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Daily Mirror
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
CD Projekt Red on 10 years of the Witcher 3 and how it will inform Ciri's upcoming sequel adventure
Following the most recent demonstration of The Witcher 4 at this year's State of Unreal presentation, we discuss the past, present, and future of the series with CD Projekt Red. We sit down with CD Projekt Red's Senior VP of Technology, Charles Tremblay, to talk about all things past, present, and future on The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary. For many players there exists two moments in history: a time before the release of The Witcher 3 and the time after. A lot may have changed in the industry since 2015, but something that's remained a constant is how revered CD Projekt Red 's open-world rendition of the celebrated Polish book series remains. 2025 marks a decade since its initial release on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and in that time it'd be fair to say that a lot of other open-world games have been playing catch up. Sure, we had The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim beforehand, but The Witcher 3 more than earns its place alongside Bethesda 's game as a true classic of the fantasy RPG genre. Knowing this makes it easy to understand why CD Projekt Red's next game, The Witcher 4, is so highly anticipated. The sequel is still without its release date, but we know that it will include a new region to explore – Kovir – alongside a totally new protagonist to do it with in Ciri. To find out more about how much CD Projekt Red as a studio has evolved since the Witcher 3's release, the switch to Unreal Engine 5, and how these changes may inform Ciri's adventure, we flew to the studio's HQ in Poland and spoke to Senior VP of Technology Charles Tremblay. How has CD Projekt Red's approach to making games changed since The Witcher 3 first released? I think The Witcher 3 was quite a sweet spot in terms of team size, mostly because we were quite a smaller team when I joined. We were 150-ish people, and we grew to 200 to 250 to make the whole [game]. The communication was fine. I could just walk to anyone at a walking distance. Right now, if I want to walk to the Witcher 4 team, I have to walk a few kilometres to the other building. The art team [and] the programming team were much more aligned also. We still had problems, but we were able to make the game as we used to do in the industry for decades. When we scaled up to Cyberpunk 2077, we almost doubled the team. Now it's getting a bit scarier because the more people you have, the more the communication problems start to arise where there's expectation on one side and reality on the other. Before we very quickly could align. Now, there's so many people in the loop. We tried to learn how to adapt, but it was extremely challenging and we did fail in quite a few ways. Some expectations from art were not aligned with engineering, especially [with] what we could do with the hardware we had at the time. But the ambition was there. If we had a small team, it would have probably been simpler and we didn't think too much about this problem until it was too late. Fast forward [to] where we are now. Especially after the launch of Cyberpunk, we had some self-introspection about, 'okay, we do not see a way we can scale down back to 150 people because of the reality of the ambition, plus what people expect from our product'. We needed to change the way we approach game development a little bit. We don't think it's sustainable to grow to thousands of people to make a game. We want to keep around the ballpark of Cyberpunk's scale, if not less. We try to now have a more multidisciplinary team working together. I cannot say too much about Witcher 4, but I think that we are getting to a point where we get some good results. But still, we are learning and evolving how to make the game better and faster, and better for the players. Is it hard to switch back to making and designing a fantasy world versus something more modern like Night City? Oh, on the technology side, it's completely different. One is a sprawling city with verticality. It was not a city like New York; it's much more organic. A very disgusting world [with] lots of trash and lots of details that needed to be handled. You have vehicles, which we don't necessarily have in The Witcher universe. Bigger crowd, different behaviours, encounters… graffiti everywhere. When we go back to The Witcher, though, it is a much more dynamic world, mostly because of the forest. The forest is a completely different challenge, technically, to make it as good as possible. You can imagine we will definitely have some city in some form going forward, like Novigrad that we had in The Witcher 3, so they're still there in some form. But I think one of the biggest issues we have right now is how to design forest and how to make everything move all the time. How to [give] it [a] feeling that it's alive. How do we improve from the Witcher 3 forest? How do make monsters, wildlife and everything so it fits into this universe's completely different design? Also, the agenda is quite different. The Witcher, of course, Ciri or Geralt, they are full-fledged characters. They have their own personality. There are things that they will not do. While when you go [back] to Cyberpunk, V is a more a mercenary. She has more freedom about how she wants to tackle the world, in an evil or good way. It's very difficult to see Geralt starting to go GTA style, so there's a different constraint. The most recent glimpse of Witcher 4 we saw from the State of Unreal presentation. Were you happy to people's reaction to that gameplay slice? Oh definitely, I think that even our friends from PR were not expecting that it would be as well received, because it's very difficult to explain a tech demo, right? How do we discuss this with you guys? I think it turned out very well. There was a lot of things that we needed to prove within [the] technology and we aligned into what we showcased. And with Epic, it was much easier to now have a result on the screen. We want to go at 60fps on PS5. Now the reception, when we were in Orlando and we were doing the rehearsal, I had shivers. I had complete shivers the first time I saw it from the beginning to end, and I was like, 'this is just fantastic'. Of course, we saw it on the little screen and were iterating on it, but when we saw on the big screen we were like, 'okay, this is going to be great'. And I think when we did the first official rehearsal everybody from Epic and our side were very impressed about the result. Speaking of Epic, how are you finding the process of developing Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the Red Engine from before? We are a very ambitious company and now, since we work together [with Epic] on what it means to make the next generation of open-world, we need to align differently. That's why we did this. The two technologies are completely different, the way they handle a few things. Definitely some things would have been way easier on RED Engine and somethings are way easier on Unreal. Now we just try to take all the good things we have on Unreal and all the things we add with Unreal Engine, and try to now have some kind of a beautiful baby, just to be sure that we can scale up to the hardware. We don't want to go back and to have a less quality product. For us, it's not very acceptable to step back, right? The ambition is still there. We want to push forward always. This was very important for us, and I think this is why with Epic, we managed to have very good collaboration. I think the fact that they managed to work with us to make this open world and deliver the technology that is required to make it at performance [where] everybody will benefit, not just us. Finally, with it being The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, do you have a favourite quest? I think the most interesting one is probably when you reunite with the witchers in Kaer Morhen. All those characters have been following you around since starting your journey with Geralt. It was really great to continue building into those great characters. All the quests with those characters were great. I'm a sucker for a nostalgic moment, especially when you're an IP fan or a game fan and you have all those moments that you know those characters, you've been working with them, or having discussions with them in previous games. There is, of course, all the quests that go back to The Witcher 2, Letho, which if you didn't kill him, spoilers, I think it's great to have him back and having this character back, and the dialogue was just fantastic.
Engadget
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Everything new at Summer Game Fest 2025: Xbox handheld, Resident Evil Requiem and more
It's early June, which means it's time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley's Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we're smack dab in the middle of that programming right now. We're covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show's in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between. Through it all, we're collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order. Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic's own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED's upcoming The Witcher IV . To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we've heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5's Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn't quite on the scale of The Witcher III 's Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved. It's fair to say that Fortnite 's moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year. Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony's standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls , a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It's also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It's being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It's coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that'll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026. Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new... let's call it aspirational "2026" date for Pragmata , which, if you're keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom! To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3 , coming in 2026; Suda51's new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man ; and Lumines Arise , a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect . There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that's out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It's probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.) It's fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year's showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell's yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn't show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Perhaps the biggest of all was the "ninth" ( Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village . Here's hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6 . We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It's now called Stranger Than Heaven , and there's a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart , Code Vein and Mortal Shell , and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX , a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game . There were countless other announcements at the show, including: As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here. Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it's got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted , a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren't going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It's your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Here are some of the other games that caught our eye: To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit . It's the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun's Hatbox . Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun's mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there's a demo on Steam available right now. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who's been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia. Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye , a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing. The Wholesome Direct arrived on Saturday, just in time to soothe that weird hangover we all got after the IOI showcase. The Wholesome Direct is a celebration of all things adorable, quaint, peaceful and sweet, and this year included mainstream news about Monument Valley 3 coming to consoles and PC, following a stint as a Netflix exclusive. There was also a release date announcement for the cozy but twisted shop-management sim Discounty , which is about as spooky as the Wholesome Direct ever gets. There's something sinister about the small town in Discounty , and while we're still not sure if it's demons or just the looming specter of capitalism, we know for sure the game is coming to PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 21. Meanwhile, Omelet You Cook hit Steam during the showcase as a nice little surprise. It's a game about making eggs for picky students in a cafeteria, and of course pleasing Principal Clucker (who is a chicken in a suit, yes). Simply put, it looks delicious. The final game we want to shout out from this year's Wholesome Direct is Camper Van: Make it Home , a perfect little crossover of interior design mechanics and slightly miniaturized objects, which makes for a super cute experience. It came out during the showcase , and it's live now on Steam. There were dozens of other announcements during the 2025 Wholesome Direct stream, and the entire thing is worth a watch. You can do so at your leisure, ideally cuddled up with a blanket and a nice drink, right here. Saturday was also the time for all of the hyper-specific game streams to shine. We saw the Women-led Games show, Latin American Games Showcase , Southeast Asian Games Showcase , Green Games Showcase and Frosty Games Fest . Party! The last big event of the weekend was Xbox, which had its usual breathless showcase. The major news, especially for a publication like Engadget, was the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, two new Xbox-focused PC handhelds. Internally, they're a lot like ASUS' ROG Ally handhelds, but the grips have been smoothed out to feel more like an Xbox controller in your hands. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The software experience is also different. The Xbox Ally handhelds run Windows 11, but in Microsoft's version of Steam Big Picture mode there'll be fewer background processes and… just a generally lower overhead compared to regular Windows handhelds. Thankfully, Microsoft isn't locking things down, as it'll be able to access other "popular storefronts," which we're taking to mean Steam and Epic. The Xbox Ally will be available closer to the holidays, but price is a huge question mark: The ROG Ally costs significantly more than the Steam Deck and Switch 2. Is Microsoft going to subsidize these things, or are they going to cost $600-$800 like ASUS' own-brand versions? Side note: A quick screw you to Microsoft for using Hollow Knight: Silksong to show off the new handheld. We're all starving out here, and this was not helpful. I guess the news that it'll be playable on day one on the handheld at least narrows down the release date to "between now and whenever this thing comes out." Less of a surprise was Outer Worlds 2 , which Microsoft said would be at the show well ahead of time. We got a release date — October 29 — and a deep dive into the game's new systems. It looks like an expanded title compared to the original, with an improved combat system and a more fleshed out set of companions. We hope to have more on what's new real soon. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The One More Thing of the show was a new Call of Duty game, Black Ops 7 . Truly, when a game comes out every year is it really worth blowing your one more thing on? If only Microsoft had an Xbox-branded handheld to show off, that would've been a really cool note to end the show! Here are the other bits and pieces worth reading about from the Xbox show: Paralives has been in the works for what feels like forever, but you'll be able to play it this year: It enters early access on December 8 . The indie take on The Sims looks charming as all hell in its latest trailer, and I can't wait. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Blippo+ has been a great distraction since it launched with Playdate season 2 , and we found out Sunday that it'll be coming to more platforms soon — in full color, no less ! It'll arrive on PC and Nintendo Switch in fall 2025. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Now you're all caught up. There's just one event on Monday, and it's the Black Voices in Gaming showcase. It starts at noon ET, and we've embedded the steam below for your viewing pleasure. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so.
Engadget
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Everything new at Summer Game Fest 2025: Marvel Tōkon, Resident Evil Requiem and more
It's early June, which means it's time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley's Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we're smack dab in the middle of that programming right now. We're covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show's in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between. Through it all, we're collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order. Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic's own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED's upcoming The Witcher IV . To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we've heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5's Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn't quite on the scale of The Witcher III 's Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved. It's fair to say that Fortnite 's moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year. Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony's standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls , a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It's also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It's being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It's coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that'll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026. Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new... let's call it aspirational "2026" date for Pragmata , which, if you're keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom! To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3 , coming in 2026; Suda51's new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man ; and Lumines Arise , a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect . There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that's out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It's probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.) It's fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year's showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell's yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn't show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Perhaps the biggest of all was the "ninth" ( Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village . Here's hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6 . We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It's now called Stranger Than Heaven , and there's a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart , Code Vein and Mortal Shell , and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX , a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game . There were countless other announcements at the show, including: As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here. Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it's got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted , a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren't going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It's your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Here are some of the other games that caught our eye: To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit . It's the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun's Hatbox . Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun's mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there's a demo on Steam available right now. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who's been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia. Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye , a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing. Now you're all caught up. We're expecting a lot of news this weekend, mostly from Xbox on Sunday. We'll be updating this article through the weekend and beyond, but you can find the latest announcements from Summer Game Fest 2025 on our front page.
Daily Mirror
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
What is UEFN in Fortnite? New Squid Game collab and custom islands explained
The State of Unreal showcase has brought some major Fortnite announcements including the Squid Game and Avatar: The Last Airbender crossovers, but many players are questioning exactly what UEFN is Fortnite has made a number of announcements at this year's State of Unreal showcase – but many players are left scratching their heads about what they actually mean for the game. Despite leakers hinting that some major Fortnite news would be unveiled at the State of Unreal showcase on Tuesday, June 4, players didn't get what they were hoping for. In fact, they might have ended up more puzzled than before. As the end of the Galactic Battle season draws near, and players prepare to bid farewell to the Star Wars -themed island and board the massive Star Destroyer for the last time, anticipation for a new season is building. With the Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 4 start date looming, players are bracing themselves for a significant shake-up as they power through the last of the Galactic Battle Battle Pass before it's gone for good. However, it's not just in Battle Royale and Zero Build where we're witnessing changes, as the State of Unreal has shown – indeed, creative is set to expand even further with some major crossovers for creators that could genuinely revolutionize how the system is used. This has raised a question among players – what exactly is UEFN in Fortnite? And what role does Squid Game play in all of this? Here's what you need to know. What is UEFN in Fortnite? UEFN, more commonly known as Unreal Editor for Fortnite, is a tool that allows creators in Fortnite to design their own Islands. This gives them the opportunity to construct new games using Epic Games ' assets which players can access for free. It's a PC application designed to assist players in designing, building and publishing games directly into the Fortnite launcher, much like Roblox. The capabilities of the system are detailed on its Epic Games Store page, revealing that it can be used to create custom content with modelling and material tools, construct fresh landscapes, and utilise systems like Control Rig, MetaHuman and World Partition. What's particularly intriguing for the average player is that it employs a number of Fortnite assets including some from major companies that have collaborated with the game. Creators have been given access to structures, character models and NPCs from Lego, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Walking Dead. It's a splendid system for both players and creators, and it has helped elevate Fortnite from being a fantastic Battle Royale game to being a grand games platform. What is the Fortnite Squid Game collaboration? The State of Unreal showcase (via YouTube) revealed that a Fortnite Squid Game collaboration is on the horizon, just in time for the show's third and final season. It won't simply end with the expected cosmetics, either, as UEFN will also receive a new collection of Squid Game tools. This is an ideal partnership for the game-creation system, especially considering when the series first landed, Roblox and UEFN were inundated with imitation games hoping to engage players with Red Light, Green Light and the rest of the show's treacherous mini-games. Now creators will have the opportunity to do this all over again with officially licensed character models, buildings, and more. However, the Fortnite Squid Game collaboration isn't the only one coming to UEFN. Epic Games also unveiled that a new Avatar: The Last Airbender crossover with the tool is set for 2026, and Star Wars will follow later. The former is thrilling, but the latter is particularly groundbreaking as such a crossover will give total control of Star Wars characters to creators on a major platform. Given Disney's protectiveness of its IP, this certainly places a lot of trust in creators to do it justice. If you've been wondering about what UEFN in Fortnite actually is, you'll likely find out first-hand soon as a significant wave of new content arrives in the game with each new content crossover. UEFN in Fortnite is a significant development, essentially turning Epic Games' favourite offspring into a total gaming powerhouse that aspiring creators can utilise to provide you with a new game to play. Have a go at fishing in the creative island tab of the game and see what you can discover before it's overrun by Squid Game experiences. Because it will. Make sure you don't miss out on our latest high-quality videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, where we'll be posting our latest reviews, previews, interviews, and live streams!
Hypebeast
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
'Fortnite' To Release AI-Powered NPCs
Summary Artificial intelligence may not have taken over the world yet, but it's certainly making waves inFortnite. Since the introduction of the Unreal Editor forFortnite(UEFN) in 2023, creators have been able to build, collaborate on fully customizable islands and much more. Now,Epic Gamesis pushing the boundaries even further with AI-powered non-playable characters (NPCs). In early experimentation of an AI-powered Darth Vader character added in game, the character could interact with players and even join their squad if they gain his loyalty by defeating him. While this was a hit with fans, it also highlighted early issues — most notably, the lack of filtered dialogue, which allowed the AI to be prompted into swearing. Epic Games quickly acknowledged the problem and added parental controls as well. Now, Epic Games is taking things a step further. At the 'State of Unreal' keynote, the company offered a glimpse intoFortnite'sfuture with the introduction of Mr. Buttons — an AI-powered NPC capable of holding real-time, unscripted conversations. Unlike traditional scripted characters, Mr. Buttons can respond dynamically to player prompts, marking a significant leap toward more immersive, interactive gameplay. That said, the experience isn't without flaws. To mask processing delays, the AI fills pauses with sounds like 'hmm' or 'umm'— a clever touch at first, but one that quickly becomes repetitive and slightly robotic. Still, the progress is hard to ignore. Take a look at the Mr. Buttons demo above.
