As spotted by Wario64, SteamDB was recently updated with a new listing for "Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2." The changelog goes back to early December of 2024 and has been updated as recently as this afternoon.

Now, this could either be some weirdly specific but meaningless update on Steam's backend, or more likely, it indicates a Neverwinter Nights 2 remaster is on its way to Steam at some point. It wouldn't be unprecedented; Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition launched on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile platforms back in 2018, so the same treatment for the sequel is actually a long time coming.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is based on the D&D 3.5 edition rules and its story is largely isolated from the first game in the series. If you've played Baldur's Gate 3 you'll be broadly familiar with the character creation process, companion system, die-rolling, RNG, and turn-based combat.

Only because I just brought up Baldur's Gate 3, it's worth noting that while generally very well-received, the Neverwinter Nights games don't have quite the same beloved legacy as the Baldur's Gate series. With that said, if you are a big fan of D&D-based RPGs and haven't played Neverwinter Nights or its sequel, they're still very much worth playing, particularly if the sequel does end up getting a remaster.

There's a reason Baldur's Gate 3 occupies the coveted top spot on our list of the best RPGs to play right now.

Samantha Béart, who shot to fame as in their role as Karlach in 2023, tweeted "To the next studio that tries this: if your 'spiritual successor' to Disco Elysium does not involve creator Robert Kurvitz, then save both of us some time and miss me with that casting call." Ouch.

Béart clearly holds a lot of respect for Kurvitz and his work if they're not even willing to entertain offers from any Disco Elysium-related games that aren't involving him. Disco Elysium is a fantastic game, one I thoroughly enjoy, but it's wild to think it's had such an effect on people that they're willing to turn down work because the original creator isn't involved. I suppose when you're Karlach you get your pick of the jobs, though.

Disco Elysium was conceived during a drunken night in Tallinn, "We were just hanging around in total squalor and poverty," Kurvitz says. It went on to become a hit, but then the studio fell apart and many of the game's developers went their separate ways.

In just one day, two spiritual successors to the critically acclaimed RPG were announced. Neither of those studios have Robert Kurvitz working with them. The Disco Elysium creator set the game in the same world as his novel, Sacred and Terrible Air, which is an incredible title. It didn't do well, though. "It sold 1,000 copies," says Kurvitz. "So after that I succumbed to deep alcoholism."

Kurvitz made a new studio with DIsco Elysium lead artist Aleksander Rostov, Red Info. It's backed by NetEase, which did a u-turn on its Marvel Rivals mid-season rank reset just hours after it was announced.

If you want to play more things like Disco Elysium, check out all the best RPGs you can try now.

It turns out, if you dress Henry appropriately, he'll be more competent at specific tasks. If you choose to get a job with the blacksmith, Henry is given a room to stay in that comes with a blacksmith apron and some leather gloves. Pop them on and you'll get an extra five points to your craftsmanship skill.

This was spotted by a redditor who noted that other leather gloves have the same effect. They also noted that "The Spectacles that you can find add +5 to scholarship, which will speed up your reading of books!"

As well as hidden bonuses on clothes, there are perks you can gain by simply spending time on certain vocations and hobbies. Lab Dweller can be earned after spending "countless hours at the alchemist's table" and makes the effect of potions last longer and hangovers go away sooner. Handy if you're getting Henry on the ale.

There's another perk like this, Resistance, that gives you a permanent plus two to your Vitality if you spend "a lot of time on herbalism," so get gathering those nettles. One commenter noted that you get a similar perk by blacksmithing for a long time. It's called Hammerer and it causes heavy weapon attacks and blocks to use 10% less stamina.

[KCD2] Little Blacksmithing tip: Wear the Blacksmith Apron(+3) and leather gloves (+2) to gain a hidden bonus to craftsmanship! Any other hidden bonuses? from r/kingdomcome

Another commenter has discovered that if you ride Henrig a lot, the horse you get from the main quest in Trosky, you'll get a hidden perk that boosts the stallion's stats. This also works on Pebbles, so try it with whatever horse you've found. Apparently you need to ride for around 35 km, so give it a while.

One player got a perk called Bushman that reduces the noise you make when moving through bushes by 50%. You get it by "following a Cuman through the woods a long way."

If you're enjoying Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, check out some of the other best RPGs you can play right now.

Predicting where Imamura's ideas will take him next is a fruitless endeavor – unless you ask the man himself. During a chat to discuss Omega 6, I asked who his dream collaboration would be for whatever comes next - and in typical fashion, his hypothetical project didn't disappoint.

"To tell the truth, I really really like The Witcher 3," shared Imamura. "I don't know whether we'd get on, but I'd love to work with CD Projekt Red on something. I'd love to do a Star Wars game with them."

At first glance, that reads like a wild game of pop culture bingo. But the more you think about it, the clearer you can see that dreamy space where Star Wars, The Witcher, and Imamura's Venn diagrams overlap – and now, I'm ready to bat for a future where his dream is realized.

A terrible fate

If you ask me to name some of the darkest fantasy games around, The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask would both rank very highly. Geralt's quest to save Ciri is steeped in tragedy. Even the most straightforward side quest forces you into making morally gray decisions – the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few is a particularly common theme, but that cold logic rarely absolves your guilt when it comes to the fate of the few.

Even the "right" decisions leave you feeling like you've sucked down cold mud – In The Heart of the Woods twists the knife whether you choose to help a village destroy or bond with the monstrous leshen stalking its surrounding forest, while The Bloody Baron's familial drama is tearful at best and soul-crushing at worst.

Majora's Mask isn't as gory as The Witcher, but when it comes to exploring the human condition, it's just as bleak. For those who haven't played one of the best Zelda games, Majora's Mask is set in an eerie alternate realm to Hyrule called Termina, where a leering moon is just three days away from falling from the sky. Link has just three days to save Termina from its lunar fate, and if you run out of time, it's shown in no uncertain terms that the land and everyone in it is violently destroyed.

On the first day, local carpenters refuse to merit the fact the moon will even fall, and insist on holding the annual Carnival of Time regardless. Some characters are already convinced it's plummeting, but true realization doesn't sink in until it's essentially too late to do anything about it. A postman can't bring himself to abandon the people on his route, despite his terror, while separated fiances Anju and Kafei choose to reunite and spend their last moments together. It's an examination of how we respond to imminent death – an unflinching look at the scream before a crash – and to this day, remains one of Nintendo's darkest games.

As the art director for Majora's Mask, Imamura was largely responsible for some of the game's most darker imagery. Think of the moon with a human face, which grins and cries over you as it looms, or the intensity of the eponymous purple mask that drives the antagonistic Skull Kid – who is himself a victim in many ways – from childish pranks to abuse and would-be mass murder. It's a tone that Imamura picked up and ran with.

"The direction of dark fantasy itself came from the director, [Yoshiaki] Koizumi-san," says Imamura. "But when I got assigned to it, I started sketching the moon, the mask – that was my design – so that was one of the reasons it went in that direction. One of the other [reasons] is just that when I start working, I get into it – I'm really fast. So before we knew it, we already had the basis of this world."

With that in mind, I can already see a world where the bleaker tone of Disney's Andor is given life through the Imamura-CDPR collaboration I'm desperately trying to manifest. CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best sci-fi games going – and with the amount of characters in it that want to escape Night City for a life on the moon, I'm starting to suspect the studio is projecting something. Even less needs to be said of Imamura, whose vast vast body of work is almost always set amongst the stars.

So, yeah: this may well be Imamura's pipe dream, but now it's my pipe dream too. Hit me with side quests that force you to choose between entire planets, and let me soak my eyeballs in Imamura's take on a galaxy far, far away. Squeeze a few hands of Gwent into that world, and I won't even ask for a matchmaker's fee.

Zelda and Star Fox veteran says the Nintendo Switch has been a global success, but thinks the House of Mario still has "something" up its sleeve for the Switch 2

McKay plays the role of protagonist Henry, and in an interview with the BBC he says working on the Kingdom Come games was "one of the most amazing and unusual acting challenges."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a sprawling RPG with many choices available to you. It's believed to have the biggest video game script ever, meaning McKay was in the sound booth for "over 500 hours."

"You would kind of go down one channel of a decision and then come halfway back up and go down another one and then maybe all the way back up to the beginning and back down," he says. "And that's not an acting challenge that you ever would have in TV or film."

You can play as a good person, an unlucky thief, or just murder anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with you. So, Henry needs to be able to deliver his lines in many different ways.

Dale, who plays Hans Capon, adds: "So you do the scene and you've got three four different people coming over to you, 'Can you do that? Can you just be aware of this?' Me and Tom are like: 'OK, can we distill this down?'"

Spending so much time together, the co-stars all became quite friendly with each other. "It is like putting on a really comfortable pair of clothes. Which is ironic because in the motion capture studio you're literally wearing head-to-toe lycra."

But while the actors can make friends on set, they had to keep the work they were doing for the better part of nine years incredibly secret. "It was almost like working for GCHQ or something," says McKay. "You couldn't talk to anyone about it and people in the studio couldn't even talk to their partners in some cases about what they were doing."

Movies and TV shows often share behind-the-scenes pictures and have actors, showrunners, and directors letting fans know what to expect for months or even years in advance, but video games are often far more secretive. When fans of the original game spotted McKay in Warhorse Studios' native Prague, he had to think fast to throw them off the scent of a sequel. "I'd be like: 'I just love Prague. And I come here very often for lots of holidays,'" he says.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has been a huge success, selling over one million copies in just 24 hours and already shattering its predecessor's peak concurrent player record and making it into Steam's top 50 most-played games.

If you're a fan of Kingdom Come, check out some of the other best RPGs you can play.

That's why "there has been a slight delay in the release of major news," CEO Akihiro Hino says on Twitter, as translated by Japanese gaming site Gematsu. Hino doesn't expand on what new hardware he's been busy brawling with, though his announcement has a peculiar smell to it… it almost sounds like Fantasy Life i could maybe, possibly be an upcoming Switch 2 game.

But we have wiggle room for speculation. Game screenshots Hino attaches to his Twitter post indicate that he's using an Xbox controller, and Gematsu also reports that PlayStation leaks show Fantasy Life i could be coming to Sony's console, too.

While the game hasn't yet been announced on any console other than the Switch, Hino says in another loaded tweet translated by Gematsu that some additional screenshots he posts are "still from the Switch version" – implying other versions.

In any case, Hino more plainly shares a crucial milestone for the life-sim RPG: "The game content has become significantly more enjoyable."

The last and only other Fantasy Life game released in 2012 for the 3DS, so while, truthfully, any cute call back to that time in Nintendo's history would be enough to satisfy me, I'm glad to hear that Level-5's sequel will also have "enjoyable" content on offer.

Hino also boasts that Fantasy Life i's twee, rainbow cereal "visuals have evolved," and that, overall, the game is "shaping up to be an outstanding RPG."

"New information will be released soon," Hino shares, "so please look forward to it!"

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time looks like the RPG take on Animal Crossing: New Horizons that I've been waiting for.

The temptation to commit crimes is rampant, but I'm committed to upholding my RPG tradition. So, I made a promise to myself early on: I will live honestly and do right by as many people as I can. I'm now 13 hours in, and it's certainly not the easiest path to tread – in fact, it at times feels like I'm doing everything the hard way – but you better believe it's rewarding. I will not allow any crime to tarnish my good name. Henry will be a good lad, groschen be damned.

Honorable Henry

The beginning of my adventures start off very slowly. After asking around about any honest work, I spent a lot of time walking down dirt roads in search of new opportunities. Outfitted in what isn't far off from rags, I don't give off the best impression, but even so, I reply politely to every passing guard who throws suspicion my way. Deciding to not only let my actions speak to my good nature, I even try to greet everyone who wants to chat with a friendly hello. On one occasion, I even try to compliment someone's strong arms, which quickly backfires. The bloke is convinced I'm taking the piss and before I know it, he's threatening to throw hands. I quickly quell the situation by refusing to engage in fisticuffs, but it's certainly a lesson in how fast things can take a turn if you don't choose your responses wisely.

Once I reach a nearby village, two fellows ask for my assistance, and what is a good boy to do but hear them out? Once I get wind that this pair wants me to pinch a lute for them, I know I'm not in great company right off, but I'm always willing to hear just about anyone out.

After all, one of the great joys of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the fact that there are often different approaches you can take in any given quest. Just because you're asked to do something bad at a surface level doesn't mean you can't try to find another solution.

So, despite my personal code of honor, I decide to reluctantly agree, believing that perhaps there's some way I can convince the instrument's owner to part with it fairly. As it is, I've yet to find a good solution to this particular quest, so it'll sit in my log forever more if need be. I'm certainly not going to risk stealing it and compromise my principles for some groschen – you just have to read about my editor Andy Brown's shenanigans to see how bad that can go .

Since a lot of early quests give you some morally questionable tasks – see the aforementioned maypole thievery or bull paint sullying – I spend a good deal of time plucking up various plants and practicing the art of alchemy to sell off decocations for food. Once I at long last make my way to the blacksmith, I make as many horseshoes as possible to sell off, with the axe becoming my mainstay weapon against wolves and bandits. I've yet to use any lockpicks, nor have I robbed anyone or stolen loot. Everything in my possession in my first 10 hours has come purely from some good exploration out in the fields, or through groschen I've earned honestly.

Good groschen

The only time I slightly bent the rules was an occasion that called for me to break into someone's home. Yes, on the surface this sounds like a pretty bad crime, but it was in the name of a very good cause. See, the good old lady Bozhena asked for my help, and since she saved my skin, not to mention Hans, of course I'm going to do everything I can to find her missing daughter. The house in question happens to belong to a missing person related to the case, and all I did was climb in through a side window – no lockpicking required – and look for clues. Sure, it was a little tempting to swipe some things in boxes, but I left with no stolen goods lining my pockets.

So much of the early stages of the game really do push you to do less than reputable things in the name of survival. Sometimes you can justify it, sure, but it's not easy being completely good in the middle ages. Nothing speaks to this more than when I encounter a miller in one of the optional main questlines. After he tasks me with what I think is some good honest labor, it turns out he's fixing to do a spot of thieving and wants me to get involved. When I call him out and turn him down, proclaiming that I want to live honestly, his reply says it all: "Honest living, eh? You're doing your own pocket a disservice, lad".

Maybe I am doing my pockets a disservice early on, and maybe it takes me some time before I'm lining them with grochen after my spell in the stocks. But over 10 hours later, I have sturdy armor, plenty of helpful perks to boost my charisma, and I'm affluent enough to get by comfortably. So, I'm proof that it is absolutely possible to get by without doing crime - even if you do have to avoid certain quests altogether. Better yet, I have a good reputation. Everywhere I go, people are happy to see me, and when I hear remarks like "you have a kind master" when I travel through a village with my loyal hound Mutt, I don't regret the path I've taken for a second. Who knows if temptation or possibly even necessity will lead me astray in the future, but I'll do everything I can to help those in need and earn money honestly.

"Instant gratification in gaming has become a problem" – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says the RPG is meant to feel like a spiritual successor to Oblivion and Morrowind.

Deltarune is an upcoming game with some familiar faces from Undertale, although it has a different setting. It's been in development for over six years and we've only got two chapters so far, with two more due out this year. Described as a "parallel story" to Undertale's, it contains "non-violent RPG battles" that function like bullet hells and have "funky, funky music."

Over on Bluesky, Fox shares something that's almost like a progress update: "I showed my family and friends a minigame I've been working on for DR and they all described it as 'a cry for help because your game is not out.'"

He follows up: "My family clarified that was a good thing. My other friend didn't clarify but they did laugh for about 10 minutes straight hearing me play it. Same friend who played Chapter 3 like over a year ago also told me 'I miss Tenna' and I was like 'man that's something no one in the world has ever said huh.'"

Tenna is a chapter three antagonist who hasn't actually featured in the first two chapters, so that's why that line is something no one has said before. It hurts to see others living the dream and playing this game before us, but hopefully, Fox can keep on schedule, and we get those next two chapters soon. You can play the first two chapters for free on Steam.

In the meantime, there are plenty of great games like Undertale that you can play right now to tide you over.

Speaking to author Marijam Did in a recent stream, Kurvitz explains how significant Fallout is to Eastern European gamers and developers in particular before Did plays its opening – an opening Kurvitz dubs "the perfect beginning." He describes the old RPG as an "incredibly important game in Eastern Europe" where it was "tremendously and totally adored," detailing how Fallout "showed them that video games can be a total work of art."

As the two move into Fallout's character creator, one Kurvitz calls "the best thing on Earth," the Disco Elysium lead admits he was "mystified" by the menu when he first played. It's one of many features that make the game so unique for its time – but its worldbuilding is where Fallout truly shines. The dark, post-apocalyptic setting comes up while answering viewers' questions, when Kurvitz is asked what Karl Marx's favorite Fallout entry would be.

He says it would be the "second Fallout, definitely" – but that's because the first leans more into establishing a convincing environment marked by destruction whereas the sequel focuses on "trade and social economics and about all of these settlements influencing each other." The original Fallout is a "mood piece," as Kurvitz puts it. "The first Fallout is like a perfect mood capsule that's almost Biblical in its annihilation," he explains.

"Humanity is truly on its knees. It makes other post-apocalyptic worldbuilding seem like an amusement park – except maybe Threads or some of the really darker TV series." It sounds like high praise from the Disco Elysium director, and it speaks to Fallout's influence decades on. While the 1997 smash hit likely isn't for everyone, especially those more accustomed to Bethesda's more recent shooters, it arguably still stands as one of the best Fallout games yet.

After forming a new studio at an "apocalyptic" time for game devs, Disco Elysium writer says "this industry is finished" but "video games are not"

Sequels are a tricky business. On the one hand, they allow developers to reuse assets and get a game out of the door faster, and if the original game was a success, it's comforting for investors to know there's already a fan base. On the other hand, if a sequel relies on you having played its predecessor, it can alienate some and lead to fewer sales. Well, it seems you're all much more interested in dense RPGs now than you were in 2018.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance had a peak concurrent player count of 96,069 when it was released in February 2018 - a very respectable number. But the sequel got a staggering 256,206 over the weekend. As noted by one redditor, this means the game is in Steam's top 50 chart for all-time peak concurrents. There's already a roadmap and post-launch plans, so all of you enjoying it now have more to look forward to.

Our Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 review noted that while the game has a lot of friction, "its realization of medieval life remains utterly absorbing." System-heavy RPGs seem to be making a comeback in the wake of games like Baldur's Gate 3.

The Kingdom Come: Deliverance series is notable for not giving you a super-powered hero right off the bat. You play as Henry, the son of a blacksmith thrust into a war who needs to learn all the skills a medieval worker would. Want to read a book? Better learn how. Want to fight a knight in shining armor? Do you even know how to swing a sword properly?

This means "progression can be a more pedestrian affair," but "having the patience to meet the game on its terms makes for a more genuine form of role-playing." Our Features Editor is a very bad thief and now has to pay a hefty fine or live life as a criminal. You can't just do what you want, this world reacts.

In recent years, I realize my taste in video games has shifted to these slower, more deliberate ones, where I have to invest in my character to navigate a hostile or indifferent world. I love Dragon's Dogma 2 and Stalker 2, games where I have to plan before I set forth on a journey.

If you want to play more games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, check out our list of the best RPGs.

The former long-time Dragon Age executive producer revealed the interesting tidbit in a new YouTube video, calling 2008's Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood his "favorite" project to work on because there was something "magical about leading a team as small as this game was - it never got much above 20 people."

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood "actually uses Dragon Age: Origins' dialogue system," Darrah said. "Heavily streamlined to fit on the Nintendo DS, but it's still at its base the same code stack. I guess if you really wanted to try, you could make the argument that, because Sonic Chronicles shipped in 2008 and Dragon Age: Origins didn't ship until 2009, that Dragon Age: Origins actually shipped using the Sonic Chronicles dialogue system."

The Sonic RPG team eventually moved on to the cancelled Mass Effect DS game that was planned to have you pirating across the fringes of the galaxy in first person. The spin-off was scrapped due to the economics of shipping games on the Nintendo DS, though.

BioWare now doesn't have the bandwidth for any quirky projects like Sonic Chronicles, though. The entire studio now reportedly employs around 100 people after EA cut even more roles from the team. The publisher blamed the layoffs on Dragon Age: The Veilguard's performance, but one wonders how much more "agile" a team can get.

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer slams EA’s BioWare layoffs as “a short-term cost-cutting measure” that “doesn’t solve a long-term” problem.

Using throwing knives, I swiftly take out any templars moving in groups of two or three with well-aimed headshots before they can react. Then, I cleanly finish off any enemies foolish enough to stand around solo with my hidden blade. Disabling any bells as I go, it's not long before the cemetery is as quiet as the dead once more. This mission contrasts greatly to what I was doing previously as Jacob. Surrounded by a group of Blighters, I was instead playing to his strengths by fighting in a way that was anything but stealthy. Throwing fists and landing hits with my cane-sword in plain sight, it was just as satisfying as Evie's covert operation – thanks to the slick combos and double-finishers I was landing as her twin brother.

Revisiting Assassin's Creed Syndicate has made me once again appreciate the sense of variety both Fyre twins offer, and I can't wait to see how that might translate over into the dual protagonist set-up in Assassin's Creed Shadows. But there are also other parallels that can be drawn between Syndicate and what we've seen of Shadows so far that only make me more excited for what's to come.

Two sides

Since Ubisoft Quebec worked on both Syndicate and Assassin's Creed Odyssey – two of my favorite entries in the series – I've been riding the hype train for Assassin's Creed Shadows since it was first announced. Returning to Victorian London to relive the Fyre twin's gang-laden, carriage-riding adventures just reaffirms my excitement. Not only does it serve as a reminder of how downright fun a dual-protagonist set up can be, but it also has me looking forward to see how the studio is bringing the 10 years of experience it's garnered since Syndicate to bring us a new, updated take on the feature in feudal Japan.

Right away, it's not hard to see the similarities between the Frye twins and Naoe and Yasuke. With Noae being a shinobi who goes all in on stealth not unlike Evie, and Yasuke being a samurai who's more combat-focused which is akin to Jacob, both lean into different strengths and abilities. I always liked how Assassin's Creed Syndicate often gives you free rein to decide which twin you want to play as, but there are certain quests that require either twin, and it always felt like it offered up variety in terms of your approach because of it. Now, Shadows is also going to give us the freedom to choose who we want to tackle a given scenario with, and I can only hope it'll be just as satisfying as my shenanigans with the Fyre twins, if not more.

In many respects, the new protagonists feel like an evolution of the Fyre twins, with their own circumstances – such as the fact that they're not closely related – promising to change up the experience and offer up a fresh perspective on the dual-protagonist setup. And not unlike Syndicate, I can't wait to see how and if their dynamic and different skills will offer up an experience as varied as the Fyre twins.

History and hooks

As a longtime fan, I've often considered Assassin's Creed Syndicate my favorite game in the series, and that's not just down to how well it delivers on the dual-protagonist formula. I always appreciated how it explores the history of the Victorian era, its sense of scale, and its satisfying combo-heavy combat system. Not to mention the traversal, with the grappling hook allowing me to zip up to chimney tops and scale notable landmarks with ease. The latter is happily making its way into Shadows with a grappling hook that's far more physics-based, which again speaks to how the upcoming RPG is evolving what's come before, but I'm also hopeful about the other aspects that spoke to me in Syndicate, too.

In terms of the historic aspect, there were so many collectibles dotted around its setting that would tell you more about the time period, from telling you the meaning of different pressed flowers you find, to showing Victorian newspaper illustrations showcasing different historic events in the city. Even the loading screen – which is now becoming a thing of the past thanks to current-gen hardware – would drop kernels of history. It always felt like I was immersed in the 19th century, with plenty to feed my hunger to learn more about London at that time. I very much hope this will be carried forward into Shadows, and I can't wait to see how it will delve into the Sengoku period of Japan.

Since Syndicate is just set in the city of London, which is made up of different boroughs, it succeeds at providing plenty of exploration without feeling as overwhelming as the likes of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. With Assassin's Creed Shadows following the RPG route of Odyssey, it'll likely feel bigger than Syndicate in this regard – with the developer revealing it will have a map that's similar in size to Origins. But I do get the sense that it will scale things back from the bigger RPG entries, and hopefully tap into the slightly more curated feel of Syndicate.

Of course, Syndicate offered plenty to do within the city, with a host of different side activities to complete that tapped into the culture of the time. Most interestingly, every activity is tied to a particular ally you meet as Evie or Jacob, and completing them will build their loyalty and earn rewards – which incentivizes me to do all of them. I'm curious to know if such a feature, or something like it, may factor into Shadows. We already know that you'll be able to recruit people who will also stay at your home base. You can get to know them and hear their stories, but I wonder if there will be other allies not unlike those in Syndicate that will give you a similar kind of motivation.

I know Syndicate's combat didn't click with everyone, but it really did always make me feel like I was a slick fighter. Landing combos without taking a hit and putting different weapons to use always felt satisfying. While the hidden blade has been a mainstay fixture, combat in the series has changed a lot in the years since. As more entries have gone down the RPG route, we've seen fighting that's far more action-oriented, with more weapons introduced into the mix. From what we've seen so far of Shadows, it looks like it's drawing from Syndicate's mix of the protagonist's strengths and building on it between Naoe and Yasuke, while also leaning into its RPG direction by making full use of the more action-based combat systems we've seen in the likes of Odyssey and Valhalla.

I did enjoy fighting in the latter games, but I'm also glad there'll be more of stealthy focus on Naoe's side to offer up a mixture of approaches. And just like the cane-word, knuckledusters, and Kukri blades in Syndicate, I'm looking forward to seeing how Shadow's arsenal of weapons may offer up something unique to the time period.

My time with Evie in the cemetery and Jacob against the Blighters only makes me more excited about what's in store for us in Shadows. I can't wait to discover how the studio might have evolved the formula over the years since both Odyssey and Syndicate, and how my favorite game may have informed the adventure set in Japan. With only a month to go before we'll be able to step back in time and meet Naoe and Yasuke for ourselves, I won't have to wait much longer to find out.

Explore the future of the series with our roundup of upcoming Assassin's Creed games.

"[SCS Software has] a ginormous, huge audience and extremely dedicated fans," Warhorse global PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling tells GamesRadar+. "And they have the nicest offices here from all the game studios. They've built up their own Silicon Valley kind of thing. We're not there yet. They have way more developers than we do. The Czech gaming industry is flourishing, and KCD maybe helps to spread some love and whatnot, and maybe motivate some new studios to come up."

As Warhorse figures, their similarities with SCS might actually go beyond their country of origin. "In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we attracted quite a lot of people who never play games, which is sort of unique," senior game designer Ondřej Bittner says. "It's sort of like Euro Truck Simulator – a lot of people who play Euro Truck Simulator don't play other games. So we interact with a lot of people who love history, or fencing, or historical martial arts, or whatever, and they didn't have a problem with most of the mechanics."

Bittner is alluding here to KCD's more divisive mechanics, like its limited save system - something players who are coming for the RPG's grounded historical focus don't seem to mind. Similarly, I doubt too many people are banging down SCS Software's door hoping to transform Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator into high-speed arcade racing games. It pays to understand your niche, and unlikely as it may seem that's something these two Czech studios have in common.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's developer knew it couldn't "repeat the Eurojank" of the first game – and as sales soar, Warhorse is having a Witcher 3 moment.

"I think the mechanics you're describing – a little more involved gameplay – falls around the fact that players may be finally [realizing] that it doesn't really matter how long a game is," Bittner tells GamesRadar+. "What matters is if your individual sessions are individual enough. If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored. A little more involved mechanics [means] more original content."

It's neighboring an old topic that's seen an uptick in debate recently: are games too dang long? Several well-known executives and designers have argued that extremely long games are out of place or outright fatiguing today. The question becomes: are games too long, or are some long games simply running out of ideas long before the credits roll? If they had more gas in the tank, more unique experiences to bring out, that long runtime may feel justified; players may be excited to have more of this thing they love, rather than fatigued by the long familiar road ahead of them.

Bittner offers an example of what sessions may look like in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – a unique adventure erratically strung together from boot theft, bar hopping, bandit hunting, and murder mystery. "Because these are vastly different, you don't get bored," he says of the experience.

"And it doesn't really matter if it's like 100 hours or 50," he continues. "And that goes for games like Elden Ring and all that. You know, with all the secrets. Elden Ring is kind of simple mechanics, but it's so involved in the levels of where you can go and what you can discover. Or Zelda games which, on the other hand, have the awesome mechanics and stuff. So I think this is good for the industry and for the players, that the entertainment is more qualitative than certain titles that are just very repetitive."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an unflinching RPG, ready and willing to kick you with steel-toed consequences, but Bittner reckons it's also approachable. The goal with the sequel was to "keep the complexity, keep all the living world that can tell the emergent stories, but make it more accessible so we can break out of the niche and be like, hey, this is for everyone. You can do it. Everyone can enjoy it. After all, the game is not hard to play, because you can always do it somehow differently."

He compares this to the demands of a game like Elden Ring, which also gives players plenty of ways to overcome challenges, but sets a high minimum for what you have to do to progress. You can beat that boss however you like, but you do have to beat it and it's still very challenging. Bittner's experience with Elden Ring is an interesting example of how some games just don't click for you even if you recognize what makes them great. FromSoftware's flavor of action has been especially polarizing over the years – at GamesRadar+ alone, we have writers who love it (me) and folks who find it impenetrable.

"I'd say I can't play Elden Ring because I'm just not good at the combat and that's all there is," Bittner says. "It's super hardcore for me and I can never understand how people can play it. But I think Kingdom Come is way more, like, you can just walk around and wear nice clothes, and you can do it, you know. So I think it's actually quite a welcoming hardcore game."

This approach, a refinement of the first game's philosophy, has certainly resonated with players. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 1 million copies and recouped its development costs within a day, per Warhorse co-founder Daniel Vávra.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs.

Unfortunately, that approach isn't exactly ironclad. A few minutes after fleeing the starting town of Troskowitz, lute safely stashed in my inventory, a notification warns me that guards have put two and two together and know what I've done. I'm now wanted in Troskowitz, but that doesn't mean too much to me. I'm already far away, and I've got what I wanted. Besides, how much can one lute be worth?

The gang gets branded

Some context: during my earlier travels, I met a pair of bards who wanted to immortalize Henry with a ballad. The only catch, as you may already have guessed, is that they didn't have a lute. Not to worry – they know the carpenter in Troskowitz has one hanging on the wall of his workshop, though the owner who commissioned its repair never came to collect it. That, according to 15th century RPG custom, makes it free real estate. I treat it as such – you already know what happens next – and by the time it's safely in the hands of my new bard friends, I've already forgotten the cold reception that's waiting for me in Troskowitz.

Unfortunately, the townspeople of Troskowitz have a better memory. Crime and punishment in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an intricate system, and avoiding the consequences of your actions is easier said than done. Bohemia has several tiers of sentencing, depending on how badly you've flouted its laws. Steal a few things, and you'll have to pay a fine and spend a few days being pelted with rotten fruit and veg in the village stocks. Break the law too soon after your first punishment – or commit more serious offences – and you'll be branded, permanently marking you as a criminal. Besides the wound itself being a pain to deal with, the brand forever impacts how everyone treats you going forward. Really screw up, though, and you'll be executed – and there's, er, no coming back from that.

When I trot back through Troskowitz a few hours later, none of this is on my mind. I'm here to pass the night before going to work for the local gravedigger at dawn, and also stock up on a few healing potions. But as I leave the apothecary, a guard waits at the door to confront me. A few things have gone missing and they know I did it, which is fair. What's not fair is the 200 groschen fine I'm expected to pay for something I didn't even keep – don't they understand how quest objectives work? I'll admit, I was following the rules of every RPG since the beginning of time: that guards have the collective memory of a single overworked goldfish, and leaving the scene of the crime for some time would resolve things. I still believed that when, indignant at the prospect of shelling out almost all of my money, I decided instead to bowl through the guard and flee – after all, the gravedigger had been very specific about me being there at dawn.

After running away from my problems, I stuck to my theory that time was the best medicine. I stayed away from Troskowitz for another day, kept busy with helping the gravedigger, and generally tried to keep Henry out of trouble. For several more days, I tried to keep my interactions with the town to a minimum. I'd either circle right past it or careen straight through on my trusty steed Pebbles, ignoring the cries of guards who tried to apprehend me (which they tried several times).

Eventually, though, my life of crime became too awkward to work around. One main quest had multiple objectives in Troskowitz, and when I tried to sneak in on foot to complete them, I was chased out by its ever-vigilant guards. Having made a little more money since the initial crime, it was time to face up to the music – so, sword in scabbard, I strolled right in and surrendered. Except there was one small catch: presumably because of all the running-away I'd done, my fine now stood a little over 2000 groschen – a sincerely unfathomable sum. If I couldn't pay up, they were going to brand me. I tried to sweet-talk my way out, to no avail. I owned up to the fact that I didn't have that sort of money, to no sympathy. Nothing worked – and given there was no way I would let Henry be branded so early in the game, there was only one option left. I fled, knocking out my would-be captor with a nasty uppercut and making a quick exit on Pebbles.

As it stands, I'm staying away from Troskowitz for real this time. My plan is to scrounge and save from honest work in the countryside until I have enough to pay off the fine. At first, having a major town off-limits was a nightmare – I still can't tick off that main quest, and Troskowitz is a very handy hub. Now, I'm quietly enjoying the ways Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is forcing me to reckon with the consequences of my actions.

My outlaw life is the most immersed I've been in an RPG in a long time, and I relish having to get inventive when it comes to making money. Does it count as graverobbing if you only took what the real graverobbers, all inexplicably stabbed to death, had already dug up? Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's world is too big to bend into shape – and by trying to do so in the main character-esque way you'd approach most RPGs, you'll only twist yourself up. For now, I'll continue to scrape enough coin together to buy forgiveness. If I'd really learned anything, I'd march back into Troskowitz and accept the real consequences – a big sizzling Crime Barcode – of my deeds. But stolen lute be damned, I won't be paying for my crimes just yet

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs – "If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored"

The first DLC was discussed in December when Team Folon revealed it would "feature both new content and previously cut content that we're working hard to restore," with not much else said regarding the release since. Dubbed "Rabbit & Pork," the DLC might be just around the corner now, as Team Folon states in a recent post(spotted by VG247) that "big things are coming," with the exciting launch "getting closer" and devs "working non-stop."

That's not all, though – it sounds like there's more to come, too, as Team Folon hints toward "some more surprises" and says there are "exciting times ahead." The DLC is only the first of three according to an older announcement from the modders, featuring a sneak peek at each one's planned title. There's Rabbit & Pork, Last Orders, and the New Vegas-esque Wildcard to look forward to – as if Fallout: London wasn't big enough already.

Fallout: London first came to fruition in 2019, with its creators at Team Folon aiming to make a total conversion mod set in England's capital for Bethesda's 2015 action RPG. The mod finally launched this past summer, boasting hours of new content, a massive map, and talent from Baldur's Gate 3. Since then, Fallout: London has received over 500,000 downloads, with Team Folon even revealing plans to "launch our own indie games company."

Ambitious Fallout mod project aiming to recreate Fallout 1 inside Fallout 4 calls it quits, suspending the project but making it clear that it's not Bethesda's fault

This Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 encounter was shared on Twitter by Game Heroes' Blaine Smith, and it shows Henry having a conversation with an NPC who's sporting an arrow sticking out of his forehead. Now, if you've ever played an RPG, you might assume at first that you'd simply stumbled upon a glitch of some kind, but no, this encounter is very much intended and is a pretty obvious nod to Skyrim.

After Henry understandably inquires about the thing sticking out of the guy's forehead, the character explains: "It's an arrow. Well, what's left of it, that is. A metal arrowhead and a bit of a wooden shaft. It used to be longer, but I broke it off after I nearly took a wench's eye out with it."

Henry then remarks that he once "heard of a bloke that took an arrow to the knee," clearly referencing Skyrim's guards. "Hah! To the knee? That's nothing," the NPC responds. "You could go dancing the next day with a scratch like that. But, have you ever heard of anyone who took one to the head and lived to tell the tale?"

According to Fextralife, you can find this legend of an NPC in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 by heading down the path between Grund and Devil's Den. Interacting with him and choosing the right dialogue options will eventually open up the "Arrow-head" side quest that rewards you with seven Groschen upon completion.

I hated my first few hours with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, but now you couldn't take it away from me.

Oddly specific? Sorry, I'm still working through some things in my own playthrough (and if your travels take you through Troskowitz on your travels, tell them I'm sorry). But there's no denying that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has taken the hardcore-leaning RPG mechanics of its 2018 predecessor and taken them to a far larger audience, landing over one million sales in its first day alone.

It feels like developer Warhorse Studios is having something of a Witcher 3 moment – that is, refining and iterating its RPG series out of semi-niche status in the same way that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched CD Projekt Red's potion-guzzling series into the mainstream in a way past entries hadn't quite managed. But how did it make that leap?

Live by the sword

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance takes up an awkward space. While its unforgiving nature, wealth of mechanics, and rough-around-the-edges bugs kept it from widespread mainstream appeal, it is in many ways too big to be niche. After all, we're talking about a game that has sold 8 million copies and counting. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 doesn't compromise on the friction that made its predecessor a success, but it does a far better job at easing players into life in 15th century Bohemia.

Speaking to Warhorse Studios' senior game designer, Ondřej Bittner, and global public relations manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, the pair acknowledge that making that leap meant tidying up some of the first games messier edges.

"Like you say, it's too big to be niche," says Bittner. "So we can't really repeat the Eurojank situation. So we really invested in optimizing, bug-fixing, and polishing all these little mechanics. And actually [we aimed] just to be big, not niche – because for a niche game, people are like 'Oh yeah, it's a niche game from a small indie studio, whatever'. We couldn't afford this a second time."

As the beginning of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – which cuts you loose in the 1400s with nothing but a pair of pants to your name – attests to, improving on the original game didn't require dialing back its lifelike elements. You still need to eat, drink, and sleep, while combat can come to a quick and brutal end if you find yourself outnumbered. While we spoke about the game's survival mechanics at length, Bittner also argued that this approach is perfectly compatible with players who may consider themselves casual gamers.

"In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we attracted quite a lot of people who never play games, which is sort of unique," he says. "It's sort of like Euro Truck Simulator – a lot of people who play Euro Truck Simulator don't play other games. So we interact with a lot of people who love history, or fencing, or historical martial arts, or whatever, and they didn't have a problem with most of the mechanics. It was usually the gamers – like [controversial save item] Saviour Schnapps! People who never played games would be like 'It makes sense to have to eat or sleep', while people who play games are like 'I can't just press F5 to quicksave?'"

"We tried to still keep that complexity, keep all of the living world elements and emergent stories, but make it more accessible so we can break out of the niche and be like 'Hey, this is for everyone – you can do it, everyone can enjoy it'," Bittner adds. "After all the game is not hard to play – you can always do it differently. I can't play Elden Ring because I'm not good at the combat, and that's all there is. It's super hardcore to me, and I can never understand how people play it. But I think Kingdom Come is way more like… you can just walk around and wear nice clothes. So I think it's actually quite a welcoming hardcore game."

Leveling up

From a more day-to-day perspective, Stolz-Zwilling says that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 meant overcoming practical constraints that the first game struggled with. "There were limitations – money, resources, less people, less experience. While many of the developers were experienced, at least half of them never released a game before," he explains, pointing to the original Kingdom Come being Bittner's first game.

But Stolz-Zwilling believes there's still more for Warhorse to learn. "Now we do have the experience, but what we are still not the best at is time management," he says. "We learned a lot from the development of the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance in that we tried very hard to put as many features and things into the game as possible, but then at the end lacked the time to polish it, make it nice, and round out the experience. We've put a lot more effort into that."

"I wouldn't really change anything," agrees Bittner. "I would just go back and make all the good decisions sooner so that we could make this sooner, so we could start making the next great thing. I still wouldn't be sad – all of it is a huge amount of experience you can't really get anywhere else, especially in the design department [...] so I'm grateful we made this, we learned a lot, and we'll use that to make better games."

Besides keeping a closer eye on the clock, Stolz-Zwilling says Warhorse's next priorities are already clear. "For future projects, the most important thing is to keep the team together," he explains. "[Developers leaving] is something you naturally have – especially in artistic positions, like concept artists just want to try something new. But other than that, it's important to have cool new projects so that the team stays together and talent doesn't get lost."

The pair also agree that challenges within the industry – namely crippling layoffs and studio closures – did not harm the sequel. Stolz-Zwilling ascribes that to "luck" and says "this struggle passed us and didn't really impact us at all," while Bittner points out that financial stress was relieved because "the first game almost funded the second".

From an outside perspective, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a testament to iteration – something that many studios simply aren't afforded nowadays. All too often it feels a game is either a hit or it isn't, and what it could be rarely factors into the equation. Here, we see Warhorse not only better itself in essentially every way, but selling a million copies (and counting) for its effort. "Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2," says Stolz-Zwilling, "is the game we always wanted to make."

If you're on the fence about jumping into Bohemia, check out our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review to help make up your mind

Baldur's Gate 3's final major patch isn't officially out for everyone just yet, but its stress test went live last week for those who successfully registered. That is, after it accidentally went live early on PS5 (which definitely wasn't supposed to happen). Being a stress test, not everything is in an absolutely perfect state yet – that's kind of the point – and Larian is already hard at work fixing issues that have surfaced, including Gale's lost appetite.

"Update 1 will be arriving later today, which is bringing a multitude of bug fixes, including ensuring that Gale will be able to fill himself up on magical items as normal, and radial menus are no longer missing their descriptions," Larian writes in the patch notes. "While this update brings some fixes for cross-play, we are still investigating instances of cross-play not working as intended."

Some of these fixes are for crashes and UI bugs, but there's loads of tweaks to Photo Mode, too, including added camera shutter SFX and improved depth of field sliders. It turns out that there was also an issue that could have allowed RPG players to lose important quest items permanently, but that's been resolved now that Larian has "fixed containers inside inventories not scattering their contents when they get destroyed."

As Larian points out, this update won't affect you at all right now if you're not playing on the Patch 8 stress test, but obviously any improvements and fixes that are figured out at this point are sure to carry over to the full Patch 8 launch, whenever that happens. Larian still hasn't said exactly when that'll be, but it's obviously a significant one when it includes 12 new subclasses, cross-platform progression, crossplay, and more. The extra good news is that Larian is "inviting even more of you to join the stress test this week," so if you're not already taking part, you might get your chance soon.

As the "incredible journey" to Baldur's Gate 3 wraps up, Larian Studios has its "full attention" on its next RPG: "The story ain't over yet."

Daniel Vávra, co-founder of Kingdom Come developer Warhorse Studios, discussed the game's launch with Czech outlet Seznam Zprávy. A machine translation of his comments, separately archived here, confirms the game made money on its first day.

"Before the launch, we were betting in the studio on how many copies we could sell," Vávra said (again, machine translated). "And I won. I missed by 300 units. We're happy with the numbers, and if the trend continues at the same pace, it will be great."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's launch success comes on the heels of controversial and somewhat opaque comments from EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who discussed the underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard at the company's latest financial call. Wilson's remarks, particularly the suggestion that The Veilguard didn't resonate with a "broad enough audience" at a time where players "increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement," came across as a ham-handed endorsement of live service models, especially in the shadow of the multiplayer component that was once part of The Veilguard.

Countless games – including many EA games – have proven that single-player games are here to stay and can find huge success. The timing and the direct parallel of an RPG like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 becoming the game of the moment only hammers it home.

Former Dragon Age lead Mike Laidlaw also bristled at the argument that live service features would've helped The Veilguard. "I'm not a fancy CEO guy," Laidlaw said, "but if someone said to me, 'the key to this successful single-player IP's success is to make it purely a multiplayer game. No, not a spin-off: fundamentally change the DNA of what people loved about the core game' to me, I'd probably, like, quit that job or something."

This notably follows significant layoffs at Bioware, with the narrative team – you know, the backbone of an RPG – seemingly gutted as EA shuffles staff around and Bioware's remnants focus on Mass Effect 5.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs – "If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored."

Speaking in a recent online thread after EA's quarterly earnings call in which the publisher insisted that The Veilguard "did not resonate with a broad enough audience" to meet sales expectations, former creative director Mike Laidlaw appears to disagree with games going the live service route to ensure financial success –  a sentiment fellow BioWare veteran David Gaider shared himself following EA's conference.

"Look," writes Laidlaw, "I'm not a fancy CEO guy, but if someone said to me 'the key to this successful single-player IP's success is to make it purely a multiplayer game. No, not a spin-off: fundamentally change the DNA of what people loved about the core game' to me, I'd probably, like, quit that job or something." He continues his thoughts in separate replies, stating that he's "just thinking out loud, of course."

Laidlaw doesn't sugarcoat his words, though: "Who'd be silly enough to demand something like that? ...twice." It's an understandable stance to take, especially when considering EA's own implications during the company's quarterly earnings call, as well as the layoffs across BioWare following The Veilguard's underperformance. Despite not hitting sales expectations, however, EA admitted the RPG "was well-reviewed by critics and those who played."

As layoffs reportedly hit BioWare, Former Dragon Age writer tells fans not to worry: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now"

Suddenly, it transitions over to two blokes on horses – one being the protagonist Henry and the other being his pal Hans – talking about their journey. At first blush, the fear that I'm going to feel lost in the freshly released sequel begins to seep in. I have no idea who anyone is, what they've been through, or how well this adventure will cater to players like me. But within just the first hour, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 proved I needn't have worried at all. With a strong set-up to lead you into the story, it not only does an excellent job of guiding you through the combat and RPG ingredients it has on offer, but it also establishes the events of the first game in a surprisingly effective way.

Choices and conversations

Despite the fact that Henry is a returning lead with a history, I appreciate the way he doesn't feel like an entirely established character. That's thanks to the fact that I'm given the reins to make choices that let me decide what kind of person he is almost immediately. The very first encounter with a group of soldiers on the hunt for some bandits lets me put my persuasion skills to good use. With the leader raising suspicions against me, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 introduces me to the many different ways I can convince them I mean no harm, with each response tapping into a different facet of Henry's personality or strengths.

Whether you want to come across as a hero or evoke dread, or you want to use lies and manipulation over honest resolutions, I'm being handed the freedom to decide how I want to play, and by extension, what kind of protagonist I want Henry to be within the first conversation. As a longtime RPG enjoyer, this is really my bread and butter, but it also means I can fill Henry's medieval boots easily because I'm the one who's deciding how they fit.

The sense that I'm shaping Henry is constant, from selecting responses when speaking to Hans on our journey on horseback, to deciding how to get my hands on some sausages from the camp's cook, Oates, to feed to my loyal hound Mutt. With other helpful tutorials such as a practice sword fight that lets me get to grips with the basics of combat, it isn't until I'm sitting around a campfire chatting with my party that I start to see that Warhorse is going fill in some gaps about Henry's past experiences for new players like me. Framed as a casual conversation among friends, the group asks Henry questions about his love life, how a previous sword fight went, and a few other instances, and once again, I'm able to give my own input to color the events of the past myself.

Formative flashbacks

I'm sure I would appreciate some of the quips and references more had I played the first game, but at no point did I feel lost or excluded from any necessary context. Of course, there's only so much a conversation can do to illustrate Henry's past, but the best is yet to come for a newbie like me. After being pursued by enemy soldiers – in my underwear no less – and taking a tumble, I take a hazy trip down memory lane. With Hans propping my concussed self up, hallucinations start to fill in some blanks and establish the tragic events of Henry's past that the first game explores. Yet again, I can react to what I'm seeing, which allows me to decide how these moments still weigh on him in the present.

It's definitely a bit of a process to learn the ins and outs of the inventory and the different commands and attacks you have at your disposal, but the onboarding process and tutorials available make everything quite welcoming. And while you might think you have all of these skills at your disposal in the beginning, that unfortunate tumble takes you back to square one, wiping out your level, skill, and perk points, so you have something of a clean slate to work from. It's quite a humorous way of offering up a fresh start, and it also means that I can learn alongside Henry without feeling overwhelmed.

I may have felt a little like a fish-out-of-water right at the start, but that no longer matters, because that's kind of what Henry is now. With skills to relearn and only his underclothes to speak of, I'm free to get stuck into some good old fashioned role-play and decide who he's going to become. How challenging it gets from here is something I'll have to discover for myself, but I can't wait to see where my adventures will take me and my medieval boots (once I've got them back on my feet, of course).

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review: "Even if some friction can lead to frustration, its realization of medieval life remains utterly absorbing".

Obsidian Entertainment is returning to its first-person roleplaying roots in Avowed, coming out February 18, after dabbling with craft-o-survival gameplay in Grounded and a historical adventure in Pentiment for its last few games. That means there'll be tons of room for unique character builds, wild choices, and multiple endings.

As such, as soon as you reach the credits with, let's say, your virtuous mage who dual wields wands, you might want to restart with a New Game Plus save and go through the whole thing again as an evildoer who betrays the empire and sides with the antagonist - which you are actually able to do, by the way.

However, game director Carrie Patel confirmed that New Game Plus isn't included in the game at launch, sadly, in an interview with MinnMax, noting that players can simply start a "new game" after finishing the RPG. Games like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2 added New Game Plus modes, which let you restart the game with all your existing upgrades and gear, in post-launch updates, so it's also a possibility in this case, especially with how different each playthrough of Avowed is bound to be. Though, the studio's last full-fat RPG The Outer Worlds was also missing the feature. Only time will tell, I guess.

On a happier note, when asked about potential Avowed DLC, Patel responded with a simple "maybe." Pillars of Eternity 2 had three expansions and The Outer Worlds received two awesome packs - one of which was also directed by Patel - so Obsidian is definitely not opposed to adding onto its big adventures.

For now, Avowed is coming out on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass later this month. You can read our Big in 2025 Avowed preview to find out why it's both the culmination and evolution of every Obsidian's ever made before.

Take a look at some of the other new games of 2025 and beyond to see what else is incoming.

Speaking in a recent thread online, the original lead writer and creator of the beloved Dragon Age setting begins by addressing EA's quarterly earnings call in which the publisher insisted that The Veilguard "did not resonate with a broad enough audience" to hit sales expectations. Gaider explores the notion that the RPG would've performed better had it been a live service game, as executives "who don't don't actually know much about games" might think.

"If I really dig into my empathy, I can kinda see the thinking here," he writes. "Like, let's say you don't actually know much about games. You're in a big office with a bunch of other execs who also don't know much about games. What are they all saying? 'Live games do big numbers! Action games are hot!' Your natural response? 'We should make more action games, and all our games should have live service!' Cha-ching, right?"

Gaider continues: "Then some uppity devs spoil your buzz by saying 'that doesn't apply equally to all games' or 'we have an established IP with an audience that has certain expectations.' You frown. You go look at their sales. Good, sure, but not as spectacular as live service and action games! Profit's great, but what's the point if you're not #1 in the charts? If you're not making headlines? If the devs can't make it work, this is THEIR failure."

He goes on, looking at the hypothetical situation through the lens of a AAA publisher eyeing up "the future of gaming," who he suggests will eventually "ask yourself why we (the company) even bother with those other games. Like single-player games. It's a question you've asked aloud before. The fans bristle, but you're not here to supply every audience what they want. You're here to make money and increase share value."

The writer admits he might sound "unkind" but says there are lessons publishers like EA can learn from big releases like The Veilguard. Although he adds he's yet to play it himself, he suggests: "'Maybe it should have been live service' being the takeaway seems a bit short-sighted and self-serving."

Although he suggests that the company won't "care," Gaider concludes with some direct advice to EA. "You have an IP that a lot of people love. Deeply. At its height, it sold well enough to make you happy, right? Look at what it did best at the point where it sold the most."

What better example to use then than Baldur's Gate 3 and its own developers, who were recently outspoken about the reported layoffs across BioWare, and Gaider does just that. "Follow Larian's lead and double down on that," he concludes in his unofficial message to EA at the end of the thread. "The audience is still there. And waiting."

As layoffs reportedly hit BioWare, Former Dragon Age writer tells fans not to worry: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now"

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launched this week to pretty great reviews, and since the GamesRadar+ guides team has had its hands on the game for a while now, various writers have been sharing amusing details about the game for the past week or two. One of those is the method you use to respec, which stinks of Disco Elysium.

If you want to respec your perks in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, you have to drink a potion called "Lethean Water," which has a skull on the bottle and is made of several poisons. In the story, it causes you to purge yourself of all of your attributes and rebuild your life from the ground up. "Drink one mouthful and you'll forget all earthly experience," reads its description.

Mechanically, it wipes all of your character's perks and refunds you all of your perk points to build out everything from scratch.

Finally, anatomically, Lethean Water is pretty explicitly an alcoholic drink, with a key ingredient being wormwood, a real-life herb used to make vermouth and absinthe.

Basically, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 makes you drink yourself into a coma in order to respec. It's worth noting that this isn't new to the sequel; Lethean Water was added to the original Kingdom Come some time after launch, but with everyone playing the sequel right now, it seemed a worthy mention.

Elsewhere, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 pays tribute to Elden Ring icon Let Me Solo Her - and the legend himself thinks the Easter egg is "awesome."

"It will be more of a meager, smaller start, which is actually kind of what we want," Kaleiki tells GamesRadar+ in an interview. "We don't want it to be insane, too many players playing it, because we need to grow, and learn, and adapt, and build out the foundations as we go to accommodate more players over time."

When it releases in Steam early access next week, Kaleiki's online PvPvE role-playing game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery should appeal to fans of classic, ogres-and-goblins fantasy, as well as masochists, on behalf of its co-op survival and extraction elements. That's to say, several genre markers later, that Legacy's initial appeal might be a bit niche, especially with the world PvP focus.

"I think you've got to do this iterative crawl, walk, run strategy," Kaleiki tells us. "That is what our internal strategy is, rather than just go full-on sprint at the beginning."

But it's also true that "live service has been challenging," Kaleiki continues. "It's sort of saturated with so many different other live service games out there. To try to make a competitor to, say, Call of Duty or World of Warcraft [...] is really hard because those studios have what I call a moat protecting themselves. [...] How are you going to compete with that? Not to say it's impossible, but it's really hard to do."

More reasonable, then, is to set humble expectations and not plan for an unprecedented breakout hit like Marvel Rivals or Helldivers 2.

"I think for a startup, for a newer studio, for an indie," Kaleiki says, "trying to compete with a AAA, AAAA kind of game is going to be incredibly hard. I think it's better to do something like what we're doing, which is more of a AA space."

Kaleiki formed his own studio to make an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard."

BioWare made the decision to work on Dragon Age 2 in December 2009, between the November launch of Dragon Age: Origins and the March release of the expansion pack Awakening. "I think it was the last day we were working before the Christmas break. That's the time when the leadership of the Dragon Age franchise had the meeting where we were going to make Dragon Age 2," Darrah recalls in a new YouTube video breaking down 30 years of BioWare history.

"We were going to essentially jump on the grenade that was being placed in front of BioWare and try to fill the revenue gap that was left by Star Wars: The Old Republic moving in 2010," Darrah explains. By this point, The Old Republic had already been in development for years, and, according to an old LA Times article, the MMO ended up eating nearly $200 million in development costs. If that figure's accurate, The Old Republic would remain one of the most expensive games ever developed to this day.

With that financial albatross hanging over BioWare, it's easy to imagine why the studio might have been pressured to pump out a Dragon Age sequel in a hurry. By 2010, BioWare was "trying to make Dragon Age 2 in a really fast rush," Darrah continues. "We have started working on it before Dragon Age: Awakening has even shipped. What's happened is that Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMO, has slipped again, and EA is basically telling BioWare to make up the revenue. So we are trying to create a product in a very restricted timeline in order to do what EA wants, which is to fill a revenue gap."

EA's financial year ends in March, and that ended up being the deadline for BioWare. "In the case of Dragon Age 2 we were always aiming at March, just to get something in the fiscal year because of what was happening with Star Wars: The Old Republic," Darrah concludes. All that work took its toll on the developers too. In an older interview with Eurogamer, designer Mike Laidlaw admitted that the studio worked under pretty brutal crunch conditions.

Dragon Age 2 met with broadly positive reviews when it launched in 2011, but the signs of its accelerated development schedule showed even at the time, with critics and players both annoyed by the game's recycled dungeons. Still, the game has its fans, and many of its characters would become fan-favorites who'd crop up repeatedly in the series entries that followed.

Darrah's rundown of BioWare's past is a fun history lesson, but it comes at bittersweet time for fans of the studio. Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally launched last year after an agonizing wait, but underperformed EA's financial expectations. Now, BioWare is being restructured in the lead-up to Mass Effect 5, and layoffs loom over the studio.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard was loved by "those who played," EA insists, but "it did not resonate with a broad enough audience."

That's easier said than done. To fend off hunger, I crept in through someone's window to slurp stew straight from the pot as they slept. During one of my first nights in Bohemia, I climbed into a peasant's attic to snooze on a pile of straw, only to be woken up several hours later by a disgruntled guard and allegations of trespassing. Yeah yeah, "to the stockades," I'm going.

As my early experience in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was shaped by these more survival-minded mechanics, it struck me that more and more open worlds have been playing with this bumpy-by-design approach. Think of how Dragon's Dogma 2 made fast travel so hard, for example, or Baldur's Gate 3 refusing to swap out Dungeons & Dragons' eating and resting mechanics for something smoother. But why are these tougher features taking root in the best RPGs – and how did Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 get it all so right?

Hungry for more

When I raise these questions with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's senior game designer, Ondřej Bittner, it's obvious that he's already thought about the topic at some length. Bittner theorizes the growing practice is less of a way to make games outright harder, and more a rejection of the 'more is better' approach that many mainstream RPGs adopt.

"I think the mechanics you're describing – a little more involved gameplay – falls around the fact that players may be finally [realizing] that it doesn't really matter how long a game is," suggests Bittner. "What matters is if your individual sessions are individual enough. If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored. A little more involved mechanics [means] more original content."

Bittner – who is a "sucker for original content" – believes that the more you force players to keep their playtime reactive, the richer that playtime will feel. "Then your experience, session to session, is like: 'Oh yesterday someone stole my boots, and then I went around boozing…next thing, I went to this bandit camp, and the next day I was solving this mystery of a murder in the city. Because these are vastly different, you don't get bored, and it doesn't really matter if [the game is] 100 hours or 150."

Though our conversation is initially focused on survival mechanics in open world games – think Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl – Bittner suggests that the core principle, of layering and exploring the way we interact with these worlds at a deeper level, carries beyond the genre. "That [also] goes for games like Elden Ring, with all of its secrets," he explains. "Elden Ring has sort of simple mechanics, but it's so involved in the levels of where you can go and what you can discover – or on the other hand Zelda games, which have awesome mechanics. This is good for the industry, and for players too. I think the entertainment is more qualitative than certain titles which are just very repetitive."

An illusion, Henry

When it comes to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, some of its more involved features aren't actually as bad as they seem. Bittner points out that you'd have to "try really hard" to die of hunger (though I'll admit to recently killing Henry with a vicious bout of food poisoning), and outside of its limited save system, Warhorse's RPG is far from "Don't Starve Together or real survival games".

"All of these survival mechanics are there to remind you that Henry's just a human," says Bittner. "That kind of puts limits on other things you can expect. If your character has to eat and sleep, you'll be more careful in combat because surely they're not a superhero. So it's kind of grounding Henry."

Likewise, Bittner points to other areas of the game that stray from hard-edged realism to ensure trotting around Bohemia is still fun. Its alchemy system is "very much fantasy," for example, while Henry's carrying capacity is limited but still much higher than more restrictive games with similar features.

"We dialled back and we only kept things that make you more human, more grounded, but didn't detract from overall RPG gameplay, which is supposed to be: 'I'm the hero, I have these abilities, I'm meant to use these abilities to solve a problem'," says Bittner. "For example in the first game, poisons are incredibly overpowered. But we kept it there because if someone does all of that [sneaking and poisoning a camp's food supply] to get the poison, it's OK – they've already had their fun!"

It's a delicate balance, as game-ifying a system too much can detract from whatever immersion it may offer. Features like blacksmithing, alchemy, and even the way Henry has to sharpen his sword to keep it in fighting condition, are all designed to build up the game's medieval atmosphere – but for that reason, they were kept deliberately quite simple. "We didn't want to marry rich representation with very complicated or layered gameplay," says Bittner, who explains that the development team was very picky about which features made it into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

"Any minigame we would do – or even considered – had to have the same basic standard," says Bittner. "It had to be immersive, it had to be like Henry is doing this. So if there's fishing, Henry is sitting on the river bank. Or if you're playing dice, you're actually sitting at the table and looking at the other person checking dice, and it takes forever – because if it didn't, the immersion would be weaker and immersion is all we've got. Well not all we've got, but it's the most important thing for the game."

Done right, these textured mechanics – even if they're taking something away from the player – mark the difference between playing in a game's open world and living in it. Personally, I'll take the hunger, the food poisoning, or even the rude awakenings from meddling lawmen if it means feeling like I'm truly slumming it in 15th century Bohemia. Some things are worth going to the stockades for.

"Instant gratification in gaming has become a problem" – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says the RPG is meant to feel like a spiritual successor to Oblivion and Morrowind

Developer Warhorse Studios announced the sales milestone on social media. "Over a million of you have stepped into our world," it wrote. "We're beyond grateful for your support - thank you for making KCD2 a triumph!" The historical RPG that takes players to 15th Century Bohemia is clearly drawing a crowd, but it's also garnering huge heaps of praise.

On Metacritic, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is currently the best-rated game of the year with an aggregate score of 88 based on 52 reviews from critics. The only games that come close to the top are the absolutely lovely co-op skiing sequel Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders and the equally lovely TTRPG-inspired cyberpunk adventure Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, holding the second and third spots on the chart respectively.

Our own Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review was just as enthusiastic about the game, calling it an "utterly absorbing" romp through a world that's committed to historical realism at every turn. "Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a vast accomplishment, an even more complete and immersive follow-up that paints a wide picture of medieval life," Alan Wen wrote.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has a lot of competition to fend off if it wants to retain its crown this month, though. Take one look at the upcoming game releases and you'll see that February is absolutely packed with games that might just claim victory on those Metacritic charts, including fellow first-person RPG Avowed, the delightfully named Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, and Monster Hunter Wilds.

Looking for another epic adventure? Check out our best RPG games.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard reportedly didn't meet its publisher's expectations, with sales previously said to be "down nearly 50%" from what EA had initially hoped for and subsequent layoffs reported across BioWare. Speaking in a recent earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirms as much, explaining that the overall sales EA's published games saw this past quarter didn't hit "the financial performance we wanted or expected." He goes on to name The Veilguard.

Describing the company's "blockbuster storytelling strategy," Wilson says that Dragon Age "had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played" – but this wasn't enough to keep the title afloat. "However," he admits, "it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market." Later on during the financial call, chief financial officer Stuart Canfield agrees that The Veilguard "underperformed."

"Historically," Canfield describes, "blockbuster storytelling has been the primary way our industry brought beloved IP to players." This approach didn't work for The Veilguard, with Canfield noting a changing market. "The game's financial performance highlights the evolving industry landscape and reinforces the importance of our actions to reallocate resources towards our most significant and highest potential opportunities."

A majority of the call is spent discussing EA Sports FC 25, but as a longtime fan of the Dragon Age series myself, EA's words on The Veilguard are difficult to process – as are the recent developer layoffs. Our own Dragon Age: The Veilguard review dubbed the game a "true return to RPG form for BioWare," with many others expressing a similar sentiment, and believing it was one of the best RPGs of 2024.

As layoffs reportedly hit BioWare, Former Dragon Age writer tells fans not to worry: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now"

None of these characters appear to actually be licensed, but the likenesses are not at all subtle. The cinematic trailer features a green-haired girl clearly meant to evoke Deku from My Hero Academia and a scarred, sword-wielding heroine with a much skimpier version of Tanjiro's outfit from Demon Slayer. The female Luffy that emblazons the game's splash art is perhaps even more brazen.

Digging through character trailers and the game's Twitter presence, the list just keeps on going and going. There's Denise, the chainsaw woman, who appears to have been separated at birth from Denji, the Chainsaw Man. There's Rora Zorana, the green-haired swordswoman putting out the exact same vibes as One Piece's Roronoa Zoro. And then there's Satoria, this game's take on Jujutsu Kaisen's Satoru Gojo.

Every single character in this game appears to be a direct rip-off of some anime boy or another, and the hits just keep hitting. We've got representation from Naruto - particularly appropriate since we're just hitting sexy jutsu on all these characters - as well as Death note, Dr. Stone, and Attack on Titan. The ones that have me most flabbergasted, though, are Ivy Linn, a Shinji Ikari stand-in who's just straight-up wearing Evangelion Unit-01 as a hat, and Chronis, the Jotaro Kujo lookalike who's even accompanied by a stand. Not a gender-swapped stand or anything, as that's just Star Platinum.

Enigma of Sepia is set to hit iPhone and Android in February, assuming none of the numerous Japanese IP holders whose characters are being, uh, referenced here take exception to the whole thing.

These are the best anime games to play in 2025.

That's right – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's recent CGI trailer features a real horse. How did Warhorse pull that off? By bringing the horse into the motion capture studio just as the studio did with its human actors. A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the new trailer highlights as much with a black horse covered in mocap gear trotting casually through the studio, a rider similarly geared up sitting atop the mount.

It's so quick, you might miss it – if it wasn't so wildly bizarre to see a horse in mocap gear – and it comes right after a scene featuring another actor "riding" a stationary mount dummy. This isn't the first time developers have used live animals to translate real-life movements to virtual ones more seamlessly, as proven by Rockstar Games' own past mocap work for Red Dead Redemption 2, but it's just as amusing to see now as ever.

Fans seem to love the idea of a horse in a mocap studio still, too, with comments showing as much. "Bringing an actual horse to mocap a 5-second scene is insane dedication," reads one such reply. Another response sees a fan simply exclaim, "That's an entire horse!" That it is, and as both a devoted horse girl as well as a lover of all things medieval myself, I'd be lying if I said the short clip hasn't impressed me as much as it has others.

If you're just as blown away by the thought of a massive horse fitted in mocap gear, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is available to purchase now on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S, and on PC via Steam so you can experience the ultra-realistic mount mechanics yourself.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 trades Skyrim stealth archers for stinky smelly archers: you can get so filthy that NPCs catch you "broadcasting" body odor, so "wash your hands, kids"

Composer Winifred Phillips has contributed the music for plenty of iconic games over the years, having been credited on God of War (2005), LittleBigPlanet 2, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and more. However, the game soundtrack she's just won a Grammy for is none other than Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord – specifically, the 2024 remake of a highly influential RPG which first released in 1981. 

As you might expect, Phillips' updated soundtrack sounds rather different to the original, but it's so damn good that it beat some very popular rivals for the award. Also nominated were Bear McCreary for God of War: Ragnarok's Valhalla DLC, John Paesano for Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Wilbert Roget II for Star Wars Outlaws, and Pinar Toprak for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, making for a truly eclectic mix. 

Of all the nominees, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord's roots certainly go back the furthest, and while the award might be for the remake's composer, it's very neat to give the series some credit here, especially when it had such an impact on RPGs in general. The series, which started with Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, is often credited as having helped shape the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

In her acceptance speech, after expressing her gratitude to remake developers Digital Eclipse, as well as the remake's creative lead Jeff Nachbaur and music producer Winnie Waldron, Phillips says: "I'd just love to thank all of you for believing in music for games and for recognizing it, and for breathing life and enthusiasm and energy into what we do. It means so much, thank you."

For more games like Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, be sure to check out our roundup of the best RPGs you can play right now.

In many ways, I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is as close a spiritual successor to Oblivion as we'll ever get. Some of its resemblances are skin-deep, like the way that 15th-century Bohemia's lush forests and rolling hills seem to sprawl in every direction like Cyrodiil's own. Elsewhere, it's a little more mechanical. NPCs live their own lives that you can't just twist around your own, which makes it all the funnier when a passing noble decides to jump off his horse to help you kill a roadside bandit with his bare hands. Importantly, though, the two games share that feeling of complete liberation in their beginnings: the implication that everything is possible, if you can just pick a direction and walk.

Of course, there was always the possibility that I was just being a huge Oblivion sicko – so when I caught up with Warhorse to discuss all things Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I had to ask whether there was any tangible connection there.

Working backwards

Right off the bat, Ondřej Bittner – senior game designer for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – has a confession. "I'm not much of an Oblivion guy myself," he says, laughing. "I'm more of a Morrowind person."

But that era of RPGs has played a major role in Warhorse's approach to crafting an RPG – Morrowind was released just four years before Oblivion, which makes the ever-growing gap between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 sting all the more. "Most of our designers are in their mid 30s – like, 30s to 40s – so these games had a huge impact on us," says Bittner.

That's largely due to the slower pacing of older RPGs, in which the emphasis lay more on discovery and slow-burn adventure. Those attitudes – to me, at least – were exemplified by the fact that the process of finding a side quest was just as exciting and important as actually playing one.

"Instant gratification in games has become a problem where, to sustain dopamine for people, you have to constantly bombard [players] with stuff," says Bittner. "One day they wake up and go 'oh, this is all really obnoxious' and they shut it all down. So we kind of go back to the roots of RPGs where it's sort of like: well, you can do whatever you want, and maybe go and do the main story."

Bittner describes the approach as "going back to the [genre's] roots with less hand-holding," but acknowledges that it can cause friction. "We don't really tell you what to do exactly, and sometimes this can clash with players from a younger generation," he explains. "They can be like 'I don't know where to go' – well, have you thought about where to go? If I tell you where to go, it's not really as fun, is it?"

Acrobatics

At times, this approach can be as much a burden for the team at Warhorse as it is a boon, as the studio doesn't want to alienate players by taking away some guidance systems they may be used to. Bittner says the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance – which features a notoriously difficult opening segment – was a "massive lecture" in finding the right balance. "We wanted to make mechanics [in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2] more approachable so that they're hard, but not so hard that players don't even know what to do. So that learning curve should be a little bit smoother, especially in combat, so it's not detracting and you can actually start exploring – so you can enjoy doing it, and you're not immediately like 'oh, this is not for me'."

There's no better example of that compromise than the moment Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 cuts players loose from its on-rails introduction. You're ditched in a strange land with no money, clothes, or weapons to your name, while survival mechanics like needing to eat, drink, and sleep make merely finding your feet in this world feel more important than the main quest. Mere feet away from your starting position, a local beggar can suggest ways for you to find essentials. Bittner says this character, designed as a "road sign for players who were like 'I don't know what to do'", was added to avoid losing potential fans too early. It's one of the more unforgiving introductions to an RPG, but that sort of in-world guidance makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 feel far more approachable than its predecessor without losing its very deliberate challenge.

It's that carefully-cultivated feeling of being lost by design that makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sit closer to the likes of Oblivion than anything I've played in a long time – and subsequently, one of the best RPGs I've played in a long time. I would love to see more have confidence in their world and set players loose as freewheeling nobodies, whether that leads to accidentally getting roped into Cyrodiil's local Dark Brotherhood chapter (a story for another time) or seeing poor Henry arrested for the humble crime of sleeping uninvited in someone's attic. Not knowing how a world will react to you is a thrill unlike any other, and that goes double for a game as mechanically deep as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – in which you can literally be too stinky to sneak.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev on launching an RPG in a brutal month for games: "I think if this happened with the first game, morale would be crushed"

Now cast your eyes to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which delivers exciting advancements in stealth fumbling technology by letting you get so filthy and smell so bad that stealth becomes incredibly difficult because an alarming cloud of your irrepressible stank will reach any unwitting guards several seconds before your knife ever could.

Our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review notes the game's unflinching commitment to recreating 15th century Bohemia with brutal accuracy, and one recurring detail – just how gross the old times were – came up in our conversation with senior game designer Ondřej Bittner. One of our writers had reason to suspect that a guard had quite literally sniffed him out because he hadn't taken a bath in a while, and it turns out they were bang-on.

"Basically, if you get the debuff that, you know, your body odor, you smell, there's like a circle around you," Bittner explains. "Basically, you're broadcasting, like, I'm here. So yeah, we added that. It's actually smelling. If he would just wash or go to the bathhouse, this wouldn't happen."

The solution to this stank-sabotaged stealth situation couldn't be more obvious: take a bath, you filthy animals. Bittner's advice was simpler still: "Wash your hands, kids." This isn't the first game with stealth to use smell as a variable, though it is uncommon, but the medieval presentation is certainly funny. I'm actually reminded of one of my favorite community watershed moments from a previous RPG with the Baldur's Gate 3 launch: that time too many players realized too late in the game that you don't have to walk around looking like the canvas from an FBI blood splatter test.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 dev on launching an RPG in a brutal month for games: "I think if this happened with the first game, morale would be crushed."

"I think, if this happened with the first game, morale would be crushed," senior game designer Ondřej Bittner tells us. When Warhorse released the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance back in 2018, the Czech studio was independent, feeling out the future with its debut title. But after Plaion acquired Warhorse in 2019, the developer gained the opportunity to deliver glossy games with more self-assurance.

"Now we learn, kind of, to sit at the big boy table," Bittner says. "We're positively confident in our own product."

Assassin's Creed Shadows was, in hindsight, mercifully delayed out of February and into March, so that's one behemoth Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 won't have to contend with. In any case, Bittner notes that none of February's big releases – including Obsidian's fantasy RPG Avowed – are exactly substitutes for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's slow and faithful adaptation of medieval Bohemia, as we put it in our review.

"Some of the games releasing [this month] are just the things that will steal media coverage, but the player bases are not really alike, so you're not afraid [of] that," Bittner says.

"The industry, I think, is going in a way where I have to buy on the first day, but, with the amount of games out there, people don't do it as much," he continues. "So it really is lucky that this whole thing is changing a little bit. You can't really do anything about it to be honest."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance creator says his RPG series only exists because he was “p***ed” at the lack of historical games.

While that often means progression can be a more pedestrian affair, having the patience to meet the game on its terms makes for a more genuine form of role-playing, where drawing your sword is rarely the first choice for solving a problem. Which isn't to say Kingdome Come: Deliverance 2 has a slow start, instead thrusting you in media res into a full-scale castle siege.

Our returning protagonist, the likeable and occasionally bumbling Henry of Skalitz, has come some way from being an illiterate blacksmith's apprentice. But even in the context of warring allegiances in the kingdom, some of your immediate concerns when you're set out questing into the world involve simply trying to find your missing dog, or helping the reclusive herbwoman who saved your life find her daughter. It's a reminder that you aren't a powerful hero, but a small cog doing your best amid grand political machinations.

Nonetheless, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a sequel on a much larger canvas, painted in a variety of brushstrokes. The emphasis on realism may mean life is hard and brutal, especially if you don't have a groschen to your name, yet there is an equally bawdy tone, backed by colorful characters using equally as colorful language, or where even a seemingly mundane quest can stretch into relatively epic proportions that'll dominate your next few hours of play. Even if some friction can lead to frustration while occasional glitches break the immersion, its realization of medieval life remains utterly absorbing.

Audentes fortuna iuvat

For an RPG with no spells, the real magic of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is just how believable and beautifully rendered with CryEngine its open world is. That's especially evident when simply walking or riding across open countryside in the early morning or sunset, without being spoiled by the usual clutter of collectibles or waypoints. Come across a village and it will be about the size that a real medieval village would be with humble amenities. Larger towns are fortified with a few specific guarded entrance points, and waltzing into someone's private property will immediately be unwelcome, albeit still giving you reasonable time to clear off before escalating.

Naturally, wielding a sword in a tavern or market needlessly will also draw ire from the locals. Instead, you're encouraged to use your powers of persuasion to affect a favorable outcome, which can depend as much on your appearance as much as your stats. High charisma points alone aren't enough to charm someone if you don't dress the part and haven't had a wash for a week.

This isn't to say that there aren't videogamey conveniences available to you, such as fast-travelling to towns you've previously visited or being able to advance time so you don't have to potter around while waiting for a rendezvous. It's nonetheless intriguing how these systems have some consistency. While time advances while you fast travel, for instance, poor Henry's hunger and sleep stats will decrease, and he'll begin to grumble at you for leaving him unrested and unfed should the numbers get dangerously low.

What there's no getting away from is that progression is purposely slow, even without including the times you may find yourself having to reload a save to try again, contributing to an already lengthy campaign well beyond 60 hours and split between two large regions of Bohemia. Some of that comes naturally as you play, and early on when circumstances leave Henry penniless in beggar's clothing, you're primed for a slow and steady climb to go from surviving to thriving, where every coin in your pouch matters.

The first main quest, for instance, has you attempting to gain access to a wedding, which means taking on a handful of menial and tertiary tasks before you can even get close to receiving the coveted invite. But ultimately, you need to put in the work, because much like in real life, the only way to get better at something is to keep doing it. That's quite literally the case when it comes to crafting weapons or brewing potions, each with their own involved and methodical minigames. There's no shortcutting these processes, at least not without causing problems down the line.

Despite usually preferring the stealthy approach, I found myself avoiding lockpicking or pickpocketing in the early hours as successfully pulling them off is difficult at first – your novice hand moves wobbly. Yet while the open-ended design for most quests means there's usually other ways to get what you want, including outright bribery, it also meant when it came to a later quest that required me to sneak into a house to steal an item, opting out of lockpicking earlier on meant my thievery stats and perks hadn't made any meaningful progression, rendering medium-level locks impossible to crack.

You're not completely (ahem) locked out, as potions can temporarily supercharge stats. But then that also means acquiring the recipe for it and having the ingredients to brew it. In other words, it all takes time and planning, one way or another.

Such is the breadth of options available to you that violence rarely needs to be the answer. Though, at times, the dangerous world will require you to rise up to meet it with steel. It's tempting to avoid bandit skirmishes on the road when you see them coming, but ultimately those will be experience points you lose out on that may put you at a disadvantage in unavoidable scraps later. Of course, beyond combat mastery, other factors like having your weapon sharpened or actually having armor equipped are also vital.

Even then, combat is one of the least appealing aspects of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, more like something you have to do rather than something you'd go out of your way to engage in – arguably a realistic response to violence. Its directional system for attacking, blocking, and parrying can feel weighty one moment, yet hard to parse the next. At times, inconsistent animations have hits on enemies you swore connected fail to register.

It's especially messy during group fights, exacerbated by an annoying targeting system that I found could all too easily disengage at inopportune moments. Of course, you would expect being outnumbered by the enemy to be unwieldy and difficult in real life too, but it's also unsatisfying when some of these encounters are just about enduring long enough before a cutscene arbitrarily moves things along. Expect to see the partying skeleton on the Game Over screen many times.

The less said about firearms, the better. They're introduced as a new and devastating weapon but are so horribly cumbersome to use to the point of being useless unless you're prepared to waste a lot of shots just so you can gradually improve your skill with them. You can understand why it would take longer to load a single shot than to loose an arrow, but there is something especially wilful in the design that the game has an onscreen crosshair by default almost all the time… apart from when you're holding a ranged weapon.

Getting medieval

For those who really want to be transported to medieval Bohemia, however, there is much to enjoy by slowing down and taking everything in the minutia. The city of Kuttenberg is especially impressive, with each of its districts distinct and faithfully realized, while you could go as far as follow any citizen's daily routine.

Sometimes that's actually the best thing to do, too, since some quests have Henry play detective, asking the locals and trying to find leads in his investigation to puzzle out the location of clues – without a marker on the map, mind you. Quests are often lengthy and involved affairs, and will sometimes tangentially lead to other stories beginning to unwind, blossoming the narrative quite naturally.

While it will of course help your stats, it's just as easy to break away from your main objectives and spend your time gambling with dice, smithing and selling weapons, or hunting animals in the wild (although you'll also run into trouble as you'll technically be guilty of poaching the king's game). But you can also find side quests to undertake from the unlikeliest of sources. Ironically, the best way to find new adventure is by fast-travelling, where there's always a chance you'll be interrupted by a random encounter, whether that's bandits trying to rob an innocent passerby or a stranger who may or may not have good intentions. One of my most surreal moments was encountering a man walking around with an arrow still lodged in his head.

Even if you can't talk to everyone, the larger scale of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 means a much larger script, reportedly more than 2.2 million words. Players may bristle at the quality of the writing, which can flip from earnest and serious to coarse and bawdy, with liberal droppings of c-bombs and 'Kurva'. The constant reference to women as 'wench' can also be cringe-inducing despite being common usage in the middle ages. Katherine, a quick-witted spy Henry teams up with regularly in the story, subverts the mostly silent or servile housewives and bathmaids you encounter, but that doesn't stop the game from pointing out her other assets first.

Yet these different facets to the tone also add to the authenticity, where life is diverse and riddled with contradictions. Talk of God is in earnest in between drinking, cursing, and whoring, death can come suddenly but the game doesn't revel in gratuitous violence. Even a mission that requires you to torture someone allows you to weigh up the moral unpleasantness of the task and even avoid it altogether, not least because you'll find yourself on the receiving end. In contrast to the exclusively white population of the first game, this sequel makes the effort of including other ethnicities in Bohemia, which impact both the narrative and the gameplay.

Overall then, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a vast accomplishment, an even more complete and immersive follow-up that paints a wide picture of medieval life. Provided you have the patience with its pacing and are willing to put in the hours to get deeper into its systems rather than just trying to min-max your way out of a problem at optimal speed, it's a thoroughly absorbing RPG that's quite unlike anything else.

Looking for another epic adventure? Check out our best RPG games!

We've seen several bases and hideouts in subsequent Assassin's Creed entries since, with each one coming in a shape or form that befits the setting and style of the adventure it's home to. It's become something of a staple that's changed as the series has evolved, but Assassin's Creed Shadows signals something of a new dawn for them. Set to offer up Sims-style customization and a wealth of new ways to engage with the space to make it our own, Shadows promises to make the base more homely than ever.

Your safe space

When I think about all of the bases we've seen across the Assassin's Creed series, I have some standout favorites. Some are far more customizable and feature-heavy than others, but above all, I've always appreciated how unique many of them feel because of the way they fit into the time period they're in. Outside of the Villa Auditore, another big highlight came in the shape of a steam train in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which would move through Victorian London. Apt and novel at the same time, it gave Evie and Jacob a little mobile base of operations, away from the gangs, where you could set down souvenirs, access the black market, and collect any funds your gangs have earned.

I was also always very fond of the theatre cafe in Assassin's Creed Unity, which captured the 18th century Parisian backdrop of the adventure perfectly. With several renovations to work towards, it featured a training room, an area for collectibles, and even a bedroom for Arno that housed his belongings and personal letters – which I always appreciated from a role-playing perspective. Now, Assassin's Creed Shadows looks set to bring forward some of the features I loved in previous home bases, and also build on what's come before by providing more meaningful customization and additional touches that lean into its RPG direction.

As GamesRadar+'s Gaming Editor Oscar Taylor-Kent explains in his Assassin's Creed Shadows preview of the new home base, we're set to have a hideout that will let us carve out our own safe space amid the violence and chaos of the Sengoku era in Japan. Not only can we feel more at home by displaying collectibles and adopting pets – such as Shiba Inus and cats – but we can also spend time there getting to know characters we've recruited along the way. As the studio behind Syndicate, there are immediate parallels to the steam train, with the collectible aspect in Shadows instantly bringing to mind the souvenir-laden room on the locomotive.

Heading home

Plus, not unlike the Fyre twins, Yasuke or Naoe will reside at the base when you switch between them, but in Shadows you can engage in a conversation with your fellow protagonist counterpart when you pop by. It's always great to have a place to reflect on all of your own achievements, or take some down time during your adventures in RPGs, and Shadows sounds like a great evolution on what the developer has brought us before in Syndicate.

Ultimately the hideout is designed to be a place "where you feel at ease", as creative director Jonathan Dumont put it, and from everything we've heard about it so far, it looks set to capture the idea of the found family. With Yaskue being an outsider and Naoe trying to better understand herself and her lineage, it sounds as though the base will provide a feeling of home that they can't find anywhere else. I already love how the circumstances of the dual protagonists give the base greater emotional weight and importance as a place they both need, as well as a functional area with useful features.

But what is even more exciting is the emphasis Shadows is putting on customization. While I've enjoyed the ability to upgrade bases in the past to see how the likes of Assassin's Creed 2's town and Assassin's Creed Valhalla's Ravensthorpe transform – largely due to the sense of progression it affords – Shadows is going all out by putting the design and look of our hideout directly into our hands. With a grid-based system and tools not unlike The Sims 4, we'll be able to place down paths, trees, and more. It's entirely ours to mold and shape, which makes it far more personal not just to Yaskue and Naoe, but also to us as players.

Bases have come a long way and chopped and changed often since the days I spent walking through the restored streets of Monteriggioni as Ezio Auditore. From hopping onto a moving train in the Victorian garb of the Fyre Twins, to developing the viking settlement of Ravensthorpe as Eivor, I've always loved having some kind of place to return to amid all of the hidden-blade, stealthy action. And now, Assassin's Creed Shadows promises to bring us not just a hideout, but a home. I can't think of anything more exciting than that.

Assassin's Creed Shadows hands-on: Stealthier and bloodier than ever.

Last week, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that considering Mass Effect 5's current "stage of development," the team doesn't "require support from the full studio," noting that "many colleagues" had been matched up with other EA teams with open roles. In a statement sent to IGN, a BioWare spokesperson confirmed that with Dragon Age: The Veilguard now shipped, "the studio's full focus is Mass Effect." The spokesperson didn't provide comment about the reported layoffs, however – Bloomberg has since claimed that less than 100 employees are left at BioWare.

In a Twitter thread responding to this news, the project director of the upcoming Mass Effect game, Michael Gamble, has clarified what stage of development the RPG is currently at and it sounds like it's still quite a ways off being completed. "As the notes have said, we are still in pre-production," Gamble writes. 

Considering how little we know about the game, it makes sense. Hell, we still don't know if it'll pull a Witcher 4 or Switch 2 and be given the "unofficial" name that everyone's been using for it – Mass Effect 5 – or be called something else entirely. 

As for the current team size, this lines up with comments made by former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah, who claimed in a video after The Veilguard's release that Mass Effect 5 "isn't ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it." In the same video, he said that he believed that since the project wasn't "up and running at full speed" yet, "there is a need to find other work for them within the rest of the EA organization while the Mass Effect team figures out what Mass Effect is going to be, figures out the structure, and then gets ready to ramp up to a much bigger team size."

As layoffs reportedly hit BioWare, former Dragon Age writer tells fans not to worry: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now."

One of YCJY Games' two main developers jumped on to Reddit to announce the release date, calling it a "management and road RPG about looking back and moving forward, just like any good road trip." He then breaks down some of what we see happening in the trailer below: "Along your journey, you'll pick up hitchhikers with their own stories and abilities that help you in the game's turn-based combat. You'll customize and repair your car, take on odd jobs and explore off-the-beat paths too. There's a lot of resource management, as every action costs something (energy/items/money/time), so you'll have to be strategic about how you progress on the road."

Keep Driving is apparently the work of just two friends (and one "awesome sound designer") who both started development a few years ago, though there's a very good chance you've already heard of or played the game yourself. Our Dustin Bailey wrote about chugging two liters of soda to survive an all nighter with an N64 game in his trunk in the game's brilliant Steam Next Fest demo, which got over 70,000 downloads and led to more than 170,000 wishlists. Keep Driving's Steam demo is still available to try ahead of its release this week, too.

For more, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond. 

In case I wasn't clear enough, the elevator pitch for Sea Fantasy is simple and effective: you take a pretty standard fishing minigame, in this case one pretty similar to Stardew Valley's, and make it the primary gameplay mechanic in a bite-sized open-world RPG. "This is not a peaceful fishing game. The destruction of the world is imminent," warns the game's Steam description.

Sea Fantasy is the debut project from developer and publisher Metasla, but you wouldn't know it from an artistic or gameplay perspective. The visuals are pixel-perfect, the RPG mechanics are deep and approachable, and most importantly, the fishing minigame is fun and challenging, if not a tad bit derivative. The fish can and do fight back, which makes Sea Fantasy's fishing refreshingly unique, but mechanically it's nothing new.

The main gameplay loop is: catch fish, use materials to craft new gear with better stats and the occasional bonus effect, catch rarer and more challenging fish, rinse and repeat. That said, there's a surprising amount of gameplay variety across different areas of the game. For such a short game (I beat it in about seven hours), I wasn't expecting to find so many different puzzles, mini-games, boss types, and random stealth and bullet-hell sequences.

In retrospect, Sea Fantasy is a deeply weird game, and that whole vibe is compounded by some really rough English translation and a borderline suspiciously generic story. It sure as heck ain't perfect, but there's really nothing else like it, and for that reason alone it gets a recommend from me.

These are the upcoming indie games you should have on your radar for 2025.

"The challenge in RPGs is we want you to feel this progression throughout the game, but it can't start in a way that just feels crappy," combat designer Max Matzenbacher tells PCGamer in issue 405. "We play with the timing of the animations, and we've spent a lot of time having the animation state change based on the type of hit.

"If it's a normal hit, we're trying to get that connection to feel right; if it's a hit where you're fighting an enemy that's too strong for you, we kinda try to make it feel like you're hitting an immobile post. Camera shake in first-person makes the game too disorienting, so our UI team has gotten the HUD to shake."

It's an age-old problem. You don't want players to be distracted by how underpowered they feel early game – much how you don't want people to feel like they need to sink 10 hours for the story to 'get good.' Still, using the HUD to demonstrate how far you've come is a nice idea that ought to go a long way, coupled with other elements to keep Avowed from feeling "crappy" early doors.

You won't have to wait long to see how it all shakes out, either. Avowed is due to launch on February 18, 2025.

Avowed is an RPG that's both the culmination of everything Obsidian has done before, and also an evolution of it: "There's really not a whole lot of our regions that's off limits to the players."

In a series of tweets spotted and translated by Automaton, a clip of upcoming base-building RPG Arknights: Endfield, developed by a Shanghai studio called Hypergryph, was praised by Japanese devs who went on to discuss China's mobile and gacha game scene.

"When I look at this, I feel like the biggest difference between recent Chinese games and domestic [Japanese] games doesn't lie in the graphics, but in the animation," writes Alwei, a representative of Indie-Us Games. "And it's not just the way the characters move – it's the physics, the camera work, and the way it guides the viewer's line of sight. Every aspect of the animation is far superior to that of domestic games."

The video is certainly… expressive. On a surface level, it's what you'd expect from a gacha game; a woman in a revealing outfit jumping and jiggling. On a technical level, though, it's easy to see what Alwei is writing about, as the animations do look incredibly smooth.

One of the most-popular video games at the moment is made by Chinese studio miHoYo, Genshin Impact. It and other games made by miHoYo, such as Zenless Zone Zero and Honkai: Star Rail, have all done incredibly well, causing plenty of us to part with our cash for the chance to pull rare characters.

Alwei adds that there's a shortage of animators in Japan which may be why China seems to have overtaken the country in that area of game development. "It remains to be seen to what extent Japanese games will be able to compete, considering that China will continue to produce highly polished animation at this level," Alwei writes.

It's not just the number of animators available in China, though. Apparently, the country does everything bigger than Japan. "If you've been involved in Chinese game projects, you'll know that they use 10x more money and manpower than Japan – the scale is incomparable," writes illustrator and animator Shiba_29. "If you knew the actual numbers, you'd be astonished. It's not the kind of budget that can be recovered with a couple of hundred of million [yen] in launch day revenue."

Considering China has a population of over 1.4 billion, which is over ten times Japan's 124 million, it's no surprise there are just more resources available to Chinese devs.

Finally, Shiba_29 notes that development in China is more "free-spirited" than it is in Japan, and developers come up with "crazy" ideas that "would never get approved in Japan," which they believe adds to why the animations look more expressive.

If you want to check out Arknights: Endfield, you can sign up for the beta right here.

In the meantime, check out the best RPGs you can play right now.

Now, BioWare has confirmed its focus is shifting to Mass Effect 5, with an IGN report shedding light on the studio's restructuring – which, reportedly, has sadly resulted in the layoffs of several veteran developers that made Dragon Age the beloved series it is. While I'm looking forward to a new game as a big ME fan, I can't shake the feeling that as Mass Effect begins something new, Rook's adventure in turn marks the end of an era for Dragon Age.

The Maker

From the moment I first experienced Dragon Age: Origins, I was hooked. Swept up in the world, lore, and storytelling, Origins and the RPGs that followed shaped a big chunk of my life. That's why, in spite of my increasing sense of excitement and anticipation about the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard late last year, I was also trying to push down some trepidation. Sure, part of that was a fear that I might not like the new RPG – which was put to rest once I tucked into the adventure – but it was mostly down to the feeling that this would likely be the last time I would play a new Dragon Age game for years. I felt like I was preparing myself not just for an ending to the story of The Veilguard, but an ending to the current series as we've known it.

I'm feeling this more keenly in light of the layoffs we've seen at BioWare this past week, not to mention in the last few years. There's been an unprecedented number of layoffs within the industry, and BioWare is no exception, with the loss of so many talented developers that made their mark on the series. Dragon Age wouldn't be Dragon Age without them. From the likes of Varric Tethras' writer Mary Kirby who was laid off back in 2023, to developers who have just recently been impacted by the studios restructuring – such as Solas' creator, Trick Weekes, it feels like so few are left who did so much to make the series what it is. We owe it to these writers and talented individuals – many of whom are sadly no longer at the studio – for the characters, stories, and moments that have stayed with us for all these years.

It's hard to reconcile the loss of so much creative talent at BioWare with a bright future for the series, but that's not to say we won't ever see Dragon Age return someday. If we do see Thedas make a comeback following Veilguard, though, it does feel like whatever comes next for Dragon Age will walk an entirely fresh path, and signal a new era for the series. In many ways, the ending of The Veilguard leaves the door wide open for just that.

With Solas' story concluded, The Veilguard ties up several threads that have been woven through the entire series, such as the nature of red lyrium, the Blight, and the fate of the Elven Gods, which paves the way for a lot of future possibilities and directions. In fact, creative director John Epler spoke with me last year about this very idea. But, as of right now, the future of Dragon Age is uncertain.

Looking ahead

It's an understatement to say that making games is hard, and the more I come to understand development and the many moving parts involved, the more I appreciate just how much of a miracle it is when a game is made. With The Veilguard going through a lengthy development cycle in the lead up to launch, and an ever mounting level of expectation surrounding the RPG, it was never going to please everyone. But I loved how it delved into the theme of regret, how Varric's role was woven into the story, and how it continued to explore Solas – who's one of the most complex characters in the series. With meaningful features such as the mirror that helps us see ourselves reflected, and inclusive character creator options, so much of its design is great to see in a modern RPG. And while The Veilguard brought closure to some of the major storylines of the series, it also marked an end I'm still processing as a longtime fan.

I'm also a big fan of Mass Effect, and the prospect of a new instalment of course has me excited. I can only imagine the pressure to deliver when it comes to something like Mass Effect 5, so I'm more than happy to let the team cook, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. But it's sad to see so much of the talent at BioWare get pushed out, and only time will tell what that will really mean for Dragon Age going forward.

As BioWare shifts focus, it'll likely be a long time before we hear about the future of Dragon Age. With so many of its creators now gone, it's hard not to wonder if it'll ever really be the same, but I can only hope we do see one of my favorite RPG series make a great comeback someday. The Dragon Age series will always be a part of me, and I can only thank the teams behind it for that. I take comfort in knowing that I can return to Thedas through books, comics, and the previous games at any time. Just as senior writer Sheryl Chee put it: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now".

Over $170,000 has been raised for Johnson's medical bills since a GoFundMe was launched four days ago after the actor was found unconscious in his hotel room before hosting an Alzheimer's charity fundraiser.

In a new video shared by Johnson yesterday from his hospital bed (spotted by VG247), he says, "Hey, it's Wes Johnson. It's still Wes Johnson, and rumors of my demise… well, they weren't exaggerated. It was very close, but I'm still here," showing he's in good spirits and tongue-in-cheek about everything.

"They took me to the hospital, put me in a coma. I'd been there five days before I found out that my wonderful friends Bill Glasser, Shari Elliker, and Kim had put together this GoFundMe," he continues. "I found out there's a lot of love in this world that I didn't know was out there, and I'm grateful to each and every one of you."

He thanks the Alzheimer's Association, people who have donated to his GoFundMe, and Bethesda: "I am grateful to Bethesda Game Studios. You say that I'm your friend? I am. Always will be. Love you guys. And I love each and every one of you who have not only donated something to help me get through this, but have written, have posted, have asked how I am, have been concerned. I love you all. I'm not going anywhere. It's going to be a while as I work my way back, but I'm coming back."

His voice sounds weak in the video, which is understandable given he's been in a coma for days, but it's good to hear him say he'll be back at some point. Let's all hope he can spend time resting and recovering first. If you want to help you can donate to his GoFundMe.

If you want to hear more of Wes Johnson, check out the best Fallout games, he's in a lot of them.

Chee was also moved out of BioWare, but they post: "I'm now with Motive. It's been a hard two years seeing my team get chipped away and having to still keep going. But I'm still employed, so there's that."

Layoffs have hit the industry hard these last few years. Record growth occurred during the COVID lockdowns, but since that growth has slowed, companies have been cutting costs by firing their most talented developers.

Despite it all, Chee still seems hopeful. They write: "So a cool French woman dropped a cool quote from Camus on me today: 'In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.' (I mean, who does resistance like the French, right?) We're going through it right now. It's a lot, everywhere…"

Many of us may feel like the games we love are dying. Games aren't made by companies, after all, they're made by people. "But DA isn't dead," Chee writes. "There's fic. There's art. There's the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can't own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn't dead because it's yours now."

Although a lot of the original team has been moved on to other studios and projects, you can still replay the games, write your own stories in the world, and read the tales others tell.

Chee adds to their thread: "someone just reposted my thing saying they'll write a giant AU and that's what I'm talking about. If DA has inspired you to do something, if it sparks that Invincible summer, then it's done its job, and it has been my greatest honor to have been a part of that."

If you're feeling down about this news, I hope you find some comfort in the community Dragon Age has fostered. Check out our list of the best BioWare games if you want to take a stroll down memory lane.

Earlier this week, publisher EA declared its commitment to Mass Effect 5 while stating the project doesn't yet "require support from the full studio." So, it announced that some roles at BioWare had been shuffled around to other EA teams. What the publisher didn't say was that several developers, including writers who had been with the studio throughout the entire Mass Effect trilogy, like Trick and Karin Weekes, had been outright laid off.

"To make it absolutely clear, what I hate about the way layoffs are carried out is that they are done *before* decision makers know what do do with a studio, and not as a result of figuring out a direction," Douse tweeted in reaction to the news. "This is consistently true. It is a short term cost-saving measure at a huge human expense that doesn’t solve a long term problem. (A lack of a viable strategic direction defined at an executive level). You can probably figure it out if you trust your developers instead of firing them. On a positive note, I’m seeing a slight shift in this direction. In the low-stakes arena of remasters and remakes, but they are the foundation of something bigger."

Douse also argues that slimming down teams in the face of a disappointing project only deepens the problem since "retaining that institutional knowledge is key for the next [game]." And you can even point to Dragon Age: The Veilguard as evidence of this. More than a year before the game even shipped, EA slashed around 50 jobs at the studio, which again included veteran technical directors and writers, some of who had been working on storied BioWare RPGs for over 20 years.

"The delta between [venture capital] and unemployed game developer is fascinating because where one falls upwards the other in parallel velocity tumbles downwards," Douse continued. "You can tank an entire multi-billion dollar initiative and head upwards, while an incredibly talented artist, engineer, QA, etc can head into poverty... On a pirate ship, they’d toss the captain overboard. Video games companies should be run like pirate ships."

What’s ahead for BioWare after this news? See everything we know about Mass Effect 5 to find out. 

The premise of Citizen Sleeper 2 is, broadly speaking, similar to the original: you are a Sleeper, an emulated consciousness attached to a deliberately decaying mechanical body owned by a massive corporation. But whereas the first game saw your Sleeper seeking to deliberately cut those ties and all the ways that might play out in a single place, Citizen Sleeper 2 is largely about what happens when an individual attempts to assert ownership over your entire being and the subsequent desperate struggle to escape across an entire sector of space.

Second verse

All the mechanics of the original are here, and, as before, you generate a row of dice each turn, which Citizen Sleeper 2 refers to as a "cycle." Broadly, those individual dice serve as actions that you can use to do all sorts of tasks ranging from the likes of foraging for mushrooms or trying to gather intel at the docks, depending on where you are. Spending a higher numbered die, combined with your Sleeper's unique stats affect your chance of success and potential resulting consequences. Do you ensure a "Safe" ranking before beginning, or risk the potential for "Danger" to chase a big reward? The dice rolls you're saddled with may have you weighing up these decisions for a while.

Each class, like Operator, comes with a specific ability (in my case as an Operator, the ability to reroll a certain number of dice) that has a rudimentary progression attached that you can upgrade over time by completing Drives, which are functionally quests that range in complexity from taking someone somewhere to fetching items to upending the corporate hierarchy of a local water company. Instead of upgrading the class ability, you can always dump these points into your skills like Endure or Engage in order to permanently have better rolls on those actions. Yet, each class has one stat that's impossible to improve or even have at all, making those rolls inherently more difficult.

Despite all of this mechanical setup, Citizen Sleeper 2 feels largely rooted in modern tabletop narrative design: the story is told and facilitated through dice rolls, pure and simple. Success, failure, and everything in between is a combination of chance and forethought with impacts ranging from devastating to milquetoast. Maybe you simply failed to rest properly and didn't remove any stress, or maybe you broke some fundamental part of a ship and now your enemies are that much closer to finding you, and it's more unstable than ever.

You can be as prepared as possible and still one bad roll will land you on the completely opposite shore of where you meant to go. With traditional tabletop role-playing games, this is where improv and quick thinking might come into play. In Citizen Sleeper 2, all of this is written and predetermined – emulated, if you will, like your own character's consciousness. It works more often than not, but as something of a tabletop RPG head myself, there is also always a small inkling in the back of my mind that any perceived depth is an optical illusion expertly crafted in concert with the developer. Increasingly throughout my 13-hour playthrough, I wondered if that is the point.

Safely risky

Despite the fact that you are ostensibly running away from a sociopathic owner for the vast majority of Citizen Sleeper 2, it never quite felt like there was ever any real danger or bite behind my rolls. Maybe my experience with the original honed my skills to a razor edge, but the standard difficulty setting ultimately meant that I rarely, if ever, had to pass up on an accomplishment or opportunity. With my own dice rolls, two each for crew members on a mission per cycle, and just a little bit of forethought put into who was coming along and where I was focused next, I only ever really felt pressured on one or two occasions. The only one where I didn't completely succeed in the end had a positive outcome regardless.

But perhaps I really am some kind of godly strategizer instead. Citizen Sleeper 2 regularly ups the ante, so to speak, by introducing new complexities and resources to manage. Sure, you've got enough fuel and supplies to keep your people fed, but what about data you can only gather at an abandoned, out-of-the-way outpost? And how do you deal with a stowaway that needs to be regularly fed or your careful supply management can be ruined? For me, personally, this was just a larger-than-typical spreadsheet to manage, but I can imagine others getting lost in the specifics.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is at its very best when all of these mechanisms come together to form narrative arcs that feel both natural and inevitable. Inevitable, in part, because of the game's robust autosaving, which all but prevents manipulating saves to redo difficult challenges. You either do, or you don't and very occasionally somewhere in between. Much of the game was easy for me and only grew easier as I completed Drives like tracking down my pilot/cohort Serafin's sister or seeking out a particular kind of engine with troublesome freelancer Yu-Jin.

But sometimes you're faced with a difficult decision that only happens in the first place because you avoided, say, physically mining due to lacking the Endure skill and you're out of supplies thanks to a mission suddenly dropping in your lap without time to prep, which means your entire crew – including yourself – is building up stress which can knock said crew out of the mission and ultimately remove dice from your pool of actions. Sometimes that means you have to pick between tasks that both seem vital; between the wants of crew members the cold reality of space. It's a friction that can create palpable tension, and it all ultimately stemming from a handful of dice, and how you try to make your own luck, is where Citizen Sleeper 2 shines.

Who are you to decide? A Sleeper, whose entire existence and personhood remains in question throughout. Someone muddling through, who in the face of authority and capitalism and oligarchy can instead choose hope and see others do the same. Citizen Sleeper 2's space and stations can be cold and cruel, and the vast corporate machine never ceases its churning, but there is a certain romance to everyone moving forward with their lives and loves – often in spite of all this – and it is hard to not be charmed.

To be clear, I give 100% of the credit to Knight by Night for getting Fade to 139% Kickstarter funding. I haven't had the chance to play it, but its trailer looks like a faithful, but unique tribute to the older Souls games, with a blend of influences from the aforementioned IP to Dragon's Dogma. I'm just trying to think of a combination of words that could appeal to a wider net of nerds, and I can't think of one to top "Soulslike meets Fable with a dash of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood," one of the most beloved anime series of all time.

Specifically, Knight by Night says Fade is a "classic third-person RPG" with gameplay inspired by the Souls series and a narrative inspired by Fable and Full Metal Alchemist. The Souls inspiration is very much bared out in the 15-minute gameplay video you can watch here:

As you explore settlements like Celeste, Solemn, Whisper, and The Baltane Capital, you'll eventually have to face off against five bosses, each a "Homunculus Monarch" with their own unique alchemy and combat skills. Naturally, they'll each require different combat approaches if you want to beat 'em. You'll also pillage your way through dungeons, collect loot, level up your stats, take on side quests, and craft items.

It's worth noting that Fade has been in Steam Early Access since 2020 with no full release date in sight, but you can play the first chapter while you wait. Steam reviews are "mixed," but reading through them it seems the actual meat and bones of the game are well-received; it's just bugs and performance stuff bogging down the overall reception. For fans of the Souls games, Fable, Full Metal Alchemist, and ideally all three, you can't go wrong giving the free demo a go.

Now's not a bad time to recommend these games like Elden Ring.

From its star-studded cast to its forgiving (for JRPG standards) 30-hour main story, we've been pretty thoroughly impressed by Clair Obscur since it was revealed last summer at the Xbox Games Showcase, and apparently we aren't the only ones.

Sandfall shared a tweet of appreciation in response to an overwhelming amount of collector's and physical edition orders. "Never could we have imagined that we'd have sold out of our collectors editions so early, nor did we know the demand for our physical editions would be so high," reads the tweet.

I'm not naïve enough to think the tide will turn in the slow death of physical media, but stuff like this is nice to see for people like me who still prefer to have games sitting on shelves. Sandfall says it's possible it'll look into its options for restocking sold out editions of Clair Obscur, but says "we can't promise it yet and we hope you understand the limitations with this."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 hits PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X on April 24, 2025, and it'll be available day one with Game Pass, as well.

Saving the world with a baguette? "A joke that went too far," shares Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's creative director, as we talk Final Fantasy, Persona, and more.