Blizzard decides to release new titles in all of its major series

In news which is more surprising than it should be, Blizzard have announced new titles in each of its major franchises. WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft will be getting new instalments released between right now and 2030.

First up is, bemusingly, a new expansion for WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. Originally released in 2002, the real-time strategy title received an expansion in the form of The Frozen Throne (2003) but no further new material, as the franchise's forwards storyline and direction was supplanted by the online multiplayer phenomenon World of WarCraft (2004). The game had a remaster and re-release in 2020 as WarCraft III Reforged, but technical issues and creative decisions angered the fanbase, resulting in a very poor reception and apparently poor sales.

Blizzard and parent company Microsoft have at least not given up on the game, and yesterday launched version 3.0, a comprehensive update to the remaster that addresses some of the outstanding criticisms as well as improving graphical fidelity. More surprisingly they've launched a new expansion, WarCraft III: The Forsaken Kingdom. The expansion takes place shortly after WarCraft III's main narrative and expands on the fall of the city of Lordaeron and its conversion into the Undercity, paving the way for its appearance in World of WarCraft. The expansion reportedly has 30 hours of new content and over an hour of new cinematic cutscenes. The news will delight single-player and real-time strategy fans of the franchise, who've had no new material for twenty-three years. The expansion and update is out now.

On the Diablo side of things, Diablo IV will continue to receive updates and Diablo V is now in development for release in 2029. The game will be set 100 years after Diablo IV but otherwise little new information has been released.

More unexpected was news of the StarCraft franchise. The series began in 1998 with the giga-selling original StarCraft, followed by its expansion Brood War a few months later. The title went on to sell around 30 million copies, becoming the biggest-selling RTS of all time, and created the foundations of the modern esports scene in South Korea. It finally got a sequel over a decade later, via StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and its expansions Heart of the Swarm (2013) and Legacy of the Void (2015). The title never entirely eclipsed the original StarCraft in popularity in Korea, and with an eye to this Blizzard released the well-received StarCraft Remastered in 2017.

Although the StarCraft II project sold well, it didn't match the enormous success of either Diablo or World of WarCraft, and Blizzard seemed to move on with little chance that the franchise would be revisited. However, it is now getting a new game in the form of a single-player-focused, open-world shooter. The game doesn't have a name (it's just listed as "StarCraft" at the moment, which would just be confusing), though the trailer is called StarCraft: Dominion, and isn't slated to launch until 2030. Narratively, the game either takes place during the events of the original StarCraft or between the two games, with the Terran Dominion under the ruthless Emperor Arcturus Mengsk under attack by the Zerg and the Terran Marines being deployed to combat them. The fanbase so far seems to be divided between relief that the franchise will return, and annoyance that there is no new real-time strategy game or even an expansion in development.

Microsoft seem to be taking the view with both Blizzard and Bethesda that new titles in their best-known franchises are the way forwards, which feels like it should be obvious but both companies seem to have been slow to realise it. Hopefully these new titles will live up to their legacy. WarCraft III: The Forsaken Kingdom is available now, with Diablo V following in 2029 and what should be called StarCraft: Dominion following in 2030, though dates are of course subject to change.

Microsoft wind up ELDER SCROLLS fans by hinting at the next game's title

Elder Scrolls fans have become a patient breed, with developers Bethesda clocking in almost fifteen years since the release of the last mainline game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies to become one of the best-selling individual video games of all time, so fans are understandably antsy over when the sequel will be released.

Bethesda did confirm way back in 2018 that The Elder Scrolls VI was in development, allaying fears after the release of multiplayer spin-off prequel, The Elder Scrolls Online. However, with Bethesda all-in on developing Fallout 4 (2015), Fallout 76 (2018) and Starfield (2023), the game had to take a back seat, with full-time development only beginning after Starfield's release three years ago. The game is now Bethesda's main focus, but when to expect it is a key question. Even a six-year development window these days feels quite short, but that would still mean the game not appearing before late 2029, potentially even drifting into the 2030s. Hopefully Bethesda have had a second team working on the game to ensure we get it before then.

Whilst that question will not be answered for some considerable time, another one has been hinted at: what the game will be called. Asha Sharma, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, tweeted that she had seen a playthrough of Elder Scrolls VI and been very impressed (presumably less-impressed at the protest outside Bethesda's Rockville HQ against recent layoffs). Most notably, she called it The Elder Scrolls VI: ********. To emphasise this, Bethesda tweeted back that it was awesome to be able to show her "********." This would seemingly emphasise that the game's title consists of eight letters and one word.

Previous Elder Scrolls games have largely had titles built around locations. The third and fifth games, Morrowind and Skyrim, are named after provinces of the Empire of Tamriel. The first game, Arena, and spin-off game Battlespire are named after individual buildings (though "the Arena" is an archaic name for the whole continent as well). The fourth game, Oblivion, was named after a plane of existence. Spin-off games Redguard and Blades are named after factions within the universe.

With the sixth game widely believed to take place in western Tamriel, in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, this opens up some intriguing possibilities for the game's title.

• The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel is a noisome title. Sentinel is the name of the capital city of Hammerfell, and likely a key location in the game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Dominion sounds pretty good. The series metaplot has focused on the rise of the Aldemari Dominion and its challenge to the power of the Empire. This was explored in a key questline in Skyrim. Fans have been theorising that the full-scale confrontation between the Empire and the Dominion, possibly in Hammerfell, is a likely storyline in the sixth game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Orsinium. Orsinium is a major city-state and kingdom in High Rock, and is the home of Tamriel's civilised orcish civilisation.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Redguard. The Redguards are the primary inhabitants of Hammerfell and are one of the setting's most popular factions. However, no main series game has been named after a faction before. Also, a 1998 action spin-off game was called The Elder Scroll Adventures: Redguard, which might get confusing. That game is very old though and extremely obscure (as well as likely the franchise's least-selling title), and the title is pretty good, so don't put it past Bethesda to reuse it.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Highrock. Maybe the developers have decided to lose the space.

Hopefully this is a hint we might get more information about the game soon, but it's really past time.

Of course, it might be the eight characters were totally random and none of this actually means anything, but fans are so devoid of clues that they'll take anything at this point.

VERY STRONG RUMOUR: Obsidian Entertainment to develop a new FALLOUT game

As has been widely reported elsewhere, Microsoft have embarked on a massive restructuring of their video game business. Thousands of staff are to be laid off and around five studios are to be sold or spun off into independent businesses. Even the company's more successful studios are being reconfigured, with Obsidian Entertainment re-tasked to help Microsoft focus on its most successful IP. To this end, according to highly reliable industry insider Jason Schreier, Microsoft have commissioned Obsidian to make a new game in the Fallout series.

Obsidian Entertainment were founded in 2003 but many of the key founders had previously worked for Black Isle Studios, formerly the internal development studio at Interplay. There, several staff had worked on Fallout (1997), Fallout 2 (1998) and the original Fallout 3: Van Buren, which was cancelled when Interplay collapsed around 2003. The IP was sold in full to Bethesda Game Studios, who proceeded to develop Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout 4 (2015) and the multiplayer-focused Fallout 76 (2018). However, Bethesda partnered with Obsidian to develop Fallout: New Vegas (2010), often (but not universally) cited as the best game in the series.

In the meantime, the Fallout franchise has acquired a substantially more massive fanbase, with the arrival of the Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime Video in 2024. The show has already produced two seasons and a third began shooting this week. There have also been new tabletop games. Aside from the ongoing development of Fallout 76 through expansions, Bethesda had admitted they were still years away from starting work on Fallout 5 due to their prior commitments to Starfield (2023) and its DLC, and the in-progress Elder Scrolls VI, which will be the sequel to the 60 million+ selling Skyrim (2011). Also according to Schreier, The Elder Scrolls VI is not expected to be released before 2028 at the earliest, likely punting off any Fallout 5 to the early-to-mid 2030s, by which time the TV show will almost certainly be over.

The only Fallout game on the horizon is Fallout 3 Remastered, which has not been formally confirmed but reliable leaks suggest it is in development as a co-production between Bethesda and Virtuos Studios, who previously handled The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025).

Obsidian were acquired by Microsoft in 2018 and have since released The Outer Worlds (2019), Grounded (2022), Pentiment (2022), Avowed (2025) and The Outer Worlds 2 (2025). Grounded 2 is currently in Early Access.

Obsidian's regular release cadence has been extremely impressive by modern standards, especially compared to other Microsoft studios (in the same timeframe, Bethesda have only released Starfield). However, these games' critical and commercial success has been mixed; Pentiment was a critical darling but a low-key release that sold only moderately. Grounded is Obsidian's most successful game in its history, acquiring over 20 million players in a couple of years (shading even Fallout: New Vegas's success), but has largely gone unrecognised due to its perceived children's focus and not being in Obsidian's usual core RPG wheelhouse. Avowed did reasonably well (over 6 million players in its first month on sale) whilst Outer Worlds 2 was a major commercial disappointment, with both games reviewing only moderately. Grounded 2 has picked up some major plaudits in Early Access, but is largely being developed by an external partner studio.

As part of the strategic shift, work on Avowed 2 has been downgraded, with a small team to continue work whilst most shift to the Fallout game. An unannounced major new RPG project, claimed by ex-Obsidian founder Chris Avellone to be set in the Shadowrun universe, has been paused, again with the team expected to be redeployed to the Fallout game. Work on the DLC for The Outer Worlds 2 is expected to be completed shortly.

The new Fallout game will apparently be headed by Josh Sawyer, who was previously the director of Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas writer John Gonzalez, as well as Fallout co-creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, are all working at Obsidian and may work on this new project as well.

No information about the game's setting or title is known, and may still be in flux as apparently this strategic decision may have only been made this week. Microsoft are likely to want to call the game Fallout 5 to capitalise on interest in the series and the length of time since the last mainline release, but whether that's the case remains to be seen.

More on this when it appears.

Age of Mythology: Retold

The cyclops Gargarensis has vowed to shatter the gates to the Underworld and release the Titan Kronos back into the world. To this end he has assembled a vast army and set about this task in Greece. Arkantos, hero of Atlantis, sails to the Greek colonies to lend his aid in the Trojan War. Learning of Gargarensis and his plans, Arkantos forges a coalition with the Egyptians and Norse to stand against him.

Age of Mythology, a magic-and-legends spin-off from the venerable Age of Empires real-time strategy series, was released in 2002 and remastered and re-released in 2014. Following the pattern set by its forebear, Age of Empires II, the game has now been remastered and re-released yet again. We are now in the age of not just the remaster, but the remaster of the remaster.

Age of Mythology: Extended Edition was fine, maybe a bit minimalist as remasters go, with better water effects, tweaked textures and greater support for modern resolutions. But it was also bit underwhelming, with the feeling it could have been much more comprehensively updated. The team evidently agreed and after the barnstorming success of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (itself a remaster of a remaster), they came back for another go-around.

Age of Mythology: Retold is now the definitive version of the game. Age of Mythology has always flown a bit under the radar, despite being an enjoyable and characterful real-time strategy game with four distinct factions (the Greeks, Egyptians, Norse and Atlanteans), a splendid interface, a reasonable difficulty curve and superb graphics, which take the painterly, 2D approach of Age of Mythology II and adapt it into 3D with subtlety. I always found Age of Mythology to be a more satisfying arrows 'n' spells strategy game than WarCraft III, whilst some of its updates to the Age of Empires formula are superb. The weakest thing to come from the game is arguably the Tale of the Dragon expansion from Extended Edition, which felt a bit undercooked.

The game itself is pretty standard as far as RTS titles go: you start with a base, in this case a town centre, from where you can train workers who construct buildings and work as resource-gatherers. There are four primary resources: wood, gold, food and faith. The first three are used to build mundane structures and units (a mix of archers, cavalry, infantry and siege weapons) whilst faith is used to train "myth units" (sphinxes, dragons, cyclopses, hydras, frost giants etc) and one-off "heroes" (like Odysseus or Achilles). Resource-gathering is a surprisingly flexible system, with multiple ways of getting resources. For example, food can be hunted (peasants kill chickens, bears or pheasants and use them for food), farmed or gained from the sea by sending out fishing boats, whilst gold can either be mined directly, gained through trade at a marketplace or setting up a trade network between your town centres using caravans.

As usual, you amass armies which you can take into battle. The composition of these armies is interesting, with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic complicated by the deployment of counter-units (pikemen who are marginally effective in infantry battles but devastating against cavalry), so assembling a well-balanced force is essential. Early in a game, units can be fragile, so making sure you get unit upgrades from an armoury to improve armour, attack and resilience to specific damage types, like bludgeoning or piercing is also important. As each game proceeds, you can upgrade to a different age, which unlocks new units and building types.

This is all standard, but Age of Mythology nails the details very well. This was one of the first RTS games that allowed you to automatically task newly-built units (so right click on a gold mine to make all the villagers built after this point automatically go over and start mining), resulting in a very smooth and intuitive playing experience.

In terms of gameplay, Age of Mythology is hugely enjoyable, but it does focus a lot on attack. Whilst some games give you impressive options for defence and turtling, like StarCraft and its bunkers, photon cannons and siege tanks, Age of Mythology's defensive structures tend to be less effective, with walls and towers coming down very easily to enemy action (disappointingly, as the game's wall-building system may be one of the best in any RTS game ever made, allowing you to built elaborate fortifications very easily). The game is at its best when you are constantly engaging the enemy, reinforcing as needed and keeping them on the back foot. Tactically, a fine balance is needed between known when to keep up an attack and when to fall back for reinforcement.

In terms of story, the game has a very silly but enjoyable narrative which mixes up the Norse, Egyptian, Greek and Atlantean legends and stories in a manner that's contrived but fun. The story can't hope to match WarCraft III's beautiful cut scenes and in-game plot twists, but it does know when to butt out and not interfere with gameplay (a lesson other RTS games could learn from, even now) through endless cut scenes and major reversals you can't do anything about. Age of Mythology remains a pretty fair game in that sense.

Retold eliminates many of the previous negatives about the game. AI is dramatically improved, eliminating some of the dumber enemy moves and improving the responsiveness of your units. Pathfinding is dramatically improved.The one-shot god powers have been replaced by cooldown abilities instead. The game leans a bit more into the differences between the factions, making them feel more distinctive. For a game that's almost a quarter of a century old, Age of Mythology feels quite fresh and modern in most respects even before the Retold improvements are accounted for.

Those improvements are significant. The biggest change is the lighting, which is now gorgeous, and the basic elimination of draw distance limitations, making in-game cutscenes (when you are most likely to be gazing across the battlefield) much more attractive. Improvements in textures and rendering make the units and buildings hold up extremely well even at 4K and zoomed-in, but the game remains very undemanding by modern standards, meaning potatoes can run it relatively well (things only start to chug if you set up skirmish matches with the unit cap increased to preposterous levels). There are also welcome improvements to the UI, which is now more intuitive, and the ability to automate resource gathering. You can now set ratios so every new villager you create is automatically assigned to a task (so set an equal ratio and new villagers will automatically be assigned to each resource in turn), though this can also be turned off. Gameplay and balance changes are minor but noticeable: walls feel a bit sturdier than in the base games, and units now automatically use their special abilities rather than requiring direct player intervention.

Content wise, Retold includes the original campaign, divided between the Greeks, Egyptians and Norse, and the Golden Gift mini-campaign for the Dwarves, plus The Titans expansion for the Atlanteans. This is a sizeable amount of content, with a playthrough of the singleplayer campaign content lasting a reasonable 35-40 hours. Two additional, paid-for expansions are also available. Pillars of the Gods is set in China and Yasuko's Tale is set in Japan. Both add an 8-hour-ish campaign and a new faction apiece, obviously the Chinese and Japanese. The Tale of the Dragon expansion is forgotten about here (probably for the best) with the new expansions being much better-written and voice-acted, with more compelling stories and gameplay, not to mention narrative ties to the original campaigns. More content is incoming, with an Aztec-themed expansion due this year, and the occasional addition of new gods, heroes and units for the existing factions.

Age of Mythology: Retold (*****) takes one of the RTS genre's underdogs and turns it into the game it was always meant to be. Twenty-four years after release, Age of Mythology finally realises its potential. The game is available now on PC, Xbox Series S / X and PlayStation 5.

Note: Part of this review was previously published in 2018.

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The Outer Worlds 2

2362. The outer colony systems have mysteriously been cut off from Earth. An Earth Directorate investigation team is dispatched to the Arcadia system to investigate possible causes for the disruption to communications, only to face unexpected resistance and betrayal. A single agent is recovered from cryosleep ten years later and learns that the system is threatened by huge dimensional rifts of unknown origin. The agent must help save Arcadia from the rifts and navigate the complex political machinations between three factions and various local concerns.

Released back in 2019, The Outer Worlds was a totally fine roleplaying game. It saw the player explore the Halcyon star system, navigating local factional squabbles and ultimately help rescue (or destroy) the helpless frozen crew of a colony vessel. Though enjoyable, it was somewhat shorter than players have come to expect in the modern era, and perhaps fell short of the more complex writing and characterisation people expect from Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind knotty RPGs like Alpha Protocol, Pillars of Eternity, Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer, Tyranny and Fallout: New Vegas.

The Outer Worlds was developed relatively quickly and on a low budget, before Obsidian's acquisition by Microsoft. The Outer Worlds 2 has a much larger budget and took twice as long to develop, with a larger scale and scope. There were also creative team changes, with RPG legend Tim Cain (creator of the Fallout franchise and the various classic games at Troika) who co-led the first game retiring but staying on to advise.

The question is here is if they could make something more impressive. Both The Outer Worlds and its effective fantasy successor, Avowed (released earlier this year), were fine RPGs which were enjoyable to play with some solid characters and storylines, but with a limited scope and risked being a bit too forgettable. The answer is, fortunately, yes. The Outer Worlds 2 is a significant improvement over both games and is easily Obsidian's best recent AA-level RPG so far. People hoping that they'd rediscover their writing mojo from New Vegas or Pillars of Eternity may be somewhat disappointed as they don't get back to that level, but definitely of their recent 3D RPGs, this is the strongest.

The game can be played from either first or second person (or flipping between them), with the player creating their character from scratch. They can decide how to approach combat (direct engagement, stealth, engineering to hack robots and turrets etc), puzzle-solving (through engineering skills, hacking or science) and dialogue (through speech, a threatening demeanour etc). It's important in Outer Worlds 2 to pick a lane and stick to it as, unlike its forebear, there's no way to respec once you're in the game itself. However, you can respec once at the end of the prologue mission, which gives you a taste of the game and how you're likely to play it.

The prologue is a nice taster for the game itself, giving you options on how to infiltrate a facility and two different routes; you can't take both, so immediately you have an alternate choice for a replay. The prologue has some obstacles that can be solved by talking to people (talking a nervous bureaucrat into helping you out in return for eliminating some problems from his service record) or just killing everyone in sight.

Once the prologue is resolved, the game sets you down on the planet Eden and you have to get to work investigating the mystery of the rifts. You'll soon find the Arcadia system is divided between three factions: the authoritarian Protectorate, the science-minded Order of the Ascendant and the hyper-capitalistic megacorporation Auntie's Choice. The Protectorate is mostly presented as antagonists and will usually fire on you on sight, but representatives from the other two factions can be more nuanced, and you can deal with them through negotiation or combat. You also gain NPC companions from these factions who will join you on your ship, and navigating the personal relationships between these companions can give you clues on how to handle the wider political relationships between the factions. You can side with one faction over the others or try to negotiate peace between them, which is more difficult but also generates a ton more missions, so that feels like the optimal choice.

The game is set over four planets: Eden, Dorado, Cloister and Praetor, along with several space stations, an asteroid settlement and several spacecraft. The four planets are each surprisingly large, with a sprawling map. You are guided around the map by quests, but you can also just break off to explore (there are various locations on each planet that no quest will take you to, and will generate quests or rewards by striking out on your own). This is the first notable difference from original game, where the maps were smaller and there was less to do outside the scope of the quests, not to mention that the first two planets were reasonable in size but the latter ones were tiny with only a few quests apiece. There is immediately more to do here, spread over a larger area, with more choice in where to go. Exploration is more of an option here than it was in the prior title.

The writing and pacing are also stronger, and the game's intro immediately grabs your attention in a way the first game didn't. There's bigger and more epic set pieces, and more changes to the story based on your choices. Combat is improved, with more variations in approaches to battles. I chose to switch between a high-powered sniper rifle for ranged engagements and an explosive-shell-firing shotgun for close-up encounters, and these got me through most of the game with moderate skill improvements. Combat is chunkier and more satisfying than the first game, with body parts flying and a wider array of loot.

The game also tries something new for an RPG: there are no weight limits or encumbrance, the designers finally giving up since people now expect a "send to camp" or "send to spaceship" button, so why even worry about encumbrance in the first place? Similarly there is no stamina bar, allowing you to run around effectively forever. Removing that limitation has zero negative impact on gameplay, and allows you to focus on having fun.

But the game does imposer limitations elsewhere. Like its forebear, the skill points are dished out somewhat miserly (2 per level, with a 30-level cap) and the game does not reward jacks-of-all-trades. You really need to focus in on 5-6 skills, spreading things out further will just leave you underskilled to really do anything. I ran a Speech, Lockpick and combat-heavy build and that allowed me to get through the game one way, but a Hacking, Engineering and Science-heavy build would give you a different-feeling result. With no respec possible after the prologue, the game does force you to think carefully about your character build, unlike other recent RPGs that basically allow you to respec at will to overcome every problem in the game. Outer Worlds 2 requires more careful thought there.

Your companion characters are fine, being a likeable lot with their own, fairly involved quest chains. Even psychotic killer Aza ends up being a valuable team member, despite her unrelenting preference to just murder everything in sight. None of the companions are going rank amongst Obsidian's best, but they're mostly a step-up from The Outer Worlds'. 

If the game has a key weakness it's probably that, after the impressive prologue, the game suddenly feels a bit underwhelming. The first planet is a bit RPG-by-the-numbers and very similar to the first game. Choices are mostly limited in scale and consequence (one Fallout 3 Megaton-ish exception aside) and shooting all the bad guys will get you through the game. Those expecting a better experience than the first Outer Worlds may feel distinctly let down by the opening to this game. But around 10 hours in (about a quarter of the way through the game), the game suddenly bursts into life: the story kicks up a gear and becomes more interesting, the scale of events becomes much larger and the level of your freedom to make choices and the variation in the consequences of those decisions both improve immensely. The game catches fire and doesn't let up to the finale, taking in some impressive level design, combat encounters, exploration and even semi-immersive sim moments along the way.

The Outer Worlds 2 (****) has a slow start but then bursts into life. It's a stronger game than its forebear, with more interesting locations, a better story, more convincing characters and more in-depth worldbuilding. It plays some interesting trade-offs, getting rid of tedious things like encumbrance and fatigue and instead forcing you make harder choices about your character build. It's a longer game than its predecessor, but not so much as to become tedious. It's still not Obsidian at their best, but it's a solid, enjoyable RPG experience even if it's not going to be troubling any best game of the year lists.

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Avowed

The Emperor of Aedyr has sent an envoy to the island-continent known as the Living Lands. A plague known as the Dreamscourge is ravaging the land, transforming all it touches into monsters. The Envoy has to coordinate with local forces and representatives of the Empire to locate the source of the infection and neutralise it. But with the Living Lands ravaged by political intrigue, religious debates, insularity and extreme suspicion of the Empire's motives, this is easier said than done.

A new Obsidian Entertainment game is always worth a look. As Obsidian and, before that, Black Isle Studios and, before even that, the internal RPG development studio at Interplay, this group has almost thirty years' experience making intriguing, if often janky, RPG experiences. These range from the original Fallout via Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, Knights of the Old Republic II, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas to Tyranny and the two Pillars of Eternity games.

Avowed is their third game in recent years designed to court a larger, more commercial audience, following on from the solid (if slight) The Outer Worlds and the excellent survival game Grounded (which is their most successful game ever). Avowed is a first-person action-RPG with a very solid story that eschews the current trend for open-world games in favour of more tightly-designed zones. However, any thought that this is "The Outer Worlds with magic and swords," should be banished. Avowed's five zones are each pretty big, there are a much larger number of side-quests and there is a much more elaborate system for gear, including upgrading, enchanting unique weapons and selling.

The game's story follows the Envoy (you design the character, generating their name and stats, and choosing their gender and appearance) as they try to track down the source of the Dreamscourge. Your mission gets off to a bad start with a shipwreck and then being marooned on an island, which acts as a tutorial area. Once you get off the island you are quickly assigned a bunch of missions by the local Aedyran Ambassador but can also take on additional quests to try to win over the trust of the locals. Despite the fantasy setting and first-person viewpoint (a third-person mode is available, but is a bit janky), there's actually a whiff of the original Mass Effect to proceedings. Your status as Envoy give you a wide latitude and special powers in dealing with missions (a bit like a Spectre) and you almost immediately meet a charismatic cynic of a warrior voiced by Brandon Keener (here playing big green man Kai rather than Turian sarcasm-generator Garrus). The wide-open areas and the non-linear questing does quickly dispel that familiarity but it is a sign of how Avowed likes to cherry-pick influences to build itself up.

There aren't any character classes in the game, with you instead picking skills from one of three trees as you level up. Ranger skills emphasis stealth and ranged attacks (Skyrim fans will be happy to know that a Stealth Archer build is viable, though not as overpowered as in that game), Mage skills emphasise magic, and Warrior skills emphasise melee combat and shields. You can mix skills impressively and can switch between wielding a bow, sword or spellbook mid-combat. Avowed's combat is fast, furious and quite ridiculous fun, with different builds allowing you to vary your combat styles immensely. Weaknesses in one area can be mitigated by your companion characters. You have up to four companions and up to two of them can join you in your adventuring (although, apart from Kai, they require some convincing first). Kai favours melee, cynical dwarf Marius prefers ranged combat, Giatta acts as a magical support and healer and Yatzli unleashes high-powered destructive magic. Periodically you can make camp and exchange information with your party-members.

I did find the small size of the party a bit odd. Most RPGs, like Mass Effect, the Dragon Age or Baldur's Gate series, allow you to build up a considerable number of allies, perhaps up to a dozen, and only take 3-5 of them into battle with your. Avowed only having 4 companion characters makes you wonder why you can't just take all of them with you on quests, a possibility given more weight by important major quests which actually allow you to do just that. This feels like the next RPG sacred cow that really needs to be slain.

If combat is fun, then simply travelling around can be even moreso. Avowed uses a parkour-like traversal system, with your character happily yanking themselves up cliff-faces and onto roofs. Movement is slick and enjoyable, though the occasional first-person problem of sometimes getting stuck on a bit of scenery you can't see easily mid-combat does rear it's head from time to time. Avowed rewards exploration, with side-paths often leading to treasure, gear or optional combat encounters your can undertake for more experience.

The main narrative is...fine. It's perfectly serviceable, and sometimes intriguing. Avowed takes place in the same world as Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series, a more traditional and old-skool isometric CRPG series, and this gives them access to a vast amount of worldbuilding and background lore. Familiarity with the earlier games is not required but it does add more depth to events. My main complaint about the narrative is that it does rely a bit too much on the "mysterious voice in your head" trope. Cyberpunk 2077 handled this well, Baldur's Gate III not as well but that game had so much going on it wasn't too much of an issue, but here it feels like the idea is painfully overused. I can easily go another twenty years at this point without ever exploring this idea again.

Though the story is fine, it's nothing special. The theme of colonisation is handled in a thoughtful manner with lots of arguments and ideas floating around it, but it's nothing revelatory. Dialogue is also fine, sometimes over-expository and occasionally clunky, but with a wry sense of humour and the ability to spin on a dime and become more serious. The problem is that Obsidian are known for excellent writing, more thoughtful exploration of themes and much more in-depth storytelling, so for those elements to be downplayed here feels odd. Still, maybe the recent Dragon Age: Veilguard'svery poor writing and dialogue will flatter Avowed in the comparison here.

In fact, that's a good assessment of Avowed: excellent combat, traversal and exploration but so-so storytelling and dialogue is the complete inverse of their normal approach, which is to have brilliant storytelling but janky gameplay mechanics. Given that approach may have won them a small group of hardcore fans and complete indifference from the mass public, perhaps inverting it is the right idea (it certainly paid off hugely in Grounded).

I also appreciate the game's breeziness compared to recent games (particularly as I played this immediately after Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's interminable, seemingly never-ending cavalcade of quests, side-quests, battle challenges and minigames). At about 40 hours - rather more for full exploration and achievement-hunting - it's not a short game by any means, but it doesn't outstay its welcome, and the shorter size means a replay with a different build becomes a more tempting prospect.

The only other complaint I can muster here (temporarily, at least) is technical: Avowed launched in a splendid state and playing the game was absolutely smooth sailing, with the game being probably their most polished ever on release. Unfortunately, something broke in one of their updates and the game started crashing, some quests became incompletable etc. Obsidian have promised to fix that quickly, but I ended up having to finish the game without using elemental status weapons (which kept causing crashes after 35 hours of being fine) and had to replay half a dungeon with a different companion to properly trigger an ending cut scene. Sigh.

Avowed (****) is a tight, focused RPG experience with outstanding combat and exploration. Its storytelling and characterisation is decent and occasionally great. The format of using tighter zones to tell a more constrained story results in a much less flabby game than some recent ones. But there is a slight feeling here that Obsidian are not playing to their strengths, and maybe next time around they can couple great gameplay mechanics to a stronger narrative. As it stands though, Avowed is a very good time, but not a classic.

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Age of Empires II Definitive Edition Chronicles: Battle for Greece

The Aegean Sea and its coasts are the battleground between the two great powers of antiquity: the vast Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, led by the two rivals of Athens and Sparta. Armies march, huge navies are constructed and the powers clash over a century of warfare, with the dominance of the ancient world in the balance.

Back in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a comprehensive remake of the classic 1999 real-time strategy game. The result was probably the best video game remake ever created, which not only updated the original game's graphics, controls and userface whilst fully retaining the spirit and style of the original, but also added a massive amount of new content. This was then expanded through no less than six new expansions: Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished.

This latest, seventh expansion marks a shift in format. Chronicles: Battle for Greece follows in Return of Rome's footsteps by adding civilisations from the ancient world to the game. Whilst Return of Rome remade some of the campaigns from the original Age of Empires game, Battle for Greece is a wholly new campaign built from the ground up. It adds the civilisations of the Achaemenids (the Persian Empire), Athenians and Spartans, but the game eschews the traditional expansion format, with 5-7 missions for each civilisation, largely separate in time and setting. This time around the game has a fully voiced, expansive, 21-mission sequential campaign which moves between the three sides. There are fully-animated cutscenes (though heavily stylised, Blizzard's cinematic department can sleep easily here, but still very nice), full voiceovers and a story that unfolds across the game. The feeling is more like Age of Mythology (which recently also saw a comprehensive remake via Age of Mythology Retold) than any prior Age of Empires campaign, with a strong narrative and character focus.

The story is appropriately epic, spanning almost the full century of the Greco-Persian Wars, which saw the Greeks square off against the Persians (not for the last time) before fighting an internal conflict, the Peloponnesian War, over which Greek city would come to dominate the rest. This is a much more zoomed-in campaign than normal, with minor battles and campaigns being featured alongside the much more famous ones like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae.

Most of the 21 missions are huge, taking multiple hours to complete apiece with numerous twists and turns. The expansion took me 27 hours to complete on moderate difficulty. Some missions have timers, some missions require you to undertake operations without a home base, and some have you relying on allies to provide troops whilst you fight with them in the field. The few times you do get a town centre and can play a "normal" game of Age of Empires both feel like a relief but also an acknowledgement of the game's limitations; those missions are usually the easiest and most straightforward. Some of the missions are intricate puzzles with you having to work out how best to hit targets in the optimal order. One memorable mission has you having to win a democratic election (this is Greece, after all), meaning you have to keep the people happy, which you can do by fair means (hosting lavish games, winning glorious victories) or foul (smearing your opponent's name through rumour-mongering). Most of the missions are inventive, showing once again how to get surprising results out of what is still, under the 4K sheen, a 26-year-old game.

The game can also be frustrating. The campaigns do feel like a 2024 design hosted on a 1999 foundation, but those foundations sometimes shine through: a few too many missions have you completing the last mission objective only to be "surprised" by a final twist objective, usually some variant of "fight off this massive enemy army which has appeared outside your city with no warning, somehow." It's the type of cheap mission design I'd hoped we'd have seen the last of somewhere around 2005. The game's traditionally eyebrow-raising pathfinding and AI awareness issues are also present and correct. The expansion has changed a lot about how the game works, especially naval forces, but underneath it's Age of Empires II through and through.

The narrative focus could be of interest to people who perhaps find the traditional Age of Empires II campaign a bit remote and hands-off. The stories here are more personal and more engrossing, reflecting the massive events happening through individual ambitions and failings. It's a strong success, leading to one of the strongest expansion campaigns we've seen for the game. However, the campaign does feel a little on the long side, with some very bizarre difficulty spikes that can be deeply frustrating. The expansion also ends on a cliffhanger, confirming there will be a follow-up focusing on the life of Alexander the Great.

Age of Empires II Colon Definitive Edition Subcolon Chronicles Subsubcolon Battle for Greece (****) is a good time, and an easy recommendation for Age of Empires II fans who want more Age of Empires II (even granted this game has more content for it than almost any other video game ever made, after a quarter century of expansions and updates). Those who've perhaps not tried out the game before may find the narrative focus of this expansion are more compelling way of playing the game, although the mission design often assumes experience with how the game already works. Some frustrations and annoyances ultimately do not derail what is a nice twist on the Age of Empires formula. The expansion is available right now.

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Starfield: Shattered Space

A year ago, Bethesda released Starfield, their massive space RPG that was a decade in the planning. It's fair to say it underwhelmed, despite some enjoyable moments. The game had a laudably weird, off-kilter main storyline and Bethesda's best combat to date, but bland writing, dry characters and a lack of the curated exploration that characterised their best games made it a frustrating experience.

In particular, Starfield suffered from its structure, which encouraged you to jump from star system to star system not via its space travel system but by fast-travelling. Given that both involved faffing around with menus and loading screens rather than engaging in rip-roaring space adventures, why not just do the faster method? Although more efficient, it arguably defeated the object of a space game to mostly avoid the space bit of it.

Shattered Space, the first major Starfield expansion, tries to grapple with this problem head-on. The expansion starts in a very promising way, with you being drawn to an abandoned space station without gravity, and having to fight what appear to be "space ghosts." The mystery of the space station is unusually gripping (by Starfield standards, anyway) and lasts just the right amount of time before you get some exposition which leads you to Va'ruun'kai, the homeworld of House Va'ruun, a faction mostly represented in the mothership game by fanatical space pirates worshipping a great serpent.

Your arrival on Va'ruun'kai is not welcomed and you'd have probably been ventilated in short order, but fortunately there was some kind of "incident" just before you arrived which blew up half the capital city, created gravitation anomalies through the area and brought in yet more space ghosts. Thanks to your knowledge of weird space phenomena from the OG game (and the incredible desperation of the planet's leader), you're recruited to help them out even if you're not totally convinced that their big space serpent god is actually a thing.

After the initial space station episode, the entire game takes place on Va'ruun'kai. The generously-sized new map is handcrafted and covered with story-critical locations, locations essential to side-quests and even locations just there for you to stumble across in random exploration. This is a huge change from the base game where most planetary areas are procedurally generated with identikit bases with the same layout, and the same small pool of events constantly happening. If anything, Shattered Space might spoil you (well, more) for the main game.

The collection of quests here is a notch above the original game, and occasionally it surprised me. One quest involved helping out a confused elderly gentleman after his daughter and only carer disappeared in the incident. This quest makes a big play for an emotional story - something not so much not in modern Bethesda's normal wheelhouse as not even in their galaxy - and almost pulls it off. A lot of the side-quests tie into the annihilation of half the city and its people, selling it as a big, traumatic event in these people's lives (and perhaps explaining a bit better than usual why they immediately trust the total rando who's shown up to save their arses for them). The main mission chain is more predictable, requiring you to bring the three ruling factions of the city in line by doing favours for them, then recovering vital equipment to allow you to get inside the lab where the incident began. But it's executed at least moderately better than the original game.

Where the expansion falters, not unlike the core game, is in comparison to its forebears and contemporaries. It feels like the expansion is aiming at a similar experience to Fallout 4's splendid expansion Far Harbor, including the hand-crafted smaller map, better story focus, and even its focus on one of your companion characters (Andreja is from this planet and bringing her along can open new dialogue options). But the game isn't quite as compelling as Far Harbor's, which had much more bittersweetness and character depth, and a really thorny moral quandary at the end. Shattered Space is less engrossing, and Andreja's extra ten lines of dialogue or whatever it is can't compare to Nick's much greater direct involvement in the Far Harbor narrative. Also, as a lot of people compared Starfield to Cyberpunk 2077 (both being first-person SF RPGs with an open world) and found it critically wanting, so Shattered Space is not even operating on the same level as Phantom Liberty.

Shattered Space is basically 12-15 hours or so of more Starfield, which some might find a questionable proposition, but the more focused storytelling and characterisation is at least a moderate improvement over the base game, even if that does insanely mean dropping the space travel bit from your sci-fi RPG. Graphically it's very pretty (especially if you're a big fan of purple), and it feels like the environments are a step up over the base game. Still, it's hard to conclude anything different to the original game: Shattered Space (***½) is solid but underwhelming. The expansion requires Starfield to run and is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S, and via the Xbox Game Pass service.

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Paramount+ cancels HALO TV series

Paramount+ have cancelled their TV series based on the popular Halo video game franchise after two seasons and seventeen episodes.

Amblin Television produced the show in conjunction with Microsoft, Xbox and 343 Industries, who developed the previous three games in the series. This group is now shopping the show to other streamers, but the reportedly high budget makes it a tough sell.

The show had a rough landing for its first season in 2022, with critics mostly left unmoved and fans annoyed by a large number of changes to the source material, including starting the show some considerable time before the games began, omitting key game characters, introducing new characters and killing off fan-favourite characters in different places in the narrative. The second season, released earlier this year, was better and had a stronger reception, finally reaching the events of the games (adapting Halo: Reach and ending where Halo: Combat Evolved begins), although the overall reception was still lukewarm. Paramount+ had indicated that the show had performed strongly for them in terms of viewership, so the decision to cancel was likely due to cost and the streamer's uncertain future, which may have also contributed to a shrinking of its Star Trek portfolio.

Fans may also hold hope that this clears the way for a more source-accurate adaptation of Halo in the future, but given how long it took this project to get off the ground and the declining reception of recent games in the series, that may be rather optimistic.

Halo: Season 2

The war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command is continuing to escalate. Frontier colonies continue to fall, whilst both sides are desperate to track down the mysterious artifact known as "Halo." The Covenant's advance soon brings Reach, the largest planet in the outer colonies, within range, sparking the biggest battle of the war so far.

Halo is a military science fiction franchise about people and aliens shooting one another, understandable as its primary instalments have all been first-person shooter video games. But as it has gone on, the series has built up a loyal following for its surprisingly deep background material (partially worked out by "proper SF author" Greg Bear) and extended cast of characters, despite them being mostly relegated to cut-scenes and secondary media.

A Halo TV series therefore isn't quite as batty an idea as it sounds, as the universe contains enough interesting ideas to be fleshed out in a dramatic format. Unfortunately, the first season of the show proved divisive, at best. Elements of the lore and setting were jumbled up and delivered in an odd order, established canon characters were either nowhere to be seen, showed up in different roles or were killed off in short order, and Master Chief spent most of the season without his helmet on (Chief, like Judge Dredd, is never seen in the games without his helmet). Some fans were livid, whilst more casual viewers found the show watchable but underwhelming.

This second season, like a lot of recent second seasons for adapted shows with iffy openings (see also Foundation and Time, Wheel of), is an improvement, but again, a qualified one. The show is more focused this year with the search for Halo being a driving force in many episodes, at least for Master Chief. Early episodes complicate this with internal UNSC politics and internal shenanigans with those space pirates nobody really cares about, but the writers are at least determined to bring all the storylines together mid-season on Reach for a massive showdown with the Covenant. This war episode is mostly impressive, but it does strain the limits of even this show's generous budget. The second half of the season unfortunately engages in some wheel spinning and makes the crucial error of thinking the audience gives even 10% as much of a toss about Soren's family than the writers do. Things do pull back together to deliver a very satisfying finale which finally, after seventeen episodes, does catch us up to where we really should have been in Episode 1 of Season 1. Better late than never, I guess?

The cast deliver good performances, with Pablo Schreiber doing a good growly Master Chief (although he somehow spends even less time in Season 2 with his helmet on than in Season 1), Kate Kennedy making Kai-125 both a sympathetic character and a badass, and Natascha McElhone's walking moral vacuum of Dr. Halsey being delightfully conniving in every scene she's in. Kwan (Yerin Ha) and Makee (Charlie Murphy) are still here, but are much better-served than the scripts they had in Season 1, and the finale finally makes us realise why Kwan is important and it nicely ties into the established Halo backstory. Bokeem Woodbine continues to have more fun than anybody else in the cast as Soren-066 (since Burn Gorman sadly left the show in Season 1), although even he seems to get bored of his "family kidnapping" plot after the interminable-feeling number of episodes it takes up. Particularly welcome are newcomers Joseph Morgan as Colonel Ackerson and Cristina Rolo as Talia Perez, who both add some surprisingly good scenes to the show, the former as an apparent new antagonist and the latter as an ordinary UNSC soldier dragged into Master Chief's orbit.

It does feel like maybe Season 2 has had a little bit of a budget trim: there's a lot of re-use of the same sets (one hallway on Reach becomes incredibly familiar) and there's very few of the all-Covenant CGI scenes we had in the first season. The action is mostly good, with the highlight being a one-on-one duel in the finale and several parts of the fall of Reach, but some of the effects are definitely iffy, like muzzle flares looking like they were made in MS Paint and copy-pasted over the guns. Obviously and correctly Hollywood is being ultra careful with weapons on sets these days, but it feels like the vfx for that could have been a lot better (especially as after-added muzzle flares is something people have been doing for decades at this point).

For those wanting an accurate retelling of the video games, Season 2 is better, but marginally. Seeing the fall of Reach, the iconic backstory moment of the franchise, later fleshed out for a prequel novel and game, is cool, but the absence of the many of the characters and events from both the Fall of Reach novel and the Halo: Reach video game may be frustrating. Some elements that don't show up until much later in the storyline turn up surprisingly early here, which feeds into the feeling that the TV writers don't seem to want the story to unfold as naturally as it did in the games, instead feeding in deep cuts from the lore when the people who really care will be annoyed by the show's deviation from the source material, whilst newcomers will likely be bewildered or not notice/care. Including an Arbiter, but not the Arbiter (the co-protagonist of Halo 2 and one of the franchise's most popular characters after Master Chief), but not making that clearer, is a good example of the writers tapping the game material but in an unnecessarily obtuse way.

Still, making a nine-hour TV show based on corridor shooting and occasionally driving a Warthog (or is it a Puma?) was clearly never going to work, so changes were necessary in the transfer of medium. It'll be up to each viewer to determine if this level of change works for them, and if they're unfamiliar with the games, whether the show works as a stand-alone experience.

For this non-hardcore Halo fan (casual appreciator might be a better descriptor), the sophomore season of Halo (***½) is better than its first, and moves up from "worth watching if there's nothing else on" to "solid sci-fi pulp action." It feels like a lot of potential from the source material is being left on the table here, but the show is at least moving in the right direction. Halo is available to watch worldwide right now on Paramount+.

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