Month: October 2020

Developer EA Motive Studios has confirmed that there are currently no plans to add more post-launch content to Star Wars: Squadrons on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

In an interview with UploadVR, creative director Ian Frazier said that the intention with Squadrons was never to create or turn the finished product into a live-service experience.

“Never say never, so to speak, but as far as our philosophy goes we’re not trying to treat the game as a live service,” Frazier said. “We don’t want to say, ‘It’s almost done!’ and then dribble out more of it over time, which to be honest is how most games work these days. So we’ve tried to treat it in kind of an old-school approach saying, ‘You’ve paid the $40, this is the game and it’s entirely self-contained. We’re not planning to add more content, this is the game, and we hope you understand the value proposition.'”

When asked whether Squadrons would eventually receive new maps and modes, Frazier highlighted Star Wars Battlefront II as fulfilling that role.

“From pretty early on we wanted to be a space combat game, emphasis on space,” Frazier said. “So even though we do go into the outer atmosphere of Yavin Prime, we never go anywhere truly terrestrial because we wanted to separate the game in that flavor from something like Battlefront, which we already have.”

As it stands, the way Star Wars: Squadrons has been built is the final version of the game. What you see for $40 is what you get, and critics seem largely content with the experience. Squadrons also received a new patch that stabilizes the game and tweaks flight controls.

In our Star Wars: Squadrons review impressions, editor Edmond Tran said, “Juggling all tasks required on your cool starfighter while soaking in the sights and sounds of Star Wars has been a real treat in the first 8 hours, even if I’m left a bit wanting.”

At NYCC 2020, Amazon Prime Video has released the official teaser trailer for its upcoming adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s successful comic book series, Invincible, which will make its debut on the streamer in 2021.

Here’s how Amazon describes the series: “Invincible is an adult animated superhero show that revolves around seventeen-year-old Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), who’s just like every other guy his age — except that his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). But as Mark develops powers of his own, he discovers that his father’s legacy may not be as heroic as it seems.”

Check out the thrilling first trailer for Invincible in the video below, or at the top of the page:

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Accompanying Simmons and Yeun on this epic animated journey is an impressive lineup of voice actors, including Sandra Oh (Killing Eve), Seth Rogen (This is the End), Gillian Jacobs (Community), Andrew Rannells (Black Monday, Girls), Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2), Mark Hamill (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Walton Goggins (Justified), Jason Mantzoukas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Mae Whitman (Good Girls), Chris Diamantopoulos (Silicon Valley), Melise (The Flash), Kevin Michael Richardson (The Simpsons), and Grey Griffin (Avengers Assemble).

While no exact release date was announced during the panel, Amazon did say that we can expect to see the series sometime in 2021. What did you think of the trailer? Let us know in the comments below.

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David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.

While it’s been off the air for more than 20 years at this point, X-Men: The Animated Series remains one of the most popular and enduring incarnations of the franchise. That series was the gateway into the world of for countless Marvel fans, and for many of them, it remains the standard by which all other X-Men projects are judged.

The iconic cartoon is now the source of a retrospective book dubbed X-Men: The Art and Making of the Animated Series, written by executive producer Eric Lewald and series writer Julia Lewald. In advance of their appearance at NYCC 2020, IGN was able to chat with the Lewalds via email and discuss the enduring appeal of the very first ongoing X-Men cartoon.

Check out the slideshow gallery below for an exclusive preview of the book, and then read on to see what they had to say:

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The Forgotten X-Men Cartoon

While X-Men: The Animated Series is the first ongoing TV project to star the merry mutants, fans may remember it wasn’t the first time Marvel attempted to give the team their own show. Three years earlier, in 1989, Marvel aired a standalone pilot episode called “Pryde of the X-Men.” Compared to the contemporary look and feel of X-Men: The Animated Series, Pryde of the X-Men was more inspired by the classic Chris Claremont/John Byrne era of Uncanny X-Men in terms of look, cast and tone. The plan was to follow up that pilot with a full series, but that obviously never happened (though Konami’s popular X-Men arcade game was based directly on that episode).

The Lewalds discussed why Pryde of the X-Men failed to gain traction with viewers and why it took a return to the drawing board for the characters to find their footing on TV. According to them, it was less a matter of the creative talent involved than the higher-ups at Fox not having faith in the concept back in 1989.

“Many of the same creative artists (Will Meugniot, Larry Houston, Rick Hoberg) were central to the making of both Pryde of the X-Men and our X-Men animated series,” they said. “Pryde was designed beautifully. The key difference was the executives making decisions. In our show, Fox Kids TV, led by Margaret Loesch and Sidney Iwanter, had final say. They wanted great human stories, confident that related sales would follow. The writing staff shared their vision – no agenda other than creating the most dramatic animated TV we could write.”

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Choosing the Cast

The cast of X-Men: The Animated Series is certainly iconic, even though that exact team roster had never existed in the comics. The cast is also unusual in that it remained (mostly) fixed across all five seasons, whereas the team is constantly evolving and gaining new members in the comics.

“The original core cast – Cyclops, Rogue, Storm, Jubilee, Wolverine, and Gambit – was a group decision among Marvel Comics, Fox TV, and the creative staff,” the Lewalds said. “Jubilee and Gambit were new characters that Marvel wanted to push. The other four were more established.”

“Amazingly, Jean, Xavier, and Beast were considered secondary, ‘use if we want to,’” they added. “That is why Beast was stuck in prison at first – we started out thinking of him as an occasional character. But as Eric and Mark Edens fashioned the first season of 13 stories, Jean, Xavier, and Beast kept ‘asserting themselves.’ They found it hard to tell a compelling X-Men story without their founder, father-figure, and spokesperson, Xavier. Jean seemed to have a unique relationship with everyone else on the team. Beast was simply great fun to write for. So we ended up with nine instead of six. Ten, actually, if you include Morph.”

As for why the roster remained fixed, that comes down to the differing needs of an animated series versus a monthly comic book.

“Fluid casts tend not to work for TV,” the Lewalds said. “Guest characters, yes. It was fun showcasing Colossus, Iceman, or Nightcrawler in a few episodes. But audiences don’t want any of the six ‘Friends’ characters to change, even after 250 episodes. We did have one episode where no X-Men appeared – the historical ‘origin of Sinister’ story starring Xavier’s grandfather.”

Staying Faithful to the Comics

Along with fellow Fox Kids show Batman: The Animated Series, X-Men helped set a new standard for superhero storytelling on TV. In many ways, the series is extremely faithful to the comics, drawing upon many classic X-Men tales and featuring dramatic, serialized storylines where even major characters are sometimes allowed to die.

At the same time, the series was ultimately still aimed at children, and hindsight makes it clear how many elements were designed to accommodate the strict standards and practices of Saturday morning cartoons. Case in point – the frequent robot enemies in place of living humans, the use of non-lethal lasers over traditional guns, and Wolverine’s colorful non-curses (“You egg-suckin’ piece of gutter trash!”). The pair say it was difficult at times to strike a balance between remaining true to the source material and reflecting the realities of all-ages animation.

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“It was certainly a challenge,” the Lewalds said. “The books at the time were ferocious, R-rated, fight-fests among super-beings. Children’s broadcast television had traditionally been incredibly restrictive – no hitting each other, no blood, no realistic weapons, nothing remotely sexual, don’t even mention death.”

“We were lucky in that Fox Kids TV had final say and that three executives there (Margaret, Sidney, and BS&P “censor” Avery Coburn) not only knew and loved the books, they loved intense character stories as well,” they continued. “[Margaret] let us kill Morph. She let us have Wolverine spend an episode struggling with his sense of God. As writers have learned to in the past (banned literature, motion picture codes), we worked to be true to the spirit of the source material. We tried to maintain the drama with emotional intensity. People scream each other’s names a lot. But in the end, the best stories are about the characters, not the violence.”

The Marvel Cameos

X-Men not only featured a massive cast of mutant heroes and villains, it was also notable for exposing many young viewers to the larger Marvel Universe. The episodes are littered with cameos and references to ancillary mutant teams like X-Force and other Marvel properties like Spider-Man, The Avengers and even The Punisher (or “The Assassin,” as he was known here). X-Men eventually paved the way for a full-fledged superhero universe on Fox, with Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer all getting cartoons of their own. Several X-Men even guest-starred in an episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series.

The Lewalds said that while they wished they could have featured these non-X-Men characters in more substantial roles, more often than not it simply wasn’t possible.

“We weren’t able to for certain characters, but Larry Houston would draw Spider-Man’s wrist, or Dr. Strange, or Deadpool, or Black Panther, and not name them,” they said. “This got past legal scrutiny. If he wrote ‘Spider-Man’s wrist’ on the storyboard, they would notice and make him cut it. The irony is, of course, that the audience loved the cameos, which made Marvel’s first hit show even more of a success. And then from the writers’ point of view, we already had nine or 10 recurring characters, plus guest villains, guest old friends, family and former lovers. We didn’t have enough time in 22-minute stories to get to know all we wanted to about the folks we had.”

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Will There Be a Season 6?

With so many beloved animated shows being revived lately, from Clone High to Beavis and Butthead to Invader Zim, many X-fans have been holding out hope for a continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series. We already got a taste of what that might be like with Marvel’s short-lived X-Men ’92 comic, and producer/director Larry Houston stoked rumors of a revival series when he revealed he’s held talks with Marvel on the subject.

Unfortunately, those talks don’t seem to have led to any concrete plans to resurrect X-Men. Or, if they have, the Lewalds are unaware of it.

“In our corner of animated TV in the 1990s, plans for further seasons were never in the control of the creative staff, and the writing and design work was completed months before the hand-animated episodes were done,” they told IGN. “When we finished writing and drawing the fifth year of X-Men, we were all off working on new shows before the first episode of Season 5 aired. Since then, hundreds of fans, at Comic Cons, online, and on podcasts have asked if we had or have an idea for a Season 6. The rumor is purely fan wishful thinking, never pushed by us. While we would LOVE to do another season, that decision is in others’ hands.”

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X-Men: The Art and Making of the Animated Series is published by Abrams Books and will hit stores on Tuesday, October 13.

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“Between the Panels” is a monthly column from Jesse Schedeen that focuses on the world of comics. You can see more of his thoughts on comics and pop culture by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

It began with a dog and an onion.

Sure, NanaOn-Sha’s PaRappa the Rapper wasn’t the first video game to demand players sync button presses to a basic beat via on-screen prompts. For instance, the early Bandai dance mat peripheral-based game Aerobics Studio – a primitive NES precursor to the likes of Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution – was first released in Japan in 1987 and handily pre-dates PaRappa. It wasn’t the first to intrinsically weave music into the core of the game itself, either, as anyone who had the misfortune of, say, waking up during 1992 and unwrapping a copy of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video can probably attest.

But Aerobics Studio is overtly an exercise game set to some bleeps and bloops, and the Make My Video trio of FMV games (INXS, Kris Kross, and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, all released in 1992) are famously regarded as some of the worst ever inflicted upon humanity.

If you’re really looking for the flame that truly lit the rhythm game fuse – a genre that would later go on to become one of the most lucrative in the industry throughout the mid- to late 2000s – look no further than this love-struck, two-dimensional dog and his onion-headed karate mentor.

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Kick! Punch! It’s All in the Mind

Development for PaRappa the Rapper began in 1994, just after the original PlayStation was announced. It was launched in Japan in 1996 and a worldwide release followed in 1997. Created by Japanese music producer Masaya Matsuura and American graphic artist Rodney Greenblat, PaRappa the Rapper was a game like no other that had come before it.

It was so unique, in fact, that Matsuura himself wasn’t even sure it was a game – and, according to him, neither were some of the folks at Sony when it came time to promote and publish it. With the initial production run for PaRappa the Rapper in the tens of thousands, Matsuura hadn’t anticipated it being particularly successful.

PaRappa the Rapper’s quirky charm and catchy songs caught on, however, and after a slow start it became one of Japan’s best-selling games of 1997. It was awarded Platinum status – the designation Sony historically bestowed upon games selling over one million copies – in 1998. Matsuura, Greenblat, and the NanaOn-Sha crew had crafted something that successfully struck a chord with gamers, establishing the bones of the structure of most modern rhythm games in the process – that is, tapping indicated buttons in time with music. A simple formula, no doubt, but an accessible and addictive one. It worked.

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NanaOn-Sha followed the success of PaRappa the Rapper with UmJammer Lammy in 1999 (a spin-off that traded raps for rock riffs) and Vib Ribbon in 2000 (a rhythm-based musical platformer with simple vector graphics and the ability to generate levels from your own CDs). However, by the time PaRappa the Rapper 2 emerged on PS2 in 2001, a rhythm revolution was well underway.

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Konami quickly shadowed Beatmania with a pair of guitar and drum equivalents: GuitarFreaks and DrumMania. These peripheral-based Japanese arcade cabinets have been rocking Japanese arcades for the past two decades, and Konami has released new editions of the series every year since 1999. GuitarFreaks and DrumMania ultimately didn’t make much of a global dent as home console ports, but their instrument-shaped controllers and vertically-scrolling on-screen button commands would be the blueprint for the next big thing in music games, unequivocally paving the way for the plastic instrument tsunami soon to follow.

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Danger Is Go

The stratospheric rise of rhythm gaming in the mid-2000s would ultimately come courtesy of a little-known Boston, Massachusetts-based company called Harmonix. However, while the studio’s success would ultimately come from building upon the foundation formed by Konami’s peripheral-based arcade cabinets, it didn’t come instantly.

Established in 1995, Harmonix has spent the last two-and-a-half decades devising ways to allow non-musicians to experience the joy of creating music. Harmonix’s first product was a joystick-based “music improvisation system” for PC called The Axe that reportedly sold only around 300 copies, but the studio’s failure with this project led them to look towards the Japanese karaoke market. When this didn’t work out either, however, Harmonix pivoted instead to examining the ideas established by Japanese studios with the likes of PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania and finding ways of bringing this brand of music gameplay to the West.

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First, Harmonix caught Konami’s eye; the studio became the initial developer of Konami’s Karaoke Revolution series. Karaoke Revolution arrived in North America in late 2003, a few months before Sony’s own singing sensation SingStar hit various PAL territories in mid-2004. The first-party muscle of Sony would ultimately see SingStar become the preeminent karaoke game series – especially in Europe and Oceania; the series was a monster hit shifting dozens of different editions in various languages and moving mountains of microphones into PlayStation 2 households.

However, Harmonix’s work on Karaoke Revolution had already attracted the attention of California-based games and gaming accessory business RedOctane, a California-based games  business that was already producing third-party accessories, like dance mats, for existing music games. It was to be this partnership that would crank the music game business up to 11.

More Than a Feeling

The proposal from RedOctane was simple: If RedOctane built a guitar controller, Harmonix would build a guitar game. No-one knew if bringing a GuitarFreaks-style game West was going to work but, nevertheless, it was the kind of game Harmonix had been champing at the bit to make – and the opportunity had arrived.

The original Guitar Hero arrived in November 2005 to immediate acclaim and strong sales. Featuring 30 tracks covering 50 years of rock (plus a handful of bonus songs, primarily from indie bands that Harmonix developers were either part of, or knew), Guitar Hero was a runaway success. It blazed the trail for a brand-new era of what was to become a billion-dollar business. Striking while the iron was steaming hot, Guitar Hero II followed the very next year. With even more songs than the original (plus bass and rhythm parts, to encourage purchases of a second guitar peripheral), the wildly-popular Guitar Hero II eclipsed the acclaim of the original and went on to become one of the highest-rated games on PS2.

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In barely a year Guitar Hero had become a cultural phenomenon, though Activision had already seen the profit potential; it acquired RedOctane and the Guitar Hero brand (but not Harmonix) in the lead-up to Guitar Hero II’s release, in June 2006. A few months later media juggernaut Viacom scooped up Harmonix and placed it under its MTV wing. With RedOctane and Harmonix now under separate ownership, the rapidly-assembled follow-up to Guitar Hero II (Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, released in mid-2007 and just eight months after Guitar Hero II) would be Harmonix’s last Guitar Hero game.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock followed quickly in late 2007 and, despite the diminishing gap between instalments, the series showed no sign of slowing down just yet. Assembled by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater veterans Neversoft, Guitar Hero III maintained the basic formula but was stuffed with over 70 songs (most of them master tracks performed by the actual bands, rather than covers), online multiplayer, and even appearances from rock legends like Slash and Tom Morello.

According to Activision, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was the best-selling game of 2007, both in terms of units sold and dollar sales, but the good news for Guitar Hero just kept coming. In January 2008 Activision confirmed the Guitar Hero series had raked in over a billion dollars in sales in North America alone. In January 2009 it was announced that Guitar Hero III had hit a cool billion in dollar sales by itself.

According to Activision it was the first single video game to do so.

Here It Goes Again

But let’s jump back to 2007.  Since parting ways with RedOctane, Harmonix had immediately begun heating up its Guitar Hero rival – a game that would ultimately go head-to-head with the series Harmonix had previously helped establish.

Rock Band, released in November 2007, was a fusion of Harmonix’s original Guitar Hero vision, its work with Konami on Karaoke Revolution, and Konami’s own DrumMania. The result was something immense – both in the size of the retail box and the success that followed. Augmenting the massively popular Guitar Hero gameplay with the crowd-pleasing appeal of karaoke games (and tossing drums into the mix for good measure) created a co-op experience truly like no other.

The multi-instrument gameplay was praised by critics and fans flocked to it en masse; sales of four million were reported for the first year alone.

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It helped that the Rock Band ecosystem was also an incredibly strong one. Harmonix’s ongoing commitment to regular DLC meant new songs were available on a weekly basis, and the ability to export disc-based set-lists to your console meant songs could be carried from previous editions of the games and into the sequels; a player’s whole library of songs was available in one place.

Guitar Hero was never quite able to match Rock Band’s all-in-one elegance in this department, but it did immediately pivot to emulate Rock Band’s multi-instrument approach with Guitar Hero: World Tour in late 2008. The cracks, however, were already beginning to show; initial US sales of Guitar Hero: World Tour were less than half those achieved by Guitar Hero III in the same time frame.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

The steady salvo of rhythm games that filled the end of the decade saturated the marketplace. Beyond the widely-celebrated Rock Band 2 in 2008 and 2010’s Rock Band 3 – which added keyboards – Harmonix squeezed several side-projects into the mix, including a LEGO-themed Rock Band game and AC/DC’s famous Live at Donington album (which found its way to the Rock Band series as a standalone expansion). Green Day and The Beatles also received dedicated Rock Band experiences. The Beatles: Rock Band is actually regarded by many as one of the most artistically striking and achingly reverent music games ever made – and it sold well over two million copies – but the tide was still turning.

Outside of Guitar Hero V (2009) and Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (2010), Aerosmith, Metallica, and Van Halen each got a Guitar Hero game to call their own before the decade was out. Activision also dabbled with several other music projects, including the bafflingly-titled Top-40-focussed Band Hero in 2009, plus a pair of DJ-themed spin-offs that shipped with their own bespoke, Beatmania-inspired turntable peripheral: 2009’s DJ Hero, and DJ Hero 2 in 2010.

However, music game sales dropped around 50 per cent in 2009, and even more the following year. On top of this, Activision was facing legal trouble from Courtney Love for the tone-deaf decision to allow an avatar of the late Kurt Cobain to be displayed in Guitar Hero V comically miming songs performed by other artists, and No Doubt took similar issue with their appearance in Band Hero.

In early 2010, Activision shuttered RedOctane. In late 2010, Viacom offloaded Harmonix to a private investor and the studio became independent again. In early 2011, four months after Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock fizzled, Activision put the series on ice and Neversoft’s GH development team was disbanded.

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But then, almost as suddenly as it arrived, music mania was over.

Still Into You

But while the rhythm sector had run its course as a fad, it certainly never went extinct. Rather, it simply returned to servicing its loyal base of diehard fans – both the ones that had been playing since PaRappa dropped his first rhymes back in the ’90s and those that had been enchanted along the way by the genre’s ability to democratise the art of music-making for everybody, regardless of their actual musical ability.

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Ubisoft appeared to arrive late to the party, debuting Rocksmith in 2011 (the finger pickin’ good follow-up, Rocksmith 2014, was released in 2013 – and Rocksmith 2014 Remastered was released in 2016 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4). Rocksmith differs from Guitar Hero and Rock Band by allowing users to plug in their own electric guitars to play along and learn the tracks. Rocksmith carved out a well-deserved reputation as a respected music instruction tool over the decade, and its epic run of 383 weeks of song releases only came to an end in April this year.

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While it seems extremely unlikely rhythm games will ever see the kind of spike in immense popularity they enjoyed in the late 2000s again, this last decade has proven they’re equally unlikely to ever go away.

The tempo may have changed, but the beat goes on.

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Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He’s a mediocre pianist and a rubbish guitarist but he still owns more plastic instruments than real ones. You can find him on Twitter sporadically @MrLukeReilly.

Though its announcement trailer might not have made it completely obvious, it turns out Bugsnax is something of a narrative puzzle game. As you encounter grumpuses, the Muppet-like characters inhabiting the game’s world, you’ll pick up tasks to complete from each. Those tasks usually involve catching the titular bugsnax, creatures that are basically food with legs, by figuring out their behaviors and tricking them into traps.

Though the game that Bugsnax has become is mostly about catching bugsnax and using them to feed grumpuses, that wasn’t always the case. Developer Young Horses has been working on the game for about six years, and president Philip Tibitoski said in an interview with GameSpot that a whole lot of gameplay ideas have come and gone during that time. Some of them sound funny, some interesting, and some a little disturbing.

“Initially, there were always grumpuses and there were always bugsnax and you were always foraging for them,” Tibitoski said. “And over time the mechanics have changed a lot. We’ve gone the Pokemon Snap route of actually being on a track and riding a little cart and capturing bugsnax as you go, we’ve had bugsnax preparation mechanics, Cooking Mama-style thing, because some of the mechanics we were looking into had to do with, like, sticker-peeling. And then we were talking about peeling parts of bugsnax to prepare them to eat, which was horrifying. And after a while we realized it didn’t really fit even besides just the fact that it’s multiple games’ worth of mechanics.”

As it exists now, Bugsnax is somewhat simpler than some of the ideas Tibitoski described, although there’s still a lot of depth to it. There are 100 different varieties of bugsnax and it seems like most of your time in the game will be spent learning about each one so that you can effectively catch it. To get a strawberry-like strabby, you have to set a trap and then hide so the strabby won’t spot you and flee. To catch a shishkabug, you use a slingshot to spray ketchup all over the bush where the bug is hiding, so that a ketchup-loving bunger (which looks like a hamburger) will charge into it and force the shishkabug out.

Some mechanics from the games that inspired Young Horses are still in the game, too–you get a Pokemon Snap-like camera that lets you scan bugsnax so you can see the paths they travel, for instance. You’ll also have to contend with the passage of time, as Bugsnax sports a day-night cycle that determines when some bugs and grumpuses will be out and about, and what they’ll be doing.

As often as you might be hunting bugsnax, you’ll also be dealing with grumpuses. Completing tasks for the characters earns you the opportunity to interview them, helping you to fulfill your actual job as a journalist (as opposed to bugsnax hunter) and find out the story of what’s happening on the island. The grumpus characters are actively going about their lives while you’re busy, particularly once you convince them to return to the defunct town of Snaxburg. There, we saw characters wandering around, conversing with each other, and even sleepwalking during the night. Tibitoski said the developers considered social mechanics like you might see in The Sims or Animal Crossing for dealing with the grumpuses, but eventually pared them back.

One mechanic that persists in the game is the idea that when grumpuses eat bugsnax, their limbs change to mirror what they’ve eaten. We’re not sure exactly how that will influence the game yet, although it does seem like the transformation idea will play a part in puzzles, with one grumpus scientist dedicating his time to trying to control the transformations.

As it stands now, the player doesn’t eat the bugs, but only feeds them to other characters. Tibitoski explained that things got a little unwieldy when Young Horses considered letting players eat bugsnax.

“We got into the territory of, well, some people want to eat the bugsnax themselves as a player, and how would we handle that? Like what kind of effects would those take?” Tibitoski said. “We ended up going down a path of, maybe they’re like plasmids or something, like BioShock. And that ended up being a whole can of worms that we were like, no, we can’t open that. At least not for this game. Maybe a sequel or something.”

Altogether, Tibitoski said Young Horses built up “three or four” games worth of potential mechanics and ideas for Bugsnax. What made it into the game is a bit less complex than having to peel, cook, and eat a bug, or shooting french fries out of your hands like a denizen of Fast Food Rapture. But from the sounds of things, there are a few mysteries to uncover, as well as quite a few bugs on which to snack, waiting in Bugsnax when it launches on November 12 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.

Among Us, the surprise hit two years in the making, could see some changes in the near future. InnerSloth is considering making dead players guardian angels who have the ability to save living players, similar to how the doctor role works in Mafia.

The Washington-based studio wants to give players more to do after they die, citing players that leave right after dying because it’s “boring” to play as a ghost. Ghosts, players who are killed by impostors or getting voted off the ship, can still complete tasks after death. They can’t participate in discussions or interact with anything else in the game and often don’t do much until the match ends.

“[Balancing a change like that] is the hardest part,” said InnerSloth programmer Forest Willard on Twitch’s Weekly Gaming Show as first reported by Inverse. “We’ve thought of a lot about [making ghosts into] Guardian Angels and stuff like that, but it’s a difficult thing to pull off but we’re definitely thinking about those sort of things.”

The three-person development team said the studio specifically wants to improve the game for the first person that gets killed. It “sucks” to be in that situation, according to designer Marcus Bromander, and the team is trying to “figure something out.” We didn’t get any more details on what a guardian angel ability would look like, though.

Among Us saw a surge of popularity this year after a number of streamers broadcasted their murder mystery matches on Twitch. The game has been downloaded over 100 million times across PC and mobile devices (it’s free on mobile). The popularity has also created a cheating problem that InnerSloth is trying to squash.

Fall Guys’ Season 2 brought a fantastic change to the game show battle royale. Players can now choose a playlist that removes all team games from the mini game rotation. Say goodbye to Egg Scramble and Team Tail Tag.

“And you say we never do anything for you,” said Fall Guys game designer Joe Walsh in a comment on the Fall Guys subreddit. The playlist is called ‘Gauntlet Showdown’ while the regular playlist is now called ‘Main Show.’ The new playlist is only available for a limited-time so the studio can track how many players choose each option.

“Right now we need to keep an eye on things like matchmaking times, player reception, etc. so we’re doing it as a bit of a time limited experiment to see what happens,” Walsh wrote. “Totally possible for it to become permanent down the line!”

This could lead to other types of playlists and limited-time modes getting added, similar to how playlists rotate regularly in Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite.

This new playlist comes in the wake of players’ feedback. Team games, especially ones with uneven teams or players who did not try, were seen as unfair in the Fall Guys community. Players had regularly asked for a way to remove them from the mini game rotation.

Fall Guys Season 2 went live earlier today, bringing a ton of new content to the game. Outside four new levels, Mediatonic has added more crowns, a costume randomizer, and much more to the game show battle royale.