Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor—Martyr was a middling action-RPG that's been tinkered with by developers NeoCore since its release, with a 2.0 update that addressed concerns with the combat and made the entire campaign playable in co-op, and now a standalone expansion.
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor—Prophecy adds a new playable class, a tech-adept who is the pet-summoner of the Inquisition. Only those pets are a variety of robots. The tech-adept will be playable in Martyr's campaign for those who own both, but there's also a three-part campaign in a new subsector unique to Prophecy, with new enemies too—the tyranids and eldar.
Prophecy adds more map varieties, including giant monasteries, factories, and a desert, as well as adding new items, perks, and passive skills. You can read the FAQ for more information.
Klei's sci-fi survival sim Oxygen Not Included entered Early Access in February of 2017, and leaves it now just over two years later. If you've been holding out on trying this game of stranded "Duplicants" crafting a colony from scratch on unforgivingly harsh asteroids, now's the time.
Klei's forum post sums up how far it's come: "We started with a game that had little more than a few Duplicants and some pipes full of cold water. Since then we’ve added oil biomes and automation, Duplicant skill progression and tubes to zip around in, critter ranching and breeding, and more features than could possibly be named. Now Duplicants can even break through the surface of their rocky home and escape away into space… with your guidance, of course."
As is par for the course, they'll continue patching Oxygen Not Included to catch bugs and tweak balance issues.
Another of Klei's games, card-RPG Griftlands, is currently in playable alpha on the Epic Store and will enter Steam Early Access when it hits beta next year.
After years of turn-based strategy games in a fantasy setting, the Age of Wonders series is going sci-fi with its next entry, Planetfall. "When we started conceptualizing this game one thing that was sure from the start was that we wanted to make a terrestrial-based sci-fi game," says Triumph Studios' game director Lennart Sas. "We wanted to take the Age of Wonders formula and do it on the planet level with a lot of detail in the battles, which are mainly ground-based—with air support and orbital strikes too, but it wasn't a space 4X like Stellaris."
What makes Planetfall stand out is its factions. During the PC Gaming Show at E3, Sas and principal gameplay developer Tom Bird menaced host Sean Plott while enthusing over options like "scavenging cyborgs or the amazon bio engineers who ride dinosaurs into battle." It was a memorable moment.
"When we started designing the factions we took what most sci-fi games do," Sas explains, "factions from different alien backgrounds without too much of a connection." It felt wrong, until they started unifying these factions by giving them a shared history. Suddenly, they clicked into place. "These people have existing personal grievances," he says, and that makes all the difference.
Only one of the factions is alien, but most of them feel alien. The're offshoots of humanity who had to adapt to survive the collapse of their empire, the Star Union. Cut off from hyperspace for centuries they altered themselves to suit the worlds they were trapped on. Now, with FTL travel suddenly accessible again, they're meeting long-lost cousins.
Like every family reunion, it's messy.
Amazons: Dinosaur-riding laser women
When Planetfall appeared at the PC Gaming Show, the dinosaurs with lasers were an immediate hit. Even if you didn't grow up with Dino Riders toys, the idea's a compelling one. The backstory of the Amazons is that they were genetic engineers midway through terraforming a frontier world when hyperspace broke and they were marooned. Modifying the planet's dino-like inhabitants and forming a symbiotic relationship with them was the only way to survive.
And as well as modifying those creatures to create laser Tyrannodons and pterodactyl scouts called Shrikes, they modified themselves and ditched the male half of the species. "The exact reason why and how that happened is not disclosed at the start of the game," says Sas. "It's not really important for their abilities and their themes. A lot of discussion has started on the forums!"
Though they began as scientists, the Amazons have become warriors and their look reflects that. "We modeled their appearance after female MMA fighters," Sas says, "looking at their physique, their facial expression."
As well as dinosaurs, the Amazons modified the fungal-looking Arboreans, another species from their homeworld. This gives them rapport with an NPC faction called the Growth, who are sentient plant beings, and the two can even share mods.
The Amazons continue tinkering with genes throughout the campaign. "Part of their narrative, the internal story in the campaign is about 'How far do we go with this?' At one point they will also get the question whether or not to merge alien DNA in their own DNA. What does it mean to be human any more?"
The Syndicate: Shiny crime nobility
If you want to be sneaky the Syndicate are for you. The descendants of explorers who settled outworlds then used that to bargain for rank within the Star Union as it spread, the Syndicate were once aristocracy. They could afford all the best tech and body mods, and prospered after the collapse by becoming slavers. Their basic troops are indentured slaves forced into military service to pay off their debts, and Syndicate tech can even resurrect them if they try to weasel out of those debts by dying.
"Nasty bunch of people," as Sas puts it. "Their abilities are about cloak and dagger, they're able to sabotage relations with other people." That sneakiness extends to scouts who are invisible on the map, and teleport away if hit by an attack that would be fatal. Their favorite weapon is a knife in the back, but failing that they're into psionics and arc weapons that shoot lightning.
"If you look at Earth history they represent maybe Italian or Dutch noble families or patricians who went out at sea to gather riches and loot the world," says Sas. Their look combines those historical influences with the unused concept art Moebius did for Dune. The result is maximum fanciness. Imagine Jabba the Hutt's cartel, but then make it fashion.
That said, you don't have to play the Syndicate as evil. "Although you have skills and abilities that you can use to subjugate others in all sorts of nasty ways you don't have to use them," says Sas, "just like other factions have weapons of mass destruction that they don't necessarily have to use. The tech tree is so big that you're not entirely stuck to using all of their abilities in order to win. Maybe in a very big game, but in most games you only research 50% or so of all your available tech. You can be an enlightened Syndicate, you can go for the celestian secret technology and redeem yourself if you want to."
The Vanguard: Your XCOM squad got very lost
The Vanguard are one of only two factions whose basic trooper can go into overwatch. When that unit, a squad of armored dudes with machine guns, runs up to a piece of cover marked by a shield symbol and hunkers down, it feels like a little game of XCOM is happening on an alien world.
Among all the oddity of Planetfall, the Vanguard are an island of familiarity. "There's a bit of a trope that you make the faction that plays the most straightforward, make them look the most familiar," Sas says.
They needed to be understood quickly. "It's easier to read what a unit does, a tank is a tank, an aircraft flies. Some of the more exotic races you might want to look twice at their ability list, at what they exactly do. We take the Vanguard as the campaign introductory race so the story gets presented from their angle."
They're viewpoint characters, the ones you play in the tutorial. An expeditionary force made up of society's dropouts who were sent to the frontier in sub-light ships to set up a hyperspace portal, they come out of cryosleep and return home 200 years later to find the Star Union they worked for gone. Then they see all the strange things humankind has transformed into while they were gone and say, "What the hell happened to you?"
They don't have to stay baseline humans though, and can change over the course of a game. "That basic trooper you can mod with all kinds of cool stuff in the game—jetpacks, or infect them with an alien parasite—and basically take that standard soldier and make them relevant in the endgame, but also tailor its abilities to face particular threats. If you're facing a psionic enemy you want to give them some mind protection."
Kir'Ko: Vomiting battle-bugs with a grudge
"The pitch for this race is that we want to tell a possible origin story for the many alien bug swarms that you see in sci-fi," says Sas. The Kir'Ko are the one alien faction in Planetfall, not evolved or modified humans. Once united by a hivemind, they were conquered and enslaved by humanity. With the collapse they're free, and it's time for revenge.
"Central to the gameplay is a swarm mechanic, which means if you position them close together they get buffed and you can increase the buff effects from that staying together." They move in packs focused on melee, but they do have access to ranged attacks. Kir'Ko larva can be grown into specialist units, from fliers to naval creatures that look like something out of H. P. Lovecraft.
"Their main infantry type is a melee unit that spits battle vomit," Sas says. "A big splash of corrosive spit on enemies. A battle with the Kir'Ko, it ends up in two colors—the purple is their blood, it spatters everywhere, and the green stuff is their spit. Everything gets goo-ed under when you fight them."
The Kir'Ko swarm absorbs territory as it grows, spreading across the map like termites through walls. "By conquering another faction's colony then, instead of burning it to the ground, putting your own people there you can absorb that population into your own multi-ethnic empire. Then you get access to their tech tree too."
The ultimate aim for the Kir'Ko is to rebuild the hivemind they lost when they were essentially lobotomized by the Star Union. "Hopefully at one point they will be able to make the hive queen back again," Sas says. "Part of their tech tree and campaign story is about finding either reconciliation with the surviving humans or to go on to a path of vengeance and basically destroy humanity."
The Assembly: Ghoulish cyborgs want your organs
The ancestors of the Assembly were clones, vat-grown by a company who manufactured augmentations for the military and the rich. After the collapse they were left to their own devices, and they took those augmentations and weapons and used them against each other.
"In their battles they took bits and pieces—livers, heads from fallen enemies—and managed to piece them together in order to extend their life," say Sas, "and that's basically how the Assembly emerged. They managed to create peace on their world by absorbing all enemies into their faction and they also created the ultimate circular economy. Very environmentally friendly."
Now they're cyborg recyclers, perpetuating their unnatural lives thanks to involuntary battlefield donations. The Scavenger units rip out enemy guts then keep the best bits to heal themselves, while Reverse Engineers resurrect the fallen like cyber-necromancers. With each victory they get better at research, taking everything they learn in combat and using it to leap up the tech tree.
"They are still functioning on human brains," says Sas, "so they are not AI-controlled inherently. The human brain is still central to them. Some of them are more humanoid, they go as far as Robocop where they still have a human head and torso, while others just have a human head and brain controlling a metallic construct."
Their look is a bit punk, a bit heavy metal. Some of them have mohawks, a lot of them look like they took fashion cues from Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie, and some of them have motorbikes for bodies.
Then there's the Wrecker, a giant mech suit controlled by a tiny human head. "The cool thing is this is also a vehicle or a mount for your heroes," says Sas. "You can find one of these suits and the you equip the suit on your hero and you would just see the hero's head attached to that body. Even if you're an Amazon hero and you've managed to find one of these Assembly suits you can equip that suit and you see just a little head with the dreadlocks stuck inside this thing."
Dvar: Squat bombardier industrialists
Stranded on a harsh mining colony when the Star Union fell, the Dvar transformed their survival suits into armor that would protect them from anything, whether nuclear fallout or biological weapons. Now they rarely leave the things, and even on the commander creator screen altering their facial features merely changes the assortment of pipes and goggles on their masks, as well as maybe putting a jaunty bearskin hat on top.
"It's obvious that the Dvar are based on the space dwarf trope," says Sas, though he explains that there's no "genetic link" between them and the fantasy dwarves of previous Age of Wonders games. The Dvar are machinery specialists, with a sideline in bombs and tectonic manipulation. On the campaign map they can flatten mountains or raise them, and their basic troop the Trencher can summon cover out of flat ground.
The ability to create cover doesn't make them turtles, however. The Dvar have plenty of melee weapons, like their two-handed mining hammers fitted with rockets. They soften enemies up with explosives then get up close. Even their jets are designed for ramming attacks. "They move forward steadily as a steamroller," Sas says. "I would call them the steamrolling race."
Their big-belly suits and bomber planes have a distinctive look. As Sas explains, "We have one guy on the concept team who is a World War 2 nut and he based some of the designs on Russian military hardware. Apparently it had a very different design language from American and German tanks, it was more rounded."
And that's how the Dvar ended up Russian bomb-making oligarchs. "All dwarves are Scottish," says Sas with a sigh, "even space dwarves. We didn't want to go there."
When I'm the Vanguard I want to do right by others, finding diplomatic solutions even with the jerk who has a dumb mustache. When I'm the Dvar, my trigger-finger gets itchy. Real itchy.
But that doesn't mean I play them aggro all the time. It means that when I do choose a diplomatic option—settling things with that rival Dvar house who have mining claim on the same world, in spite of the grudges between us—it feels more meaningful for it. There's a reason Civilization players love Nuclear Gandhi. Playing against type is fun too.
That requires having a type in the first place, and the factions of Planetfall provide. They're flavorful, and they make you want to roleplay. The only hard part is choosing between them.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall will be out on August 6.
Have you ever thought to yourself, "I've heard good things about this Crusader Kings 2 strategy game from Paradox Interactive—87/100 on PC Gamer!—but there are so many expansions to buy and that really adds up. How can I indulge my curiosity without breaking the bank?" If so, the Humble Crusader Kings 2 Bundle is just what you need to scratch that oddly particular itch.
For $1, you get Crusader Kings 2, and The Old Gods, The Republic, Sunset Invasion, Legacy of Rome, and Sword of Islam expansions. That's a lot of crusading with kings for a buck. For more than the average amount of bucks, you'll also get Horse Lords, Way of Life, Charlemagne, Rajas of India, and Sons of Abraham. And finally, at the top tier of $15 (which is so close to the average price that you might as well go all-in) the Holy Fury, The Reaper's Due, Jade Dragon, Monks and Mystics, and Conclave expansions are also yours.
As far as I can tell, the bundle includes the base game and every CK2 expansion: The only things not included are things like the shield, unit, and portrait packs. That's a whole lot of game for $15, especially given that the comparable Royal Collection bundle is normally $200 on Steam. The Humble Crusader Kings 2 Bundle is available until August 13.
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The biggest esports event of the week took place at FarmCon in Harsewinkel, Germany, and no one had to wait around for points to be tallied, unlike in the Fortnite World Cup. (I'm not sure who even watches that when there's wheat harvesting on.)
Farming Simulator 19 as an esport really is entertaining, if slow. Two teams race to harvest wheat, both delivering fresh grain to town and baling the straw. Sending those bales up a hay elevator scores points, while delivering grain ups the team's points multiplier.
With different equipment comes different strategies. Some teams piled bales in stacks of two and then sent them up the elevator as fast as possible just before time ran out, while others stored hay as they went. There were some close finishes, as well as near disasters, as in the clip below:
We also got to see some pro maneuvers, including this triple-bale barn shot:
The winner was team Trelleborg, which is made up of Felix Hasenberger, Simon Hollweck, and Lukas Bauer. For their combined combine skills, they took home €2,000, a €500 Nitrado voucher (it's a server rental company), and three Logitech G513 keyboards.
You can watch the full stream here. The next Farming Simulator League tournament will be an online tournament taking place on August 10 and 11. There will be a second tournament at the end of August at Gamescom, followed by many more throughout the year (full schedule here).
My only wish is for fewer camera cuts when things go wrong. Embrace that wonky physics and linger on it.
Xseed Games said in 2016 that despite the challenges involved, it—and other publishers—would continue to bring "niche" Japanese games to Steam. I have no doubt that Senran Kagura Peach Ball, a digital pinball game based on the "genre-spanning" series that made its North American debut earlier this month on the Nintendo Switch, is one of them.
"Ninja battles, rhythmic cooking contests, water gun fights, massage therapy—what new horizons hasn’t the Senran Kagura series conquered yet? Oh, right: pinball!" the Steam listing states excitedly. "Use the flippers to bounce the magical Peach Ball all around one of multiple dynamic tables, with a beloved shinobi girl in the middle of it all. Bounce the ball off her knees, feet, or hands to make her shift position and raise the stakes!"
And if you're wondering why exactly these scantily-clad women are on the tables—or why you're firing pinballs at them, instead of politely asking them to move because, hey, you spent a quarter on this and you don't want to waste it—it's because Haruka spilled a chemical in the arcade where she works and it's made five of her shinobi friends think, and act like, they're animals.
"The only way to cure them is with Haruka's mystical Peach Ball. The best way to do that? Pinball, of course! Haruka will get the girls onto the tables, but she needs you to work some magic with the flippers and apply the antidote."
Of course.
In case there's any doubt, Senran Kagura Peach Ball is a "mature" game, with "partial nudity, sexual themes, some strong language, and descriptions of violence." The pinball you're firing at them is "soft," according to the description, and not the traditional silver balls that sound like they could kill a man when you catch them right, but "in one mode, players are able to freely touch the characters." That would get you bounced out of most respectable arcades pretty quickly, but I guess it's okay here.
Senran Kagura Peach Ball will arrive on Steam on August 14, where it will join the rhythm cooking game Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit!, the 3D brawler Senran Kagura: Estival Versus, the ecchi dating sim Senran Kagura Reflexions, and Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash, a third-person water gun shooter—all of which, by the way, have "very positive" user reviews on Steam. A genre-spanning series, indeed.
Secret Government is a sneaky grand strategy game that puts you in charge of a secret society, starting in the 18th century. By manipulating governments, engineering conflicts and tinkering with the economy, you'll be able to create seismic shifts, starting revolutions and toppling monarchies. It's hitting Early Access in October, and you can check out the announcement trailer above.
Crusader Kings 2 remains my favourite grand strategy game in large part thanks to the copious amounts of intrigue, so I'm quite keen on the idea of one that focuses exclusively on that. Sitting back and letting nations go to war while I reap the rewards sounds lovely.
Instead of one big sandbox, it seems like Secret Government will be split up into missions where you'll need to become a puppeteer and make sure big global conflicts end in the secret society's favour. That means coercing world leaders, placing agents in positions of influence, creating civil unrest and generally trying to destabalise everything.
You can even create your own political parties, which you can then help to attain power or kick off a revolution. According to developer GameTrek, everyone can potentially become a pawn, though they might not know it.
As hinted at in the trailer, there's more than one meddling secret society. There's competition, presumably with similar abilities and their own pawns. Sharing power seems a bit unlikely.
During QuakeCon, the original Doom trilogy was released on consoles and the first two appeared on iOS and Android. It was a nice surprise, except for the the additional surprise of an online requirement in strictly singleplayer ports. Players needed to make a Bethesda.net account and log in to play, hopefully avoiding connection errors. Clearly this is a feature other Bethesda games need. One modder agrees and has added it to Skyrim.
The Immersive Bethesda.net Experience will ruin your game by trying—and failing—to connect to Bethesda.net. The exciting moment has been captured in the video above. It will never succeed and after five attempts will kick you back to the main menu.
"In case it was unclear, this mod is a joke," says its creator, d3sim8. "Bethesda re-released DOOM/DOOM II and DOOM III in July 2019, and they required a Bethesda.net connection to play. This was despite DOOM being 26 years old, and not including an online component (in this particular version)."
After facing a lot of criticism for it, Bethesda is planning to make connecting to Bethesda.net optional. But we'll always have the Immersive Bethesda.net Experience mod for Skyrim.
This interview was conducted in April earlier this year and originally published inPC Gamer UK issue 331. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in theUKand theUS.
Leif Walter is in a relaxed state as I speak to him ahead of his appearance on stage to talk Total War: Three Kingdoms at EGX Rezzed in London. A fan of Total War since before he joined Creative Assembly, he now talks enthusiastically about the series and his work on it. During our conversation, he answers questions about how Creative Assembly decided on ancient China as a setting, how the era manifests in Three Kingdoms’ design, and what the future might hold for the Total War series.
PC Gamer: This is probably the first Total War to explore a new era or timeline since Attila, with the exception of Warhammer. What is it about exploring new eras, new timelines, in the series that excites the development team?
Leif Walter: Well, for a Total War game, you always look for turbulent and interesting periods of history where there’s conflict and drama, maybe an interesting development at a cultural level. And when we first got in touch with the Three Kingdoms period, we realised very quickly that, basically, it was the perfect Total War setting. A lot of charismatic characters and leaders with relationships between each other and backstabbing and this kind of drama. Massive armies marching against each other. It’s basically the perfect Total War setting. You know, there’s the massive Han dynasty, the Han empire, which is basically the equivalent of the Roman Empire. And this big empire, crumbling, suffering from internal corruption, engulfed in this big civil war. It was the perfect setting.
For the most part, it’s Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones actually happened?
Yeah, basically! I mean, like I said, there’s sort of fake gods and fake armies marching against each other. But mostly there’s cool, personal stories between characters and personal feuds, maybe sometimes irrational friendships or irrational rivalries. That would inform gameplay decisions and the directions for the gameplay design. It’s pretty clear we need these personal relationships to have an impact on your campaign.
How do you decide on the balance between the story and the game systems? How do you bring those two things together?
It’s an interesting balance to strike. We always have the three big pillars between historical accuracy, authenticity, fun, and then of course some interesting gameplay that we want to bring in. And yeah, sometimes we have to make those sacrifices to increase the fun of both. I would say with Three Kingdoms, there’s the benefit of having two big sources that allow different factors to that problem. There’s Records of the Three Kingdoms for the pure historical period, and then the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel which delivered all this personal drama. So we have these two big sources we could draw from.
You mentioned it in part in the first question, but what’s the creative process like in determining what is the right era or timeline to bring to a Total War game? Describe that for me.
I mean obviously we all have sort of an idea of certain historical periods. There’s loads of cultural knowledge of certain things like the medieval era, there’s knights, and in ancient Japan, samurai. And so the story of the Three Kingdoms is a bit of an almost surprise find because it’s not very well known in the west. It has a huge cultural legacy in the east, in China and Japan.
But in the West, it’s not very well known, so it was almost like getting sudden inspirations from, say, movies and then you learn more about that period, and then you try to match the historical context with possible gameplay mechanics and how they tie together.
And then sometimes you’ll be running through a situation where you feel like certain settings might be cool, but then you learn more about it, and you realise maybe there’s not enough cultural richness, not really enough battles, these kinds of things. The Three Kingdoms has both. Like I said, the perfect match.
You mentioned how in the West, it’s not as well-known as, say, in China and Japan. So how do you go making that sort of story easy for players to understand, who don’t really know that background? Or who just aren’t as historically savvy and so don’t know the story?
There are two big things about this. First of all, I think from my personal experience, Total War games—or any historical game for that matter—are a great vehicle to get players more interested in that kind of time period, so you deliver nice appetisers and then they start to learn a bit more about that period, then they go away from the game and get a history book out. I think this process, that’s where Total War games can be really cool. A piece of entertainment that’s educational.
Secondly, Total War is a sandbox game, so for us it’s always important to not necessarily tell the story in a narrative, it doesn’t have to play out exactly like the Three Kingdoms novel for example.
But what we wanted was to create an environment where players almost create their own Three Kingdoms story. And that’s so important. I know Ma Chao ended up being in Liu Bei’s army—being one of his generals—but it’s more about creating gameplay systems that allow players to forge their own story and so focus not so much on delivering that detail, but more about enabling players to tell their own stories.
So how accessible have you made the game for newcomers, or for maybe those like me, who have had very light experience with the series? I think I’ve played only an hour or an hour and a half of Shogun 2. So how do you make that accessible for newer players or old players with little experience with the series?
That’s one big pillar for us was the concept of gating, so that... Total War is a complex tactics game—there’s no way around it—there’s always going to be that complexity and that’s what players are interested in. But what we wanted to achieve was that the game starts off with less systems involved, less things to be aware of, less things to run towards.
So to start off, it’s very straightforward, you build armies and take territories. But as you go and you learn more about the game, the game gets increasingly harder, more challenging and more complex.
You just don’t want to overburden the player from the start?
Exactly, because what’s most important for our fans, we wanted to create a rich Total War experience that has a lot of deep mechanics in it. So we didn’t want to make it, you know, over-accessible and streamline it too much, but have this journey through the game where you start off not overburdened with thousands of things to manage and then you learn more about the game as you go.
Can you talk about the inclusion of the Romance Mode, because it changes the dynamics of the game and has a different tempo to Records mode. With Records, it’s more strategic, but with Romance, everything feels more fast-paced, with a higher tempo, etc. Was that daunting at all to explore, settling on the difference in style and pace between the two modes?
First of all, like I said, we have these two big sources for the game, so it was pretty obvious from the beginning that we want these two perspectives. And like I said, especially in battle, we tell you the difference between [Records], where it’s all about how you position your troops and the manoeuvres you perform, and Romance, where you almost have an additional tactical layer on top.
[In Romance], you have your army interactions, and then your heroes and how they interact with the enemy heroes. So it’s a cool interesting additional layer and sort of fits the over-arching mechanics of battles to keep the tempo a bit up because you want a fast pace to move the heroes to another area, trigger an ability, leave an impact there, then move somewhere else. So you have a faster interaction with the game.
The Total War series has visited so many eras and timelines, from Shogun to Rome and even Warhammer. And it feels like each setting brings a different size and scope, especially with the launch of the Total War Saga series. What is it about the series that makes it so consistent, even as the setting changes? What is it that keeps it fresh for players?
Like I said, Total War games are a very evocative sandbox for a historical environment. Especially for me, I was a Total War player before I joined Creative Assembly.
And for me, it was always to play the same pattern where I had this narrative in my head. I started with Rome: Total War and there you have your generals with their trades, and you tie everything together with a backstory about your generals, and it’s all embedded in this historical context. So it’s almost like watching, like you said earlier, Game of Thrones, or a historical series like the Rome HBO series, and I think it’s just a very nice journey for players. That’s what they appreciate, and then the different settings deliver a different flavour.
Quality wise, of course, CA are passionate developers who want to deliver high quality content, and we always try to be better next project, learn from our mistakes and try to make the best historical game possible.
What can CA do in the future to keep that consistency going for the series for the next five, ten, twenty years? Assuming we can all look forward to that sort of vision in the future...
I mean, Total War, that’s large battles, and historical settings and environments, and trying to achieve it in this game. That’s the formula... Now there are many more exciting historical periods to explore, we also listen to what our fans are asking for in some of the titles. So yeah, there’s a lot of amazing content to explore, and mechanic wise, I think we’ll always push the Total War formula and make it more engaging and tell even grander stories to players, enable them to tell their own stories. There’s exciting stuff to look forward to.
We've already explained why Keanu Reeves makes the perfect Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077. Apparently CD Projekt RED felt the same way, and not just because Reeves is a cultural lightning rod who stars in both big screen films and internet memes.
In an interview with Xbox: The Official Magazine (thanks, WCCFTech), story director Marcin Blacha says that "When we thought of an actor for this role, we didn’t approach it on a ‘who’s the biggest celebrity now’ basis—the actor had to have a connection with the character."
Given Silverhand's backstory as a military deserter with a tragically lost lover, Keanu's sad man energy was exactly what CDPR was looking for to bring the cyberpunk rocker to life. "A good actor, and Keanu is a great actor, will always infuse their character with a bit of their own special thing," Blacha says of Reeves.
Despite how Keanu stole the stage when he appeared at E3 to tell us Cyberpunk 2077's release date, CDPR seems determined that he won't do the same in the game. "Johnny is an icon and a very powerful character," Blacha says. "But—in their own way—so is V. Both will often butt heads, but I think they will also learn something from each other." We know that Johnny lives on in 2077 as a digital implant in V's head. That may well make for some interesting conflicts in opinion.
We'll get to see Keanu's cyber ghost performance in full when Cyberpunk 2077 releases on April 16, 2020.
