It’s a pretty big deal that another PlayStation 4 exclusive has made its way to PC. This time, it’s the open-world action game Horizon Zero Dawn. It may be a little over three years old at this point, but proper PC ports of former exclusives tend to offer an optimal way to play for a mostly new audience. In my case, I was just hyped to replay one of 2017’s standout games with cranked up visuals, higher frame rates, and, in this particular case, keyboard and mouse controls. After about 12 hours with this version, I’ve come away with some very mixed results.
Horizon Zero Dawn is a visually captivating experience; its depiction of nature and the wilderness is rich with thick vegetation, vast mountain ranges, and sweeping deserts. Remnants of the world’s high-tech past with imposing, beastly machines also contrast with the environments in a fascinating way that entices you to uncover more of the story’s mysteries. That’s all part of why a PC version is such a big deal. However, in the current pre-launch phase, performance hiccups and some graphical shortcomings can overshadow these elements.
During my time playing Horizon on PC, I used a rig equipped with a Core i7-7700K, RTX 2080, 16GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD–a fairly high-end system. I also used the ultrawide 2560×1080 (21:9) resolution and set all graphics options to their maximum along with TAA (temporal antialiasing). While I could maintain around 80 FPS or a bit higher in many open areas, my mileage varied by virtue of the changing density of towns and villages, or the intensity of certain chaotic combat encounters. Here, I would experience drastic drops in frame rate to about 35-40 FPS. It’s expected that a game of this scale and fidelity would be quite graphically demanding, but what stood out was the inconsistency in performance and the occasional stuttering or hitching.
Another present bug is that the anisotropic filtering option simply won’t work. For a vast open world game like Horizon, it’s an important graphics setting to use since it provides much more clarity and detail for surfaces in the distance. (Also, be sure to update your graphics drivers to the latest versions–using older versions may result in significant artifacting and serious visual glitches, which is a mistake I made when first booting up the game.)
The natural environments of Horizon Zero Dawn are quite stunning, and you’ll spend a lot of time in Photo Mode.
The list of bugs doesn’t end at the graphics department, however. There are a few issues that actually stop the gameplay from working as intended. For example, the Concentration ability is supposed to let you zoom in and slow down time to carefully aim your bow. But in my particular experience, activating it on the PC version only zooms in and does not slow down time at all. Pulling up the weapon wheel should also slow down time, but this does not happen. This problem extends to the perk that’s supposed to slow down time when aiming the bow while sliding or in mid-air–everything keeps moving at normal speed. It seems that the game simply does not recognize any of the time-slowing mechanics. I tried experimenting with different settings to see if it was an issue tied to unlocked frame rates or v-sync, but such is not the case. These mechanics are extremely useful in all the game’s combat situations, and the fact that they are not functioning properly at the moment is a major problem.
The big caveat is that there will be a day-one patch, and I’ve currently only experienced Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port in a pre-launch state without the upcoming fixes. Once I have access to the patch, I plan on reevaluating many of the bugs encountered to see if they’re addressed for official release.
Aside from the aforementioned shortcomings, this PC port offers some welcome features such as an FOV slider, native ultrawide support, fully customizable control mappings, an uncapped frame rate, and a benchmarking tool to test out the viability of your chosen graphics settings.
As for the game itself, Horizon Zero Dawn impressed back in 2017 as the first open-world effort from Killzone developer Guerrilla Games. While there’s a noticeable reliance on a few tired open-world gameplay tropes, it truly stood out with an excellent combat system that emphasized precise aiming, exploiting weaknesses, and clever use of the many neat weapons and tools in your loadout. Horizon has a distinct David-and-Goliath type of feel as you’re often overwhelmed and dwarfed by the hostile machines, and seemingly ill-equipped–like, how the hell am I supposed to destroy robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow? Devising ways to overcome these odds has a satisfying feel, especially in big fights that test your mastery of the makeshift arsenal of bows, arrows, tripwires, and slingshots (and your ability to repeatedly dodge roll from danger).
Taking down intimidating machines with a bow and arrow, and other low-tech weaponry, is pretty satisfying.
Horizon’s style of combat always left me wanting to use a keyboard and mouse control scheme, given the need to land pinpoint shots, but that comes with some concessions. The nature of using WASD to move in this style of third-person action isn’t as intuitive as an analog stick, and the need to dodge-roll or platform in high-pressure situations highlights how exact directional movement can be awkward. And with the Concentration ability broken right now, I haven’t really been able to wield mouse-aiming the way I expected. Controllers have native support with the proper button mappings, but there’s an issue: aim assist is hardly present, if at all, regardless of whether it’s on or off in your settings, making combat more difficult than it should be.
What remains intact is Horizon’s narrative ambitions. A 31st century where civilizations are thriving as hunters and gatherers, living within specific tribes, is fascinating as it’s juxtaposed to an “old world” of futurist high tech buried in the waste of a calamity from long ago. Our protagonist Aloy remains relatively steadfast in the wake of wild revelations about her own past as well as the truth about how a super-advanced civilization continues to haunt the present day from its grave mistakes and the technology it left behind. These are also really good excuses to have robot dinosaurs roam the wilderness and pose major threats to you, since it does come together in a thematically coherent fashion.
Our stoic protagonist, Aloy, has a complicated past, and Ashly Burch delivers a great voice performance.
Admittedly, I’m still wary of its amalgamation of Native cultures and Nativist tropes with little proper context. It’s something to be mindful of as you dig deeper into Horizon’s characterization of its in-lore tribes and the ways in which it draws upon our real world with terminology and imagery of tribal practices as a backdrop for its fiction.
Overall, it’s quite disappointing to see the game in a rough state, but again, this is the experience of a pre-launch version before the scheduled day-one fixes. Considering that Horizon was the progenitor for Guerrilla’s Decima engine, and we just saw Death Stranding hit PC with an outstanding port (it uses the same engine), I’m also surprised by the shortcomings. If you’re in the mood for a sprawling open world with some top-notch combat thrills–that sometimes get bogged down in genre routines–there’s a great game underneath. But you’ll probably want to wait and see how the launch day patch goes. I will update my impressions of Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port for the official launch, which is set for August 7.
Pokemon Go‘s second Ultra Unlock event–Enigma Week–kicks off soon, and as part of the event, the Mythical Deoxys is returning to Raids. The DNA Pokemon will appear as a five-star Raid boss until August 14, and this time around, you’ll have a chance to catch a Shiny variant. If you’re looking to add the Mythical Pokemon to your collection, we’ve rounded up some tips to help you battle and catch Deoxys below.
Deoxys Raid Hours
Deoxys will appear in five-star Raids throughout Enigma Week, which runs from August 7 until 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET on August 14. These Raids will occur periodically, but you’ll receive an in-game notification when a Raid is about to begin at a nearby Gym.
Normal Forme Deoxys
Deoxys Weaknesses And Counters
Like Mewtwo, Deoxys is a pure Psychic type, which makes it vulnerable to Ghost, Dark, andBug Pokemon. What makes Deoxys different from most other Legendary and Mythical Pokemon, however, is that it’s able to assume four different forms: Normal, Attack, Defense, and Speed. Each of these counts as a separate Pokemon in Go, and they all have different stats and movesets, so you’ll need to keep the form in mind before challenging Deoxys.
Other Legendary Pokemon, particularly Giratina, Darkrai, and Genesect, will be especially helpful against Deoxys if you have them. Chandelure, Tyranitar, Scizor, and Hydreigon will also deal super-effective damage to it, as will Gengar and any Mewtwo that knows Shadow Ball. However, Gengar’s part-Poison typing means it’ll take super-effective damage in return from Deoxys, so it likely won’t last too long in battle.
Pokemon To Avoid
Poison and Fighting Pokemon have a severe disadvantage against Psychic types, so you’ll want to avoid bringing those along when you battle Deoxys. As previously mentioned, Deoxys’ moveset will vary depending on what form it takes, so different forms will have different elemental attacks.
In addition to their Psychic moves, each Deoxys form can possibly know Electric attacks, which will deal a lot of damage to any Water and Flying Pokemon you have. Attack Forme Deoxys can also know Dark-type moves, which will be super-effective against your own Psychic Pokemon. Finally, Defense Forme Deoxys may use Fighting attacks, which will hit Rock and Dark Pokemon–especially Tyranitar–strongly. Keep the form that you’re facing in mind when assembling your team and you’ll be able to defeat Deoxys.
Fortnite: Season 3‘s Week 8 challenges are coming tomorrow and one of them tasks you with dancing at an unusual location. The challenge asks you to dance on the Apres Ski Dance floor for 10 seconds. The Apres Ski Dance floor isn’t a named location so some players may find it hard to locate. This guide will show you exactly where to find it and how to complete the challenge.
These challenges have leaked early. Check back on Thursday to try them for yourself in Fortnite.
Where Is The Apres Ski Dance Floor?
The Apres Ski house is located on the southern edge of the island in the E8 tile on the map. It’s a lodge-like building next to a snowy mountain. There is a fireplace and various ski-adjacent items scattered in front of it. Check out this map for an exact location:
Fortnite Season 3 Apres Ski Location
Once inside you’ll see the dance floor in the back right corner of the lodge. Head over there and use a dance emote for ten seconds in order to complete the challenge.
Fortnite Season 3 Dancing On Apres Ski Dance Floor Challenge
Developer Ubisoft Toronto has opened up about Watch Dogs: Legion, saying its online multiplayer mode is eyeing a “larger player count.”
As part of Game Informer’s cover story, the team at Ubisoft Toronto confirmed that four-player cooperative play will be in the game when it drops this October on PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One. In addition to talking about the expected multiplayer mode, GI’s in-depth profile revealed that a “larger player count” for Watch Dogs: Legion was teased. Details about this mode remain scarce.
Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 featured plenty of multiplayer modes, with the 2016 sequel getting more sophisticated with its offerings. Instead of just eight-player competitive and cooperative multiplayer, Watch Dogs 2 allowed for players to battle one-on-one, two-on-two, asymmetrically (with multiple going against one), and more. And both titles featured seamless connectivity; Watch Dogs: Legion is expected to continue that seamless online multiplayer offering.
We were able to go hands-on with Watch Dogs: Legion recently. Associate editor Michael Higham discussed his thoughts on the latest Watch Dogs entry, saying the preview build “offer[ed] a variety of playstyles, and it’s pretty damn impressive how well it [all worked].”
Watch Dogs: Legion is slated to drop on October 29 for PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One. It will also launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those consoles come out this holiday season. You can check out our Watch Dogs: Legion pre-order guide to learn about the bonuses and editions available.
Sony’s announcement, made earlier this year, that Horizon Zero Dawn would be released on PC caused quite some uproar. And with good reason: it’s the first time that the company will release one of its flagship single-player first-party games on the platform. It is, as of yet, unknown whether this is a one-off exception, part of a new approach of porting older games, or even indicative of a larger strategic shift. What we can discuss in detail, however, is the quality of the game’s PC port. In this article I’ll get into its features, discuss the available graphics options, and most importantly point out some important and unusual performance properties to be aware of in order to get the most out of the game.
Feature Overview
Horizon on PC ticks all the basic boxes one would expect from a high-profile PC port in 2020: it supports arbitrary rendering resolution, unlocked framerates, ultrawide aspect ratios, and a sizable set of graphics options. All of these work as expected, with a few caveats. For one, the built-in frame limiter has proven relatively problematic for me, and as such I’d suggest always keeping it turned off and externally limiting the frame rate if desired. There is also an adaptive quality option which allows you to set a target framerate and have the game adapt the rendering resolution to try and keep it. While a very useful feature in theory, this is rarely desirable in practice, for reasons that will become more clear when discussing graphics options and performance.
Regarding ultrawide support, as you can see in the screenshot up top, it works great during gameplay and often looks fantastic. Cutscenes, however, remain constrained to 16:9 as shown above. This is not unusual, but the developers chose a rather unique way to fill the side areas: as you can see above, they show the left and right parts of the center, but darkened and blurred to some extent. While an interesting choice, I personally found it distracting compared to simple black bars, and hope that an option can be added for people who prefer those.
An incredibly important – to me at least – related feature is the field of view setting. This is extremely welcome, and the game felt very claustrophobic when sitting directly in front of a large monitor without adjusting this setting. I’ve always argued that the best field of view for a 3D rendered game is a direct function of each individual player’s setup, including display size, distance and aspect ratio, and as such should always be a configurable option.
Input Mechanisms and Key Binding
Horizon Zero Dawn does a great job supporting various input methods and configuration preferences. General options such as toggling aim assist, changing sensitivity, switching between toggling and holding for movement options, and inverting camera directions are available regardless of input method.
The mouse and keyboard controls support full remapping, including the ability to map two distinct bindings to each action, which can be of great utility – for example when assigning actions to additional mouse buttons. Speaking of those, mouse button 4 and 5 are natively supported, while – as in most games – this is not the case for further extra buttons. The default controls feel very familiar to anyone who plays third person action RPGs on PC, with keys such as K, I, M and J doing exactly what you expect. Overall, as expected in an aiming-heavy game such as this, I found that it plays very well with mouse and keyboard and I prefer that to playing with a controller.
There is one small nitpick I have concerning the controls. At first I was positively surprised to see that the game has an official Steam controller profile. However, sadly this profile uses the right touchpad in joystick simulation mode rather than trackball mode. As a big fan of the Steam controller I’m pretty sure that no one who actually likes the hardware uses this type of mapping for camera control, making the built-in support actually worse than not including a profile at all and falling back to the user’s defaults.
Graphics Options and GPU Performance
The PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn features a decent set of graphics options, which mostly range from “Low” over “Original” to “High” and “Ultra”. For a few options, there might also be an “Off” setting, and some are missing the ultra level.
There are several things to like in this graphics settings menu. First of all, each individual setting includes an image preview of its impact, and this is quite accurate for most of them. Secondly, the inclusion of an “Original” setting makes it easy to understand which options correspond to the level the console version operates at, and which go beyond it.
Some of the settings, like “Textures”, “Anisotropic FIlter”, and “Motion Blur” are quite straightforward. The texture setting seems to have no measurable performance impact as long as you have sufficient GPU memory, so I suggest keeping it at the maximum supported by your GPU. Motion blur is more of a stylistic choice, I personally liked the game’s implementation of it.
“Model Quality” is, as far as I am concerned, the single most important setting and the one which provides the largest improvement over the “Original” console visuals, beyond the obvious resolution and framerate. This setting controls the detail level of geometry shown and at which distance more detailed models are used. Note the differences in geometric detail on the mountain in the background, as well as the brick walls and some trees. Luckily, this setting also appears to have a relatively small performance impact in GPU-constrained scenarios, so I suggest keeping it as high as possible.
The “Shadows” setting is somewhat disappointing: it only changes shadow resolution, there is no way to enable more advanced shadow features such as variable penumbras. In a game with very high-end visuals such as this, that would have been a very nice addition. As-is, the shadow setting does not have much of an impact visually (unless turned off entirely of course), and might be a candidate for reducing if you need to eke out a bit more GPU performance.
The “Reflections” and “Clouds” settings each only have a visual and performance impact in very specific scenarios, as you would expect from their name: when a significant amount of reflections or clouds are visible on screen. Of particular interest is the clouds setting, which can have a large performance impact at the highest level. It also produces very beautifully detailed and lit clouds, but if you are trying to increase performance this might be one of the first choices to reduce.
Finally, the game provides a choice of antialiasing methods. Here you can either select no AA, let the game decide, use one of the two common screen-space options – FXAA and SMAA – or use TAA. None of them has any significant performance impact so it comes down to an aesthetic choice. For a highly detailed game with tons of foliage, I personally feel like anything other than a temporal solution is completely inadequate for dealing with flickering and image instability. The built-in TAA is relatively sharp, and very good at dealing with opaque geometry edges and texture detail, but not ideal in terms of stability for alpha-tested surfaces. It would have been very nice to see an implementation of DLSS 2.0 in this game, which might have provided comparable or even better image stability combined with a nice performance boost.
Talking about performance, the game features four presets, from “Favor Performance” to “Ultimate Quality”, which map to the individual settings as you would expect. In the chart above you see the impact of these settings on game performance in a GPU-limited scenario – 4k resolution at 100% scaling on an RTX 2080 Ti. Conducting reliable real-world testing in an open world game such as this is not easy. For all the data in this article I ended up loading a save game and performing the same set of movements for roughly one minute, and repeating this process three times per measurement point. The sequence includes quickly traversing the open world in an area with a lot of foliage and a herd of robots to the side, and should be somewhat representative.
The “Average FPS” metric should be self-explanatory. “1% percentile FPS” is the framerate achieved by the worst 1% of frametimes recorded, and is a good general metric for smoothness of gameplay for most people. “0.2% percentile FPS” is more strongly affected by even individual framedrops, and a good metric to watch if you are extremely particular about frametimes. Note that I used the excellent CapFrameX for all the frametime analysis in this article.
Part of my benchmarking sequence, which I got intimately familiar with after running it many dozen times.
With this general information out of the way, we can look at what the results actually tell us about the performance implications of each preset. What we note is that there is a rather significant step in at least some of the metrics for every single increase in quality. Combined with the observations above, my suggestion for people who need to get more GPU performance out of the game is to first look into reducing the preset to “Original”, preferably with the “Model Quality” and “Textures” settings increased, before reducing the rendering resolution.
Performance Deep Dive and CPU Performance
So far, we have only looked at the game’s performance in the GPU-limited case, which is actually relatively straightforward – the performance obviously scales with rendering resolution, some of the graphics settings, and general GPU hardware performance in a more-or-less expected fashion. However, there are some very interesting and important-to-know factors when it comes to what performance you can expect in a CPU-limited case, and what is required to ensure that you get the best possible performance out of Horizon Zero Dawn. Here are some of the unusual factors involved:
As noted previously, the internal framelimiter is not particularly consistent and also reduces performance measurably. It’s preferable to use external framelimiting if required.
HZD uses basic double-buffered V-sync if the in-game option is enabled, which means that the framerate will drop precipitously if rendering slightly misses the sync. Again, it is preferable to disable the in-game option and use external/driver-level vertical synchronization.
Unlike many recent games, there is a non-negligible performance difference between exclusive fullscreen and borderless windowed mode. I measured roughly 10% better performance in exclusive fullscreen.
Having a completely up to date driver is essential on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Prior to the latest driver version I was experiencing severe periodic stuttering which vanished with the latest driver.
The game makes significant use of PCIe bandwidth. Having your GPU connected via fewer than 16 PCIe lanes reduces performance to a larger degree than any other game either of us is aware of.
As such, to get the best possible performance out of the game, you should disable its internal framelimiter and V-sync, play in exclusive fullscreen mode, and ensure that your GPU actually has access to the full PCIe bandwidth – and this is how I performed all tests in this article.
Since this section is designed to illustrate the performance of HZD when CPU-limited, a very low resolution (50% of 1080p) was used.
A question I was very curious about going into this article was how a relatively straightforward port of a high-end console game such as this would perform in terms of CPU core scaling when CPU limited. The chart above is designed to answer this question, and allows us to make some important observations:
The game scales well up to 12 hardware threads, at which point scaling appears to start levelling out.
While full cores without hyperthreading are relatively effective at keeping up the average FPS, when going below 8 hardware threads – regardless of whether these are full cores or just threads – the percentile metrics drop off immediately and heavily.
4 cores with 8 hardware threads are sufficient to keep frametimes in a well playable range, with the 1% percentile FPS remaining above 60.
We can gain some further insight by looking into the frametimes over time of each of these samples. Clearly, there are three distinct streaming/loading “humps” that are visible and reproducible in each run. The more hardware threads are thrown at the problem – up to 12 that is, the lines for 8C 16T and 6C 12T are almost identical here – the more these humps are smoothed out. Below 8 HW threads they develop into significant stutters.
As expected in a CPU-limited scenario, scaling with CPU clock speed is much more linear. Interestingly, as long as you have a sufficient number of cores, even a lowly 2 GHz clock speed is sufficient to run the game at an average of 75 FPS, with the lowest drops still remaining above 40.
Conclusion
Horizon Zero Dawn is a very beautiful game, and it arrives on PC in a version which allows for higher framerates, arbitrary resolution rendering, 21:9 aspect ratio support and a field of view adjustment option. It also features some graphics settings and improvements which significantly enhance its appearance compared to the console original, such as dynamic foliage and the “Model Quality” option. The controls have also been ported to keyboard and mouse very competently, largely making the game feel like a native PC action Adventure/RPG when played with this input option.
HZD Gameplay at Native 4k Resolution with the “Ultimate Quality” Preset.
However, getting good performance out of HZD is more involved and finicky than perhaps it should be – with several in-game options being actively detrimental to performance or perceived smoothness in non-obvious ways, and an unusually high load being placed on the PCIe bus. While the two games are of course substantially different in their load profiles, it is hard not to compare this port to the very recently released Death Stranding, which is free of these more obscure performance concerns and offers DLSS 2.0 for significantly better image stability at lower GPU performance requirements.
Overall, if all you want is 60 FPS and you have a relatively recent system and a sufficiently fast GPU for your target resolution, that should be easy enough to achieve as long as you take note of the settings and configuration requirements I pointed out in the performance deep dive section. However, chasing consistent very high framerates above that (e.g. 120 FPS) seems like a fool’s errand even on top-end hardware. Ultimately the game is a visual spectacle and the gameplay is not particularly fast-paced, so the severe sacrifices in graphics necessary to achieve even relatively consistent 120 FPS do not appear to be worth it in this case.
Note: This article is based on a pre-release version of the game, and the developers have communicated that a day one patch will be available. This patch might mitigate or eliminate some of the performance peculiarities encountered in the pre-release build.
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Peter “Durante” Thoman is known for developing the popular DSFix mod that fixed many problems with the PC port of Dark Souls. He co-founded PH3 Games, a studio that specializes in porting games to PC.
Call of Duty 2020 and other upcoming “premium titles” will have a “tight integration” with Call of Duty: Warzone, according to Activision’s President Rob Kostich.
The news arrives thanks to an Activision Blizzard Q2 earnings call which took place on August 4. During the call, Kostich revealed that there will be “a very tight integration” between Call of Duty: Warzone and this year’s upcoming Call of Duty game.
“And what you should expect is that there will be a very tight integration between the two. Modern Warfare and Warzone are obviously very tightly connected, and I think that’s really important for the player base,” said Kostich.
“We plan to do the same with all our upcoming titles as well – our premium titles — to ensure we can reward all our players and give them fresh new experiences regardless of whether they choose to just play Warzone or also playing the premium game as well. So the connection will absolutely be there,” he added. This suggests that even beyond this year’s Call of Duty, future “premium” COD games will feature an intrinsic connection with the free-to-play Warzone.
Another quote from the call talks bout how Warzone has caused the team to “rethink how, when and even where we reveal our upcoming title,” suggesting that Call of Duty 2020 could be revealed within Warzone itself. Players have already found Black Ops easter eggs in-game, such as the RC-XD, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
Late last month we reported that Call of Duty 2020 may be called Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Of all things, promotional packets of Dorito’s have been spotted in the wild bearing the name, suggesting it is the title of the next entry in the franchise. An Alpha listing for an Activision game called The Red Door was found on the Microsoft Store earlier this month, which is rumoured to be a codename for Call of Duty 2020.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockdown is a brand new multiplayer game that sounds like a Battle Royale, but plays more like a game show, with every round acting as a new means of eliminating swathes of players, until only one victor is left standing.
Every level in the game comes with its own flavour, and you’ll get to know, love, hate, and love them all over again as you play. With each level machine-tooled to balance fun, frustration, chaos, and skill, I decided to talk to lead game designer Joe Walsh and junior level designer Joseph “JJ” Juson about the process of making just one of them, from start to finish.
They chose Slime Climb, a round that’s already making a name for itself as one of the hardest in the game. We talked through how Slime Climb was first born, the different forms it took during development, how it was nearly cut altogether, why it’s so horrifically tough, and how it might change over time. Here’s what they told me, in their own words.
Joseph “JJ” Juson: Slime Climb is essentially a race to the top of a winding hill, a sort of gauntlet that comes back on itself. But instead of racing other players, you’re racing this slowly rising wave of slime. I think it’s unique to other races in the game because you don’t really need to worry about what other players are doing, as long as you’re staying out of their way. It doesn’t matter if everybody else finishes as long as you make it there, before this slime gets you. Layers in the level get more difficult as you go up, and then you get to this final bit with the finish line. You’re never safe in Slime Climb.
The Beginning
Joe Walsh: I think the place we started was looking at games that kids play in the playground, and things like that. One of those classic games is The Floor Is Lava. The most important rule we have is that our minigames have to be simple and easy to understand, and childhood playground games are very good for that because they have to be explained quickly and they have to be very extensible for lots of people in the playground to just join in. That felt like it embodied a lot of what Fall Guys is about – so it made for a really good starting point.
That was initially where we started – we knew we wanted to have a level where you were escaping some sort of rising tide. It’s also something you see a lot in classic platforming games as well, those levels where you’re trying to outrun the lava or outrun things. But we felt like lava was probably a little too threatening for Fall Guys, and so the idea of like a giant, stadium-sized bathtub that’s filling with slime felt like a really good starting point for a level. From that point, it was very much just trying to figure out what specifically we could do with that mechanic.
The original “Fallcano” design concept.
JJ: We kind of knew that if the lava is going to be rising the whole time, it needs to be that the player is progressively going upward. So for the first idea, I went really literal with it: it was just a mountain. A volcano erupting lava was the idea, and it would basically be 60 players around the outside, everybody just running up this mountain and trying to get to a point on the top. It sounds really cool, but when we actually started playing with that, it felt like the only way you could really progress upwards is by platforming, and that doesn’t really feel like it’s at home in Fall Guys – we have platforming in levels, but we try to make it interesting in other ways.
The Experiments
JJ: I was going through my notebook, and there’s a note where I’m just like, “I don’t know if this is gonna work. Does this concept fundamentally work?” Because for a long time, it wasn’t a race, it was purely survival.
JW: Slimb Climb was one of the most difficult ones [to make]. That was one of the games where we really had to sit down, scratch our heads a bit and have a proper conversation about whether or not this was actually going to work. Some of them you play once and it’s like instantly like, “Oh my gosh, yep.” But Slime Climb was on the cutting room floor briefly, before JJ figured it out.
JJ: [At one point] we were doing this sort of spiral version – there was an end zone, and you would just have to stay in it. It was really mean – there was a tilted slime bit, and there was a jump spinner on there as well, and you had to stay on there. You could make it all the way to the end and still lose if people didn’t get eliminated before you.
The experimental second elimination design.
JW: I think another big moment as well was when we changed it to be this switchback design [the design that made it into the final game]. One of the problems with running up a hill with the lava behind you, in a third-person platforming game, is that you can’t see what’s behind you. So you would get hit by an obstacle and there was no tension – you just suddenly got eliminated because then you fall backwards into the lava. It was quite jarring; it kind of felt a little bit like a classic Battle Royale where it’s just a sudden, like, “Oh god, I’m dead? Oh well.”
As soon as we put the switchback version in, you can see the lava as you turn the corner. That was a really big moment. It’s like, suddenly I’ve got the same anxiety I get from playing like a rising water platforming level in Mario or something. That was quite a big moment for me: “This is starting to sing. I’m liking this one now.”
JJ: We were still trying [the elimination model when we changed] to this switchback version, and it was [creative director Jeff Tanton who] walked over and said, “Make it a race”. We did it and it was immediately so much more enjoyable when you know you have that end goal, when you know you’re doing all of this for something, when the end is in sight and you know you’ve, “ I’ve just got to make this last obstacle and then I’m done”. So yeah, that changed it entirely and really sort of saved the level I think.
An early take on the final switchback design.
The Final Result
JJ: It’s definitely one of our harder levels. You know, you’re midway for a tournament and that comes up and it’s, like, anguish.
JW: Generally, we have a rule of roughly 50% chaos and 50% skill from the game.
JJ: One of the things we really wanted to do was to be able to allow good players to get far enough away that if they make a mistake, they can kind of recover from that. So you either have this experience where you play really well and you make a mistake and you’re like, “OK, well, I’ve earned the right to not be eliminated here”, or you’re constantly in danger, but you can afford to maybe slip up once. It took a long time to get it feeling like most players were just ahead of the slime – that it felt fair but also challenging.
Slime Climb as we know it coming together.
JJ: I think it’s interesting, because if you look at a general Battle Royale game, there’s this thing that these games need to be fair and balanced. But really, when you play a Battle Royale, sometimes you spawn and you get a pistol and that’s all you’ve got for 15 minutes, and the game has just given you a harder route to the finish line. That ebb and flow with having an easier or a harder game is really what makes those games replayable. So by [Fall Guys] having easier levels and harder levels, it creates this different route to the finish line each time you play that I think is really really important for creating something that is going to give you different experiences each time you pick it up.
JJ: Even in the form it is now, a lot of people on the team maybe suggested that it was too difficult, but we kind of felt like we wanted to have a level in particular that would come up and have that kind of mythos around it of being, “Oh, this is the really hard one.”
One of my favorite things about Slime Climb is that Meg, our lead level designer, consistently fails at it. Like, she really really struggles with it, and I love that – and she loves that as well. She really appreciates that we we have that in the game. When we’re sort of balancing this stuff, it’s really important that we listen to all these voices – with this level, it was like, let’s try and make a level for the more hardcore people.
The Future
The Slime Climb we’re playing today.
JW: One thing we’ve seen is that people are creating shortcuts for the level, so there’s this evolving metagame. We didn’t expect people to be figuring out these things, but people have found that you can ping off of certain inflatable objects and skip certain parts of the level. But even over the playtest there’s been this evolving thing of, now everyone’s going through the shortcuts, it’s actually safer to go the way we intended. We’re quite looking forward to seeing what other weird shortcuts come out.
JJ: With all the levels in the game, we want to continuously update. So whilst we like the core of it, I want to get to the point where somebody thinks they know Slime Climb and then they come on one day and it’s different, and there are elements that they’re not expecting. We’re aiming to kind of do that for a lot of the levels in the game.
JW: I think it’d be really good to have people reminiscing about back when it was simple and they knew what they were doing. I think that’s the exciting thing about Fall Guys is that we have these 25 really exciting levels for launch, but as the game progresses we can just keep adding and tweaking and customizing all the ones that we already have. The idea is that you know, six months, a year down the line, Slime Climb is this gargantuan thing with so many variations. That’s kind of the dream for Fall Guys, I think, and where we see it hopefully going.
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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Disney has announced plans to launch a new international streaming service under its Star brand name in 2021.
According to The Verge, Disney CEO Bob Chapek revealed the news on a recent quarterly earnings call, in which he outlined the company’s plans to expand its streaming offering by distributing content from ABC, FX, Freeform, Searchlight, and 20th Century Studios on a new international streaming platform geared towards “general entertainment,” which will not license any third-party content.
“In terms of the general entertainment offering internationally, we want to mirror our successful Disney Plus strategy by using our Disney Plus technical platform, bringing in content we already own and distributing it under a successful international brand that we also already own, which is, of course, Star,” Chapek announced on the call.
Chapek went on to explain why Disney opted to launch a new platform rather than expand Hulu to the international market. As part of his explanation, he revealed that the new streaming service will only offer Disney-owned content through its Star brand, which is an already established name overseas, unlike Hulu that has “no brand awareness outside of the US.”
Chapek didn’t share many more details about the Star-branded platform, including which countries it will be launching in, what the pricing structure will be, or the exact release date for the service. However, more information is expected to be revealed during an upcoming investors event that will focus on the company’s broader streaming plans.
Disney+ recently hit another major streaming milestone, as it surpassed more than 60 million subscribers worldwide. In India, the streamer “is offered in conjunction with the existing Hotstar service,” which apparently accounts for a portion of those subscribers. Disney is said to have amassed 100 million total subscribers across all of its streaming offerings, including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN Plus.
Blizzard will hold a virtual version of BlizzCon in early 2021.
As reported by GamesIndustry.Biz, Blizzard president J. Allen Brack noted during Activision Blizzard’s earnings call this week that a virtual version of the show would take place during “the early part” of 2021.
The digital showcase will be “channelling the spirit of BlizzCon” in the absence of a physical show. “We’re looking forward to sharing what the teams have been working on for that event,” Brack added.
Blizzard announced in May of this year that it had come to “the very difficult decision” to cancel BlizzCon 2020 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was announced that an online version of the event would take place in 2021, meaning this will be the first November without a BlizzCon since 2012. The announcement of “early 2021″ suggests it won’t be too long of a delay, though.
Recent BlizzCon events have used a virtual ticket system to offer fans who are watching the show from home the ability to engage with the show, with unique cosmetics given out to those who pick up the ticket.
In this case, it looks like everyone will be watching BlizzCon 2021’s panels and reveals without actually being present in Anaheim. The company has plenty of irons in the fire, what with Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 on the horizon, so we can expect news about these games when the event rolls around in early 2021.
