is going to go into the front line.” It wasn’t necessarily as clear in Original Sin, where it was really like, “What cool things did I put together?”

Mike: Divinity was very much your own thing. No other group had its hands in it. Now, with Baldur’s Gate, you come in, and it’s kind of the exact opposite. With Baldur’s Gate, you have that added weight of nostalgia. What’s that been like?

Swen: There’s multiple ways that you can deal with that. You can let yourself be paralyzed by that pressure, because everybody has a different game in their heads that they want. But we’re making a game that we think is going to be fun. We generally tend to make games that we like to play, and then hopefully there are people that will want to play it. I think that in BG3 they will find a lot that they will enjoy. There will be people that will be disappointed that it’s not real-time and fast. We just chose to go for turn-based because we think it’s closer to the source material, and allows us to do more things. It is what it is. We’re just making a game, and we try to make it really cool.

Mike: There’s been somewhat of a CRPG renaissance lately. Divinity rests comfortably within that. Why are they having such a moment now? What is it about the audience’s taste, or the goals of developers, that led this to happen right now?

Swen: I think that actually is because you have this widespread distribution, so there is more access to broader markets and specific initiatives and markets that in the past were not necessarily identified by publishers, because they didn’t think that was going to work. I explicitly was told back in the day that that turn-based [games never sell].

You can let yourself be paralyzed by pressure… but we’re making a game that we think is going to be fun.

Swen Vincke, Larian Creative Director

Mike: I feel like games in the early 2000s were very much about accessibility and, in some cases, handholding. But in the past several years, it seems like players have gotten used to learning super complex systems. Larian’s games seem to be benefiting from that.

Swen: That’s always been the trick, right? “Easy to learn, hard to master.” That’s literally what it is. You’ve seen me do very advanced things [in today’s demo]. That’s not how you start playing as a normal player. You see a tutorial that will ease you in, but then you start discovering things. The magic of these games is that moment where you say, “I tried something and it works,” and you don’t expect it to work in general, because in the more guided games you don’t have it.

It’s like, “This is your corridor. Walk in your corridor.” You can’t get out of your corridor. You see plenty of objects. You can’t interact with a single one of them except if it highlights. Then you play this game like this and you said, “Huh. Here’s an object. I wonder what I could do with it. Oh, if nothing else, I can throw it at somebody and do some damage.”

That experimentation leads you to progress that you probably weren’t supposed to have. Now I say, “Hey, now I’m on the real adventure. I’m in over my head. I’ll have to keep on doing these things if I want to survive,” which is basically what happened to me today.

Mike: That’s such an opposite idea of what so many games today seem to be about: min-maxing and optimizing everything to death. But then you watch a demo like today, and I thought it was extremely entertaining because of how often things went wrong, and you had to adapt to that failure.

Swen: It’s super, super important in this game, because when we put the dice roll in there, we knew that the dice roll was going to fail also. We had to make sure that failing in the dice roll, be it narratively or be it systemically, needed to lead you to a place where you actually were having fun. Because then you start to really care, because you know stuff is going to happen. You know you can continue to play.

You know you’re not going to reload because hopefully, you’ll trust that the game is going to guide you to a fun place, just like an experienced dungeon master would. We do also give you abilities, very limited ones, where we give you the ability to manipulate the dice. We give you inspiration points, right? Then you can say, “When will I use my inspirations?” Maybe you’ll just hoard it until the end of the game. But you have things like Lucky points that allow you to reroll. These things are going to make that roll an important event, which is what it is on the tabletop.

Mike: Another thing during combat that you seemed to stress today was verticality. The earlier Baldur’s Gates had these flat, pre-rendered backgrounds. What’s it been like to rework that? What does that allow for? Was that a big focus from the start or was that something that just unfolds when you were saying, “How do we adapt these rules into combat?”

Swen: The latter actually, because we were starting to think about advantage and disadvantage. DnD 5th Edition streamlined a lot of things into advantage and disadvantage. One of the big drives that we had is how do we bring that in an actual way to the player? Height is a very easy one. “I have a height advantage, so, okay, let’s start thinking about this. Oh, look at that, you can shove people. Well, that’s interesting. Let’s start shoving people. Okay, this is rather fun.”

That’s one of them, but there are others. Light and dark are also really good sources of advantage. Sneaking up on somebody from the darkness, surprising them so you get the benefits. These are things that sound super mechanical when you read them in the books, but they’re not mechanical though. When you see them and you play them, they’re just as logical.

We always wanted to make very big RPGs. The idea is that if we can manage to be successful with this, we essentially free ourselves.

Swen Vincke, Larian Creative Director

Mike: Whether it be combat or lore or the storyline, have you worked closely with Wizards of the Coast, or do they just kind of let you do whatever you want?

Swen: Both. When we were setting up a storyline, we worked together with Adam Lee, who is the man who was partially responsible for Descent Into Avernus. He was one of their writers. He came over to Ghent to work with us and we went through storyline permutations and so forth. Then we spent a lot of time at Wizards’ offices also. We traveled a lot there as we were building up the entire concept. Over time, trust started increasing in what we’re doing. At this point, they’re just like, “Surprise us.” They’re very big fans.

Mike: In terms of lore: coming into this project, did you know what parts of the DnD universe you wanted to pull from?

Swen: Well we actually started out differently than where we ended up. That is partially because of the work that Adam was doing. We knew that the city was going to be central. You eventually get to Baldur’s Gate, and the things that you will encounter in Baldur’s Gate will depend on how you deal with events before then. There’s quite a lot of reactivity in there.

Then we also knew that we wanted to have something like what the previous Baldur’s Gates did, where you had lots of diversity in terms of where are you going to go. Baldur’s Gate was almost like a carousel of iconic creatures that you had, or locations that you wanted to visit, which means it’s very DnD. It’s no different here. You’re going to see lots of things that you like about Realms reappear.

Mike: Do you see Larian always kind of sticking to fantasy as far as-

Swen: No.

Mike: No? Do you have genres you have talked about wanting to go into?

Swen: No. We always wanted to make very big RPGs. The idea is that if we can manage to be successful with this, we essentially free ourselves, so that we can actually start exploring other things at the scale that we want to do it at.

Mike: You mentioned an early access for Baldur’s Gate 3. Have you talked about how you’re going to structure that in terms of what that will include as opposed to the full game?

Swen: We’ll do it similar to DOS. We’ll come in with content, and then we’ll add pieces of content, like extra classes, extra origin characters, extra systems, extra spells. We’ll add some regions over time also. We want to limit it to first act content, if you want. Players that are joining us during early access, when they play the game on release, they still have plenty of content to go through. But at the same time they do have sufficient content to actually have a really cool adventure during early access.

Mike: Do you feel as if that kind of a release structure could hinder the overall experience? As opposed to just having the game and jumping in and being able to play for 80 hours straight?

Swen: You can! There are two types of people that go into early access. There are the people that are fans and that want to support us early and just… try it out. They generally spend five or ten minutes and that’s it. They don’t touch it anymore. Then you have the people who want to be part of development, and that send us plenty of feedback, which we listen to, because otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. Then we adapt the game. If you look at DOS2, the game that went in and the game that came out of early access is a very different game. Same thing goes for DOS1.

Mike: Were there challenges with DOS1 and 2, specific you could point out that were really valuable lessons for making Baldur’s Gate 3?

Swen: There’s plenty, yeah. This is our own engine that we’re building. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that the team wanted to change on the engine. Now that we have more resources, obviously, we could. That’s been a big one. New problems appear, of course. We set up an entire cinematics pipeline to be able to record all this dialogue for every single scene. That really is a big chunk of new work and new problems that appear, because we’re doing multiplayer also..

I don’t think you’ve seen that before at this scale. It’s quite the challenge. In other ways, there’s so much stuff that’s written about DOS2 and there are so many opinions. We just tried to make a game that we liked, because that’s the only guideline that we can follow anyway.

Mike: Yeah, I imagine that must be tough. I work for a site that gave it a 10 out of 10. It’s like, “Of course, people really like this thing. So how do we do something different?” It’s always hard to ignore criticism, but it must be even harder in some ways to ignore praise. Are you trying to just block that out while you make this game you want to make?

Swen: Yes. Yeah, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

Mike: How’s that going?

Swen: Well you’ve seen the results. I think it’s shaping up to be a really good game. We still have a lot of work. We’re certainly not done yet. There was so much demand. We also think that we’re at the stage where we’re ready to start showing it. In a couple of months, we will probably be ready to throw it into early access. Then the real fine-tuning can begin. We have a lot of content. There’s a lot of stuff that I bypassed today that you didn’t notice it because you didn’t know that it was there or I turned my camera at the right spot. There is a lot of stuff there.

Mike: I just imagine that the pressure of your success, coupled with the legacy of Baldur’s Gate, must be its own challenge throughout development.

Swen: The thing we are telling people is that we are the dungeon master. And we’re just going to play DnD together. That’s literally what we’re doing here. I think that’s an okay approach. Every single person that plays DnD has their own version of it that they’re playing.

When we talked to Wizards, we initially thought this is going to be impossible because they’re going to want every single rule strictly implemented. On the contrary, they’re very open to [change]. There are things that they want to have in there. Then there are things they say, “Well, try to make the best out of it.” That’s also how they approached 5th edition towards their own players. I think that’s a large reason for their success.

Mike: 5th edition is pretty widely revered now. Is that mainly because of the systemic streamlining you mentioned?

Swen: I think first of all, they did a really, really good job designing it. I think the way that they’re approaching storytelling, lore, freedom for their players, is exceptionally good. That’s a very important part of it. The fact that it’s really easy to learn now, but still you have all the depth and complexity that’s in there. That’s probably the main reason it’s doing so well.

You take Dragon, you take the Mine of Phandelver and the starter kits, and you can walk into a room with people who’ve never played it and they’ll come off fans. It’s a powerful thing. We had the same thing with DOS. We gave it to people who never played it. We saw that at PAX inevitably, when people walked in there with a friend and they said, “Try this out.” We walked out with somebody converted and said, “I can actually play this. I didn’t think I was going to be able to play this. I thought it was too complex, but this is actually really a lot of fun.” You have the same thing with DnD.

Mike: Larian was a respectable name coming out of DOS1. Now it’s a household name in the world of CRPGs, or just RPGs in general. What’s it like making that jump in a pretty short time?

Swen: It doesn’t feel like that, because we are still bitching at each other continuously about how we can do this better and can do this better. We are very focused on the things we don’t do well. Of the things that we do well, we then start taking them for granted because we want to improve our game. There’s so much stuff that we still want to do and there’s so little time.

You have to remember we rebooted ourself in 2010. Went completely independent. Stopped being dependent on publishers. Meaning that we didn’t listen to anybody else anymore telling us how to do our stuff. We started building our engines from scratch. We decided to make multiplayer CRPGs, which is really complicated. It’s much harder than single player CRPGs, I can tell you that, and they have to be consistent with the ambition of recreating a virtual version of what a tabletop is.

What is so cool about Dungeons and Dragons is that your agency gets rewarded because you have a dungeon master that reacts to that agency … that’s what we’re trying to do.

Swen Vincke, Larian Creative Director

We’re just going forward with that and now, we’re adding the entire cinematic angle to it, which we always wanted to do. We have so much dialogue and so many permutations. When you see it cinematically like you see now, it’s this [new] layer of polish. You can already see what the potential is of the destination, and how much more emotion you can bring into the scenes.

Then being able to play that with my friends, and all having the same experience in a narrative that we’re all affecting, that’s pretty awesome.

Mike: It feels like RPGs in video games have been chasing the magic of DnD for so long. Do you think that’s something they’ll ever catch? So much of a DnD lives in people’s heads, whereas video games are very much, “Hey, we’re putting this concrete thing in front of you that you’re going to interact with.” Do you think they’ll ever really cross paths?

Swen: What is so cool about DnD is that your agency gets rewarded because you have a dungeon master that reacts to that agency and creates the result of your agency. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to give you as much agency as we can, giving you an ever increasing toolset of things that you can do within a world that promises to react to you in a way that is going to be rewarding to you. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to replace a DM completely, but I think we can go very far with that.

Mike: You still have to play DM, it’s just for millions of people at a time, not four.

Swen: (Laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But yeah, for each person, it’s their own thing. A lot of how the story is going to evolve is going to be a function of their [individual] agency. For instance, you didn’t have to decide to bite Shadow Heart in that scene. (Editor’s note: In today’s demo, Wincke played as a vampire character and decided to suck his party member’s blood while she was sleeping at camp) The fact that you bit her – if the die rolled wrong, that’s your choice.

You created that in the game. From now on, she’s gone. She’s never going to be back. You will encounter situations that were dealing with her and they’re going to react to the fact that she’s gone. It’s the same thing that you would have with a DM. It’s like, “I did this. The world happens to evolve this way. I have to deal with this.” That is a very powerful feeling for a player. That’s also unique to video games.

During its PAX East 2020 panel, Gearbox announced Borderlands 3 season pass owners would receive four campaign-focused DLCs in 2020. Following on the heels of Moxxi’s Heist of the Handsome Jackpot, Borderlands 3 will take a Lovecraftian turn in Guns, Love, and Tentacles–scheduled for March 26. Two more major expansions will be coming in 2020 as well, the third will arrive in the summer while the fourth will release later.

“One of the key pillars of [Guns, Love, and Tentacles] was to put the love back into Lovecraft,” Gearbox art director Jonathan Rancourt said in an interview with GameSpot. “We’re going for a strong contrast between those [Lovecraftian] landscapes and the story of a love worth telling. You’re going to be in a frozen wasteland where there are high mountain peaks that convey a sense of horror in some ways. But the story is lighter and it’s about Hammerlock and Wainwright sharing their wedding. There’s always trouble when you’re going through your wedding and, this time around, it’s even crazier.”

Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs won’t be the only familiar faces you’ll be running into during Guns, Love, and Tentacles–Borderlands 2‘s first DLC character, Gaige, is finally coming back. Much like Lilith, Mordecai, Zer0, and the rest of the Vault Hunters from previous games, Gaige returns as a companion NPC, not a playable character.

“Gaige is one of the fan favorites and it was super important for us to stay true to the character and to make her a really big [part of] the DLC,” Rancourt said. “So players will follow Gaige throughout the [DLC’s] campaign and interact with her. We also wanted to bring back Gaige because she’s really close to Hammerlock in some ways. It really made sense in this story to have her there.”

Between these major expansions, Gearbox will continue to implement smaller updates for Borderlands 3, like the Mayhem 2.0 patch in March. “The main goal from the design team is that they wanted to make sure everything in Mayhem 2.0 was just fun,” Gearbox public relations manager Austin Malcolm said.

The new Mayhem Mode will continue to provide a post-campaign challenge for players, but will further lean into the wacky nature of Borderlands 3. You could get a modifier like “Big Head,” for example, which makes everyone’s heads noticeably larger–increasing the overall size of the headshot hitbox for both your enemies and your own Vault Hunter.

Season 2 of Fortnite Chapter 2 rolls on with a new set of challenges to complete. Week 2 brings the second wave of Brutus’s Briefing challenges, and as before, many of these tie into this season’s spy theme. One in particular asks you to find Shadow safe houses. If you’re not sure what those are or where they’re located, we’ve put together the map and guide below to help you out.

Where Are The Shadow Safe House Locations?

Shadow is one of the two warring spy factions in Fortnite Chapter 2, and this challenge has you traveling to their safe houses. We’ve found five of these hideouts across the map, which is how many you need to visit to complete the task.

What makes these safe houses particularly tricky to find is their inconspicuous appearance. They look like normal buildings from the outside, but you’ll know for sure when you stumble upon one, as they’re swarming with AI henchmen, so you’ll need to be cautious when approaching them. We’ve marked down the safe house locations on the map below:

• Pleasant Park
• East of Craggy Cliffs
• South of Sweaty Sands
• Middle of the island east of Frenzy Farm
• On the small island north of Misty Meadows

How To Complete The Challenge

Once you know where the five Shadow safe houses are located, all you need to do to complete the challenge is enter each one. This may be easier said than done, however; not only is each one guarded by henchmen, who are all heavily armed, you’ll also need to contend with other players who are trying to complete this challenge. Make sure you have some good weapons and ammo at your disposal before you head to a safe house.

We’re still in the early days of Season 2 of Fortnite Chapter 2, but there are already a variety of challenges to complete. You can find our maps and guides for the trickier ones in our Fortnite Season 2 challenges hub. Be sure to also check out our Fortnite Season 2 roundup to catch up on everything that’s new in the popular battle royale shooter this season.

February is Black History Month, and IGN will be live streaming tomorrow with a bunch of special guests to celebrate.

Tune in tomorrow, 28th of February from 1:30PM PST to 4:15PM PST as we play games, chat about the black video game community, the importance of representation, and getting into the industry.

We’ll also be joined by Azure Bowie from EA (Producer on The Sims 4), and  FGC Esports commentator/streamer for Game Goons TV Hellpockets.

The stream will be hosted by IGN’s own Akeem Lawanson and Kinda Funny’s Blessing Adeoye Jr.

Where To Watch

Watch the Black History Month livestream starting at 1:30PST tomorrow February 28th on the following platforms:

• IGN’s website
• IGN’s YouTube channel
• IGN’s IOS App
• IGN’s Android App

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Gearbox kicked off its PAX East panel by announcing the Steam release date for Borderlands 3 and it’s only a few weeks away. Borderlands 3 will hit Steam on March 13, 2020, and what’s more, it will feature cross-play between Steam and Epic Games Store.

Borderlands 3 was released last year exclusively on the Epic Games Store for PC. Although it was only a limited-time exclusivity, it was one of the first major titles to launch first on the Epic Games Store. But now Gearbox’s latest Borderlands game is coming to Steam.

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Thanks to cross-play, there’s no need to worry about online co-op if your friends ended up waiting for the six months to get Borderlands 3 on Steam. An updated SHiFT system will let you manage your friend list regardless of the platform.

Not every cross-play feature will be available on March 13. According to Gearbox, weapon mailing won’t be available on day one and will instead be rolling out over the following weeks.

With today’s release date announcement, Borderlands 3 will be available on both major PC digital platforms soon. Check out IGN’s Borderlands 3 review here, our Borderlands 3 wiki for walkthroughs and tips, and our livestream of the Gearbox Panel live from PAX East.

Also, check back on IGN for all the latest news from PAX East.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

Borderlands 3 has been one of the most high-profile games to forgo a Steam release in favor of Epic Games Store exclusivity, but that will soon come to an end. As part of a PAX East panel, developer Gearbox announced that Borderlands 3 has a Steam release date: It launches on March 13.

The Steam store page is now available and you can add it to your wishlist, although pre-orders aren’t yet available. While cross-play with the PS4 and Xbox One versions will not be available, cross-play is supported across both PC versions, letting Epic and Steam players join together for online multiplayer.

Borderlands 3 originally released on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on September 13, 2019. That means this Steam release arrives exactly six months later; we had previously heard it would come no sooner than April. Also as part of the PAX happenings, Gearbox unveiled Borderlands 3’s new DLC.

Despite complaints from some fans, as has been commonplace with Epic-exclusive releases, Borderlands 3 was quite successful on Epic. On launch day, Randy Pitchford shared that the game was beating expectations at launch and that it had roughly doubled the all-time concurrent players record for Borderlands 2 on PC. Across all platforms, it quickly became 2K’s fastest-selling game ever.

You can race pretty much anything in Grand Theft Auto V‘s GTA Online. Whether you’re racing against other players in supercars, mopeds, SUVs, planes, boats, RC cars, or even something as ludicrous as an airport baggage carrier. And yet, there’s something missing… The next logical step is obviously to compete in the San Andreas Prix in F1-style open-wheel vehicles.

GTA Online: Open Wheel Racing is now available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The update adds two brand new ultra-performance vehicles for you to race in, the PR4 and R88. Both share the same stats, but you can take each one to Los Santos Customs to fine-tune and purchase spoilers, tires, liveries, engine mods, and more.

There are seven new tracks to hurl your new open-wheel masterpiece around, with closed-circuit races spread out across Los Santos and the surrounding area. The Vinewood Hills are home to the winding hairpins of a historic street circuit, while City Hall is the centrepiece of a rapid city circuit. There are also races around the Port of Los Santos, Los Santos International Airport, and the Fort Zacundo military base. Elsewhere, Davis tasks you with avoiding potholes and concrete blocks as you propel around its tight corners, and the final track transports you to the coast, as breaking waves provide the background noise to each race.

GTA Online: Open Wheel Racing even delves into some of the intricacies of the sport, as choosing which tires to use is a decision that needs to be made, as well as determining whether you need to take that all-important pit stop.

Microsoft Game Stack has also announced that due to concerns over COVID-19, better known as the novel coronavirus, it will be dropping out of the 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC).

“After a close review of guidance by global health authorities and out of an abundance of caution, we’ve made the difficult decision to withdraw from participating at Game Developers Conference 2020 in San Francisco,” the company wrote in an official blog post.

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Instead, Microsoft Game Stack will host a series of digital-only events from March 16th to 18th which will cover a majority of the planned GDC sessions it was originally set to host. This includes panels on the cloud, the evolution of game development, and a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Microsoft titles like Minecraft and Gears of War.

Other than panels Microsoft announced other events that have been thrown into uncertainty including the annual ID @ Xbox event showcasing indie games, and a Games Showcase. IGN has reached out to Microsoft to find out whether these events will still be hosted at GDC.

Update: Microsoft confirmed that both the Games Showcase and ID@Xbox events have been canceled as well.

Microsoft Game Stack is the latest developer to drop out of GDC following companies like PlayStation, Facebook Oculus, Kojima Productions, EA, Unity, and Epic Games which also made the announcement today.

Meanwhile, GDC organizers say that they “are confident that Game Developers Conference will follow int he footsteps of other large and successful international events taking place at the Moscone Center,” and have not announced plans to cancel the event.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.