ENTERTAINMENT

Ubisoft has assured that Assassin’s Creed Shadows players who largely ignore one of the dual protagonists won’t be “missing out.”

Creative director Jonathan Dumont told Screen Rant said Assassin’s Creed Shadows won’t force players to play as both the stealthy Naoe and the brutish Yasuke in equal measure when it arrives March 20, nor will it lock off certain parts of the game to those who prefer one over the other.

“I don’t think you’re missing out on things too much,” Dumont said. “I think it’s more on your preference to [say], ‘Okay, I’ll see how the game will adapt a little bit to the character if you choose one over the other.’

“They get individual introductions and then they get their own questline also. Let’s say [for] Naoe, a personal questline cannot be played by Yasuke and those are two distinct things. But the core of the game can be pick your character and the game adapts.”

Naoe has a play style reminiscent of the original Assassin’s Creed games or, ironically, the most recent Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which prioritises stealth and encourages full combat only as a last resort.

This is a stark difference to Yasuke who emulates the more aggressive elements of the role-playing game Assassin’s Creed entries, meaning Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. He charges head on into battle instead of sticking to the shadows like Naoe.

“We’re not imposing players try to split the time,” Dumont said. “If you prefer one character for any reason, you can play maybe, I don’t know, I’m not going to put a percentage, but quite a bit of the game using one of them.

“But if you want to balance it out… I play quite a bit balanced out and what happens is, I play with one for three, four, five hours, and then I switch, and then I just play two, three hours. Usually I play stealth and then I [say], ‘All right, let me destroy some camps and stuff all right for a while.’ And then I just change like that.”

A lot rests on the shoulders of Assassin’s Creed Shadows as not only the long-awaited Japan-set entry and the first full Assassin’s Creed since 2020, but a struggling Ubisoft needs it to perform well following recent flops and investor frustration.

It’s not enjoyed a particularly positive promotional period so far, however, with the development team having to apologize on separate occasions for inaccuracies in Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ depictions of Japan and using a historical recreation group’s flag without permission.

Yet another controversy came as collectible figure maker PureArts removed an Assassin’s Creed Shadows statue from sale over its “insensitive” design, and combined with the two delays, fans are growing increasingly impatient as a result.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

I was smitten with Compulsion’s South of Midnight well before I got to play a little more than an hour of it recently. From the first enigmatic trailers hinting at this Southern gothic, dark fantasy, magical realist stop-motion game set in the Deep South, to IGN’s own first look, to the bigger gameplay overview at the recent Xbox Developer Direct – South of Midnight struck me as a deeply moving, highly stylized game that would almost definitely make me cry. When I told the Art Director, Whitney Clayton, that I had immediately thought of that decade-plus-old movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, she confirmed that was one of their early major inspirations for its “Mythical Bayou-type location, folklore creatures, and this really heartwarming protagonist.” That, along with the “darkness and folktale fantasy” of Pan’s Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro. Huge yes to all of that.

In the section that I got hands-on time with, I absolutely got the sense that all of the intrigue and hype-building was no bluff, and yet a couple elements of the gameplay still needed more time in the metaphorical oven before it’s ready to ship out. Even with those minor blemishes – which are slightly concerning because we’re just a couple months away from its April 8 release date – I left still enamored with the setting and bubbling with curiosity about the bigger story about ghosts and environmental catastrophe driving South of Midnight.

I played through Chapter 3, far along enough to have some magical combat tricks as a Weaver going up against spooky figures called Haints – which is exactly where I began. (Though the question of “What exactly is a Weaver?” is yet to be explained.) Diving pretty much headfirst into a fight was expectedly disorienting, but I was reassured that all of the mapped techniques – push, pull, and what’s basically a stun move – are introduced at a pace that’s much easier to get acquainted to naturally. Part of the struggle was the autolock feature being a little loosey-goosey at times; because of the volume of Haints and where they appear in the combat area, the camera spun around the main character, Hazel, in a way that made me a tiny bit woozy.

I eventually got the hang of the Weaving moves, plus the timing of dodging for its magic recoil against nearby Haints, and found it challenging enough but not necessarily revolutionary. But I hardly think it needs to be: South of Midnight’s charm is, well, basically everything else. As long as it’s fun (it was) and not horribly repetitive (it wasn’t), then it can, in fact, run almost purely on vibes. From each encounter with the Haints, I felt a sense of eerie dread from the lighting and fog, the blaring drums-and-horns score, the general spore-like creepiness of the Haints and their corruption. And when I finally beat their spooky asses, it culminated in a cathartic cleansing of the land, both physically and spiritually, that had been choking on its past. Hazel wasn’t just clearing out the wreckage of environmental disaster from a devastating hurricane where she lost her mother, setting her on this very journey. She was healing the ghosts of history that were haunting the land, too.

That’s kind of how the beats of the chapter went: platform around a swampy area with double jumps, glides, and magic skills to find what I’ll call “Haint holes,” clear ‘em out, and pick up little pieces of a bigger story that all point back to a Mythical Creature – this one in particular at the behest of a giant talking magical Catfish who is both narrator and seemingly Hazel’s mode of transportation around different areas. Chapter 3 didn’t end with a boss battle against one of the giants highlighted in earlier videos; instead I climbed up a giant man-shaped tree to clear the Stigma of its Wound. I swear, the game explains why it exists at all through the collected ghost stories, and houses and spaces are littered with ephemera that help fill out more of the character-building picture. But even so, the ultimate answer still felt like a cliffhanger: Who were these people and how were they connected to the bigger tapestry of South of Midnight? I gotta know!

This storybook narrative meshed peachily – pun intentional – with the luxuriously textured elements of its habitat. Clayton told me the basis of these details was rooted in making the animation feel tactile: “What would this look like if it were actually handcrafted in real life?” she said. “What kind of materials would they have been made out of to look like the thing that they’re supposed to be made out of?”

Speaking of stop-motion: The team knows that not everyone is going to love the style, Clayton said, and that’s fine: “Anytime you do something a bit bold, you’re gonna get polarizing feelings.” (For what it’s worth, if it’s that distracting, you’ll be able to turn it off outside of cutscenes in South of Midnight’s settings.) I will say, I did catch a couple of moments with frame rate issues that haven’t been fully ironed out yet, but Compulsion is aiming for 60fps on Series X by launch. And when everything is running smoothly as it ought to, South of Midnight should be a uniquely beautiful game that might even make you cry a little bit, too.

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While Henry Cavill may be the most famous actor to have played Geralt of Rivia, he’s not the first name many will think of when discussing The Witcher. Certainly amongst the gaming community, Doug Cockle — the voice of Geralt in CD Projekt Red’s series of critically acclaimed RPGs — is considered the original and ultimate white wolf. But the paths of Cavill and Cockle’s Geralts have now merged, with Cockle bringing his unmistakable voice to Netflix’s interpretation of the character in the new animated movie, The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep.

While he’s not playing the same version of Geralt who appears in the games, Cockle was not asked to alter his performance to sound more like or include the mannerisms of Henry Cavill or Liam Hemsworth, who replaces Cavill as Geralt in the next season of the live-action show. This creative decision meant Cockle was able to draw upon the same method and approach that created the unmistakably gravelly tones of his Geralt of Rivia. And so you’ll still hear the same voice you’ve known and loved for nearly 20 years.

Cockle formulated that voice back in 2005 when recording dialogue for the first Witcher video game. “The thing I found most challenging about recording Witcher 1 was actually the voice itself,” Cockle recalls. “When I first started recording the game, (Geralt’s) voice was very, very far down in my register. It was something I had to push towards.”

At the time there was little guidance as to how long voice actors should spend recording in a single session, and so Cockle was spending eight or nine hours per day delivering that gravelly voice. “I was going back to my hotel just going, ‘Wow, my throat is ripped’,” he recalls. The struggle continued into the recording of The Witcher 2 a few years later, but Cockle’s vocal chords eventually strengthened and began attuned to what was required of them — a process he sheepishly likens to an athlete’s muscles getting into shape.

Cockle’s vocal chords adapting to better support Geralt’s voice wasn’t the only major change that happened during the development of the second game, though. “The books started to come out in English while I was recording Witcher 2,” he explains. “Before that, it was the developers from CD Projekt Red who taught me everything I needed to know about Geralt. So as soon as The Last Wish came out in English, I was down at the bookstore buying it, and I tore through it. And I understood things about Geralt just from reading just that one book that I didn’t understand at all before.

“The developers kept saying, ‘He’s emotionless’,” Cockle says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, I get it, I get it, but I’m an actor. I want to play with emotions.’ But I better understood [when reading] the book why they were pushing for as flat as possible of an emotional life for him.”

Stellar Blade developer Shift Up has posted a record breaking year financially as Stellar Blade brought in $43 million in royalties, and the PC version is expected to outsell the original PlayStation 5 game.

As reported by Game World Observer, Shift Up released its 2024 financial report which revealed it recorded $151.4 million in revenue, an increase of 30.4% year over year. This includes $43.2 million from Stellar Blade royalties alone.

There are seemingly no signs of it slowing down either, as Shift Up reiterated that it expects PC sales to be “better than that of the console version, especially in the Asian game market.” It also plans to reveal its new game, Project Witches, in the first half of 2025, though this doesn’t appear to be the highly requested Stellar Blade sequel.

Project Witches was revealed in 2024, not long after Stellar Blade was released on PS5, and therefore before momentum for a sequel was built. Shift Up has said it’s considering making another game in the franchise though.

Stellar Blade sees players take on the role of Eve as she battles against unknown invaders to reclaim Earth in fast paced action role-playing game combat. It earned a 7/10 in IGN’s review and proved popular otherwise, quickly selling a million copies.

“Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre,” we said.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.