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As more and more tidbits of information, looks at gameplay, and tease-heavy trailers have been released for Resident Evil Village, the impression that it’s taking major cues from Resident Evil 4 has been growing. With a new in-depth look at the eighth mainline entry into the survival horror series, that’s never been more true.

Where Resident Evil 7 was a first-person horror game that seemed heavily inspired by the original, mansion-exploring Resident Evil from way back in 1996, Village borrows more from the action side of the franchise’s history–although it definitely still looks to pack the scares that made its predecessor so effective.

Capcom recently gave GameSpot a look at about an hour of gameplay footage for Resident Evil Village. We didn’t get to actually play, but we did get a very good sense of what an early portion of the game will be like. Essentially, if you can imagine the first-person intensity of Resident Evil 7, combined with the higher action and feeling of being overwhelmed of Resident Evil 4, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

The preview kicks off somewhere after the start of the game, with protagonist Ethan Winters waking up after what appears to be a car accident. He’s lying in the snow near the back of an overturned van; beside him is what looks like a dead soldier. At a guess, this seems like the aftermath of the scene we’ve seen in the Resident Evil Village trailers, where Chris Redfield and some masked goons shoot Ethan’s wife, Mia, and grab Ethan and his daughter. Ethan’s the only one who walks away from the crash, and as he heads out into the darkness, he starts to find his way into a ramshackle wood house with a trail of blood leading through it.

In this early scene, Village leans into the tight, oppressive atmosphere that characterized the Baker house of Resident Evil 7; it’s dark and crowded, and we hear strange banging coming from the floors above, although Ethan never sees anyone. Before long, he gets out of the building as first light starts to creep over the snowy landscape. Ethan follows a forest path until he comes out on a hill looking down into a valley, marked by a small village and a huge, looming castle. He makes his way down into the village, which immediately feels strangely empty and somewhat decrepit; the houses are old and poorly maintained, the yards and streets filled with garbage.

When Ethan slips into a house with an open door, he pushes past a curtain dividing one room from another and is nearly shot by an old man wielding a shotgun. Finally, we get a sense of where everyone is–they’re hiding. A vicious-sounding scream in the distance prompts the old man to shove a pistol into Ethan’s hands. The preview doesn’t show us exactly what happens to the old man, though: after a brief cut, we return to Ethan as he explores a nearby shed. The old man is gone and there’s a huge hole in the wall of his house.

Gee, I wonder what might have happened here.

We get an answer before long as Ethan hears a roar from outside while exploring another house. A werewolf-like creature crashes through the ceiling, slashing at Ethan’s face, but he fights it off with the pistol. Instantly, the whole house is being attacked, with clawed, furry arms reaching through boarded windows. Something’s trying to crash through the front door. They’re seemingly everywhere.

This early moment feels almost exactly like the iconic first encounter in Resident Evil 4, as players discover the European village that served as that game’s early setting and Los Ganados, the murderous townspeople that populate it. Like RE4 protagonist Leon Kenney before him, Ethan is besieged by weapon-wielding villagers, only these are wolf-people. You can make moves to help you survive, however, like pushing furniture in front of doors and windows to block them or shooting explosive barrels to take down multiple enemies at once–more Resident Evil 4 idea brought forward into Village.

Before he’s overwhelmed, Ethan climbs out a back window and makes a run for it, fighting off more creatures along the way. Some of them attack with just their claws; others carry torches or swords. While Village is clearly a bit more action-oriented than its immediate predecessor, Ethan still moves a bit slowly and has to square up to fire his weapon like in RE7, so expect a fair amount of close, intense encounters with enemies. More than once, enemies leaped onto Ethan and clawed away at him before he managed to kick them off. You can mitigate that damage by raising your hands or your weapon to block blows–just like in Resident Evil 7–and you’re unlikely to make many quick getaways in combat, it seems, so blocking to protect yourself is essential.

The fight continues to escalate, and after a while, it seems as though Ethan won’t make it. This becomes especially obvious when a bigger werewolf wielding a huge hammer enters the melee. Before it can finish Ethan off, church bells start to sound. All of the wolves hustle off toward the bells, leaving Ethan alone in the village. It’s another moment that echoes Resident Evil 4 almost exactly.

From there, Ethan continues to investigate the area. He comes across a shotgun, makes his way through more buildings, and smashes a few crates to find various items. In another page taken from RE4, Ethan has to keep an eye on his inventory–how items are placed in your box of goodies matters, and keeping it well-organized makes space for other items. You’ll also have opportunities to craft items from raw materials like in Resident Evil 7, combining items such as herbs and chem fluid to make first-aid medicine, or chem fluid and gunpowder to make ammunition.

Here we also start to see the kinds of puzzles Resident Evil has always been known for. Ethan finds a gate leading toward the castle, but it’s shut and locked. The gate is covered by a relief of a demon and a woman with their faces missing. Not far away in a small church, Ethan finds an altar that holds the Maiden Crest, the first of the two pieces that will complete the relief and open the gate.

The demo starts to hit a big story moment here as well, when Ethan discovers more survivors: a woman and her injured father. Earlier, Ethan heard a radio transmission directing him to the house of Luiza, where other survivors were holed up, so he helps the pair make their way to safety. At first, the villagers at Luiza’s are distrustful of Ethan, but they eventually let him and the others inside. Luiza and the other seem just as confused as Ethan that their village is overrun by monsters. Luiza tells him that someone called Mother Miranda has previously protected the village, but then monsters started to attack them without warning. The survivors say a creepy prayer–you might have heard it in the latest Resident Evil Village trailer–in hopes of regaining Mother Miranda’s protection.

Of course, this momentary bastion of safety quickly crumbles. Ethan escapes, having grabbed a key item–a screwdriver–which allows him to open up a small locked altar outside of the house and claim the second crest for the gate he passed earlier.

Before Ethan gets to the castle, however, he’s accosted by a tall, duster-wearing, bespectacled man. This apparently supernatural guy captures Ethan by slamming him with metal gears and objects, seemingly flinging them through the air with his mind like he’s Magneto. When Ethan comes to, the man is dragging him through a cave-like tunnel.

Here we see Lady Dimitrescu and Mother Miranda for the first time and learn this guy’s name: Heisenberg. He seems to be the big hammer-wielding werewolf that showed up earlier. He and Dimitrescu are subordinates to Mother Miranda, apparently. Miranda leaves Ethan to Heisenberg to deal with, but they don’t execute him. Instead, Ethan is tossed into the tunnels to try to survive as something of a show–but the preview footage doesn’t show us exactly what happens, and when we catch up with Ethan again, he’s back outside and standing in front of the castle’s entrance.

Here we get another big Resident Evil 4 moment when Ethan meets the Duke, a recurring character who serves as the game’s shopkeeper. You’ll find the Duke in multiple locations throughout Village, like RE4’s Merchant, and you can buy items from him in much the same way. He sells first-aid items, ammo, and weapons, as well as gun upgrades. You can also sell things to him, like small crystals Ethan finds throughout the game. As in RE4, there are vases, boxes, and other items to smash through all over Resident Evil Village, and it usually pays to check them to find ammo, items, money, and stuff you can eventually sell.

From here, Ethan enters the castle and we see a lot of the same rooms and locations that appeared in Resident Evil Village’s first demo, Maiden. At first, Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters, the black-clad women from Maiden, don’t seem to know Ethan is there–but it’s not long before they find him. As in Maiden, the daughters are particularly frightening as they chase Ethan around, taunting him before disappearing in a swarm of bugs, only to rematerialize and attack. Where the monsters in the village seemed to be werewolves, Dimitriscu and her daughters seem to be classical vampires, as best we can tell.

Ethan is captured and brought to Dimitrescu by her daughters. Again, they don’t kill him, but instead stab him through with hooks and hang him from the ceiling, departing to get their orders about what to do with him from Mother Miranda. The footage doesn’t show exactly what happens, but once again, Ethan escapes. He starts to explore the castle, and as we saw from the Maiden demo, it’s filled with locked doors that require some weird and esoteric solutions. One door has a relief of a woman missing an eye, which opens when you find a ring housing said eye and place it into the door. Another requires you to find several pieces of statues to replace them.

The castle feels a lot more like Resident Evil 7’s Baker house than the village portion of the preview. For much of the footage, Ethan is creeping around the castle, seemingly trying not to get found out. On more than one occasion, he opens a door or slips through a hole, only to find Lady Dimitrescu leaving through another door on the other side. Unlike moving through the Baker house, though, it doesn’t seem like you have to stealth your way through the castle–it’s more like that, at certain points, you might run into enemies, while most of these near-encounters with Dimitrescu are of the scripted variety.

Moving through the castle is still dangerous, though. Sometimes Ethan is attacked by the daughters, who seem more or less impervious to bullets; other times, Ethan might happen across a lower tier of enemy that’s similar to the werewolf creatures in the village area. At one point in the preview, these monsters even had wings, looking like gargoyles or half-bat creatures. Like the werewolves earlier on, though, they’re tough but killable with your conventional weapons, making them seem a lot like RE4’s Los Ganados.

While he explores a lot of the castle, including the cellar and other regions from Maiden, Ethan eventually runs afoul of Lady Dimitrescu. She’s not just a frightening presence for cutscenes–eventually, you’ll encounter her out in the castle’s foyer and she’ll go after you herself. Like the daughters, Lady Dimitrescu gives chase to Ethan. She threatens him with those huge claws we’ve seen in cutscenes, and she doesn’t seem too bothered by gunfire. Ethan’s advantage is that she’s generally a bit slow, especially because she has to duck low to get through doorways, so it seems you’ll be fleeing from Lady Dimitrescu when you encounter her, just like Jack Baker in RE7 or Mr. X in Resident Evil 2. The castle is laid out in such a way that you can circle back to certain locations through multiple pathways, though, so it’s possible to give Lady Dimitrescu the slip. The demo ended not long after as Ethan made his way to the highest parts of the castle, and we don’t know exactly what might happen between him and Lady Dimitrescu.

As you work through the castle, it seems you’ll be doing a lot of running as you search for Ethan’s daughter and try to find the objects you need to open doors and escape. So from what we’ve seen in about an hour of Resident Evil Village, the game is melding different aspects of the RE experience to put you up against different challenges. In the village area, expect heavy combat and fleeing from overwhelming force, using items like shelves and dressers to block doors–but like in RE4, those barricades are only ever temporary solutions during a fight.

In the castle, the situation seems much more tenuous. Fighting isn’t really on the table in most cases, and you’ll need to run away from enemies you can’t handle and try to find your way out of bad situations. There’s still combat in the castle section, especially once you get out into the courtyard or up into the parapets, and you’ll run into the lycan-like enemies from earlier in the game. But when it comes to Lady Dimitrescu, it feels like Resident Evil Village is channeling its predecessor and the other, more survival-horror-oriented entries in the series.

The most interesting thing about the preview footage, apart from its many obvious callbacks to and elements borrowed from Resident Evil 4, is this mixing of RE influences. It seems like, as you move through different areas in Village, you’ll be encountering different brands of the RE experiences, each with its own different emphasis. To some degree, that was true of RE7 as well, but Village looks to be putting that mixture of RE ideas forward even more in its philosophy. We’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see if that impression is borne out throughout all of Resident Evil Village.

Check out more Resident Evil Village coverage, including the return of the Mercenaries mode, details on the release of the game’s upcoming demo, and the Resident Evil Re: Verse open beta.

What began as a joke is becoming a real product, as Microsoft is now actually making Xbox mini-fridges after defeating Skittles in a Twitter marketing competition. Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg, who is in charge of this campaign, has now provided an update on how the fridges are coming along. He said on Twitter that Microsoft is making progress on the fridges, recently getting a first look at the design proposals.

“We got first look at design this week and sent some notes back,” Greenberg said, adding the hashtag “#Progress.” He did not share any specifics about the design or his notes, however. We still don’t know anything about the price, release date, or final design.

The Xbox mini-fridge is inspired by the popular meme about the Xbox Series X looking like, well, a refrigerator. Microsoft took this chilling feedback in stride, agreeing that the console does in fact bear a resemblance to the home appliance. Microsoft even created real, working, full-size Xbox refrigerators and sent them to influencers like Snoop Dogg and The Rock, which in turn generated positive buzz for the brand.

To inspire people to vote for Xbox in the Twitter Marketing contest recently, Greenberg promised to make the Xbox mini-fridge a real product if Microsoft won the contest. Xbox ended up defeating Skittles by an incredibly close margin.

Microsoft and Skittles don’t have any bad blood, it seems, as Greenberg has said the first Xbox mini-fridge off the line will be filled with games and sent to the team at Skittles.

The mini-fridge will be just the latest odd-ball product from Xbox, following the Xbox Onsie and the greaseproof Xbox controller. And who could forget the Xbox body wash?

In other Xbox news, Microsoft has announced that its Xbox Cloud Streaming service will come to Windows PCs and iOS devices in a beta test beginning April 20.

The popular British historical drama Downton Abbey’s movie spinoff is getting a sequel, according to Variety. So far only being referred to as Downton Abbey 2–which may not be the final title–the movie is expected to bring back its predecessor’s cast, and has reportedly already started production last week.

The sequel will be written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, with Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) directing. The series, and both movies, are set in the fictional titular Yorkshire country estate, and through its aristocratic characters and their servants, chronicles events that have an impact on the British social hierarchy.

“After a very challenging year with so many of us separated from family and friends, it is a huge comfort to think that better times are ahead,” said Gareth Neame, whose Carnival Films will co-produce the film. “And, that next Christmas, we will be reunited with the much beloved characters of Downton Abbey.”

The returning marquee cast includes Hugh Bonneville (Paddington, Muppets Most Wanted), Jim Carter (Transformers: The Last Knight, The Good Liar), Michelle Dockery (Hanna, Tuca & Bertie). Elizabeth McGovern (Woman in Gold, War of the Worlds), Hugh Dancy (Hannibal), Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy), Nathalie Baye (Catch Me if You Can), and Dominic West (The Wire) will be joining for this sequel in, as of this writing, undisclosed roles.

Downton Abbey 2 is due for release on December 22, 2021.

Microsoft’s cloud-based game-streaming service is finally coming to PC and iOS devices. Invitations will go out to “select” Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members starting April 20 as part of a “limited test” that will be available for the newly supported platforms.

This isn’t a perfect or ideal situation for iOS devices, as Xbox Cloud Gaming on iPhones and tablets is available through web browsers as opposed to directly through an app. For iOS, Microsoft has criticized Apple’s policies that have led to this situation.

Starting April 20, those who have been granted access to the beta can visit Xbox.com/play on Safari, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge to play Xbox games over the cloud. “Offering cloud gaming through the browser and having a simplified, universal landing page presents a great opportunity to make cloud gaming approachable to more players in more places over time,” Microsoft said.

More invitations across all 22 supported countries will be made available over the coming months, Microsoft said.

If you’re accepted into the beta, you’ll need a Bluetooth or USB controller to play the cloud games, or you can use touch controls for the 50+ games that currently support them.

Game streaming is currently available only through an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which also grants you access to the Game Pass libraries on PC and Xbox consoles, and bundles in the Xbox Live Gold subscription.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer reacted to the news, saying he’s excited to see Xbox Cloud Gaming continue to grow.

“Great to get to share progress team has made, looking forward to continuing to grow Cloud Gaming with the community. Browsing XGP library, instantly trying a game and either keep playing in browser and/or download to continue on console or PC is a really nice discovery feature,” he said.

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The first trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has been released. The upcoming Marvel movie stars Simu Liu and Awkwafina, and it hits theaters September 3.

Liu plays Shang-Chi, a seemingly normal man living in San Francisco. But he has a dark family history–his father is Wenwu–and The Mandarin–a mysterious and powerful villain who once had plans for his son to join him in the criminal life. Shang-Chi rejected this, but finds himself coming into conflict with him once more and tapping into amazing powers of his own. Awkwafina plays Shang-Chi’s friend Katy, and the movie looks like a spectacular mix of mystery and wild martial arts-inspired action. Check the trailer out below:

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings also stars veteran Chinese star Tony Leung as Wenwu, Fala Chen as Jiang L, Meng’er Zhang as Xialing, Ronny Chieng as Jon Jon, and Michelle Yeoh as Jiang Nan. It’s directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who previously helmed Short Term 12 and Just Mercy.

The character of Shang-Chi was created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, and first appeared in Marvel comic books in the 1970s to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee and the TV show Kung-Fu. However, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Liu explained that it was because the character is relatively unknown that made him so interesting to play.

“The most exciting thing about stepping into this character was that his backstory has never been told before,” he said. “We know so many different versions of Batman’s origin story, how his parents were murdered when he was very young. We know Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he loses his uncle. Shang-Chi’s story is very much unknown to most of the world, so we had a lot of freedom and creative liberty to make it the way that we wanted to.”

The first poster for the movie has also been released. Check it out below:

The PlayStation 5’s latest update added compatibility for external hard drives and SSDs. When presented with so many options, which can be costly, it’s important to know which storage method is best for you. Thanks to Digital Foundry, we have a good idea of what storage solution you should use if you’ve filled up your PS5’s measly 667 GB of internal storage.

Before we get into any numbers, it’s important to note that all the games that Digital Foundry tested on the PlayStation 5 are PS4 games. While the PS5’s latest firmware update lets users store and play games on external drives, you can only do so with PS4 titles. PS5 games still require the speed of the PS5’s internal SSD to function properly. That being said, you can still store PS5 games on external drives, and moving them back onto the PS5’s internal storage should be much faster than redownloading them or reinstalling them from a disk.

With that out of the way, it’s easy to determine from Digital Foundry’s analysis of PS5 load times that the best storage option available right now is by way of an external SATA SSD. Digital Foundry used a Samsung 870 QVO hooked up to the PS5 by a Sabrent USB to SATA adapter in its testing. That adapter plays a big role here, as it has a large enough bandwidth to let the PS5 perform at maximum capacity.

In tests across multiple games, load times on the external SATA SSD were almost always faster than any alternative, including in some cases the PS5’s internal SSD and the external NVMe SSD Digital Foundry also tested with. However, there were times when the SATA SSD performed on par with the other SSD storage options.

In Cyberpunk 2077 for instance, which has a 102 GB file size, the internal SSD of the PS5 loaded into the mission The Pickup in 33 seconds. Both the external SATA and NVMe SSDs loaded in a bit faster, at 31 seconds.

Load times in Fallout 4 show just how much faster external storage options can be though. Loading into Diamond City takes the PS4’s internal SSD around 17 seconds. However, the external SATA SSD took just 13 seconds to load the same area. The external NVMe SSD clocked in at around the same time.

As far as storing and playing games on an external HDD go, well, do it if you must. Not only is it slower to transfer data to and from an external hard drive, that performance also carries over to load times. In every single test conducted by Digital Foundry, the external HDD took markedly longer to load any game, with the most egregious time being for The Witcher 3’s Novigrad. The PS5’s internal SSD loads that area in around 47 seconds, as does the external SATA SSD. The NVMe SSD is a tad slower at 49 seconds. Loading this game off of an HDD will have you sitting around for over 10 more seconds though, with a load time near one full minute.

There is a clear oddity in the overall test results though. Using an external NVMe SSD, you won’t find the load times you expect. These high-end drives can read and write data faster than your average SATA SSD, however, that kind of performance may be limited to PCs. The PS5 is a different case, as it apparently has some limit on how fast PS4 titles to load. In this scenario, using an external NVMe SSD would leave performance on the table, whereas using an external SATA SSD, you’re getting pretty much the best bang for your buck.

It’s especially not worth getting an NVMe SSD when you consider the price. If you were to get the same hardware Digital Foundry used in its testing, the Samsung 980 EVO and the ASUS ROG Strix Arion, you could spend up to $300 just on external storage. The Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD and its adapter on the other hand would cost $150 at the very most.

A new TV show about one of Sweden’s most famous ice hockey players, Borje Salming, is in the works. The new biopic series is coming from NENT Group, which is a streaming company in the Nordics; the show will be made in English, however.

The show has big-name talent behind it, as Amir Chamdin created it and is lined up to direct; his show Partisan won acclaim and the top prize at Canneseries in 2020. Swedish actor Valter Skarsgard, the brother of Alexander Skarsgard (Godzilla vs. Kong) and Bill Skarsgard (It) and the son of Stellan Skarsgard (Chernobyl), is lined up to play Salming.

Martin Bengtsson (Agent Hamilton) is writing the series, which will follow Salming’s life from his early days to his stardom in the NHL. Filming is expected to begin in 2022.

The show is being produced by Warner Bros. International Television Production and it is slated to premiere on the Nordic streaming service Viaplay. It’s not immediately clear how people in other markets may be able to watch the untitled show.

Salming is involved in the production of the show, and he said to Variety that it’s “flattering and exciting that my story will become a series.” Skarsgard spent some time with Salming to get ready to hit the ice. “His attitude was always to do things his way and enjoy it, and I’ll try to bring the same approach to the task of playing him,” he said.

In the ’70s, the NHL was dominated by players from North America instead of Europe, and Salming was a pioneer in this respect. You can check out a great profile on Salming in the video above from the NHL.

Salming played in more than 1,000 NHL games from 1973-1990, scoring 150 goals. He played every season except for his last with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Salming was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame in 1996.

Your first impression of Astria Ascending will probably be that it’s a fantastical side-scrolling turn-based RPG that borrows several cues from the likes of Final Fantasy. The character designs, the music, and even the game’s logo all lead you to believe that the seminal RPG series is a core influence. You’d be right, and there’s a reason for that.

Kazushige Nojima, who has been with the franchise as a scenario writer since the original Final Fantasy 7, is currently working on the wave of new stories in that universe with Remake, Ever Crisis, and First Soldier. He’s also the scenario writer for Astria Ascending. Hitoshi Sakimoto, who helped compose the music for Final Fantasy XII and Tactics, is lead composer on this new game as well, lending his talents to building a whimsical world through music. (And you also may recognize the distinct character designs of Akihiko Yoshida, who’s done artwork for much of Final Fantasy and Nier).

But what is Astria Ascending? It’s important to note that its core development is in the hands of Artisan Studios, a French-Canadian team that focuses on 2D RPGs. Artisan’s first game was Super Neptunia RPG, and you can definitely see where Astria Ascending’s presentation style comes from. But this new game’s story is said to be a mature one, where adult heroes take on the responsibility of protecting an illustrious world called Orcanon. Director Julien Bourgeois says that the goal was “to explore how people cope in extraordinary times,” and that “each hero has their own perspective, but it’s the relationships they form with one another that truly bring the story to life.” With this collaboration between Artisan and a few big names in the JRPG space, you can imagine there’s more prestige expected in Astria Ascending.

I was able to correspond with both Nojima-san and Sakimoto-san about Astria Ascending to dig into what it is about this new game in particular that’s going to carve out a unique place among the big-name RPGs they’ve worked on. And I get the feeling that this is a sort of clean slate, without the pressures of a major franchise, where they can try something new.

Storytelling From The Perspective Of Kazushige Nojima

When asked about what makes Astria Ascending stand out, Nojima told me, “I would say it’s the age of our heroes. They may be older than the typical party of heroes.” That can be a tricky thing to reflect in a story, so I asked him about how he designed characters well into adulthood. “Regardless of the in-game world’s design, if a character’s age is close to your own, you must be careful so that they don’t reflect your personal habits and behaviors; it will diminish the feeling of stepping into a fantasy world and your players will notice that,” Nojima stated. He continued, “So, this time I paid special attention to creating a fantasy world with a strong consciousness [of that].”

Characters are, of course, always key to telling a meaningful story, and their backgrounds seem to be important to understanding the stakes of Astria Ascending. “We establish the elements required for each character and the game world–their individual techniques, how to obtain them, where they are needed, then [their place in the world] itself). Then we mixed them into the settings and scenarios to make that world real,” Nojima explained. Although we’ve yet to see how these ideas manifest in the actual game, the expectation is that we’ll see cohesion between narrative and gameplay.

Nojima explained that this story–said to be a grand tale of sorts–is contained within a few weeks’ time in that world, but several complementary and heavy plot threads could lead your imagination in filling out the world. “Players will have some room to interpret and think about those details and elements. Allowing players to contemplate and consider these details is part of the game’s spirit,” Nojima said.

Although quite vague in specifics, he attributes this as “part of the reason why Astria Ascending can be thought of as a mature experience.”

Saving the world can be more complicated than beating the big bad evildoer or attacking and dethroning god, and it seems Astria Ascending is taking note of that. When discussing themes and motifs found within its story, Nojima responded by throwing some questions back. “What is the true nature of a world living in harmony? What does a status of global harmony mean and require? Is achieving something like that our ultimate goal? Do we really even need such a thing? These are some of the questions posed by the game; I think there is always value in thinking about open-ended questions like this.”

Despite its influences and connections to them, Astria Ascending flexes a unique style, too. And from the side-scrolling perspective with hand-drawn art, I wondered if these features impacted the way Nojima created its story. “I like to take a different approach each time,” he said. “The mechanics, gameplay systems, and method of expression ultimately decide whether one of my scenarios fits the game I’m writing for. However, I don’t focus on being eccentric or consciously try to choose a different style to approach new projects with.”

After so many years being involved in crafting RPG stories, he’s seen how the genre has evolved and has directly influenced it in many ways. “There are many definitions of RPG; it is a complicated genre to define,” he told me before coming in with a little self-plug, saying, “But with that said, Final Fantasy 7 Remake is great.”

But from his perspective, Bloodborne has been an influence and stand-out in narrative design. “I’ve recently replayed Bloodborne after a long time. I love its storytelling style; you know, players need to feel like they’re really inside the game’s world rather than just reading or hearing about it, and Bloodborne is excellent at achieving that,” Nojima stated.

Looking at Astria Ascending in particular, Nojima feels as though he has something special, saying, “I’m proud that I was able to create a world without having an existing concept and story to build on top of. I designed this universe from a foundational, ground level as I studied Astria Ascending’s gameplay systems and mechanics.” With that approach, we should expect a synergy between what happens in the world of Orcanon and what you’re asked to do in order to save it.

How Hitoshi Sakimoto Composes A Fitting Soundtrack

“Listening to music is partially studying and partly a hobby. My favorite songs make me feel refreshed, so I channel that energy into my works and aim to provide the same experience to my audience,” Sakimoto said after telling me about his favorite genres of jazz and fusion. While those feelings have informed his approach to the Astria Ascending soundtrack, which sounds closer to a grand orchestra. And he’s indicated as much, saying, “I added many classical layers and sounds, and supplement the overall worldview through sound.”

But how does he know what he wants to create for a video game in particular? “For me, the interaction during the production process is the real thrill of creating music for video games, so I try to stay involved during that stage,” Sakimoto said. “My general approach to a soundtrack is also dependent on the individual project itself, and from there I can focus on musical devices and each piece’s performance. When it comes to stories and game systems, it’s best to collaborate starting from the game’s initial conception phase, and the team behind Astria Ascending has worked hard to achieve this.”

In the same way I asked Nojima about what he’s seen in the RPG genre over the years working within it, I wanted to know Sakimoto about how he’s seen music and game soundtracks evolve. “I don’t think there are any major technical changes other than the dynamic changes in the songs,” he said. “But from the perspective of composition, the multiplicity of compositional direction has really improved my skills. However, it seems that a tidy, flawless sound has become more commonplace overall. Personally, I need more character, that rougher or irregular musical measures in my work.”

With his name attached to so many renowned games, from Radiant Silvergun to Valkyria Chronicles to the aforementioned Final Fantasy games, I wanted to know what keeps him creative over a long career. “After reflecting on the drastic changes in video games over the past 30 to 40 years, I would have never been able to use the same processes I used during the start of my career as a routine approach,” he said. I’m always facing unknown scenarios and learning through trial and error.”

“I started my career back during my time as a student. At that point in time, I thought that when I grew up (even though I wasn’t a child then), the job of composing music would be standardized and I’d be able to breeze through it,” Sakimoto recalled. “I was surprised to find that the more experience I gained, the more things I realized I still didn’t know. But as I got used to this situation, I’ve found comfort in it and have steadily proceeded.”

He concluded his thoughts with a bit of a knowledge dart, saying, “There is no grand secret for my creative process and drive, but learning to willingly face the unknown is important.”

Sakimoto also shares a sort of kinship with Nobuo Uematsu, the legendary composer who’s best known for creating most Final Fantasy’s greatest songs. As a friend and mentee of Uematsu, Sakimoto revealed, “I actually have rarely talked about composition with Mr. Uematsu, we usually just talk about our favorite music and small household affairs. It is a pity, but I still learned many things from him about how to live as a composer. Since I know very few senior composers, chatting with Mr. Uematsu is still a treasured opportunity to me. I view him as my loving teacher and we are definitely not on a similar level.”

What’s apparent from both Nojima and Sakimoto’s answers is that the DNA of Final Fantasy is closely woven into prominent parts of Astria Ascending by virtue of its creators. Sakimoto said the best way to understand how music will influence and impact the experience of Astria Ascending is to see it in the game, and that’s also true of the way the work and influence of Sakimoto and Nojima will affect how the game’s pieces will fall into place. You’ll be able to do that sometime this year when Astria Ascending launches on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X|S (and Game Pass), PC, and Nintendo Switch.

For some competitive first-person shooter players, there’s a hill you can never seem to surmount. You might excel at planning and have an excellent sense of the game; you know how your opponents think and where they’ll be, and you know how to outsmart them. You carefully plan your ambush, lying in wait with a superior plan–but when you get your opponent in your sights, they overpower you with superior aim and twitch shooting skills. You might have superior planning, but in many FPS scenarios, fast reactions can and often do win the day.

In Lemnis Gate, though, your tactics are often much more important than your twitch skills. The competitive FPS combines the planning and execution of real-time strategy games with the on-the-ground play of a character-based shooter, creating a sort of turn-based FPS that values out-of-the-box planning and preparation.

Winning is all about timing in Lemnis Gate, which we quickly learned in our recent hour-long hands-on session with the game. The idea is that Lemnis Gate’s matches take place as a series of time loops, each spanning 25 seconds. When you take your turn, you dispatch a character onto the map to complete an objective–say, to grab an item and return it to a teleporter on your side of the map. You have 25 seconds to do that, and your turn ends. Your opponent then takes their turn, dropping a character into the same 25 seconds you just played; they see your character run out and do whatever it is you did on your turn, but they have the opportunity to grab the resource first or shoot your character, stopping them from accomplishing their goal. The 25-second time loop changes thanks to their actions, and then it’s your turn again. You might kill their character so that your character survives and grabs the objective, for example, changing the loop again.

In a one-on-one game, that process continues until each player has dispatched five characters into the loop, and the winner is whoever nabs the most objectives when the 25-second time loop finally is completed. (When your opponent is taking their turn, you can fly around in a drone to survey the map and see everything that’s happening during the time loop.) So Lemnis Gate isn’t about playing against another player like in Call of Duty or Apex Legends–it’s about playing against the recording of another player. Since you’re not fighting an active player but instead reacting to what they already did, you don’t usually need those super-tight aiming skills that might define high-level play in other FPS games.

“We specifically designed the game to be strategic and skillful at the same time,” game director James Anderson explained in an interview with GameSpot. “We wanted players to be able to win by outsmarting or out-thinking their opponents. We reward creative thinking and outlandish setups and stuff like that.”

Those potential setups come from another aspect of Lemnis Gate: its characters. Each time you run through the time loop on one of your turns, you send in a different character from your squad of five. Each one has a different set of weapons and special abilities–one character can engage a brief speed boost, another can drop turrets every few seconds, another sprays toxic waste that damages enemies that walk over it. There’s a sniper, a character sporting a rocket launcher, and a gunner with your standard assault rifle-and-grenade loadout.

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“Because the whole game’s set in a time loop, you can actually use causality as a gameplay mechanic and defeat your opponent just by setting things up in a way that they didn’t expect or positioning your operatives and your abilities, placing mines and turrets and stuff like that,” Anderson said. “If you can find a great strategy, then the mental aspect of the game can actually support and, in some cases, outweigh your twitch aim skills, right? Obviously, the best players in the world are going to have both of those things, a cunning mind and great twitch skills, but we wanted to kind of even the playing field and provide a shooter where you don’t need to be 100% accurate with every pixel-perfect headshot to win. You can actually rely on your mental skills a little more than perhaps a regular shooter.”

Our hands-on session included two game types: a one-on-one competition in which your goal is to grab four floating resource orbs and return them to the aforementioned teleporter, and a two-on-two mode, where players shoot at several free-standing generators scattered around the map to capture them and score points. In both cases, things got hectic in a hurry, highlighting how much you need to have battlefield awareness and solid planning in order to be victorious. By the end of a one-on-one match, 10 characters are running around the relatively tight maps. You not only need to have a plan in place for what you want to do with each turn, but you have to be aware of what you’ve already done–fire a rocket in the wrong place or step through another character’s line of fire, and you could be taking out your own team thanks to friendly fire, damaging your ideal time loop.

“…We wanted to kind of even the playing field and provide a shooter where you don’t need to be 100% accurate with every pixel-perfect headshot to win.”

In the two-on-two mode, things get even more complex. There, players have teammates backing them up, bringing the total number of characters who appear in the 25-second time loop up to 20. It’s easy for the match to become a confusion of turrets, mines, rockets, and characters scuttling around, but your goal is to shoot at several stationary towers to capture them. The team with the most captured stations at the end of the loop wins, and like in King of the Hill modes in other games, a captured tower won’t stay captured if the other team shoots it, allowing for things to swing drastically.

The map we played had several tight lanes characters could move down, and the possibility of having two characters on each team dropping mines and turrets meant that map control became much more important–and difficult to manage. There’s also the matter of when you bring out certain characters; you don’t want to lead with your sniper, for example, because they won’t have any targets to hit. And since you only have 25 seconds to make your moves, you still need to be quick, careful, and on-point; if you miss your shots and the timer runs out, you’ll essentially waste a turn.

“The thing that gives us the most freedom is the fact that in our game, you don’t play one character, you play all characters,” Anderson said. “So whatever the player does on the other end, you have the equivalent to throw back at them, right? If, for example, take the guy with the rocket launcher, Death Blow. If your opponent takes him and blows up all your guys with Death Blow, it’s like, ‘Oh, man, that devastated me.’ Well, then on your round, you can actually just do the same back to them. We’ve found that because you can play multiple characters, it kind of stabilizes and equalizes the playing field quite well.”

While we only got a short look at Lemnis Gate, taking on a few matches of each game type, expect there to be even more strategy at play over time. The preview build we played gave a glimpse of how meta progression will work–you earn experience points over time when you play, and that progression will unlock new items over time. Most of them will be cosmetic, Anderson said, but you’ll also earn some new equipment as you develop expertise and gain XP with specific weapons and characters.

That equipment, like new weapons or different kinds of secondary gear, will allow you to further customize your team, Anderson said. You might get a different version of the sniper rifle with slightly different stats, maybe increasing the size of its magazine at the cost of its accuracy. The idea is that these customizations will be tradeoffs, so it won’t be that players who put in more time have more dominant weapons. Instead, over time, you’ll create a team that’s tuned more to how you play and your needs on the battlefield.

And ultimately, that’s the kind of thinking developer Ratloop Games Canada wants you to be doing–considering your FPS battles in a different way. Anderson said the studio is looking back to the early days of the FPS genre, when its ideas were first solidifying.

“I grew up on stuff like Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Descent, these kind of early first person shooters where they were really just being invented, right?” Anderson said. “And every new game that came out back then, there weren’t really rules about what was supposed to be in them and what wasn’t. The concept of the modern genre didn’t really exist back then, so every time you played a new game was, ‘Okay, what’s this game about?’ And it was kind of a lot less strict in terms of thinking or design. So we wanted to kind of do a throwback to those kind of days. where really the rules about what a shooter is and what a PvP online game is. They didn’t exist back then, and I think there’s a lot of areas which are still unexplored.”

Lemnis Gate is slated to release sometime this year on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Thanks to backward compatibility, it’ll also be available on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.