The Nintendo Switch Online library just got a bit beefier, thanks to the addition of four classic Sega Genesis titles. The subscription-based classic games platform is now host to Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, The Revenge of Shinobi, Landstalker and Crusader of Centy, joining around 30 pre-existing Genesis titles and many more NES, SNES and Game Boy releases. That’s right. Sonic and Mario are friends now.

For the uninitiated, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a tough-as-nails platformer that still gives nightmares to adults of a certain age. The Rise of Shinobi is a serviceable entry in the OG ninja-simulation franchise. Landstalker is a cult favorite action RPG with an isometric view and Crusader of Centy is a well-reviewed, yet relatively obscure, Zelda clone. Crusader of Centy is tough to find, with physical copies selling for thousands of dollars, so this is a boon for retro gaming enthusiasts. Here’s a video of all four games in action, so you can decide if you want to plunk down $50 for a yearly NSO Expansion Pack subscription.

As a note, these games are only available with a $50-yearly Expansion Pack subscription, though that also gets you access to N64 and Game Boy Advance titles. If you just want to play from a library of NES, SNES and Game Boy releases, go with the cheaper standard NSO subscription of $20 each year. Nintendo isn’t exactly speedy with these releases, with game drops around once a month, so check the full library before handing over your debit card information.

Sony announced the PlayStation Plus games lineup for July today. They include Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Alan Wake Remastered and Endling – Extinction is Forever. All three titles will be available on PS5 and PS4 for subscribers on the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) is a controversial installment in the long-running military shooter franchise. Set in the early 1980s, its plot borrows from a well-known (and largely baseless) real-world conspiracy theory about a Soviet spy named Perseus who supposedly infiltrated the US atomic weapons program. If you can get past its questionable premise and (arguably tone-deaf) Vietnam War flashback missions, you can enjoy classic Call of Duty shoot-em-up fare as you blast your way across East Berlin, Turkey, Moscow and other Cold War hotspots. In addition to the story mission, it includes the title’s Multiplayer and Zombies modes.

Activision

Meanwhile, Alan Wake Remastered is the 2021 remake of the now 13-year-old adventure title that was initially an Xbox 360 exclusive. The game puts you in the shoes of the title character, a successful author on vacation in the (fictional) Washington state town of Bright Falls. But after his wife mysteriously vanishes, he sets out on a nightmarish investigation that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The remastered version includes the case game and (initially DLC) expansions “The Signal” and “The Writer.”

Finally, Endling – Extinction is Forever is a third-person survival-adventure title that puts you in the paws of the last surviving fox. Set in a future reality where humans have exhausted Earth’s resources, leaving it in ruin, you must guide your three cubs to safety and save the species. Aside from its obvious thematic commentary about climate change, nature preservation and human excess, it provides fun (and relatively short) stealth gameplay using 2D movement in shifting 3D environments.

Herobeat Studios

The three games will be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers from July 4th through the 31st. In addition, Sony says you’ll have until next Monday, July 3rd, to claim June’s games, including NBA 2K23, Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Trek to Yomi.

For nearly eight years, Joe Tung was responsible for leading development on Riot’s hit MOBA, League of Legends. At the end of 2020, he left the company to cofound Theorycraft Games. Since then, the studio, which employs people who contributed to League, Valorant, Overwatch, the Halo series, Destiny and Apex Legends, has been quietly working away on its first project, a game codenamed Project Loki. Before today, only a handful of content creators and pro-gamers have had the chance to play Loki. That’s about to change, with Theorycraft announcing a two-day PC playtest that will start tomorrow, June 29th.

Theorycraft describes Project Loki as a squad-based hero battleground. Imagine a game that has MOBA-like heroes who need to nail skill shots to perform their best. Now, instead of pitting those characters against one another on a map with minion lanes and towers, you force them to fight on a large, Fortnite-inspired battleground. That’s the pitch of Project Loki, and the studio hopes it turns out to be the next game you decide to spend 10,000 hours playing with your friends. One thing Tung, whose past credits also include Halo: Reach, says is a core part of Project Loki is player creativity. Each session starts with you and your teammates choosing a group of heroes you think will win you the match, and will need to adapt your strategies on the fly.

Tung says Theorycraft Games is a “small and very independent game studio,” but it has the backing of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which took part in the company’s $50 million series B fundraising round last year. In other words, there’s a lot of money riding on the bet that Theorycraft can create the next LoL or Apex Legends. Expect to hear more about the game in the weeks and months ahead. You can sign up to playtest Project Loki on Theorycraft's website. 

The original free-to-play battle royale game Call of Duty: Warzone (now known as Warzone Caldera) will shut down definitively on September 21st. That will allow developers to focus on "future Call of Duty content including the current Warzone (originally called Warzone 2.0) free-to-play experience," Activision wrote in a blog post. 

All gameplay, player progression, inventories and online services will expire on that date. However, any Caldera content purchased in Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War or Vanguard will still be accessible in those games.

Warzone came along in 2020, featuring two gameplay modes (battle royale and plunder) plus a single map called Verdansk that supported up to 150 players at a time. It shared a battle pass, weapons and cosmetics with 2019's Modern Warfare. It was an immediate success, reportedly hitting 30 million players just 10 days after launch. 

The game was renamed Call of Duty: Warzone Caledera (after the 2021 Caledera map) following the release of Warzone 2.0 in November of 2022. Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 was recently renamed simply to Warzone, and Activision is encouraging original Warzone players to jump ship to that title. "Expect a vast amount of gameplay choices across three Battle Royale maps (including Season 04’s new map Vondel), as well as Ranked Play, the DMZ Beta featuring five different Extraction Zones, BlackCell offerings, and more," it wrote.

Some players aren't pleased, though, citing the fact that earlier battle royale games like Blackout from Black Ops 4 still have operating servers, while the original Warzone won't. Others are displeased that resources are being shunted to Warzone: Mobile, and some have pointed out that they'll lose all their Warzone cosmetics, according to Kotaku. 

Bandai Namco knows what to do when it turns anime or manga series into video games. Revealed at Summer Game Fest last week, Sand Land is the latest addition, with a big punchy poster on the show floor in Los Angeles, conveniently right next to an established hitmaker for the publisher, its Naruto (now Boruto) Ultimate Storm fighting series.

Sand Land, though? You may never have heard of it, but don’t let that put you off, because it’s a 2000s comic penned by legendary manga artist, Akira Toriyama. Yes, Dragon Ball creator, Akira Toriyama. The man who created the character designs for Chrono Trigger, Blue Dragon and the Dragon Quest series. And Toriyama’s creations have never looked better.

Sand Land is an action-adventure game where you’ll play as the rambunctious prince of the Devil, capital ‘d’, Beelzebub, as he explores a desert-themed world where water is a rare and costly resource. Demons and humans coexist in this world, with the human Sheriff Rao and the demon Thief accompanying Beelzebub on his adventure to solve the water crisis.

At SGF 2023 last week, I played a 15-minute demo that showcased a few parts of the game, including melee combat, exploration and two vehicles: a tank and, er, a golf cart. The demo kicked off with the trio fleeing a desert dragon, and after having steered the cart away from relentless attacks, the gang eventually had to cast off their supplies of water to escape.

Apparently, this is a beat-for-beat replication of how Sand Land plays out in the manga, and you can expect the game to follow the same storyline beats. That’s sometimes frustrating for games where you already know the story. For example, I know who dies in Dragon Ball’s Frieza saga, so it’s not a surprise when it happens in one of the several Dragon Ball video games. With Sand Land, however, many of us will be hearing the tale for the first time.

During my demo, the game split into two play styles. You’ll explore the desert, outposts, and towns with your vehicles but also set out on foot when you need to brawl with someone or interact with things appropriately. Bandai Namco has teased that you can customize vehicles within the game, adding different weaponry and components to improve performance or offer tactical advantages. I loved using the armor-piercing rounds. Sure, they had a low fire rate, but they obliterated almost anything. Vehicle controls are simple enough but vary depending on the type and whether they feature weapons or not. Don’t forget: my first Sand Land vehicle was a golf cart. There was no artillery option.

Bandai Namco

When not rolling around in a tank (which can be repaired if it takes damage), Beelzebub himself can go toe-to-toe with enemies in melee combat. He has a mix of weak attacks, dodge rolls and super attacks that will charge up as you battle enemies. If it sounds a bit… simple, well, it is. Bandai Namco isn’t reinventing the wheel here. More moves and support characters could help deepen the combat sections, so I’ll hold judgment for now, but it’s also worth remembering that this game is likely aimed at gamers younger than I. You will only ever control Beelzebub himself, but both of his aforementioned companions will eventually be able to assist in fights, although this wasn’t apparent in my demo.

The highlight of this early demo was confronting a gang of bandits. They gave off a mild Ginew Force vibe, which I wasn’t mad about. Each wielded different weapons and attacked differently, offering a nice opportunity to test out little devil’s combos, sending enemies high with a punch, only to jump up and slam them back to the ground.

Ensuring even these secondary characters are interesting is proof that, hopefully, the developers are ensuring Toriyama’s characters, and his offbeat humor and charm, make it onto consoles.

While there are some questionable lip-sync moments (at this point, all the voiceovers are Japanese), this generation of consoles and PCs offer more than enough power to replicate Toriyama’s detailed drawings. I gawped at the tank during my playthrough just because it looked so good. Imagine how long I’d stare at a tank I customized myself.

Sand Land will launch on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

You'll soon have a way to revisit Rocksteady's best-known games on a Nintendo handheld. Warner Bros. Games has revealed that Batman: Arkham Trilogy will release on the Switch sometime this fall. The bundle will include Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Arkham Knight as well as all the previously-released DLC for the trio. There's no mention of Switch-specific features, but Turn Me Up Games (involved in Switch ports for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and It Takes Two) is responsible for the adaptation.

Arkham Asylum revolves around Batman's fight against The Joker and allies as they take over the game's namesake asylum. Arkham City expands the battle to Gotham and includes more classic villains, such as Mr. Freeze and The Penguin. Arkham Knight adds its titular supervillain and introduces more open-world gameplay that includes a drivable Batmobile.

For the most part, all three games earned a reputation for an engaging story and varied gameplay that included combat, stealth and puzzle solving. The brawls were a particular highlight — you were rewarded for performing seamless combos while dodging opponents that can come from multiple directions at once. The series arguably popularized a fight formula that has surfaced in games ranging from Spider-Man to Shadow of Mordor. Throw in the animated Batman' series voice cast (such as Mark Hamill and the late Kevin Conroy) and it's easy to see the appeal for fans of the caped hero.

This won't thrill Switch fans who were hoping for a version of Rocksteady's upcoming Suicide Squad game. This is more a bid to reach an untapped audience than to set the stage for the studio's first new game in nearly eight years. Still, you might not mind if you're either new to the franchise or want to revisit the series. If nothing else, it may serve as a palate cleanser for those who thought Gotham Knights missed the mark.

It’s back again. This time, it’s real-time. With Final Fantasy XVI, the series’ creators have decided that the future of the franchise is action-centric and storyline driven. And it’s been inspired by epic fantasy series from television. Until now, the Final Fantasy games have never quite had their angry, moody dark moment. With nuanced, occasionally horny characters and often a lot of violence, is this the series’ moody teenager era?

FFXVI is the first game in the series made for the PS5, expanding the detail of both character models and environments. While the significant characters move and emote realistically, Square Enix has kept an artistic touch to character design. The most impressive parts are the environments, with gorgeous forests, medieval fortresses and major landmarks towering over the usual fields and cliffs you’ll be exploring and fighting at. The quality isn't consistent enough in an era of games like Horizon: Forbidden West, Dead Space and Elden Ring, though. I noticed when character models and environments weren’t given the same attention as key scenes and chapters.

Unlike previous Final Fantasy games, while there’s still an ensemble cast, you’ll only ever control the protagonist Clive — yes, an interesting choice in hero name, one that even some in-game characters are... surprised by. You’ll eventually be able to offer simple commands to your faithful wolf, Torgal, and you’ll be joined by other companions that will fight entirely independently of you. These include your childhood friend Jill, the mysterious daddy of thunder, Cid, and several more spoiler(ish) additions.

Fortunately, and unlike an awful lot of non-playable battle allies in RPGs, they can usually attract the attention of a monster or two and even finish off enemies by themselves. Still, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s an even looser party battle dynamic than its predecessor Final Fantasy XV, let alone older titles.

The tale of FFXVI is achingly Game Of Thrones-y. It starts out as a battle of warring states, of religion versus monarchy, wars for the sake of controlling resources — or escaping inhospitable land. Sometimes the inspiration is a little on the nose: Dad dies early on? Check. Mysterious wolves? Check. Creepy mother-son relations? Check. However, the series has always drawn on pop-culture inspiration over the years: Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have all been tugged at for monster names, storylines and more.

Within the opening hours, we meet Clive, his sickly (but ‘chosen’) younger brother Joshua and their childhood friend, Jill. Clive and Joshua’s mother, the Cersei-styled Anabella Rosfield, swiftly betrays her family and the entire nation. The leader, her husband, is slaughtered in front of Joshua, whose latent powers as a dominant fully awakened due to this trauma. Arguably even more harrowing, a chocobo (the game series’ giant bird mounts) gets bricked in the head and someone kills an owl. This all happens in the span of a couple of minutes.

In the form of the giant fire Eikon (elemental deity), Phoenix, Joshua burns enemies and allies alike to ash, and as Clive watches, horrified, he somehow unleashes a new, never-before-seen Eikon of his own, Ifrit, who has a surprisingly grisly encounter with Phoenix. Clive wakes up with no memory of this, however, while a foreboding figure in a hood watches all of this unfold, So yeah, the perfect pilot episode of a fantasy series on HBO. The superb voice acting and writing really helps sell the melodrama and seriousness of the story. For a series often criticized for cliche or awkward translations, this is all so much better. The voice actor for Cid is Ralph Ineson – who was even in GoT. Get ready for lots of Yorkshire accents: It’s time for all to learn what “ta-ra” means. Square Enix notes that, even if you pick the Japanese language setting, the game’s lip sync is set to the English version.

Square Enix

If you haven’t played a Final Fantasy title before — and Square Enix is positioning this as an action game for that kind of player — Ifrit is usually a run-of-the-mill summonable demon. He’s rarely a crucial plot pivot, so it’s cool to see the series subvert expectations and pay tribute to the games of the past. There are lots of Easter eggs like this, both subtle and obvious.

The crystal theme, originally penned for the first Final Fantasy game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, is remixed and dropped in during multiple points of the game, while Cid (a character found in every FF game, either as a non-playable character or party member) has a daughter called Mid — a reference to the grandson of Final Fantasy V's version of Cid.

While other games, including spin-offs and Final Fantasy XV, have touched on real-time combat, Final Fantasy XVI goes all in. It’s dangerous new territory for a series with some die-hard fans, but possibly a necessary move to attract a new audience.

But it’s not Devil May Fantasy. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly deep system on either the default or story-centric difficulties. I found myself leaning on abilities I knew could do sustained damage, doing well-timed dodges and countering.

There are layers to battles – but they’re easy to ignore. Mid-game skills like the ability to jump and then kick-off an enemy, or launch yourself into the air with a pull attack normally used to sling smaller enemies toward you, offer some more vertical approaches to combat. However, I rarely needed to figure this out during battles, and it was more about relentlessly attacking and paying attention to incoming attacks that enemies usually signposted. Clive will bolster his initial fire attacks, courtesy of Phoenix, with skills from other Eikons, adding new forms of attack or counters. If there’s some kind of elemental scissors-paper-rock dynamic, I didn’t notice it, or missed an explanation.

The major difference between action- and story-focus modes is the inclusion of several accessories that make FFXVI one of the most accessible (and forgiving) action RPGs I’ve ever played. You’ll start the game with a handful of accessories like the Ring of Timely Focus which slows down when an evadable attack approaches, giving you ample time to dodge. The Ring of Timely Strikes will unleash a barrage of complex attacks just by spamming the square button. I played with the Ring of Timely Focus occasionally equipped, helping me to hold my own in more difficult scenes filled with enemies, but tried to fight the bigger enemies (and bosses) with only my own skills. There is a new game plus mode that offers hardier enemies and challenges, but I haven’t had time to play it yet.

The bosses, while spectacular, have a tendency towards being damage sponges – especially the Eikon-on-Eikon fights that typically include three or more transitions in a single battle. Once you’ve figured out the timing of dodges to attacks, it’s often repeated to boredom. But hey, they always look cool. Some of these boss fights are.. incredibly epic – and I mean Bayonetta-level of ridiculous. There aren’t many boss battles in video games that reach the level of Clive’s duel against Bahamut…

Final Fantasy XVI also has a wonderful hidden weapon: Its own built-in wiki. Active Time Lore, a play on active time battles from the series’ arguable heyday of the late-’90s, not only fills in the narrative gaps plaguing FF but plenty of other politically tilted RPGs.

Both FFXII and FFXIII suffered from lots of fictional terminology and complicated back-story. With the latter, developers relegated anything close to a glossary to menus that were difficult to navigate and consequently rarely investigated.

Square Enix

Active Time Lore, which can be summoned from the touchpad during almost any scene or area, brings a convenient shortcut to that tip-of-the-tongue, which-warring-state-is-he-from-again quandary. It’s an elegant solution, inspired by Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray feature. It also ensures gamers don’t come undone when there are so many political maneuverings, time skips, false deaths and hooded strangers.

All of this is augmented by Vivian, a character whose sole purpose appears to be educating Clive about the wider political implications of his fight to dismantle the political structure around huge magical crystals (by destroying them), dominants (by besting them, usually) and freeing indentured magic-wielding slaves. All while seeking vengeance for his brother.

Talking with her at your base of operations will open a handy personnel chart of all the main characters, their associates, and the rest. It also comes with a chronological slider, so you can guess who’ll betray who next. If you came undone during a season of Game of Thrones, you might understand why this could be needed.

Square Enix

Final Fantasy XVI is different – perhaps due to the producer, Naoki Yoshida, who worked on the online MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV as both producer and director. But with Final Fantasy VII Remake (including the next chapter) offering the party battles I want, I don’t see a problem in Square Enix taking the series in this direction. I miss the party battle dynamics, but I didn’t feel hamstrung by my own mediocre action game reflexes or skills. If you are looking for challenging battles, the game comes with post-game content aimed at completionists and the muscular of thumb. But for those looking for a fantasy adventure with a plot that’s kept me hooked – so far – the sixteenth Final Fantasy delivers.

Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based in their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.

What’s behind (hidden) door number one

Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.

Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.

Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)

“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”

“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.

“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”

The building blocks of a cursed village

Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.

Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them 'story thread templates' and they're at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”

Hidden Door

The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village curse, “you don't know what it is,” Mason said. “You don't know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”

Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.

Safety (and inclusivity) first

We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.

“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one's ever tried that before’ or ‘that's gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.

“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that's not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We're not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”

Hidden Door

The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”

That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they're respected throughout the system,” she said. “There's no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It'll be randomly assigned.”

Go ahead, snoop around

Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes and other forms of mass violence, players can do most anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It's the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.

But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You're discovering new locations that get generated as you're playing these stories and the world grows.”

And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.

“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you're persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”

Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.

“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody's version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.

In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward, or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.

“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That's been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”

16 secret herbs and language models

Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.

We use a variety of models, some of them were building on open source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It's not just one big LLM, it's decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if it can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”

“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that is just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.

This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.

Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)

While the game is designed to be family friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the table top for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.

“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”

Hidden Door

The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and inclusion of story arcs.

There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you're on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don't like you or you don't have the kind of relationship. That is something that's very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”

The future of interactive fandom

“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn't raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out, and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”

“I do think there's a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don't currently have.”

If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.

After dozens of stories, we’re just about wrapped with our coverage of Summer Game Fest 2023. Following the cancellation of E3 back in March, we had a smaller, stripped-back experience at SGF. It began... before it all began, with Sony holding its own PlayStation Showcase livestream on May 24th. It was a pretty packed show, featuring Bungie's Marathon, Haven's Fairgame$, a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake, more info on Final Fantasy XVI and Spider-Man 2, and a release date for Alan Wake II. There was also the Project Q handheld streaming device. 

Then came Summer Game Fest with an opening night event on Thursday, June 8th. We got a gameplay reveal for Mortal Kombat 1, a new (delayed to 2024) release date for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and a handful of smaller reveals like Sand Land and Sonic Superstars. There were a lot of sequels and free-to-play MMO trailers, but it was a generally low-key affair, with fewer big names than we've come to expect from the team behind The Game Awards.

The Day of the Devs and Devolver streams immediately following Summer Game Fest's live show were a little more successful, with interesting games from smaller studios, including Baby Steps, Beastieball, Cocoon, Hauntii, Helskate, Simpler Times and Viewfinder.

It wasn't until Sunday's Xbox event that we got an event filled with the AAA announcements you'd expect out of E3. Microsoft had a customarily dense show that featured new announcements and some release dates (or windows) for known games. Among the games featured were Avowed, Fable, South of Midnight, Persona 3 Reload, Forza Motorsport, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clockwork Revolution. We also finally got an Xbox Series S that has 1TB of built-in storage.

On Monday, we saw a pair of smaller shows. First up was Ubisoft, which featured Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a trio of Assassin's Creed games, a new Crew game and a fresh Prince of Persia title. Later that day it was Capcom's turn, and they showed off Exoprimal, again, and offered an intriguing look at Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, which looks like a unique third-person action game. Finally, because it's 2023, there was also an indefinite delay to the company's almost-forgotten AAA sci-fi game, Pragmata. That's a game that was announced for PlayStation 5 way back in June 2020 — before we even knew what the PS5 looked like — and this is its second delay after initially being expected in 2022.

We’ll have more coverage in the coming weeks, and will update this post with links when they go live. For now, enjoy our analysis, previews and all the other big announcements from SGF 2023.

Analysis

Summer Game Fest 2023 and the stagnant state of the industry

I published this story about the state of AAA gaming on the eve of Summer Game Fest. After a week stuffed full of gaming announcements, I feel exactly the same way. — Jessica Conditt, Senior Reporter

Generative AI can help bring tomorrow's gaming NPCs to life

This story from senior reporter (and Engadget's AI expert) Andrew Tarantola looks at the history of NPCs from if-then programming through to finite-state-machines, decision and behavior trees, GOAPs, and modern AIs in games like The Last of Us, and then looks to the future to see how generative AI might impact the future of gaming.

Ubisoft needs a reboot

At some point in the last console generation, Ubisoft lost its soul. It was a piecemeal erosion process that started in 2015, and it finally resulted in a complete identity collapse somewhere between the studio’s unironic rollout of in-game NFTs and its sixth delay of Skull & Bones. Ubisoft has 40 years of AAA hits and weird licensing deals to its name, and it used to be a pillar of European innovation — but in 2023, it’s selling live-service blandness, mobile ports with microtransactions and unreliable release dates. What even is Ubisoft anymore? — Jessica Conditt

The Starfield direct has me excited for Bethesda's new ambitious RPG

Senior video producer Brandon Quintana shot this video immediately after Microsoft's Starfield Direct on Sunday, outlining why, after a fuller look at the game, he's more excited than ever for Bethesda's new ambitious RPG.

Why the 'Oxenfree II' team became Netflix's first game studio

In early 2021, Night School was in the market for a partnership. It ended up being acquired by Netflix, becoming the company's first game studio. Now, Night School is gearing up to launch its first game for the streaming giant. But that's not the end of Netflix's ambitions.

Game previews

'Alan Wake II' stands out in a sea of sequels

I’m nervous about Saga’s fate in Alan Wake II — and that only makes me more excited for the full game. This is first-and-foremost a linear, narrative-driven experience, and it looks spooky as hell. – Jessica Conditt

‘Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon’ has fast battles with customizable mechs

Armored Core, one of the longest-running mech battle series ever, hasn’t been seen in over a decade. Now, developer FromSoftware, flying high from Elden Ring and Dark Souls glory, is returning to mechs, with what it says is a remastered, reimagined take on robot combat. It’s time for a mech gaming boom. – Mat Smith, UK Bureau Chief

‘Cocoon’ is worth getting excited about

Cocoon is a game that makes perfect sense while you're playing it. That would be an unremarkable achievement if it wasn't also a game that forces you to use its levels to solve themselves. It’s the debut title from Geometric Interactive, a studio from folks that previously worked on the award-winning puzzle platformers Limbo and Inside. At Summer Game Fest 2023 I had around half an hour to play through the game’s opening, and it has stuck with me more than anything else I saw at the show. In my mind it’s the game of the show. – Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

'Forza Motorsport' wants you to drive forever

The long-overdue next title in the Motorsport series (it’s been over five years since the last!) has a bunch of new features, improved physics, better AI and looks absolutely fantastic at 4K/60. The most interesting thing about it to me is that it could well be the last distinct Motorsport game, as Microsoft is moving the series to a game-as-a-service model. In the age of Game Pass, that makes perfect sense to me, and I can’t wait to start driving this October. – Aaron Souppouris

'Immortals of Aveum' first look: A little more magic and this might be wonderful

When I saw the announcement trailer for Immortals of Aveum in the winter of 2022, I was surprised by my own interest in the game. Today, I remain interested in Immortals of Aveum and I think I’ve figured out why. There aren’t a ton of first-person action games that rely on mechanics other than guns — Dishonored, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hexen come to mind, but it’s a small field overall. That might be one reason Immortals stands out as something fresh, but it’s also nice to see a new, AAA-level game that’s single-player and narrative-driven with a contained campaign, rather than an open world of live-service features. – Jessica Conditt

‘Lysfanga’ is what happens when hack-and-slash meets tactical time travel

Lysfanga’s isometric views may conjure up memories of Hades, but this is a different kind of game. While you’ll still be slicing and dicing monsters and enemies, protagonist Imë combines her spells and weapon combos with the ability to revert time and do it all over again, differently. The second time around, her shadow from the previous timeline will continue to rush into the enemies. While some action-game prowess helps, you’ll only beat most levels by thinking them through before you act. The controls and play style aren’t remotely similar, but Lysfanga reminded me of old Fire Emblem games, where careful planning decided a fight before it even begins. Even in this early demo, the game offers some incredibly satisfying moments when all your attacking clones come together to wipe out all the enemies in mere seconds. – Mat Smith

‘Mortal Kombat 1’ made a great first impression

Ed Boon's on-stage gameplay reveal of Mortal Kombat 1, the latest entry in the storied fighting game franchise, was one of the stand-out moments of an otherwise subdued opening event. At a private event after the show, Brandon Quintana and Mat Smith sat down to play some MK1 and came away impressed.

'Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown' is a Metroidvania-style platformer coming in 2024

After a small reveal at Summer Game Fest’s opening night event, Ubisoft did a deeper dive into the game during Monday’s “Forward” stream. After that, senior video producer Brandon Quintana got his hands on an early build of the game and had a blast.

'33 Immortals' first look: Defying a god is more fun with friends

Can you imagine assembling 33 players for a 25-minute raid? 33 Immortals plans to do exactly that. Channeling the animation style of retro cartoons (and a little Banner Saga), 33 Immortals is a multiplayer roguelike top-down action game from the creators of Spiritfarer. In this early build of the game I played with five others and had a lot of fun, even if some technical issues spoiled the party a little. I’m excited to play a roguelike as part of a mob, and I'm curious to see what the other character types will be. – Mat Smith

‘Under the Waves’ is a sad but relaxing oceanic adventure

Parallel Studio’s Under the Waves is a calming game. Between the cheers and jeers from Crash Team Rumble players (possibly employees) nearby, I was diving. Diving deeper and deeper into the inky blue, chasing a jettisoned shipping container as it bounced off rocks, spilling soft toys and revealing a mysteriously abandoned submarine hidden deeper still. While I might have been relaxed, I also felt a little unsettled. In a lot of ways, whether it’s the story yet to be revealed or the uneasy tension that is touched on regularly, it reminds me of Firewatch, even if it’s all set undersea. – Mat Smith

All the other big announcements at Summer Game Fest 2023

You can find all of our coverage from Summer Game Fest right here, but here’s a chronological list of the announcements we think really moved the needle.

Thursday June 8th

• You can play a demo of the goth Pinocchio game 'Lies of P' right now

• 'Sand Land' is a new adventure game based on a manga by the creator of Dragon Ball

• 'Sonic Superstars' gives classic gameplay another modern makeover

• ‘Like A Dragon Gaiden’ revives Kiryu on November 9th 2023

• 'Final Fantasy VII Remake: Rebirth' is delayed to early 2024

• 'Baby Steps' is the 3D 'QWOP' we've all been waiting for

Sunday June 11th

• Take a peek at Xbox's Fable reboot in action

• 'South of Midnight' is a Southern Gothic monster adventure from Compulsion Games

• Obsidian's fantasy RPG 'Avowed' is coming to PC and Xbox in 2024

• 'Senua's Saga: Hellblade II' will arrive in 2024

• 'Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth' will make you see Ichiban's bare butt in early 2024

• Xbox Series S will be available with 1TB storage in black for $349 on September 1st

• 'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' will take you back to Night City on September 26th

• 'Cities Skylines II' will arrive on PC and consoles October 24th

• 'Metaphor: ReFantazio' is a fantasy RPG from the team behind 'Persona 5'

• 'Clockwork Revolution' is a time-traveling RPG of steampunk anarchy

• Overwatch 2's story missions and new PvP mode will land on August 10th

• 'Persona 3 Reload' updates a PS2 classic for modern platforms in early 2024

Monday June 12th

• Ubisoft’s ‘Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’ arrives on December 7th 2023

• 'Skull and Bones' is still alive, will apparently have a closed beta in August

• First 'Star Wars Outlaws' gameplay trailer offers 10 minutes of scoundrel wish fulfillment

• Capcom's Pragmata has been delayed for a second time

• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is an action game with traditional Japanese aesthetics

Rockstar Games co-founder and former creative director Dan Houser has a new company. Absurd Ventures says it will build stories, characters and worlds across different mediums — including but not limited to video games. The 49-year-old left Rockstar Games in 2020.

“Storytelling. Philanthropy. Ultraviolence.” That’s the tagline for Absurd Ventures, which launches with the two-minute video below that shows more than it tells about the company’s creative, abstract and edgy vibe. However, a press release does provide a more tangible description, describing Absurd as “building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a diverse variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.”

It would be a vast understatement to say Houser was a central figure during his 22 years at Rockstar, one of gaming’s all-time great success stories. He co-founded the legendary studio in 1998 with his brother Sam Houser, Jamie King, Terry Donovan and Gary Foreman. As Rockstar grew, he remained an integral part of the company’s creative works, including producing five Grand Theft Auto games and serving as a writer for every GTA installment to date (including Grand Theft Auto V) and both Red Dead Redemption titles. In addition, he did voice work in Grand Theft Auto III and its two standalone expansion games.