Blizzard has released their official preview of Season of Discovery Phase 2, including details on quality of life runes, raid preview including bosses and loot, more details about the new PvP event, and profession updates.
17.01.2024 - 17:05 / engadget.com / Jessica Conditt / Keri Russell / Kaitlyn Dever
I own a jacket that’s eerily similar to Tess’ in Open Roads. It’s a blue bomber with yellow and burnt orange accents, and it’s not the only thing that Tess and I have in common. As she leisurely explores her childhood bedroom in the first few minutes of the game, Tess comes across set pieces that ground her environment in the early 2000s. There’s a chunky black television set and scattered DVD cases, little bottles of bright nail polish, a black-and-white strip from a photo booth, newspapers remembering 9/11 and hunting for bigfoot, and a bright pink tube of sickly sweet lip balm. These are the leftovers of her adolescence — the room is disheveled and largely empty, with most of her possessions packed away, ready to move. Tess picks through the room’s remaining photos and yearbooks, her hand-drawn fingers reaching out to interact with 3D objects, revealing more of her backstory with each touch. The cuff of her jacket is jarringly familiar every time it enters the frame.
Open Roads is a narrative-driven, exploration-focused game about the road trip that Tess and her mother take when a death in the family uproots their life. After clearing out the house and finding a mysterious diary in the attic, Tess and her mom, Opal, print out directions from RoadBuddy (not MapQuest) and set off on a long drive. Emotional upheaval is bound to ensue.
Annapurna InteractiveI watched developers play the first 15 minutes or so of Open Roads, and the preview reeled me in immediately. Visually, the game is polished and engaging; the settings and interactable objects are 3D, while characters are hand-drawn, carving depth into each scene. Developers at the Open Roads Team uploaded real-life handwriting samples to create yearbook pages, postcards and letters, which removes the threat of pixelated text ruining the immersion. In conversation, the characters float between movements like old-school Disney storyboards, making the entire experience feel like a lucid dream.
Tess and Opal are fully voiced by two mainstream actors, Kaitlyn Dever and Keri Russell, and in the scenes I’ve seen, their performances are fantastic. The interactions between Tess and Opal are simultaneously loving and strained, as mother-daughter relationships can be. The writing is also evocative and genuine; dialogue flows smoothly, even with the various player-chosen paths that each conversation can take. These characters feel real right away.
Annapurna InteractiveThe house that Tess and Opal are leaving is lived-in and it has a sense of history. There are personal, hand-crafted touches in every room, and developers added bits of their own lives to the game. The chair by that desk? It was modeled after a developer’s own childhood memories. Those old,
Blizzard has released their official preview of Season of Discovery Phase 2, including details on quality of life runes, raid preview including bosses and loot, more details about the new PvP event, and profession updates.
Publisher Annapurna Interactive has announced a delay to the release of narrative adventure game Open Roads.
The developer of upcoming Genshin Impact-like Wuthering Waves says it's rewritten 90% of its story ahead of the RPG's second closed beta.
Graham has been bandying Abiotic Factor around the Treehouse as "Half-Life designed for co-op survival japes", which is obviously a noteworthy combination of words, so let's have a look at the Steam page, trailer, and gosh, there's a demo here too. That's Friday night sorted.
Skull and Bones will have an open beta, Ubisoft has announced. It kicks off across all platforms (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Windows PC via the Epic Games Store and the Ubisoft Store) on February 8 and runs until February 11.
After years of delays, reboots, and all manner of behind-the-scenes issues, Skull and Bones is finally less than a month away from launch, and ahead of its looming release, Ubisoft is going to allow everyone to test the waters before deciding if you want to fully dive in.
Palworld's upcoming player-versus-player options won't suffer from "the same pitfalls" that irk other survival games, according to developer Pocketpair.
For realsies this time, Skull & Bones launches on February 16. If the pirate game has managed to keep you curious all this time, look out for the open access running from February 8 until 11.
Ubisoft will hold an open beta for Skull and Bones ahead of the game’s release next month.
In a stroke of exciting news for seafarers and pirates, Ubisoft has announced that multiplayer open-world pirate sim Skull and Boneswill get an open beta ahead of its imminent February 16 launch.
Myth of Empires has opened up a limited-time Steam playtest starting today through January 30th. The test comes as the open world survival sandbox set against the backdrop of warprepares for launch next month.
Blizzard has revealed the next evolution of top-level Overwatch 2 esports after the demise of the Overwatch League. The publisher has teamed up with ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) to run the new Overwatch Champions Series (OWCS) under an exclusive multi-year agreement.