Dec 20, 2016

Prison Architect adds 'staff needs' in surprise Christmas update

Prison Architect

In August, Prison Architect launched its 45th update—version 2.0, the final instalment of the jail simulator's impressive list of feature-filled incremental amendments spanning Early Access into full release. With it, Introversion gave players access to the game's dev tools and cheat mode and announced plans to focus its attention on its next project.

That's been the case, so says producer Mark Morris and designer Chris Delay in the latest developer-led trailer below, however Prison Architect has also now received its 11th post-launch update.

"This frosty December, we give you guard needs," explains the video below's description. "No longer can you treat your hard working prison officers as robot gaolers. They're going to need their own toilet and canteen and your staff room is about to get a whole lot busier."

Morris notes above that until now, Prison Architect has focussed on its prisoners and not its guards for good reason—that narrowing the scope of the latter's credentials allowed the game to be more fluid in its earlier stages.

"You need your guards to do what you tell them to do otherwise it will look like it's just broken," says Delay. "If you say build me a building here, make a holding cell or a toilet block or something and your guards just don't do it, an early player is just going to go 'this game's rubbish'."

Morris adds: "Those are valid concerns and that's probably why we shied away from it for all this time. We thought from a gameplay standpoint it'll be better if your staff are more like automatons and the prisoners were where all the magic was. But I think the game is mature enough now and established enough, and there are enough systems in game to telegraph to the player what the hell is going on that we can get away with it."

A whole host of considerations are now tied to staff wellbeing including toilet breaks, meal times, health and safety concerns, recreation allowance, comfort in the workplace, and rest to but some of the new criteria. Full details can be found on the game's Steam page, alongside details for installing the Update 11.

Prison Architect is out now and costs £19.99/$29.99 on the Humble Store.

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Dec 20, 2016

Best Writing 2016: Firewatch

Firewatch

We loved the warm writing in Firewatch so much we had to give it an award. Our games of the year are chosen by the staff through voting and debate, with commentary written by its biggest proponents. We'll be posting the rest of our awards and personal picks daily as we approach the end of the year, and you can see all of the awards so far here.

Chris Livingston: Typically, I’m not a great listener when I’m playing games. I managed to save the world in both Oblivion and Skyrim without ever letting an NPC complete an entire sentence. When forced to listen to NPCs rambling on with important information, I’ll jump around, climb on furniture, throw objects around—anything to pass the time besides simply standing in place. And listening to someone talk via radio while I’m trying to enjoy myself is both an incredibly common feature of games and one of my biggest pet peeves. Can I hold a button down to skip a cutscene, or tap a space bar to get someone to shut the hell up? If so, I’m thrilled, and if not, I’m annoyed. Rarely does a game come along where I want to stand there simply listening to people talk, and almost never do I find myself wishing the characters in a game would talk even more than they already do. It happened in the Mass Effect games—nothing excited me more than returning from a mission to find fresh dialogue options available—and it happened in Firewatch.

I can’t recall a game that so quickly had me invested in the story and characters. There’s the gut-punch of the opening choices you make to set the stage, brilliantly presented as a series of simple text-based prompts that still manage to be emotionally powerful. This leads to wonderfully written dialogue between the game’s two main characters, bolstered by the fantastic voice performances—I would go so far as to say the best in a game, ever—by actors Rich Sommer and Cissy Jones.

I stalked glumly through the park, angry with myself, not even wanting to play if she wasn t going to talk to me, but not wanting to stop playing in case she called back.

Keeping the characters restricted to only communicating via radio was perhaps done out of practicality—Campo Santo isn’t a huge studio, and introducing a fully animated NPC into an open world surely adds tons of extra work and all sorts of logistical challenges—but it’s perfect for Firewatch. It makes the players rely on their imaginations when it comes to Delilah, a more powerful tool than any mo-cap rig can muster, and as the guy who never listens I found myself hanging on her every word. At one point in the game I pissed her off with one of my dialogue choices, and she stopped talking to me for a while. It made me truly miserable to be suddenly cut off from her, and I felt real regret in what I’d said and wished I could take my words back. With her silence stinging, I stalked glumly through the park, angry with myself, not even wanting to play if she wasn’t going to talk to me, but not wanting to stop playing in case she called back. That’s the power of words, when they’re thoughtfully written and skillfully performed.

Though the plot itself eventually wanders into fairly ridiculous territory, the realistic and believable relationship created by the writers and performers remains strong throughout, full of humor, longing, regret, and sexual tension.

Samuel Roberts: I loved exploring Firewatch's hot Wyoming wilderness, but it's the performances and writing that really made this worth talking about this year. Probably the most mature depiction of a relationship I've seen in a game.

Tony Ellis: As well as artfully recreating the beauty of America’s national woodland on screen, this game also creates a world in your head. It’s a more nebulous but equally fascinating and changing landscape, woven out of Henry’s evolving relationship with someone who exists only as a crackling voice on his walkie-talkie, and their shared, increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories. While the story ends in a pretty silly place, as Chris notes, the way this internal terrain maps onto the beautiful Wyoming wilderness as you play makes for a unique and remarkable game.

Tim: Sometimes, when I’m editing our Canadian news writer Andy Chalk, who I’ve never met in real life, I like to pretend we’re like Henry and Delilah, only communicating via Slack rather than shortwave radio. There’s a powerful pull to the idea of two lost souls, not quite knowing each other, bonding against a backdrop of some potential crisis. In Firewatch’s case, a sinister conspiracy—or is it!—and in Andy and mine’s, another delay to some Ubisoft sequel to write up. Still, however classic the scenario is, what brings it to life in Firewatch is the warmth and humanity of the writing, which linger in the memory long after the ending fades. Also: I’ve heard a lot of people grouse about the ending, but the low key lack of resolution felt just about perfect to me. Or at least it certainly felt like real life.

For more on Firewatch, read our full review, check out the game's lovely trees, and discover some of the other best short games you can play on PC.

Dec 20, 2016

Uncovering the meaning of the Outsider, Dishonored's misunderstood god

Dishonored 2

The following article contains plot spoilers for Dishonored 2.

The Dishonored series presents us with the continuous choice to do violence. We might sneak past every obstacle and neutralize each target with ironic nonlethality, or we can indiscriminately murder everyone who crosses our path. The choice, ultimately, is ours, but the one who asks us to make that choice is a character whose involvement in the games is both marginal and integral, and whose position has been badly misunderstood.

The Outsider is the sardonic god who offers us magical gifts at the beginning of both games. He is explicitly beyond our knowledge, yet continually draws us into intimate conversation throughout both games. His places are the hidden, marginal places of the world: the witches’ hideouts, the rat-filled sewers, the abandoned apartments inhabited by the mad or the wicked. His chthonic nature binds him to death and judgement. He is hated and feared by the powerful and worshipped by the destitute. Through this, he’s often seen by players as an archetypal Trickster figure, a kind of Loki or Satan meant to tempt us into an Lovecraftian nightmare of our own making. It’s easy to arrive at this interpretation, but it obscures the Outsider’s true role.

In Dishonored 2 we are shown a truth hidden in the deepest, oldest recesses of the Void. In this place, we witness the method behind the Outsider’s godhood: a ritual which merged a young, helpless boy with the vast, malevolent powers of the Void. Arbitrarily selected, anointed, and murdered, the Outsider is shown to be a sacrificial victim of an unknown, ancient cult which imbued him with tremendous power at the expense of his humanity.

This paradoxical double meaning demonstrates the power of scapegoating, as curative violence ends poisonous violence.

This insight gives us a new way to understand the character and his involvement in both games’ thematic arcs. As a sacrificial victim pushed to the margins of society and reviled by the community that rejects him, he assumes the role of the 'pharmakos'.

'Pharmakon' is an Ancient Greek social ritual of catharsis, cleansing, and sacrifice. The victims, 'pharmakoi', were required whenever a threat, real or imagined, destabilized the borders and hierarchies of a community to the point of crisis. Disease, war, famine, or lack of resources could all disrupt the community to the point of escalating, all-encompassing violence. Quelling these becomes a psychic and social necessity to avoid irreversible damage. And so a pharmakos would be chosen from among the marginalised, and either ritually murdered or exiled. Typically bathed, adorned, and treated as sacred, this act of unifying violence through sacrifice would expel not just the victim, but also all the social ills that the victim would come to represent; all evil, violent, and immoral acts become associated with the pharmakos, regardless of his guilt.

The pharmakos is therefore granted enormous power by the community: he has the means to both destroy it and save it. It is no accident that the root word, 'pharma', means both ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. This paradoxical double meaning demonstrates the power of scapegoating, as curative violence ends poisonous violence.

It might seem strange to draw connections between a modern day video game and Ancient Greek social ritual, but the themes and patterns that come to us from antiquity still have power over our lives. The most revered act of ritual murder across the globe, an event which underpins the language and literature of Western culture, is Christ’s crucifixion. We are preoccupied with sites of abuse and victimhood because of their ability to transcend boundaries that divide mankind. We are all vulnerable to violence; we are all vulnerable to abuses of power. Suffering is a facet of our lives that can level us all. How power employs, perpetuates, and quells violence within a community are questions we have explored throughout our history.

The Outsider is the thematic touchstone who both grants us the means to access the game s content and provides the backdrop necessary to contextualise the choices we make.

The Dishonored series is a complex exploration of these themes, and the Outsider is the thematic touchstone who both grants us the means to access the game’s content and provides the backdrop necessary to contextualise the choices we make. He gives his gifts to the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the blamed. He revisits his own powerlessness when he reaches out to give a choice to the abused. His position within the Empire, forcibly outside its walls, gives him the power to ask these questions.

The Abbey of the Everyman, the only religious institution within the world of Dishonored, seeks to unite the different cultures and social classes of the Empire through rejection of the Outsider and his magic. What we mainly encounter of the Abbey’s role in both games are the Overseers, who are the militant witch-hunters zealously seeking out and destroying what they perceive to be the works of the Outsider. (We also briefly encounter artefacts related to the Oracular Order, the women’s branch of the Abbey; within pharmakos myths, Oracles are used to divine when a sacrifice is necessary.) Sea monsters, witches, black magic, wayward girls, thieves, murderers, etc, are all blamed on the Outsider’s influence. Some rightfully, most arbitrarily.

The Abbey calls for us to reject the strange and the different for the good of the community. Across both games, we may witness civilians threatened and killed in the street for various crimes against the Abbey. Understandably, performing magic in front of an Overseer in the sequel will instantly make him hostile. The way they speak echoes Biblical exhortations against evil. “We must cull the flock,” one says after executing a man for committing one of the many sins under their religion.

While this mimics how the Christian church regards Satan, it would be a mistake to view the Outsider solely in this light. The Outsider is not a tempter, sowing discord and offering power to bring people away from a righteous or compassionate path. Neither are his machinations meant to trick us into committing acts of chaos for a bored, eldritch boy-god to watch with amused delight. Ultimately, he wants to see power used justly rather than vengefully. Your violence only cements his cynicism; the Void might be chaotic, but the Outsider is not.

The player s violent impulses are destabilizing to the point of crisis in both Dunwall and Karnaca.

Like the unnamed child whose abuse maintains the happiness of the city in Le Guin’s haunting short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, the Outsider’s origins in death and sacrifice is fundamental to the Empire itself. What would the Abbey of the Everyman be without the Outsider to constantly, ritually accuse of every social ill? Nothing. They would have no cohesion and no society. They would certainly have no power. Their religion relies on scapegoating in order to maintain their ordered society, and this tenuous foundation is one which is uniquely prone to outbursts of violence.

In both Dishonored games, violence is miasmatic. In the first game it is literally so: the plague proliferates more voraciously if the player is violent. Rats will strip the flesh from the rich and the poor alike. In the sequel this is represented again by bloodflies, which can infest parts of a level procedurally and make exploration more difficult even within the same map. The player’s violent impulses are destabilizing to the point of crisis in both Dunwall and Karnaca. As pharmakon demonstrates, it is in these moments, when order has utterly broken down and violence becomes as infectious as disease, that the only means of unifying a community is through scapegoating and sacrifice.

As a boy, the Outsider witnessed the cruelty and violence of a society maintained through sacrifice; as a god, he grants power to these victims of society and hopes, in the vestiges of his humanity, that it will not be abused.Both Emily and Corvo lose their names, faces, and honour when they are wrongfully blamed and then exiled for the stability of the Empire; they, too, become pharmakoi. In the first game, we see graffiti scrawled across Dunwall, reading ‘The Outsider walks among us’. We play as Corvo, a foreigner to Gristol. We can’t know that it doesn’t refer to us. The tagline for the second game, ‘Take Back What’s Yours’, could easily be Delilah’s mantra as she steals the throne which she had, like Emily, been promised as a girl. The more violently Emily or Corvo seek to reclaim what’s theirs or to take revenge, the more indistinguishable they become from their adversaries.

We may be the poison that infects the city with horrendous, unending violence, or we might be the cure to quelling it without requiring another sacrifice.

What intrigues the Outsider most is when Corvo or Emily refuse to blindly mimic the violence and anger shown to them, and refuse to perpetuate the cyclical violence that calls for a sacrifice to quell it. Delilah uses the Outsider’s power to climb up from the gutter, claim power, and even uncover the secrets of his own creation. She rejects her status as a pharmakos when she was blamed and exiled for Jessamine’s misdeed. But when she engineers the coup that exiles Emily or Corvo to the margins of the Empire, the Outsider offers his powers to Delilah’s adversary. His attention is to structures, not necessarily individuals. His view of the world is much longer than one single sacrifice.

In ancient Greek, the word for gift is ‘dosis’, from which we derive the word ‘dose’. But a dose of what, we don’t know. When the Outsider offers us his gifts, there are more than two choices at play. We may be the poison that infects the city with horrendous, unending violence, or we might be the cure to quelling it without requiring another sacrifice. As the public brays for blood and the apparatus of justice and order execute dissidents in the streets, Dishonored asks us if the Outsider is as frightening as the walls which keep him out. We are invited to view the violence that maintains the hierarchies of Dunwall and Karnaca, and either take part or walk away. And the Outsider, a victim of this violence which preys on the weak and the dispossessed, looks on in surprise when we choose the gentler path.

Dec 19, 2016

The Dwarves review

PC Gamer

The Dwarves, a new realtime tactical RPG based on Markus Heitz’s German fantasy novel series of the same name, is an uneasy adaptation. As an RPG, Dwarves wants you to make choices to explore the world of its characters, but as a slavish recreation of a well-known book, it is constantly taking choices away from you. It’s a novel stuffed into an ill-fitting RPG suit, straining at seams held together by threadbare patches of tactical combat.

There are a few different problems going on here, but if I smelt it right down to the base ore, The Dwarves has two main failings: its RPG doesn’t give you any freedom to make choices or grow, and its combat is spammy, tiresome, and not very fun.

Brittle steel

Only a few minutes into my adventure—playing as Tungdil Goldhand, the young dwarf on a quest—I came across the first of many times that the plot of Heitz’s novel stomps on my fun. I’m travelling across an overhead map in the style of a board game, with pieces moving along a gridwork of paths and roads. At each grid intersection, a chance encounter, town, or event pops up.

On this occasion, the encounter window tells me I’ve found an abandoned camp and fire ring. Do I want to start a fire and bed down, or should I be extra cautious and climb into a tree? Not seeing any reason why I should be paranoid enough to sleep in a damn tree, I sack out. The next window informs me that an orc stabbed me in my sleep, and I am now dead. No ceremony, no preamble. Dead dwarf, game over.

I had to load my most recent save because, according to a friend who has read the series, Tungdil sleeps in the tree in the book. It may be faithful to the source material, but if I played D&D with a DM who concluded a short introduction with “...and a piano drops on you and you die; let’s start again,” I would not hang around that game for very long.

Some choices are meaningless and some choices are momentous, and there s no telling which is which.

After reloading and sleeping in the tree, Tungdil wakes up to see an orc warband (surprise!) set up camp below him. After they leave, an encounter window gives me my options: climb down, or wait up in the tree to make sure the coast is clear. Well, you don’t have to stab this dwarf in the gut more than once to teach him some caution, so I wait in the tree. Nothing happens, says the encounter window. Do I want to wait some more?

I chose the option to wait in the tree a dozen times, waiting for something to happen. Nothing ever does; the plot didn’t move on until I climbed down. These false choices are everywhere: maybe saying hello to a traveling caravan will give me an opportunity to buy some supplies; maybe meeting a character in that caravan is absolutely critical, and walking past it is game over. An RPG is a game about choices, yes, but Dwarves is a game in which some choices are meaningless and some choices are momentous, and there’s no telling which is which. I found myself quick-saving every few minutes.

For being so devoted to the plot of the book, sadly, this is a rendition of The Dwarves that did absolutely nothing for me as an introduction to this world. Names washed over me, signifying nothing, as though I was making introductions at a friend’s family reunion: Vraccas, Tion, Girdlegard, Boёndal, Älfar. A narrator delivers some pretty talented voice work, including what sound like direct dialog quotes from the book, but not being able to understand the references pulled me out of the game. The whole story wraps up in about 11 hours, reminding me again and again that I was playing a Wikipedia-level summary of a much more interesting story.

Shorted out

When Tungdil isn’t clicking around, exploring this and that and getting quests to here and there, The Dwarves spends a lot of time in combat. It’s a standard party-based tactical RPG set-up: overhead camera, pause at any time, give orders, deploy special skill attacks set to cool-down timers. This design is serviceable in a lot of other games, but it stumbles badly here.

The members of your party automatically attack the nearest enemy and pound them steadily with a basic attack until you give an order to use a special skill, which is actually pretty nice to see. Unfortunately, the basic attacks are useless, so the special skill attacks do all the heavy lifting. After some trial and error, I discovered that using basic strategy and smart party placement isn’t nearly as important as making sure that all of your fighters use as many of their special attacks as often as possible. The best way to make it through a tough fight is to pause often, switch characters constantly, and throw around those special attacks the instant their timers expire.

If any party characters die, that’s game over (because the characters have to participate in the plot, of course), so it’s a real pain in the leather that there are very few ways to heal during a fight. This made difficulty spikes a real issue for me. Even on the easiest difficulty, I came up against several seemingly impossible battles, randomly placed before or after another fight that I found effortless. My success or failure depended entirely on how many bad guys level designers decided to spawn for that battle. If they added too few, I had an easy time. If they added too many, I had a horrific grind.

It’s at this point that I would spend some character points beefing up that basic attack or spend some gold improving my gear, but Dwarves doesn’t have even those basic RPG elements. There are a few inventory items, like enchanted pendants and such, but no way to upgrade armor or loot new weapons. The only way to grow a character is by advancing along a very simple, one-path skill tree (skill stick? skill line?) with half a dozen special moves to unlock.

Everything in The Dwarves made me feel like I had no real control over my journey across Girdlegard.

After all the whining I’ve just done about this poor, battered game, it hardly seems worth mentioning, but: I had a lot of technical issues with The Dwarves, too. I only crashed to desktop once, thankfully, but there were other problems. My frame rate plummeted in every battle when a lot of enemies showed up, and moving around the map interface brought on screen tears and texture-pops. In combat, the camera is a real nuisance; I paused to find a camera angle free of tree branches and terrain almost as often as I paused to give combat orders. On one occasion, a corrupted saved game loaded to show a permanently frozen, motionless dwarf in the foothills around Blacksaddle. I returned to a previous save and started again.

Between the rocky difficulty curves, the linear progression, the forced petty choices, and insta-death penalty for veering away from the dictated plot—everything in The Dwarves made me feel like I had no real control over my journey across Girdlegard. I lacked any real agency as a player, and even for a short RPG adventure, that sucks. I wanted to go on a journey, but I ended up just watching a pretty good book as read by someone else.

Dec 19, 2016

Overcooked seasons simplicity with mayhem for 2016's best local co-op

Overcooked

Some of the most fun I've had playing a game this year came during a brief but overwhelming love affair with Overcooked. This frantic local co-op cooking game really captured the hearts of PC Gamer's US office—the minute the clock struck 5 pm we were crowding into a meeting room to chop tomatoes and wash dishes and plate our meals as the timer ticked down. Taking place in increasingly ludicrous restaurant scenarios, including a moving iceberg, a pirate ship and even the middle of a road, Overcooked requires careful concentration and coordination to fulfill specific orders in quick succession, but naturally everyone in the kitchen starts shouting at each other within just a few minutes. It might be even more fun to watch the madness unfold than to have a hand in it.

The most gratifying thing about Overcooked is rising to the challenge of a new level. The game seems easy, at first, with an introductory few levels that just introduce you to the basics of working together to prepare ingredients, cook them, and turn them in quickly. But as soon as obstacles start to show up, a poorly prepared team falls apart.

There's no single strategy that works in every kitchen, except perhaps having a team captain to Gordon Ramsay your chefs into ashamed organized obedience. Sometimes it's best for each player to focus on a specific task: you're on dishes, you're on chopping, you're on steaks. Don't. Burn. The. Steaks. You. Fuck. Got that process down? Good—now you have to toss aside that routine for something completely different.

The first crack at the harder kitchens almost always collapses in indecision, yelling, and despair, but those are the natural stages of Overcooked grief.

Then the next level constricts your movement, requiring everyone to cycle through each task in one smooth, continuing motion. Suddenly it's a game about timing, not mastery of a particular activity. And things just escalate from there, requiring some creative planning and pinpoint execution to clear. Another level sets you skidding across a broken ice flow, where it's treacherously easy to drop a completed dish into the ocean. One late-game stage takes you to space (cool) but requires pinpoint timing to move ingredients and completed dishes back and forth between a moving airlock compartment (so hard).

The first crack at the harder kitchens almost always collapses in indecision, yelling, and despair, but those are the natural stages of Overcooked grief. You take a deep breath. You admit that that was a disaster. And you regroup. Responding to that failure with a battle plan and executing on it for that sweet sweet three star reward? That's a bisque for the soul.

Like other great co-op games, Overcooked is mostly a tool used to form memorable experiences with your friends. It does a lot with simple controls and variation on a single concept, but it helps that everything is so cartoony and adorable. The characters are easy to differentiate from the overhead perspective thanks to a few fun standouts like a fox and a raccoon who uses a wheelchair (Evan's go-to). Even the simple story is great, involving time travel to save the world from a giant meatball called the Ever Peckish.

Overcooked is so much more intricately designed than you'd expect for a small co-op game about cooking. I wouldn't recommend it by your lonesome, but with a trio of friends, it's a phenomenal choice for an hour of co-op madness. You'll come out stronger for the effort, new bonds forged in a kitchen split asunder by an earthquake. Or you'll hate each other, but such is the risk of a friendship tested by overcooked soup.

Dec 18, 2016

The Witcher developer awarded $7 million for seamless multiplayer, city creation research

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt Red has come into quite a bit of money to help it research several areas of video game development. The Polish government gave the developer the biggest portion of its 116 million PLN ($27 million USD) fund that was granted to it by the National Center for Research of Development, WCCFTech reports.

The Witcher developer had all four of its proposals approved, including an additional one that pertained to GOG.com and focused on the development of "cross-platform multiplayer gaming software for popular consoles and operating systems." The proposals revolved around city creation, seamless multiplayer, cinematic feel, and animation excellence. You can read more about each of CD Projekt Red's proposals further down this article.

The studio was awarded 30 million PLN ($7 million USD), and CD Projekt Red president Adam Kicinski released a statement that said, "Developing video games is a hyperinnovative activity, but also one which carries substantial financial risks, involves continuous R&D work, and requires much experimentation and prototyping along the way.

"The GameINN program—a fruit of our industry's collaborative efforts—will, in the coming years, enable Polish developers to carry out nearly 40 projects worth 191 million PLN," the statement continues. "I am confident that the resulting innovative solutions will further elevate the quality of Polish video games and enhance our competitiveness on the global stage. Indeed, our industry now has the potential to become the champion of the modern Polish economy."

We can get a pretty good look at each of the developer's proposals, thanks to the NCBR's official document. Open world RPGs are mentioned several times throughout, which could point to work that's being done for Cyberpunk 2077, another Witcher title, or a different game altogether. Of course, this is just conjecture; this research could end up unused by any title at all. You can see the four proposals, translated by WCCFTech, below.

City Creation

Comprehensive technology for the creation of "live," playable in real-time, cities of great scale based on the principles of artificial intelligence and automation and taking into account the development of innovative processes and tools supporting the creation of high-quality open world games.

Seamless Multiplayer

Comprehensive technology enables the creation of unique gameplay for many players, taking into account the search of opponents, session management, replication facilities, and support of a variety of game modes along with a unique set of dedicated tools.

Cinematic Feel

Comprehensive technology for providing a unique, film quality RPG with open world, also taking into account innovative solutions process and unique set of dedicated tools.

Animation Excellence

Comprehensive technology enabling a significant increase in quality and production of complex face and body animations for open world RPG games, also taking into account the innovative process solutions and a unique set of dedicated tools.

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Another studio awarded with funds is Dying Light developer Techland for a prototype of a first-person "action RPG set in an original fantasy world." Other funded studios include CI Games (Lords of the Fallen), The Farm 51 (Get Even), and Bloober Team (Layers of Fear). You can read more about their approved proposals on WCCFTech.