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While Fifth Edition saw a huge boost in popularity for Dungeons & Dragons, devoting time to a campaign and character can be a bit too much for some people and may not be great for families. And diving into D&D can be a little overwhelming, as it can be complicated for new players to learn. Luckily, WizKids has a new, fun game arriving this October called Dungeon Scrawlers.

WizKids’ Dungeon Scrawlers takes the dungeon crawling aspect all D&D players are familiar with it, simplifies it, and makes it easily accessible to everyone, no matter your age. Pre-made maps have players drawing a continuous line throughout a dungeon in order to collect points. You collect points by collecting numbered stones in order, scribbling out monsters, tracing spells, etc. The winner is whoever scores the most points during their adventure.

The full game arrives this fall and contains 10 maps and is for 2-4 players. It will cost $25, and you can preorder Dungeon Scrawlers from your local game store, or you can preorder it online here. Check out the “How to play” rules below, which also gives you a look at one of the maps.

Dungeons Scrawlers is compact and portable. “We definitely wanted it to be something you could easily bring along to game night, while still fitting in a ton of gameplay,” said Eric Meyers, Board Game Project Manager at WizKids. “The whole box should fit right in with your D&D books.”

The game won’t teach you to play D&D, but it will introduce people to elements from the game. “One of the most important elements are the different character classes, and their special abilities,” said Meyers. “Each has an action that they can do faster or better than the others can–spells for the Wizard, collecting treasure for the Rogue, or defeating monsters for the Barbarian–that lets you do some light roleplaying as you lean into that activity. You even level up, in a sense, as each map grows more intricate, with more elements and challenges requiring the talents of experienced adventurers. Mostly, it perfectly captures the feeling of a tension-filled dungeon crawl.”

Dungeon Scrawlers has more of a light-hearted and fast-paced tone than D&D players are used to. “The designers were looking for a new way to use markers in a board game, when they realized that it could be a great way to explore maze-like dungeon maps in real time,” explained Meyers. “They brainstormed different elements that the dungeon could include, from monsters, to spells, to treasure, and ways to give special abilities to different adventurer classes, and they soon had a sample version to test. When everyone they tried it with wanted to immediately delve into the next dungeon, they knew they had something special.”

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Meyer continued saying they wanted to find unique ways to interact with D&D elements, using the scribbling mechanic. This includes casting spells, attacking monsters, and collecting loot. Dungeon Scrawlers will be available this October.

For more on D&D, you’ll want to tune in to D&D live on July 16-17, when you’ll be able to see WWE wrestlers play a campaign and learn more about the upcoming books: The Wild Beyond The Witchlight and Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. Additionally, you can check out some of the miniatures WizKids has been putting out like the Wildshape and Polymorph set and the Icons of the Realm: Boneyard minis.

Windows 11 is finally official after Microsoft’s big splashy Livestream. In case you missed it, Windows 11 features a completely redesigned UI, new aesthetics, Auto HDR for games, Android Apps, and much more. There’s plenty to get to know about Windows 11, but if you’re just looking for the absolutely new features you’ll find them below.

1. Auto HDR Gaming

If you’re playing any classic games or non-HDR games on PC, Windows 11 will be able to automatically update the lighting and color to meet the HDR spec. This feature has been on the Xbox consoles for a while so it was inevitable to see it come to gaming PCs as well. Microsoft promises it will bring auto HDR to over 1,000 games including Age of Empires Definitive Edition, Rocket League, Day Z, and Doom 64.

2. Android Apps Come to the Microsoft Store

The biggest surprise of Windows 11 is it can run Android Apps. Unfortunately, Android Apps aren’t being fully integrated into the Microsoft Store, but rather you’ll be able to find them through the Amazon Appstore. From there you can launch them off the taskbar or Start Menu, and even snap them just like any other applications made for Windows.

Android apps are able to run on Windows 11 thanks to a new “Intel Bridge” compiler that helps the apps run on x86 system. What’s even better is this Intel tool runs just fine on AMD and Arm-based processors as well, so all PCs should be able to run Android apps.

On a smaller note, the new Microsoft Store will also feature streaming media from multiple companies and providers such as Disney+. Windows 11 also allows you to project media to your 4K TV with “wireless connect.”

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3. New Design

Of course, the most striking thing about Window 11’s new design is the center-positioned taskbar. Traditionally Windows has always had a far left-positioned start button, but now it’s closer to the center to make it more accessible to users with large monitors or ultrawide displays.

Windows 11 also features softer visuals with plenty of rounded corners, animated transitions, and more refined transparency effects. The widget panel for example is now placed onto a sheet of glass that flies in from the right and you can overlay it on top of all your open windows.

4. Faster

Microsoft promises that Windows 11 is all about speed and it’s faster at waking from sleep, Windows Hello logins, browsing with Edge and any web browser at all too, and the new background Windows updates will be 40% smaller.

For gaming specifically, Microsoft has unveiled a new feature called Direct Storage that allows games to directly upload assets to the graphic card. This should in theory lead to shorter load times and instant graphics rendering.

5. Snap Layouts

Windows snapping has been around for a long time, but with larger and ultrawide screens gaining more appeal, just being able to snap Windows to four corners isn’t that useful anymore. Well, Snap Layouts offer a ton more options including arranging three windows side-by-side, one large window with two smaller ones stacked on the side, and many more. While you’re working on your multi-window setup, Windows 11 will also remember which applications you had open and their arrangement in a Snap Group that’s also saved to the taskbar.

6. Windows Widgets

Widgets are back as a centerpiece for Windows 11 that Microsoft is calling a personalized feed powered by A.I. The pack of widgets includes the usual things you would expect like weather, stocks, and maps. However, Microsoft has paid special attention to the news feed widget, which is designed to conform to your interests whether it be international politics, Esports, and the local news.

All the widgets fall onto a sheet of glass that flies in from the left and you can overlay it on top of all your open windows.

7. New Tablet Mode

Windows 11 is an improved experience for Windows tablet users. As soon as you switch your device into tablet mode or detach it from the keyboard, the UI changes subtly with more spacing between icons and larger touch targets. Resizing and moving around windows by touch is easier thanks to new animations. Windows 11 also adds touchscreen gestures like a three-finger side swipe to snap a window or a three-finger down swipe to minimize it.

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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam

The makers of Ratchet & Clank and Marvel’s Spider-Man, Insomniac Games, appear to be gearing up for work on a project with a heavy emphasis on multiplayer.

This comes from multiple job postings at the studio, which Insomniac says are for a “multiplayer project.” Among other roles, Insomniac is looking for a creative director, a story lead, an art director, and a systems designer specifically for multiplayer systems.

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Digging into the listings doesn’t glean too much in the way of specifics, though there are a few clues.

The systems designer role asks for candidates to design player interactions and systems “(including combat, navigation, progression, and economy) for a multiplayer environment” indicating that whatever this multiplayer game is, it’s likely pretty involved and complex (certainly more than just a multiplayer component thrown into a single-player game). The same listing also asks for a “thorough understanding of melee combat systems, enemy design, and boss design.”

The story lead job looks similarly detailed, and indicates that the narrative aspects are tied in closely with the multiplayer component as it asks for experience “with multiplayer narratives.”

Insomniac is hiring! We have five new job openings for a multiplayer project. Come join us and be part of the #PlayStationStudiosFamily as we work on exciting things!

Apply today: https://t.co/WpJzOR39tK pic.twitter.com/eBJzEEtCsR

— Insomniac Games (@insomniacgames) June 24, 2021

Whatever Insomniac is making, it’s unlikely we’ll see this project in the light of day for several years, given that the studio has just wrapped up Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (which we loved) and is only just now looking for a creative director and several other leadership roles critical to making a game happen at all. Given the studio’s string of really, really stellar single-player narratives in recent years, this could be a fascinating new direction for the Sony-owned studio.

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will include Auto HDR built into its upcoming operating system.

Sarah Bond, head of game creator experience & ecosystem for Xbox, confirmed that Auto HDR will be a part of the new OS. When using a high dynamic range (HDR) monitor, Auto HDR improves the color range in a slew of DirectX 11 and newer games, even in games for which HDR settings were never implemented.

Auto HDR was previously introduced into Microsoft’s ninth-generation gaming consoles, the Xbox Series X/S, which helped improve both the colors and luminance in many titles. Microsoft previously offered the console’s Auto HDR feature to PC players in March as a preview feature.

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Microsoft touts Windows 11 as the best operating system ever for gaming and is incorporating a lot of interesting features found on its ninth-gen console into the latest OS. This includes DirectStorage, which will require the latest NVMe drives, allowing Windows 11 to expedite the load times in games running on the operating system. The company also confirmed that game developers will need to enable DirectStorage to speed up the loading times in their titles.

The move comes as no surprise. Microsoft has made it clear it is all in on gaming in recent weeks. Alongside confirming that Xbox Game Pass is integrated into Windows 11, including xCloud integrated inside the built-in Xbox app, Microsoft is thinking outside the box on expanding the Xbox ecosystem outside of traditional hardware.

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Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is using an upgraded version of Ubisoft Massive’s Snowdrop engine to create a far more complex game than previously possible – and that includes a system that will apparently create NPCs that more realistically understand and react to changes in the world around them, like weather, or your own progression through the game.

A new tech showcase video for the game shows no new footage, but reveals new details, including the game’s systems for adding far more vegetation to the world, creating more realistic clouds, and more. Later in the video, lead narrative realization designer Alice Rendell touches on some gameplay changes that come from the improved tech:

“The different activities that NPCs can perform in the world, and the different animations they have, can make the world feel really alive. So, for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora we wanted to take this one step further and created a system where our NPCs understand the state of the world – for example, weather, player progression, or time of day.”

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While the video doesn’t make totally clear how that system works in a practical sense, technical director of programming Nikolay Stefanov gave us an example in a separate interview with IGN. “For the big creatures,” he explains, “whenever they are calm, they would obviously walk around trees and things like that. But when they are fleeing, or attacking you, or whatever, they will just go straight through the bamboo and other vegetation and just completely destroy it. I think it’s really cool to be able to see all of these effects that the NPCs have on the environment, as well as you having an effect on the environment too.”

It’s seemingly not just Na’vi, humans, and Pandoran fauna that will react to the world around them, either – even plant life can react to your presence. Senior technical artist Kunal Luthra explains elsewhere in the video, “The advantage of Snowdrop is that it can handle quite complex shaders. To add life to the vegetation of Pandora, we’ve created many interactive shaders that can be affected by the player, from real-time wind simulations and interactions, to intelligent plants reacting to your presence.” We see a glimpse of a rective plant in the original annoucnement trailer.

It’s clear that Massive is very proud of its work on the technical side of its Avatar game – not least because it’s Ubisoft’s first new-gen only title. We spoke to some of its lead developers about why Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had to drop last-gen hardware to exist.

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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].

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be Ubisoft’s first new-gen-only game, and that remains an unusual choice. Given the sheer number of owners of Xbox One and PS4 out there, it’s simply financially more viable for most developers to work on cross-generation games – something we’ve seen borne out by most of the games released in Xbox Series X/S and PS5’s first year.

It begs the question then – what makes Ubisoft Massive’s Avatar game so much more demanding that it can only run on next-gen hardware, beyond the obvious answer of “it looks nicer”? I spoke to the game’s creative director, Magnus Jansén, and technical director of programming Nikolay Stefanov to find out.

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Flying

Much of Frontiers of Pandora’s reveal trailer takes place with Na’vi heroes riding their Banshee companions. As it turns out, this isn’t just for show – the game will let you take to the skies and travel across them at high speed, and only new hardware allowed the team to couple that mechanic with the detailed world it wanted to present.

“[New consoles allowed] us to have much better object detail up close to you,” explains Stefanove, “but also when you’re flying high up in the air – to have a lovely vista and far-distance rendering, where we can even use the ray tracing to do shadows super far away, you know, three or four kilometers away from you.”

It’s not just that the world needs to look good as you lazily soar over it – it’s that it needs to stay looking good while you travel very, very quickly, as Jansén explains: “You’re flying at enormous high speeds on a Banshee over this very, very detailed landscape. It doesn’t matter how much we can render, unless we can stream it in as fast when we’re moving very fast from one place to another. So just this shift to these newer hard drives, it can’t be underestimated because, and it really has a lot of implications.”

Map Design

One of the less visible benefits of new hardware is in changing not just how the open world looks, but how it’s pieced together. Because of more limited tech, older open world games needed to balance detail with density, which can lead to large areas of relative nothingness between major points of interest (I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey). It seems that new-gen tech will allow Frontiers of Pandora to be built a little more organically:

“It’s not just the old ‘I’m taking this slow walk as I enter into the place because we have to stream everything in’,” explains Jansén of the benefits to his maps, “it’s little subtle things that people don’t think about, which is how close together are all the places in the world. If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world. So, there’s a ton of stuff like that.”

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Enemy and Creature AI

It’s not just graphical power helping Massive’s designers – processing power will help them try new things, too, particularly when it comes to NPCs.

“Technology is everything,” says Jansén, “it’s what allows us to realize our dreams as designers. It’s what allows us to tell our stories, and to create the immersion and the escapism that we want. It’s not just about escapism, it’s about danger as well, because Pandora is a beautiful place, but it’s also a dangerous place. So, the wildlife, the AI, the way that they track you, the way that they attack you, the advances in technology and the way that we are taking advantage of the power with our in-house Snowdrop engine is allowing us [to] do amazing things that would not be possible [otherwise].”

Stefanov steps in to show us exactly what that can mean: “I can give you a specific example of something that you see in the trailer that has to do with the AI systems. For the big creatures, whenever they are calm, they would obviously walk around trees and things like that. But when they are fleeing, or attacking you, or whatever, they will just go straight through the bamboo and other vegetation and just completely destroy it. I think it’s really cool to be able to see all of these effects that the NPCs have on the environment, as well as you having an effect on the environment too.”

Immersion

While this does fall somewhat under the “it looks nice” bracket of technical improvements, Massive is adamant that improving some of the more complex visuals will help players get into the idea that they’re on the Pandora of James Cameron’s original movie, not just another game world.

“It’s a first-person game,” says Jansén. “It’s, to me, the most immersive way of playing. So we’re really going all-in on that vision of, ‘Remember the movie, remember you wanted to go to Pandora.’ Now you can go to Pandora and, to do that, we needed to have the best simulation of weather, rain, animals, and the best rendering, because the more technically excellent it is, the more capable it is of taking you from where you are and into the world of Pandora.”

Stefanov gives some examples of what that can mean to the game: “In terms of a new generation of consoles, the improved [hardware] just gives us so much opportunity to make sure that the game’s as immersive as possible. So a couple of examples, we have a completely new lighting system that is based on ray tracing, and I think it is a dramatic step up in quality that makes you feel like it’s a real place. One tiny example is that it can actually handle the translucency of the leaves […] so it can figure out how much of the light is reflected through the leaves, how tinted it is with the colors and everything else. You get lovely reflections and sights for the water, even down to the volumetric clouds up in the sky – they actually receive the correct lighting as well.”

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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].

Microsoft’s first-party shopping spree has continued unabated since we last checked in on Xbox’s stable of studios in 2018. Since then, Microsoft has added none other than the entirety of Bethesda/Zenimax in one fell $7.5 billion swoop, bringing the total number of Xbox Studios members to 23. We’re going to cover most of them here (i.e. not Bethesda’s support studios or Xbox Game Studios Publishing, which handles internal support and third-party exclusive relationships). Let’s see what we either know – or suspect – they’re all up to!

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343 Industries

Current Known Project: Halo Infinite

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It’s been one a hell of a ride for 343 Industries ever since Halo Infinite’s announcement back at E3 2018. After two impressive teasers that showed off the potential of its proprietary new Slipspace graphics engine, and the Xbox Series X announcement at The Game Awards 2019, it was immediately positioned as the flagship day-one launch title for the new console (though it will also come to Xbox One). That launch day status would soon end after a poor gameplay reveal in July 2020 forced Microsoft to rethink its approach to the beloved series, and that included a full year’s delay into Fall 2021. Whether or not it launches on November 15 to hit the exact 20th anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved, 343 has a ton of pressure on them to hit this entry out of the park after Halo 5’s actual campaign failed to live up to its grandiose marketing campaign. Microsoft took it on the chin by delaying Infinite, but it was the right move, as was announcing Infinite multiplayer being free-to-play and PC getting full launch support. It will now be six years between mainline Halo games, and Infinite cannot fail, lest the franchise be forever damaged. 343 has had ample time and budget to get this right, now they have to deliver.

Arkane Studios

Current Known Projects: Deathloop and Redfall

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Arkane is an Xbox studio that’s currently working on…a PlayStation 5 exclusive. Deathloop is a timed PS5 exclusive thanks to a pre-acquisition deal Bethesda made with Sony. Regardless, Deathloop is an intriguing first-person shooter with a groovy style that seems to incorporate roguelike elements courtesy of its main time loop mechanic. It’s being made by Arkane Lyon in France, while Arkane Austin has a new Xbox-exclusive project up its sleeve: Redfall. It was a surprise reveal at Xbox’s E3 2021 showcase, and it’s an open-world co-op first-person shooter set in a vampire-infested world plunged into darkness. It’s from the team that brought us Dishonored and Prey.

Bethesda Game Studios

Current Known Project: Starfield

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As the crown jewel of Microsoft’s $7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition, Todd Howard’s Bethesda Game Studios team is hard at work on not just their first new game since Fallout 4 in 2015, but their first original franchise since the original Elder Scrolls. That game is Starfield, a space-bound sci-fi RPG where you join the Constellation, and it is the ace up Microsoft’s sleeve: a completely original new game from the creators of Elder Scrolls and Fallout. It’s due out on November 11, 2022, meaning that we already know what Xbox’s biggest Fall game is for both this year and next.

The Coalition

Current Rumored Project: Gears 6

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Microsoft’s Gears studio is almost certainly hard at work on (surprise, surprise) Gears 6. Based on the series’ recent release cadence, we would’ve expected it in Fall 2022. Except The Coalition is basically now telling us that they’re going to need more time as they make the expected but exciting switch to the new Unreal Engine 5. That engine upgrade practically guarantees that, like all of its predecessors, it’ll be a jaw-droppingly gorgeous game. Story-wise, Gears 6 has plenty of loose ends to tie up, as Gears 5 ended on a Kait-tastic cliffhanger after forcing players to make a gut-wrenching decision near the end of its campaign. 

Compulsion Games

Current Rumored Project: Unknown

The Montreal-based studio shipped We Happy Few to generally mixed reviews for publisher Gearbox back in 2018. Now they’ve folded into the Xbox family, and barring a massive staff-up, they’ll remain a medium-sized studio. As such, it’s probably not wise to expect anything from them anytime soon, as their last game before that was Contrast back in 2013. If we were betting on it, we’d look for a new IP in the second or third wave of the Series X generation.

Double Fine

Current Known Project: Psychonauts 2

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Legendary game designer Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine were already neck-deep in work on the sequel to Schafer’s 2005 original-Xbox cult-classic Psychonauts prior to their acquisition by Microsoft in 2019. Now they’re nearing the finish line on Raz’s new telekinetic adventure, with Schafer telling IGN in a December 2020 Podcast Unlocked interview that the studio was likely to do something completely new afterwards (read: not a sequel or game based on any other Microsoft-owned property). Psychonauts 2 will be released on August 25.

The Initiative

Current Known Project: Perfect Dark

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So, the rumors were true. Microsoft’s new Santa Monica-based ‘AAAA’ studio is working on a reboot of Rare’s Perfect Dark, a first-person spy shooter that appears to be mixing in a bit of Mirror’s Edge in this version as well, if its cinematic reveal trailer from the 2020 Game Awards is anything to go by. Perfect Dark was being directed by Sunset Overdrive director Drew Murray before he returned to Insomniac earlier this year. The idea remains an intriguing one, though. Perfect Dark was beloved on the Nintendo 64, but Perfect Dark Zero stopped the franchise in its tracks before this latest attempt. Here’s hoping The Initiative can hit a homer in its first official at-bat. 

id Software

Current Known Project: Unknown

Most of the original Hall of Fame talent that changed gaming forever with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake has long since moved on, but a new generation of id Software developers, led by creative director Hugo Martin – himself raised on Doom – have returned id to the short list of the game industry’s most talented development studios. Doom Eternal was brilliant, and its recent DLC, The Ancient Gods, seemed to conclude the Doomslayer’s story. Will Doom continue, or will id turn its attention to resurrecting and reimagining another of the old studio’s creations? Quake, anyone? We are eager to find out.

inXile Entertainment

Current Rumored Projects: Unknown

Revered RPG developer Brian Fargo and his team recently finished Wasteland 3, an old-school RPG that was Kickstarted prior to Microsoft’s acquisition of inXile. Now the team is working on not one but two new Unreal Engine 5-powered RPGs. We have no idea what they are, including whether or not they’re original games or if the studio is dusting off one of the old IPs in Microsoft’s vault (if they are, please be Shadowrun!). But the bottom line is that this studio knows good RPG mechanics, and now that it has the financial backing of Microsoft, we should see its full potential unleashed. 

MachineGames

Current Known Project: Indiana Jones

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You’ve seen how talented MachineGames is if you’ve played any of their impeccably good, narrative-driven Wolfenstein revivals, but this team’s talent goes back even further than that: the core crew here was also the team responsible for the Xbox classic – and title-holder for Best Movie-Based Game Ever – The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. The announcement that MachineGames is working on an Indiana Jones game – and that Todd Howard is directing it – caught us by quite the pleasant surprise. Will it be first-person (which is all Machine has ever done)? Will it use the idTech graphics engine (which is what the Wolfenstein games are all built off of)? We’re not expecting to see or hear any more about this project for a while, but our whips and fedoras are on standby for when they’re ready to tell us more.

Mojang

Current Known Project: Minecraft

Minecraft, always Minecraft. Sometimes some Minecraft spinoffs, like the pretty-darn-good Minecraft Dungeons.

Ninja Theory

Current Known Projects: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Project Mara, The Insight Project

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Ninja Theory’s Hellblade sequel was officially the first Xbox Series X game ever announced, as it was revealed alongside the console itself at The Game Awards 2019. We’ve since learned that it will be powered by Unreal Engine 5, but beyond that, we don’t know much else. It’s highly unlikely to ship anytime soon, given that its engine isn’t even done yet. But when it does, it should bring the interactive exploration of mental health to a whole new, larger audience. Ninja Theory’s other two known projects, Project Mara and The Insight Project, are also focusing on mental health as their themes. 

Obsidian Entertainment

Current Known Projects: Avowed, Grounded, The Outer Worlds 2

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The studio best known for Fallout: New Vegas has been on a heck of a roll lately. Obsidian has a burgeoning community with their Early Access survival game Grounded, which is basically a playable version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, while another team at the studio is hard at work on Avowed, a first-person open-world RPG – seemingly in the vein of New Vegas – that’s set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. And they just announced The Outer Worlds 2, a first-person sci-fi RPG sequel that will now be exclusive to Xbox.

Playground Games

Current Known Projects: Fable and Forza Horizon 5

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Playground expanded from one studio – the seemingly infinitely talented creators of the sublime Forza Horizon driving game series – to two, with the new crew tasked with rebooting Fable, the beloved Xbox action/adventure/RPG series that went into hibernation when Lionhead, the studio that originally developed it, shuttered. The new Fable’s reveal teaser succeeded in showing everyone that Playground understands the whimsical, charming tone Fable should have, and we also know that it will be built on the same open-world game engine that Forza Horizon is. So expect, at the very least, some glorious four-season weather effects.

Meanwhile, Forza Horizon 5 was a surprise announcement at E3 2021 and will be released on November 9. It’s set in Mexico and will feature the largest game world Horizon has ever seen. It’s upping the ante by including major weather events like dust storms and live volcanoes. 

Rare

Current Known Project: Everwild

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Sea of Thieves sails on with more of a tailwind than ever thanks to the new Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in, but Rare also has a new game in the works: Everwild. It’s been shown twice so far, but we haven’t seen a proper gameplay demo, nor is there a public release window as of yet. From those trailers, it looks like it might borrow at least some of the Sea of Thieves framework, but it’s otherwise tough to glean much from its fantastical setting. As fans continue to call for the classic Rare IPs, like Banjo Kazooie, to be dusted off, Rare seems more interested in forging new paths. With the continued success of Sea of Thieves, it’s hard to argue with them.

Tango Gameworks

Current Known Project: Ghostwire: Tokyo

In Tango Gameworks, Microsoft finally has its own Japanese game development studio. Shinji Mikami’s team created two critically acclaimed Evil Within survival horror games, but Tango has now moved on to Ghostwire Tokyo, a first-person…well, we’re not sure yet. Combat director Shinichiro Hara describes it as “karate meets magic.” Paradoxically, this one is another timed PlayStation 5 exclusive like Deathloop thanks to a deal Bethesda made with Sony prior to being acquired by Microsoft.

Turn 10

Current Known Project: Forza Motorsport

Turn 10 had turned around new Forza Motorsport games on a predictable biannual cadence for years, but that ended after Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017. Instead, the talented team at Turn 10 has been busy rebooting its venerable simulation racing game, rebuilding ForzaTech from the ground up for Xbox Series X and S as well as PC; it’s not confirmed, but all signs point to Xbox One being left behind so that the new hardware can be pushed as far as possible. Will the new, simply named Forza Motorsport get sequels every two years as before, or will Motorsport simply become an umbrella under which all future content updates will live? That remains to be seen but is somewhat likely, given the direction the industry has moved in recent years. After Turn 10 recently solicited community playtesters, though, don’t expect the studio to stay quiet for too much longer.

Undead Labs

Current Known Project: State of Decay 3

All we know about State of Decay 3 is that it exists. Is it finally the realization of “Class4,” the codename Undead Labs assigned the better part of a decade ago to a planned massively multiplayer online sequel to “Class3,” aka State of Decay? Maybe, but regardless, what we’re really hoping for is for State of Decay 3 to finally deliver the AAA polished experience that this brilliant concept deserves. Both State of Decay 1 and 2 were incredible zombie-RPG simulations masquerading as open-world games, but both were done on relative shoestring budgets and both suffered from technical problems and general jankiness that dragged the otherwise great gameplay down. Now they have the full power of Microsoft behind them as a first-party studio, so it’s time for them to shine.

Zenimax Online Studios

Current Known Project: The Elder Scrolls Online

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The Elder Scrolls Online recently celebrated its seventh anniversary, and it has grown and improved tremendously in that time. It has added Morrowind and Skyrim, among many other things, and it now officially supports the Xbox Series X and its 12.1-teraflops of horsepower. However, studio head Matt Firor recently reconfirmed to IGN in an upcoming IGN Unfiltered interview that the studio is also in the early stages of a new next-gen project. Firor’s comments in the same interview seemed to suggest that it won’t be Fallout Online. Hmm…

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As you can see, Microsoft is playing to win the next generation by fortifying and reenergizing their first-party stable of studios. How this massive pile of first-party games turns out remains to be seen, but with any luck, the Xbox’s best days are still ahead of it.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features and host of Podcast Unlocked.

The cultural chokehold vampires–Lady Dimitrescu, for example–have over us continues: Anne Rice’s iconic Interview with a Vampire is coming to AMC.

Casting hasn’t begun yet, but AMC and it’s streaming arm, AMC+, plan to launch the first eight-episode season in 2022. Producer Mark Johnson, known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, will be on board the project. Co-creator of HBO’s Perry Mason, Rolin Jones, will co-create, write, and run the new Interview with a Vampire series. Rice and her son, Christopher Rice, will also participate as non-writing executive producers.

AMC acquired the rights to 18 of Rice’s works, back in May 2020, which includes the popular Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches series.

Interview with a Vampire follows the tale of Louis, Lestat, Claudia, and their complicated, intertwined lives as immortal vampires. The series previously received a film adaptation in 1994, famously starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Kirsten Dunst.

Rice’s Interview with a Vampire series already has a built-in fan-base, and it’s clear AMC hopes to compete with other content platforms by building another IP hit like The Walking Dead.

AMC Networks and AMC Studios Dan McDermott commented, “[Interview with a Vampire] already has millions of fans in the U.S. and around the world. We can’t wait to share this new interpretation of the classic brought to life by Rolin and Mark, as we continue to work on developing the entire collection. With The Walking Dead, this Anne Rice collection and our majority stake in Agatha Christie Limited through our own Acorn TV, we are proud to have the stewardship of three unique, fan-forward and beloved franchises and universes, which we are only just beginning to explore. We are also thrilled to have Mark, a world-class producer we have previously worked with on iconic series like Breaking Bad, Rectify, Halt and Catch Fire and Better Call Saul on board at the helm of our efforts to develop an entire Anne Rice universe, with significant aspirations for these beloved stories and characters.”

The cast for Damien Chazelle’s new movie Babylon, set in 1920’s Hollywood during the movie industry’s transition from silent films to talkies, is now further expanding to include Olivia Wilde (House), director Spike Jonze (Her), Phoebe Tonkin (The Vampire Diaries), and Tobey Maguire (Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy), according to The Hollywood Reporter. Babylon is expected to hit theaters on Christmas Day in 2022.

These names, impressive on their own, join an already swelling ensemble that earlier this month added Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Handmaid’s Tale’s Max Minghella. While the movie’s plot is still largely under wraps, it has been confirmed that the Paramount film will carry an R rating.

Chazelle is the writer-director behind Whiplash and La La Land. Given the increasingly high-profile nature of his projects, all that’s known about Babylon at this point is a lengthy list of names and a loose premise–joining the likes of Knives Out 2, which is similarly swirled in mystery but commanding marquee names. Although, in many ways, Babylon is certainly shaping up to be much stranger–its cast boasts both Flea and Eric Roberts.

As you’re pondering those questions and more about Babylon, you can also plan how you’ll pass the time this year with the biggest movies to watch still ahead in 2021.