Category Archives: Cyberpunk

Roll20, maker of virtual tabletop roleplaying tools, has released a new integration with Discord that aims to make remote game nights more convenient.

Starting today, all Discord users can launch the Roll20 virtual tabletop software directly within Discord as an "Activity," gaining access to all the usual roleplaying tools their platform provides, including interactive maps, character sheets, simulated dice rolling, drag-and-drop rulebooks, and more.

Roll20 currently supports most of the heavy-hitters in the tabletop space, including Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast, the Dune TTRPG from Mophidius Entertainment, Cyberpunk RED from R.Talsorian Games, and my personal favorite: ALIEN The Roleplaying Game from Free League Publishing. Now available alongside Discord's voice and video features (not to mention its gamer-centric userbase), Roll20 hopes to make it easier than ever for roleplaying enthusiasts to organize game nights.

This integration marks a pivotal moment for the hobby, offering an unprecedented level of convenience to players and GMs," Roll20 told IGN. "By leveraging Discord's intuitive communication features and enabling their vast user base access to adventure at the click of a button, we're opening the door for even more players to discover and enjoy tabletop RPGs."

Roll20 has been testing this integration in beta for the past four months and making adjustments based on player feedback. Games created within Discord will also feature Roll20's new platform experience, which was its first major update since 2012.

Both Roll20 and its new Discord integration will also support the D&D 2024 revised 5E editions as well, which IGN has been following closely, including a reveal of the upcoming Monster Manual cover.

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Roll20 Introduces Discord Integration, Will Support Dungeons & Dragons, Dune, Cyberpunk RED, and More - IGN

I like Cyberpunk 2077. Its a game that I feel a persistent pull to return to especially after the Phantom Liberty expansion despite already having played it through to completion twice. Im the kind of person who uninstalls a game the second I hit credits, more focused on playing a broad array of games than I am in playing anything very deeply. So the fact that I felt compelled to return to Cyberpunk 2077 tells me that it does, in fact, have a hold on me. Though it has frequently frustrated me, I cant argue with my own behavior.

Still, it wasnt the game I wanted it to be at least not fully. I love Blade Runner, and despite Cyberpunks marketing focusing so heavily on its sunnier take on the genre, I held out hope that it would deliver the kind of neon-drenched, rainy metropolis I go back to Ridley Scott's masterpiece for over and over. 2077 did offer those sights intermittently, but that aesthetic wasnt really what CD Projekt Red was going for. Cyberpunk was doing something different and while thats laudable, I still wanted something else.

Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece set the bar and few stories, in any medium, have cleared it.

If youve ever felt a similar pull and/or a similar frustration, Nobody Wants To Die is a must play. Im still only about a third of the way through the game, but it is delivering evocative cyberpunk vistas at a clip that 2077 just couldnt match.

Thats partially because Nobody Wants To Die is a strictly linear game, which allows developer Critical Hit to carefully craft each skybox. Cyberpunk 2077 often served up sights that wowed me like a huge wall of skyscrapers that reached to the sky, filling your entire field of view but those moments were fewer and farther between because the game was offering an open world that you could look at from any location and angle you chose. Plus, those sights were enticing because they stoked your imagination of what you could do once you got to those places. After playing the game for a while, you figured out that the answer was, "Not much."

Nobody Wants To Die, by contrast, doesnt pretend that it's going to let you loose on its futuristic New York City. It's a highly curated experience, and its strict linearity and minimal interactivity mean that you're only ever focused on taking in the world around you and the story unfolding within it. And that story is pretty interesting genre storytelling in the tradition of Blade Runner, with a retrofuturist spin that will hit hard for fans of BioShock and Fallout. The game is set in the New York of 2329, and our era is now referred to as The Mortal Age. Humanity has solved the pesky issue of mortality, but what should be an unalloyed good has, through the innovation of capitalism, been replaced with a hellish payment plan. Thanks to a substance called Ichorite, humans can pass their consciousness from one body to another. But, to do so, they must continually pay into a subscription service. And because new physiques are auctioned off, regular working class people tend to inherit bodies with illnesses, chronic pain, or worse.

It's playing with some of the same ideas as Altered Carbon, the sci-fi novel which was adapted into a Netflix series starring Joel Kinnaman and Anthony Mackie, but the ideas still feel fresh here. The game's portrayal of a capitalist future where immortality the most mythic, impossible dream humanity ever dreamed has been reduced to just another bill rigged to screw over working people is dark and bleakly resonant.

The actual gameplay is less exciting than its ideas and presentation. Mostly, your hard-boiled detective character, James Karra, walks around murder scenes, searching for bits that the UI indicates are interactive, interacting with them, then moving on to the next interactive bit. We've been doing these kinds of crime scene investigations in games for over a decade now, and it just isn't particularly interesting. Piecing the case together using little holographic statues on James' apartment floor is more fun, but mostly you won't be here for the gameplay.

No, you're here for the sights Nobody Wants To Die has to show you, And those are things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate. Just kidding, thats Blade Runner. But, more than most cyberpunk games, Nobody Wants To Die comes close to realizing on screen the evocative beauty of Roy Batty's monologue to Deckard on that rain-drenched roof.

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Whether You Love Or Hate Cyberpunk 2077, You Need To Play Nobody Wants To Die - TheGamer

Memory is a funny thing. Two people can have different recollections of the same occasion thanks to personal perspective, and the passage of time may influence how you interpret your own past experiences. But what would happen if someone could get inside your head and deliberately tamper with your memories? Poking and prodding until they fundamentally changed who you are? How could you handle your day-to-day life when you start questioning everything you ever thought you knew about yourself and your history? These are questions that come to the surface during the most unsettling quest in Cyberpunk 2077 which happens to also be my personal favorite.

While there are plenty of memorable quests and gigs in CD Projekt Red's RPG, the side job Dream On refuses to leave my mind. Each time I replay it, I find it just as disquieting as the first time I experienced it. What begins as a simple break-in investigation soon unravels into a dark web of shady politics and mind-altering manipulation. It steadily becomes apparent that something much bigger and far more sinister is going on than first meets the eye, and the way it all unfolds always hooks me right in. Even now, after trying out each possible solution at the end of the quest, I'm still not sure what the best course of action is, which only makes me appreciate it more.

It goes without saying that there are major spoilers ahead for the Cyberpunk 2077 quest Dream On

What I appreciate most about this side job is how a previous quest titled I Fought the Law sets it up. Early on in Cyberpunk 2077, the news is all abuzz about the death of Mayor Rhyne. Now, with an election to be held, new candidates are gunning for the role, and that of course opens up the way for some seedy politically fuelled dealings. One such candidate is Jefferson Peralez, who you meet after his wife Elizabeth calls you to set up a meeting. It's all quite clandestine, with you hopping in a car as they offer you money to look into the death of Mayor Rhyne. They believe Holt, a rival in the running, is involved and after investigating, you go to their swanky apartment to deliver your findings.

It's here that the first seed for what's to come is planted. When you meet Jefferson in his home the first time, he's speaking on the phone and having a very polite conversation. When you come back to the apartment to take up the Dream On quest, he's on the phone again, only there's a marked difference in Jefferson's behavior. He speaks crassly and makes demands of the person on the other end of the call, and when he talks to you, he doesn't sound quite the same in tone Even his posture is altered. When I initially did the quest in my first playthrough some years back, I didn't think much about this. It was only when I came to replay it that I truly appreciated the setup and realized the significance of those changes in him.

Jefferson and Elizabeth call you back for the side job in order to look into an unusual break-in at their apartment. Jefferson recalls waking up and seeing someone there, even reaching for his gun, but the next morning, it's as though he dreamt it. All signs that anything has happened have seemingly been erased. Convinced that Holt is once again up to something, it's up to V to find out what's going on. I always jump at the chance to do any sort of detective work, and nothing speaks to me quite like a good mystery, which is also why this job reeled me right in from the get-go.

What makes this quest so memorable is the way it starts to build a strange, troubling picture that just keeps unraveling. Elizabeth guides you through the apartment, and as you interact with various rooms, it begins to become clear that something very weird is going on. When you look at her wedding photo, for instance, she recalls how beautiful the blue roses were, even though they're clearly red in the picture.It's a minor detail, but I can still remember the pit in my stomach and the foreboding that only grew as she made more mistakes.

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You eventually find a hidden room she had no idea was there, and worse still, it's full of monitoring equipment. It's such an unsettling invasion of privacy, but it's also the first tangible evidence that something much worse is going on than anyone initially suspected. Upon pursuing it further, with a little help from a satellite scan on the rooftop and a fast car chase across Night City, you finally learn the truth. In true dystopian form, the revelation plays into the darkest side of Cyberpunk 2077: someone or something is messing with their minds, changing their memories, modifying their personalities, and transforming them into the perfect puppets to control.

When you tell Elizabeth your findings, it turns out she had an inkling all along and her words are enough to give anyone chills: "His personality He seemed to be changing right in front of me, becoming someone else. He stopped reading, forgot the title of his favorite movie, even his musical taste changed overnight." In the world of Cyberpunk 2077, there's nothing as deeply terrifying as the idea that technology can change who you are, or that people could manipulate you in such an invasive way. So much so far that you lose yourself. I love how it shares frightening parallels with what Johnny Silverhand's engram threatens to do to you as V.

The main question Dream On leaves you with is one I'm still thinking about - despite playing it several times at this point. Would you want to know this is happening to you? Or never know the truth? You're left with the choice to tell Jefferson what you've found or lie and tell him what he thinks is true - that Holt is the one behind the break-in. After seeing both outcomes, I'm still not entirely sure what is better. Could you handle knowing that your very memories have been tampered with? How could you trust anything or anyone, when you question your own mind? Your own memories? What's worse, to live in paranoia, or live like a puppet on a string? I still don't know myself, but that's why I love this quest. The way it unfolds never fails to pulls me right in, and the uncomfortable questions it leaves me with are why it sticks with me.

Phantom Liberty didn't change my mind about the best Cyberpunk 2077 ending.

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Every time I replay Cyberpunk 2077's most unsettling quest, I'm reminded why it's a firm favorite - Gamesradar

Johnny Silverhand just got added to Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game as a reward for reaching the first stretch goal of its crowdfunding campaign which launches on September 3rd. Johnny will be part of an optional game mode called Relic, which will attempt to replicate the Relic experience from the video game. You can read below for more details about Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game and the addition of Johnny Silverhand:

Go On Board and CD PROJEKT RED announced that the crowdfunding campaign for Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game will launch on the 3rd of September and will last until the 20th September, and the character of Johnny Silverhand will be included as the very first stretch goal. What else is known?

Go On Board and CD PROJEKT RED once again joined forces to create another adventure-packed game. This time, the authors of the acclaimed The Witcher: Old World will take players to neon-soaked Night City in a tabletop adaptation of Cyberpunk 2077. Only recently did the studio publish a refreshed Gamefound project page that now presents everything the game will have to offer. One of the biggest reveals to accompany the announcement is the debut of Johnny Silverhands board game rendition.

Where is Johnny?

Go On Board revealed in their recent project update that the first stretch goal (unlockable content) for Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game will be the famous rockerboy Johnny Silverhand. The now iconic character was first featured in the tabletop RPG created by Mike Pondsmith. His dramatic story had a huge impact on shaping the story of Night City, where the games action is set. He also appeared in Cyberpunk 2077 from CD PROJEKT RED, where he was portrayed by Keanu Reeves. We eagerly awaited to see if Silverhand would also be part of Go On Boards latest production and he is! The miniatures design is based on his appearance in the hit video game, confirming that Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game is indeed true to its core inspiration.

Gameplay-wise, Go On Boards pre-campaign materials disclose that Johnny will be a part of an optional game mode titled Relic. Its also a nod towards CD PROJEKT REDs work, where the Relic appeared as a powerful biochip that stored Silverhands digitized personality called an engram. The adaptation will aim to replicate the experience from the video game if used during a mission, Johnny will merge with a players character, providing powerful advantages while also posing a constant threat of losing oneself. It adds a fun twist to the regular gameplay, enhancing its replayability potential and resulting in surprising effects, thanks to which every mission becomes a unique experience.

What other features can we expect?

Besides the already revealed star of its pre-campaign, Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game will offer a plethora of components and unique gameplay features that correspond to what gamers as well as board game and tabletop enthusiasts love in the franchise. From miniatures to cards and more, every element is perfected to the smallest detail, reflecting all the characteristics of Cyberpunks dark future seen in Cyberpunk 2077. Even the first-person perspective arts relate to CD PROJEKT REDs work, which sees players experience the setting and story from their characters eyes! The refreshed Gamefound project page also talks about the games goals and storylines, key features, and how to sink into Night Citys dystopian mood. So gather your crew and get ready to experience an unforgettable adventure full of adrenaline-pumping action and epic fights! Among other, Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Games story campaign will include such gameplay elements as:

Thats but a drop in the ocean of all the content you can find on the updated page. Visit Gamefound to learn more about the game and plans for further development.

What is Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game?

This cooperative story-driven tactical action game will take 1-4 players on an exciting adventure in the most dangerous megalopolis of the dark future, Night City. Participants can choose from the characters of V, Panam, Jackie, or Judy and explore a what if? scenario, where a crucial event from the video game is altered and branches out into a completely new story comprising 13 different missions. In moments of respite, players will visit Night City to upgrade their characters equipment and uncover Street Stories, immersive micronarratives that result in surprising outcomes through choices and mechanical tests.

As for the action part, Go On Boards game will provide a unique teamwork system in which every participant must think on the fly and make individual tactical decisions to achieve a common goal. Creative implementation of different mechanics help recreate the pace known in the video game. Players have time to prepare a plan, but changing circumstances may require mixing some improvisation into the initial strategy.

More to be presented

So far, the game has attracted the interest of over 47,000 followers. With such a large community, Cyberpunk 2077The Board Game is expected to be a huge success. Thanks to fan feedback, the creators keep expanding and transforming the project. If youd like to know more about the game and see how it changed or whats in store for the future, visit Gamefound.

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Upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 The Board Game adds Johnny Silverhand as a stretch goal - Gaming Trend

Nobody Wants to Die begins with two 2010s storytelling flourishes that made me groan. First, we've got some dead wife hallucinations up in here, the favored psychiatric symptom of tough guy protagonists everywhere. The second was the main character, whose name I already forget, making a noise like "Hnnnnrrrraaaaagggh" and looking down at his hands clenching and unclenching while the screen kind of pulses and goes all blurry. This guy has a terminal case of Xbox 360 FPS protagonitis.

But Nobody Wants to Die isn't an FPS, it's a first person adventure game set in a dark cyberpunk retro-future, a distinct '40s noir twang complicating the requisite megabuildings, neon everything, and corporate domination. A sci-fi setting that looks a certain way just for the heck of it is totally fine in my book, but Nobody Wants to Die's wiseguy future just left me cold.

It didn't help that it opens withstop me if you've heard this one beforean old timey cartoon whose goofy presentation belies the horrible alien morality of its creators, in this case a society where everyone is immortal via consciousness transferring between bodies. I'm sure tons of movies and TV shows pulled this move before Fallout did, but even this trope's big videogame debut was all the way back in 1997. I didn't feel shock or surprise at the upbeat music or cartoony guys swapping brains around, just an emotionless register that I was supposed to think "this ain't my daddy's dystopian sci-fi!"

The body snatching-based economy strains credulity. That'd be fine if Nobody Wants to Die said or did anything interesting with it, but it does not. The protagonist is 120 years old but he doesn't feel particularly haunted by that lifespanyou could have told me he's fortysomething like any number of Philip Marlowe wannabes and I'd believe you.

I've enjoyed plenty of first person puzzlers in the past, but Nobody Wants to Die is a chore and a bore.

There are flashes of a smarter, more fun take on this concept scattered throughout the game, when Nobody Wants to Die loosens up a little and explores the logical conclusions of such a society. Health and physical ability are aggressively enforced by the government, since transfer-ready bodies are a valuable commodity controlled by the state, and this has led to a new Prohibitionthat's cool, and very funny! Murder and death aren't much of a big deal unless a body's consciousness transfer juice gets borked, but the casual attitude towards mortality this might engender was only briefly touched on in my time with the game, and otherwise you could totally forget that everyone around you is haunted by the ages and jaded by cheap, mildly inconveniencing death.

Cool stuff like that takes a back seat to the story's obsession with its own fictional history and boring political intrigue. I don't care about the Illuminati/Freemasons/whoever's conspiracy behind the immortal economy, a plotline that gets kickstarted before you've even had a chance to get to grips with the setting. Similarly snore-worthy is the relationship between our protagonist and his handler, two individuals with no chemistry and even less charisma.

"Today's special: Skewered asshole. Get it?" Detective Guy says after finding an impaled body at a crime scene. "Get what?" Mission control lady flatly asks. "He was impaled?" Mr. Detective replies. "Oh forget it." Firewatch this is not.

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While musing about how the body transfer economy favors the wealthy, the protagonist declares: "It's not an auction anymore, it's some kind of fucking exclusive bidding club." Somebody's gotta fill me in on the finer distinctions between an auction and a bidding club. Would you be surprised to learn the detective protagonist is a loose cannon? "Everyone knows you don't give two greasy rat shits about regulations," the mission control lady says, just so we know he doesn't play by the rules.

It's corny, wooden stuff that might have made for acceptable bread to an FPS sandwich, but Nobody Wants to Die is an adventure game with the story and characters front and center. I've enjoyed plenty of first person puzzlers in the past, but Nobody Wants to Die is a chore and a bore. You have a little device that lets you rewind time to investigate crime scenes, which sounds cool, but the incredible visual of a bombed-out room reassembling itself is undermined by the piecemeal, halting way the game delivers it.

Investigation basically plays like Cyberpunk 2077's braindance sequences, with you zipping along the timeline of the crime scene looking for anything of note. I liked Cyberpunk's braindances, but they were minigames in a wider RPG, and rarely overstayed their welcome. Nobody Wants to Die's investigations have to carry an entire game and are bloated with stultifying busywork.

I felt like a put-upon errand boy, shuffling back and forth in the two crime scenes I endured, fiddling with my detective toys and touching things in the environment to finally make the plot move forward. Nobody Wants To Die's corkboard and string companion minigame, meanwhile, has an enjoyable degree of freedom to it that elevates it over similar gaming examples like the one in Alan Wake 2, but it can still be effectively brute forced and does not have the juice to power a six-hour game.

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Nobody Wants to Die is not a good adventure or puzzle experience, and instead feels like someone made a whole game out of the lightly interactive cinematic intro sequence of a triple-A shooterall it's missing is somebody walking backwards delivering the exposition. There's some stuff I liked, despite everything: The environments are meticulously detailed, with clutter and non-plot-related interactive items that make it feel worthwhile to just poke around and explore. It's also graphically quite pretty, leveraging all that shiny Unreal Engine tech and sweating my graphics card in a good way. I had to lower the settings to "Medium" and still had north of 80% GPU utilization on my RTX 3070, along with a consistent 60fps, still-impressive environments, and few stutters that I noticed.

At the risk of damning Nobody Wants to Die with faint praise, I was also impressed by some of the written reactivity I saw in its opening hours. A cigar purloined from a high-end office was available for me to smoke later on, while my mission control buddy referenced that particular history of larceny when the possibility of stealing evidence came up. Being nice to Ms. Mission Control and not an asshole similarly opened up new dialogue options based on her growing trust.

But after enduring two of Nobody Wants to Die's projected six hours, I don't want to play any more of it, and I cannot recommend investing that time or $25 into it. There are better first person adventures, sci-fi detective stories, short games, and cheap games you should check out instead.

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Cyberpunk adventure Nobody Wants to Die feels like if you made an entire game out of the boring no-combat intro of a triple-A FPS - PC Gamer

Behind the wheel of my car in Cyberpunk 2077, the real-world slips away. The troubles weighing on me are pushed to one side, and suddenly all that matters is the road in front me. Sometimes I don't even have a set destination in mind. I just drive; soaking in the sights of the neon-tinted city through my windshield. Then, I relive quests and gigs I've done many times before. Keanu Reeves' abrasive rocker Johnny Silverhand keeps me company all the while, weirdly helping me stave off the loneliness that can so often take hold. For a place dripping with danger, corruption, and violence, it might sound odd to say I find it relaxing to get lost in Night City. But with almost 700 hours behind me in CD Projekt Red's RPG, I've come to the conclusion that V's adventure continues to be unexpectedly comforting.

I've always found solace in repetition. I often rewatch the same shows, reread my favorite books, or replay the same games over and over. It's something I've done for as long as I can remember, and I know I'm far from alone in that. There's a sense of safety that comes from knowing what to expect, and the familiarity that comes from revisiting a virtual world you know so well can also bring a sense of consolation or reprieve. Whether it be an escape from everyday concerns, or as means to help pull you through a particularly hard time, there are certain games I always return to.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I never expected V's action-packed journey would be one such source of comfort. Following its rocky launch, I made the decision to hold out for the Cyberpunk 2077 PS5 upgrade, which eventually landed in early 2022. At that point, many parts of the world were still shut down as a result of the pandemic, and I was still processing two years of isolation. With a more polished Night City to explore, I immediately got sucked in, and as I drove through the streets, I found just the space I needed. When I played it, it felt like I could breathe again, and I couldn't seem to get enough of the driving. Even now, when I can go outside again, I still find myself getting back behind the wheel just to shut off for a while on tough days.

Racing games have always been a major source of stress relief, and I often fall into a flow state when I zip across tracks or drive through the roads of any one of the Forza Horizon entries. I never expected Cyberpunk 2077's open-world would help me decompress in much the same way. On occasion, I'll even boot up the game for that express purpose, shirking all quests to take my time driving from district to district. Listening to The Dirge or Body Heat radio station, nothing beats cruising around at night (particularly when it rains); the city is all aglow with animated advertisements and I feel like I'm transported right into the car.

Any time I get the chance to sit in the passenger seat as the likes of Panam, Judy, Jackie, or Claire take the wheel, I never skip the ride. In fact, I relish any opportunity to sit take in the views from the window - much as I do aboard the metro these days. Just as V sits still for a moment, I sink into the moment on my couch right along with them.

What's perhaps more surprising is that Johnny Silverhand often brings me a sense of companionship that helps me far more than it has any right to. Let's be honest, he's not the most likable fellow to begin with, and your partnership is entirely forced after a shot at the big leagues gone wrong. In fact, the first time I played Cyberpunk 2077, I actively tried to distance myself from him. I outright refused to engage or give him anything he wanted; unknowingly locking off an ending in the process. But the more I played in subsequent runs, the more I opened up to his presence. Eventually, I actually started enjoying his company and as I did some of Silverhands quests through the latter part of the game, it even got me through some particularly lonely episodes in my own life.

That's not to say I care for him half as much as any one of the companions in BioWare's RPGs, and I wouldn't say he's stolen my heart in the same way as, say, Parvati did in The Outer Worlds or Karlach in Baldur's Gate 3. But in a place like Night City, where V is alone much of the time, Silverhand makes everything feel less lonely. He may be selfish and harsh at times, but he's with you through every dangerous mission, gig, and side quest. After all, since he's in your head, there's no getting away from him, but it does mean you'll always have someone with you - for better or worse.

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The more hours I spend in Night City, the more I've come to accept it's a place I want to keep coming back to, if only to get away from everything for a while. I'm sure I'll no doubt continue to find myself behind the wheel in Cyberpunk 2077 anytime I need to kick back and unwind.

For more, see why playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the very first time, is making one of our writers question everything they knew about how an RPG should look and feel.

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After 700 hours, Cyberpunk 2077 has unexpectedly become one of my comfort RPGs - Gamesradar

Nobody Wants to Die doesn't bring much invention to the table - but while it lacks originality, it has atmosphere, heart and relevance in spades.

Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.

Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel - only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games' medical themes hit way too close to home.

Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It's all very Altered Carbon, really.

The really dystopian bit is that there doesn't seem to have been any comparable advancement in cloning or artificially grown bodies. Instead, fresh bodies for the rich and powerful come from regular folks who haven't been able to pay their subscription fees. Yep, in 2369 you no longer own your body, you merely rent it. If you can't keep up, you're arrested, your body is auctioned off to the highest bidder and your ichorite is locked up in the Memory Bank.

Into this hellish vision of the future steps protagonist James Karra, a pro baseball player turned detective, and the cheesiest collection of noir clichs you could possibly imagine. Noir and dystopia go together like hot lead and even hotter dames, but Critical Hit Games have taken it to extremes and it is glorious. It's all done with a nod and a wink that's self-aware, but not self-deprecating, and this commitment to the bit helps you accept the setting on its own terms.

Karra, still adjusting to a new body after a recent on-the-job accident, is predictably pulled into a murder investigation with the aid of remote liaison Sara, who provides the audience for Karra's monologues and musings as he pokes around each crime scene. What follows is a linear series of investigations where you use a selection of tools, most importantly a fancy time-manipulation bracelet, to reconstruct each crime scene, amassing evidence on the way. Afterwards, you'll head back to Karra's apartment and use an evidence board to make connections and figure out the who, what, why and how of each murder.

I say you'll do these things, but it's really Karra and Sara doing it all, while you pilot James around and press some buttons. Investigative video games are hard to get right, but Nobody Wants to Die is so afraid that you'll miss something or get stuck for even a moment that it doesn't just hold your hand, it drags you through the process, giving clear instructions every step of the way. There's a selection wheel for your assorted tools, but you never have to use it, because not only will you be told what to use, but a button prompt will pop up to select the correct device. If you want to flex your detecting muscles, Nobody Wants to Die isn't the place to do it.

That being said, you're not completely devoid of agency. As you make your way through the game, you'll be presented with dialogue options and some genuinely thorny moral conundrums, and frequently have to justify them to Sara or other characters. You can't make drastic changes to Varra's personality, but you do get a good amount of leeway to decide how he reacts to events and consider how he, and you, feels about it all.

Once I'd gotten over my initial disappointment at how guided the investigations were, I really started to appreciate the structure. The step by step process of moving back and forth through the timeline of each crime scene helps to properly comprehend the sequence of events, while at least one scene turns out to be a full-blown shootout. Being able to watch the fully reconstructed firefight play out in slow motion was a real icing on the cake moment. It's a bit like reading a good mystery novel in that you're going to be told what happened, but there's a lot of satisfaction to be gained from figuring it out for yourself before then.

Even more important is how every scene is an opportunity to immerse you in Nobody Wants to Die's beautiful, intriguing world. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at, all dramatic cityscapes, opulent bars and run-down slums, and the slow reveal of precisely how messed up things are veers from humorous to horrifying, often simultaneously. Like when you discover that Karra shares a bathroom with his neighbours, which involves pressing a button on the door to summon it like a lift and having to wait if it's already in use.

Subtitles, crosshair customisation, limited excessive flashing option, FoV slider.

These mundane moments provide a welcome contrast to the grand intrigues of the plot, and it's what makes Nobody Wants to Die so successful. We're shown how the wealthy and the powerful have created this dystopia, how they continue to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, but we also see the utterly banal ways in which this manifests, like terrible processed food and omnipresent acid rain. Karra is the ideal protagonist for this environment, representing the squeezed middle, once a lauded celebrity, now trapped in a broken body, one wrong move away from the Memory Bank.

There's nothing new in Nobody Wants to Die; the story and characters are built from long-established tropes and archetypes, the world constructed from well-worn elements. This doesn't make it any less powerful. Instead the confidence with which it presents itself allows these familiar elements to resonate all the more strongly. Its five to six hour runtime keeps the story tight and makes replaying to see the results of different choices much more manageable. It's not subtle, but the issues Critical Hit Games have highlighted are more pressing now than ever, and the time for subtlety has long passed.

A copy of Nobody Wants to Die was provided for review by Plaion.

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Nobody Wants to Die review - a noiry cyberpunk tale told beautifully - Eurogamer

Guilty Gear Strive is now entering its fourth year of content updates, and despite now earning the reptutation as being the "old man" on the block, especially when put side-to-side with more recent releases like Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1, Strive is still continuing on just as strong as ever.

Which brings us to Evo 2024, where Arc System Works made perhaps their biggest announcement involving Guilty Gear Strive to date: In addition to two returning characters, Dizzy and Venom, and one brand new character, Unika, they would also be adding their first guest character to the roster: Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners. I got a chance to catch up with Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi to find out how this surprising collaboration came to be, along with getting some insight regarding Strive's future.

IGN: We learned that Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners is going to be in Strive. Can you talk a little bit about how long this has been in the works and how this collaboration came around?

Ken Miyauchi, Guilty Gear Strive Producer: So yeah, we've tried to find who will be a good guest character for Guilty Gear Strive. And we've been doing this work since 2023, actually. And we've been talking to CD PROJEKT RED because our lead artist, Hidehiko Sakamura, is actually a big fan of The Witchers series. And we've been in talks with CD PROJEKT RED, and then there was several conversation going on and that kind of led to the decision to get Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

Now, I'm not opposed to the idea of Lucy, but Lucy's not the main character of Cyberpunk Edgerunners, David is. What made you want to go with Lucy instead of David?

Miyauchi: So I cannot talk much about why because that might spoil what we are trying to do. But there is a reason we decided Lucy. Of course, I personally wanted to see David with Sandevistan, but yeah, so I can't talk about it right now, but I hope people will figure [it] out in the future.

Is there any kind of collaboration happening between you and Studio Trigger who made the Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime? Are you working together with them to make Lucy happen in Strive?

Miyauchi: Honestly, we've been in talks with CD PROJEKT RED directly, not through Trigger, but if there could be any kind of collaboration that we [would] be able to do with Trigger, I'd like to do [it]. But that's still not in [the] plan.

Another thing that you guys announced, which is something that you've talked about in the past, is the 3-on-3 mode. Can you talk a little bit about what makes this mode different than something like Dragon Ball FighterZ or a Marvel vs Capcom?

Miyauchi: So you'll eventually see the game mechanics explanation from our website or social post. So what makes the Team of 3 unique compared to the other games is that people will play at the same time, not just you controlling the character and doing the 1v1 in one screen. So I'm just going to explain the first layer of this game mechanic. The team will be formed with one main role and two assist roles, and the two assist roles will be able to select their skills to interact in the battle.

Oh, interesting.

Miyauchi: And of course, during the battle, the assist players can switch with main players or assist player can interact into the battle with their own character in certain condition. Well the game mechanics-wise in the open beta test, I think people will be able to find out in tutorial, there's a Team of 3 tutorial mode in open beta test. So I hope people will figure out how they can utilize the new game mechanics that's exclusive for team of 3.

And then another character that I'm sure people are very excited for is Dizzy. Can you talk a little bit about how Dizzy is going to perform in this iteration of Guilty Gear? And specifically, I saw that she was Queen Dizzy, can you talk a little bit about what the significance of that is?

Miyauchi: I want to explain the details, but I'll keep it secret for now why she's called Queen Dizzy. I had the same question when I first received [the] Queen Dizzy name from Daisuke Ishiwatari. There's a interesting story going on and you if actually see the trailer, you might find some hint of why she's called Queen. But for more details I'd like to say please look forward to actual her arcade story mode.

And then other characters that were announced were Venom and Unika, from the anime. I know they're probably early on development, but is there anything you can tell us about how those characters are going to play in Strive?

Miyauchi: So yeah, Venom, and also Unika, I can't explain the details of how their battle styles are for now. I think Venom is going to be quite similar to how he played in the past series, but sort of like how we've been doing, [it won't be] exactly same as the past series. Because if you want to play his past series style, you can play for example Xrd or XX. At the same time there is certain type of [uniqueness] in what makes Venom, Venom. And we would like to keep that as his gameplay. Regarding Unika, anything that I talk about her is going to spoil the anime series. So I'm going to expect people to watch the anime and then also try to maybe bring up their own theory of how she's going to play in the game play and check her actual game style later.

Did you ever expect Strive to be going this strong for this long? It had a lot of entries at Evo this year.

Miyauchi: Yeah. I'm actually very, very surprised to see that we've been getting [consistently] over 2000 [entrants], throughout all the years of Evo for now. And I'm really, really happy that communities are supporting our game. And it's achieved all because I think the Guilty Gear community is very enthusiastic and they keeps wanting to support the game, and really appreciate it, and I really want to pay back their support with Gear Guilty updates.

Is there anything you can tell us, any kind of hints you can give us about what to expect mechanically from the updates that you're bringing to Season 4?

Miyauchi: In a Developer's Backyard just a month ago that I released, I kind of talked about what's coming in the next few months, which are the Battle Balance updates, the minor version, it's coming out at the end of this month. And also the major one is coming sometime... I don't remember when I said this, but I think it's around October, end of October timing.

But the minor updates is more of mainly targeted to those characters who have less chance of getting access to their potential. So more of, buffs to those characters. And also adjusting on some of the universal mechanics such as the burst meter gain and also the positive bonus kind of thing. And also we have some changes to Roman Canceling mechanics on some of the invincible moves. So those are coming in the next character balance update. And I think this update will sort of shake up some meta in the current competitive fighting scene and I hope people will look forward to it.

Beyond new mechanics, is there any kind of intention of improving some of Strive's more, let's say, base level features? Are we ever going to get frame data in training mode? Are we ever going to get matchmaking that doesn't go through the lobby system? Anything like that in the works?

Miyauchi: So those are updates that I've been always thinking that I want to accomplish, I mean, implement in some point. This is just from the producer perspective, I've been always talking about it with director. And we are always talking about when we'll be able to do this update. And currently we announced the new updates that's coming in next, which is the Team of 3, and the development on Team of 3 is going so hard right now. And once we release that, I think we'll be able to take our hands on those updates. So I'd like players to look forward to them, too.

I apologize for this in advance because I feel like I ask you this every single time that I've talked to you, but insta-kills, fans love them. It's one of the things that I think fans love the most about the Guilty Gear series. What are the chances of them still making their way into Strive? And if it's something that you've thought about, are there any unique challenges involved with implementing insta-kills into Strive?

Miyauchi: So implementing instant kills is something that we would also like to do, and I do agree that it's some, how do I say, very, very unique mechanic that presents Guilty Gear. So we would like to make that happen sometime in the future. I can't tell when will that be possible because developing instant kill actually takes a lot of time. And also the character animations, emotions, which makes instant kills very, very unique and cool, will take a lot of time developing.

We try to make it unique because we animates them by frame, by frame. And if the instant kill motions are long and cool, that means we have to have more time to make sure every pattern looks cool, right? And if we decide to implement instant kill to all characters, that means we have to develop that to all characters, which is almost nearly equal to developing maybe two characters. So we'll try to find a chance. Our team has been expanding still even now, we have our motion designers and animators recruited in our team and our team is getting bigger. So I'm looking, please look forward to future updates if we'll be able to do it.

Final question, I'm asking this of pretty much everyone that I'm talking to here at Evo, but we've just crossed a milestone of Rollback netcode, everyone kind of has rollback netcode now. It's now become standard among fighting games. I think fighting games are a lot better for it. What do you think is the next step for fighting game evolution across the genre?

Miyauchi: That's something that we've been also discussing among the development team. Of course, as you know, Arc System Works has been making fighting games and we'll continue making fighting games. And if we make new fighting games, we'll always discuss about what will be something that we can bring, revolutionize the fighting game, how do I say, industry. And I don't have the answers yet or I can't share any answers for it, but I will be always thinking about it. And I honestly think the community right now, fighting game community right now, is in the best form of the current era. In the past, there was always... I mean, I wish if I would be a player in this fighting game era right now, people are expecting more and more fun things to the fighting game and we'll try to find out what we'll be able to provide to the community.

Mitchell Saltzman is a Senior Producer at IGN. You can find him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit

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Guilty Gear Strive Producer Talks Lucy From Cyberpunk Edgerunners - Evo 2024 - IGN

There is no subgenre I love more than cyberpunk. I've written about it several times. And yet, as much as I love it, it often disappoints me it's filled with ambitious swings, but few true masterpieces. Even the canonical greats, like Blade Runner, tend to be flawed. It wasn't until that film's 25th anniversary in 2007 that we got the Final Cut, the definitive version that you should watch today. And even that best possible version is long on mood and short on compelling plot. It's a movie I deeply love for its masterful production design, moody cinematography, and evocative score, but if you're immune to those aesthetic charms, it doesn't really hang together.

This is the difficulty cyberpunk fiction often runs into. Few subgenres do mood as well, but most storytellers working within its confines fumble the actual story. There are the rare masterpieces, like The Matrix, that manage to bring everything together, but cyberpunk works usually emphasize one quality to the detriment of all others, like a cybernetically enhanced boxer who keeps building up the top-half of his body until he can't stand anymore. This is a genre of massive strengths and obvious weaknesses.

With "The Hunt," Cyberpunk 2077 heads into The Silence of the Lambs territory, and it rules.

However, reviews of Nobody Wants To Die make it sound like a cyberpunk unicorn. The new first-person adventure from independent Polish developer Critical Hit seems to emphasize story while still building a world that consistently wows you. This game looks incredible, is right up my alley, and presumably due to the struggles of marketing indie titles in a saturated market, I hadn't heard about it until today.

Almost as soon as I saw the screenshots I had the retrofuturist walking sim downloading onto my PS5. But it is wild to have a game like this that, in normal circumstances, I would have been eagerly anticipating, setting aside money and time for, seeking out previews on YouTube just suddenly appear. This can happen to anyone, even if you cover the industry for a living. The gaming industry is so diffuse now that if you skip one indie showcase on the packed June schedule, you might not hear about a game that would become your next obsession.

That's a downside of the splintering of E3, but it's a massive endorsement of the independent space as it stands today. Nobody Wants To Die, which I'm going to start playing as soon as I clock out, has reminded me that incredible things are happening in gaming all the time. I often see posts on social media where gamers express nostalgia for the good old days when gaming was more exciting and, yeah, there are trends that I think have made triple-A games more safe and homogenized than they used to be. But the indie scene is doing more than enough to pick up the slack.

I've played a few triple-A games that I've liked this year. I'm putting in the time to get good at XDefiant, slowly playing through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and having a good, if repetitive time with Rise of the Ronin. But the standouts this year have all been smaller games from smaller teams. There isn't a triple-A game in my current top five for the year. Instead, I have picks like Anger Foot, Crow Country, Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain, Fallen Aces, and Harold Halibut. None of those games are from big teams and, in a few cases, I had no idea they were coming out until they were tempting me from a new releases list.

Nobody Wants To Die is just the latest example of this trend. A cool-as-hell indie game with impressive production values and standout art design that has captured my imagination more than anything made by a triple-A team this year.

As Lucy comes to Guilty Gear Strive, it's time to look back on the modern anime classic.

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How Had I Not Heard About Nobody Wants To Die Until Now? - TheGamer

Highlights

Night City is a vast, neon metropolis. It's a city so vast that even three and a half years later, players are discovering its secrets, new and old, for the first time.

Recently, a player ran into an issue with a hostile vending machine flatlining a citizen, and now, players are discovering that there's a button that can turn the lights out across the whole of Cyberpunk 2077's conurbation.

The magic button, which was initially discovered during the early stages of the game but overlooked by millions of newer players, can be inconspicuously found on the side of a road in Westbrook.

The small red button is found on the side of a yellow box. The box has neon writing above it, with messages that rotate between "Turn out the lights, the party's over", "Baby when the lights go out", and "Press me after dark!"

Upon being pressed, the button appears to switch the streetlights out across the whole of Night City. Reddit user Aggressive_Seacock, who re-discovered the secret, said they "drove around a bit, and where I was, it was off everywhere", when questioned if it hit the whole of the city.

It comes as no surprise that, given how wild Cyberpunk 2077's Night City is, none of the citizens react to the fact that there are suddenly no streetlights. Maybe it's because they're used to chaos, or maybe it's because there are so many luminous signs illuminating the streets that, actually, they just didn't notice.

Cyberpunk 2077, which has now been completed with the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC, has a sequel in the works. Developers CD Projekt Red recently shared advice for anybody looking to get into game development, saying that players should "learn how to mod", just like the creator of the recent "Taxi Work in Night City" mod.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Players Are Just Discovering A Button That Turns Night City's Lights Off - TheGamer