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While we’ve known that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will let players choose and swap between main character Eivor’s gender throughout the campaign, a new video has shown how that process will work.

As discovered by @AccessTheAnimus, this video shows how Eivor’s gender selection is handled in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It is presented as a “DNA stream selection,” and players are then given the option to choose Male Eivor or Female Eivor’s “Memory-stream.”

DNA STREAM SELECTION

This was described by Narrative Director Darby McDevitt as a new feature that ensures both male and female versions of Eivor are considered canon.

The feature is backed up by new lore that upgrades the abilities of the Animus#AssassinsCreed Valhalla pic.twitter.com/SlV5Q0Bh7v

— AccessTheAnimus (@AccessTheAnimus) July 21, 2020

It appears this can be done at any point in the story, that it will not restart the game or take you back to the main menu, and all the player’s gear will remain intact.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s narrative director Darby McDevitt has previously confirmed that, although you can choose Eivor’s gender throughout the story, both male and female versions of Eivor are considered canon and that the “feature is backed up by new lore that upgrades the abilities of the Animus.”

This ability to switch the main character’s gender in-game is in contrast to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s in which the choice players made at the beginning of the game – between playing as Alexios or Kassandra, was the one they were stuck with. Furthermore, the official tie-in novel was written with Kassandra in the main role, meaning she was the canon version of the story.

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Speaking of differences between the two games, both Alexios and Kassandra lived in the world, you just chose to play as one, while in Valhalla, Eivor is the same no matter what gender you chose. How you play them is your choice, and McDevitt promises it will “reveal the nuances of its approach to canon when we can finally play it in Holiday 2020.”

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia on November 17, 2020. It will also be a launch title for both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but the dates of those are yet unknown.

We were able to get our hands-on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and we said it “looks to be, as is the tradition of the series, an iterative update on its predecessors. If the new approach to RPG design and gear-based progression has put you off the series, this slice of the game indicates that you’ll likely be unconvinced by Valhalla’s barely altered direction. But the few changes it makes to those systems suggests developer Ubisoft Montreal may have a newfound confidence in its RPG abilities, and a willingness to embrace more of the genre’s toolset.”

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

2K Games and developer Hangar 13 have revealed gameplay footage of Mafia: Definitive Edition, the from-the-ground-up remake of the original Mafia from 2002. The Mafia 1 remake will be released on September 25 for $39.99 or as part of the $59.99 Mafia: Trilogy, which also includes remastered (not fully remade) versions of Mafia 2 and Mafia 3. The latter is available now, though Mafia 1 won’t be downloadable until its release date next month.

The new 14-minute Mafia 1 video, which you can watch below, shows off the complete rebuild that Hangar 13 undertook, with assistance from some of the original developers at 2K Czech (nee Illusion Softworks). I sat down with Hangar 13 president and chief creative officer Haden Blackman to ask him about how the studio approached the revival of this well-loved but almost-20-year-old game.

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I asked Blackman what the impetus for this project was, seeing as how we’re still two years away from Mafia’s 20th anniversary. He said it was a matter of timing in a less obvious way. “It was a pitch that came from the team. We have a number of people on the team who worked on the original Mafia, and they saw it as a good opportunity as we were bridging the gap between Mafia 3 and the next project we’re working on. And I agreed.” So was it originally planned as a full-blown remake, or just a remaster? “A full-up remake was the original pitch,” he said. “I think that once we got into it, though, and we kind of started looking at all the things we could do, it became a little bit more than we originally anticipated.”

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It’s not a shot-for-shot remake, however. “We knew from the outset that the core narrative would hold up well,” he said. “There weren’t giant plot holes that we had to shore up. The mission flow — the number of missions — we knew would hold up. The tone and central themes and setting — the Prohibition era — we knew that all those things were things that would hold up. Then, when we started looking at the next layer, that’s where we said we needed to take things up to modern standards. The way in which we tell the story, the quality of the cinematics, the representation of certain characters.

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Blackman cites tweaks made to the story to give main character Tommy Angelo’s wife Sarah more than the literal one scene she had in the original game, in service of Tommy’s family-driven motivations in Mafia’s story, which is regarded as one of its strongest aspects. Its driving model has also been updated to give players a lot more freedom – literally, as speed limits were enforced by the in-game police. In Mafia: Definitive Edition, you’ll have the option to use the new driving model or stick with the version from the original game. “We’re trying to cater to new fans but also let the existing fans know that we knew that that was important to them.”

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The streets are also wider, and the layout of Lost Heaven has been tweaked slightly in order to have more visible waypoints for the player – a choice also fueled by the fact that draw distances are much greater now than they were in 2002 thanks to the power of modern hardware. All of this is in service to the core story and underlying gameplay. “The way that Mafia 1 originally worked, there were a lot of bespoke gameplay sequences that all were very specific to that specific mission,” Blackman added. “So we wanted to continue that and make sure that we had gameplay sequences that felt true to the original, but also have underlying mechanics that were really solid. So we brought in a lot of the cover shooting mechanics from Mafia 3 and polished those even further.”

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Finally, I asked Blackman about the tech side of things for this from-the-ground-up remake. “It’s built on [the Mafia 3 engine] as the foundation,” he said. “But we continued to make improvements to it.” For instance, the team added a new lighting model and environmental audio. As for next-gen versions – what with this releasing on the eve of the next-gen consoles release, Blackman said, “There’s nothing we can talk about right now” but added, “It’s definitely something we’re looking at.” He did say that Mafia: Definitive Edition will run in compatibility mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X, at the very least.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

The Destroy All Humans remake will contain a new level that was not included in the original PS2 and Xbox release. The mission, which was designed but did not make it into the game, has been restored and remade for the upcoming release.

The mission is called “The Wrong Stuff,” and it’s set in an Area 42 base (which is, essentially, the Destroy All Humans version of Area 51). You encounter this area in the middle of the game, and this mission has been inserted back into where it was originally going to appear.

You can see the brief trailer below.

Pandemic Studios, the developer of the original game, closed in 2009 after releasing The Saboteur. They are credited with the design of this new “lost” mission.

Destroy All Humans will release for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia on July 26.