Author Archives: Ryan McCaffrey

Is id Software moving onto Quake after Doom? Job postings suggest that might be the case, and we discuss what we’d like to see out of what would be Xbox’s next major exclusive first-person shooter. Plus: Miranda and Ryan tell you about their visit to 343 Industries to play Halo Infinite, Sega and Microsoft forge a new partnership, and more!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our new YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out our Halo Infinite new multiplayer map reveal below:

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For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

As a person who waited in a very small line to grab a launch PlayStation 3 and dragon-riding action disappointment Lair, you could say that any talk of flying scaly wyrms fighting in a video game both bristles my scales and ignites my curiosity. After spending some preview time with Century: Age of Ashes, I’m newly optimistic that mid-air monster battles don’t have to just be flights of fancy.

Century is a third person multiplayer shooter that feels more akin to Ace Combat than Panzer Dragoon at first. Teams of three or six riders take to the skies to burn and blast their enemies to secure kills and objectives across a handful of maps and play modes. Before I did any of that, though, I had to take a pass through the tutorial mode, which does a great job at teaching you the many technical aspects of flight, as well as offensive and defensive maneuvers to dominate your airspace with. I initially learned the controls on my keyboard, but soon switched to an Xbox controller with zero down time needed to readjust to the new layout.

Skip the tutorial at your own peril though. Learning how to move your dragon is easy enough to pick up, but the trick to regain lost stamina, for example, is a less obvious core mechanic you’re not likely to just stumble across. The tutorial also gives you lots of opportunities to learn how to throw fire at opponents, both in ball and faucet form. Your fireballs act almost like bullets, auto locking onto a target in range allowing you to pepper them from relative safety. Getting closer still opens up the flame breath option, which douses your prey in a steady gout of blaze that quickly drains their health. In combination, I found that this was my usual opener/closer. The autolock feature is a welcome one, as it puts less pressure on you having fast twitch reflexes and aim, and more emphasis on positioning and maneuvering into and out of danger.

All this heats up further when you factor rider classes, and their powers and abilities. Classes include the damage-focused Marauder and the stealthy assassin Phantom, but I fancied the Windguard, a support style class who can rush to the aid of allies and shield them, or obscure yourself and team with a trail of smoke like a Bond gadget. Both powers and abilities are skills you have to activate, but while powers are static and wholly unique to the rider, you have your choice of a pair of abilities you can ride into battle with, and some of these abilities are shared options among more than one rider class. In this closed test, that meant that Marauder and Phantoms both shared an ability, and in a game with so few abilities to go around at this stage in development, it really didn’t help those two classes feel much different from one another.

Once the training wheels were off, the team at Playwing ushered me into the Rookie Skirmish 3v3 game mode. It’s a straight-up best-of-three-round deathmatch, but your additional skills unlock gradually over the course of each round. If a game makes it to the final round, each player will have their full kit available to them. This was an interesting way to ease into the sometimes chaotic combat, but potentially not even getting to full strength win or lose, is a bummer.

After a round or two of Rookie, Playwing called in some heavy hitters from their QA team to join us for what would be my favorite mode of the entire demo, Spoils of War. In it, two teams of six dragoneers fight to accumulate gold from neutral loot dragons flying around an expansive map. Every few minutes, new sub-objectives spawn that make gathering your horde easier, or threaten it entirely. Maybe it’s suddenly locked, and a floating NPC is carrying a key you have to retrieve and return to your base to unlock it. A bomb could spawn, and the team who can successfully secure it and bring it to the enemy horde will blow it up, spilling tons of their gold out into the air, ripe for the stealing. These kept the game tense during the entire length of a round, and was where player skill, map awareness, and team balance all coalesced into a tactical and rewarding experience that stands out among the free-to-play shooter offerings available these days.

When Age of Ashes launches on December 2nd, it will launch with a market brimming with cosmetics for your rider and dragon available to purchase with real money or in-game currency earned through completing daily and weekly missions. Maybe the most curious thing to get into between matches is hatching dragon eggs and raising new dragons. If you’re lucky enough to receive a dragon egg as a reward after battle, you can equip it, and complete its list of “growth step” missions in order to raise it to adulthood. It’s an interesting, if not a little tedious, way to earn now looks for your scaly mount.

If you’ve been burned by dragon combat in the past, or just looking for a new, outside the box multiplayer shooter to fire up your Winter, Century: Age of Ashes might be worth taking a scalebound spin. It’s narrow offerings in terms of classes and abilities may make teams look pretty similar over time, but its stellar Spoils of War adds enough frantic objective chasing that will surely keep the interest of adventurous action game fans looking for a new challenge.

Startup game developer Mumo Studio – whose founders have resumes that include games like Black Desert Online and Dead to Rights – has announced Dubium, a new five-player social deduction multiplayer game for PC via Steam Early Access in 2022.

Gameplay, as the studio describes it, should sound familiar to Among Us fans: “Players take on the role of Frontier or Traitor and must escape from an abandoned space station by any means necessary. Frontiers will cooperate to repair solar panels that power the escape pod while trying to uncover the identity of the sole Traitor. Players must not relax until they escape; the Traitor will sabotage the Frontiers’ efforts at every step as they try to complete their own mission. The Traitor needs to hide their identity and use deceit and treachery to take the Frontiers out one by one in order to escape the station unopposed.”

A key obvious difference between Among Us and Dubium, though, is certainly the presentation. While Among Us has its own cartoony look, Dubium aims for a much higher production value, though its visual style could certainly still be described as cartoony.

Gadgets are upgradeable during matches, a Twitch extension is built-in so as to try and make Dubium a streamer-friendly game, and you can sign up for a future closed beta test on the official website and see more on the Steam page.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Halo Infinite will be released on December 8, but in the meantime, IGN has exclusive coverage of Master Chief’s spiritual reboot all month long as part of our editorial IGN First “cover story” initiative. That means we’ll be dropping exclusive content throughout the month of November (and yes, we’ve played the campaign – the first four hours of it), starting with today’s reveal of a brand-new Arena multiplayer map called ‘Streets’.

As you can see in the video above with me and lead multiplayer level designer Cayle George, Streets is a small, asymmetrical battleground set in New Mombasa at night. This immediately sets it apart, visually speaking, from the other Halo Infinite multiplayer maps we’ve seen in the test flights thus far. It’s got numerous subtle artistic touches, such as the “Holodog” advertisement, the retro-style Halo Infinite arcade cabinet that plays a MIDI version of the Halo theme, the skyline you can see in the background from certain vantage points on the map, and the glass railings that you can just smash right through. It’s a very fast map with short sightlines, and I really enjoyed it.

We did the above walkthrough video before we actually played the map competitively; we wanted to capture our actual first impressions of it when walking through it with George. Hilariously, after he politely ribbed me for bringing up CTF on this asymmetrical map, the very first gametype that came up in 343’s internal custom-games test hopper when we sat down to play it was…you guessed it, Capture the Flag. And it was really fun! So it certainly can be done, just don’t expect to see it in ranked playlists.

As to other multiplayer tidbits, we sat down with the 343 multiplayer team for over an hour. Among other things, we asked about whether or not we should expect any remakes of classic maps, as has become Halo tradition. “That question is something we actively talk about quite a bit,” said lead multiplayer designer Andrew Witts. “I think that what we’ve done with [the Big Team Battle map] Fragmentation is something we want; we want things to feel new, but we want things to be a bit reminiscent without giving you the exact same layout or the same layout with slight differences, because we’re a different game with different needs.” He cites Valhalla and its remake Ragnarok as influences for Fragmentation. “There are some maps that have been coming out in almost every single iteration of Halo. So I wouldn’t say we would never do a remake, but again, we’re doing a spiritual reboot, so we look at how we kind of put our own twist on it, but still make it feel like a little bit of a nostalgia trip when you kind of run through them.” George added, “We’ve tried the one-to-one ports. They don’t work well.”

Later in our discussion, we also learned that there are at least two more BTB maps that we haven’t seen yet, called ‘Deadlock’ and ‘High Power’, respectively. Multiplayer creative director Tom French described Deadlock as “very dramatic,” saying it feels very “classic Halo.” It has a “very different mood” than the rest of the maps, he told us. High Power, meanwhile, started out as a “test gym” for BTB. And, 343 says, “Test gyms never ship. At all.” But they told a story about doing a BTB playtest on the-map-that-would-eventually-be-known-as-High-Power, and the hooting and hollering was so loud from developers and testers having so much fun that they all looked at each other and asked, “Oh, is this a [real] map?”

We’ll have much more Halo Infinite as November rolls on, including a look at what awaits in Season 1 of the Battle Pass, an IGN Unfiltered conversation with Halo Infinite head of creative and longtime Bungie veteran Joseph Staten, our hands-on impressions from the first few hours of the campaign, and more – starting with raw, full-match gameplay of ‘Streets’ this Wednesday!

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

The Weird West is a brutal place to live. The prairie boomtowns are overrun with bloodthirsty outlaws, the vengeful undead are climbing out of their graves, and scheming witches are brewing dark magic on the outskirts of society. A heavy, dirgeful soundtrack follows the player everywhere as they cash in bounties, stave off the carnivorous wildlife, and stay one step ahead of everyone who wants to see them dead. In Wolfeye Studios’ debut game, everyone is a suspect and nobody should be trusted; good thing you always have your trusty revolver.

Wolfeye Studios is composed of former Arkane veterans, and unsurprisingly, Weird West is steeped in that ill-defined “immersive sim” subgenre emblematized by games like Dishonored and Prey. This is a top-down action-RPG with a huge swathe of incisive, interlocking systems — all working in unison to submerge the player in this perverse interpretation of the American frontier. Weird West has multiple protagonists, but I spent my time with the game under the guise of an amnesiac bounty hunter tracking down her missing husband. You navigate to each encounter by moving from point to point on an all-encompassing map of the backcountry. As players carve through the main quest, they’ll stumble into side quests, random encounters, and the occasional mysterious locale off the beaten track. My favorite of those was a band of mysterious cultists guarding a stone temple that seemed to hold some ancient, terrible secrets. It’s exactly what you want out of a single-player adventure set in a beguiling, eldritch universe; the feeling that there’s always another macabre layer of intrigue left to find.

The combat in Weird West is expressive, modular, and christened by the aforementioned Arkane tradition. I had plenty of fun pumping out lead in vintage, John Wayne-style shootouts; the game lets you swap out your entire arsenal on the fly, and packs an awesome bullet time feature that adds an extra bit of cinematic oomph to your coup de gras. But Wolfeye is clearly encouraging players to be more cerebral in their approach. Case in point: in one bandit stronghold I found a well that could be explored with the rope that happened to be sitting in my inventory. My character plunged into the depths, discovering some vital intel, good loot, and a perfect flanking position on my enemies. The alternative tactical pathways in Weird West aren’t always that comprehensive — sometimes we’re just detonating an oil barrel next to a target — but the game is at its best when it engages our Dungeons & Dragons logic. It took me forever to realize that you could drink water from the cacti out in the desert, restoring a small touch of health. I can’t wait to learn about everything else I’ve been overlooking.

Weird West doesn’t overburden the player with a progression system. You won’t spend hours staring at a character sheet redepositing talent points. Instead, I found troves of purple “Nimp Relics” on my journey, stashed away like Zelda chests, which could be spent to unlock a variety of special powers. Within a few hours of play, my bounty hunter could lay down shrapnel mines, fasten a silencer to her rifle, and chuck the bottles and crates she found lingering around the arenas at a terminal velocity. You also uncover the occasional Golden Ace of Spades that are cashed into a perk system for some more conventional bonuses — faster reload speeds, more max health, and so on. It’s possible to minmax out an impeccable build in Weird West, but thankfully, nobody will have to calculate any percentages.

Frankly, the only notable concern I have about Weird West is its optimization before its January 11 release date. The gunplay is visceral, but the controls could be a little tighter. A number of my firefights devolved into both sides circle-strafing around each other, waiting for someone’s health to drop to zero, which doesn’t encapsulate the high-minded tactical flair that Wolfeye is going for. I also experienced one hard-crash to desktop, and a hilarious bug in which a cowboy devolved into a horrible polygonal monstrosity after I knocked him out. Those issues will likely be ironed out when Weird West is in the public’s hands, and if Wolfeye pulls it off, players might finally have the occult, grimdark western we’ve all been waiting for.