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Game Reviews

LEGO Is Going All In, Its 4.9-Rated Star Wars R2-D2 Set Is Selling for Pennies

by admin October 4, 2025

Star Wars remains LEGO’s most coveted license with countless sets from the franchise earning exceptional ratings from builders worldwide. The adorable R2-D2 droid exemplifies this success perfectly and boasts a 4.9 out of 5 stars across thousands of reviews. By fortunate timing, this set has just dropped to an all-time low on Amazon, and it’s flying off the shelves: At $79 down from its usual $99 price, this 1,050-piece building experience delivers both a satisfying construction project and a display piece that captures one of cinema’s most iconic characters in brick form.

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No introduction is needed to any Star Wars aficionado for R2-D2. The clever astromech droid has appeared in every but the most insignificant Star Wars films and TV shows and saves the heroes with technological magic and unflinching perseverance time and again. This LEGO set remains true to R2’s charm with meticulous care for detail and playful interactive features. The completed model stands over 9 inches high, 6 inches wide, and 4 inches deep, which makes a grand impression without taking up too much of your shelf real estate.

Interactive Details That Bring R2-D2 to Life

R2-D2’s dome head will rotate 360 degrees so that you can pose him like he’s scanning his surroundings or reacting to droids and minifigures across from him. This rotating system uses LEGO Technic parts hidden in the build to create smooth motion without loosening after extended periods. The third leg that is removable also flexes and folds, emulating R2’s movement from the films in which he transitions from his stable three-legged form to his faster two-wheeled wheel mode. An attachable periscope replica’s the sensor that sticks out of R2’s dome during recon missions and other attachable tools wink to the many various gadgets he’s dispatched throughout the saga, from arc welders to drink service trays.

The set includes a bonus 25th Anniversary Darth Malak minifigure and celebrates LEGO Star Wars’ quarter century milestone. Darth Malak is from the well-loved Knights of the Old Republic video game and belongs to the wider Star Wars universe beyond the films. Including him not only provides collectibility but also provides you with an option for a display other than R2-D2 himself.

The building experience uses 1,050 pieces and offers a number of hours of enjoyable constructing that is appropriate for 10 years and up. LEGO instruction guides guide you through the construction with numbered bags that organize pieces by build phase, precluding the overwhelming feeling of pouring all pieces into one heap.

For $79, you’re getting excellent value for an officially licensed LEGO set of this size and sophistication. Star Wars fans, here is your opportunity.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Clover Pit does for slot machines what Balatro did for poker, and I can’t stop spinning

by admin October 4, 2025

It’s almost shameful. To play Clover Pit is to collide with gambling head-on. There, in front of you, is a slot machine, perhaps the purest expression of casino gambling there is. And there’s the handle on the side of the machine for you to spin the drum within. Go ahead and rotate the columns of symbols in the hope they’ll slow and stop into a scoring pattern on the screen. Did they? It doesn’t matter – you can always spin again.

Clover Pit

Developer: Panik Arcade
Publisher: Future Friends Games
Platform: Played on PC
Availability: Out now on PC (Steam)

For a moment, that’s all Clover Pit seems to be: simple and crass. It even yells “Let’s gamble!” as you spin the drum. It’ll make you wonder why people thought Balatro was problematic – at least that game has the strategic innards of Poker in play. Here you just pull a handle. But that’s not all Clover Pit is. As you get up from the slot machine and take a step away, you’ll see a room around you, an oppressive kind of basement-slash-prison cell. And there on the tables and walls around you are the things that make Clover Pit tick.

Watch on YouTube

But hang on: why are you in a basement? You don’t know. All you know is you’re here to spin in solitude. There’s no one else and no discernible way out, though there is a grated metal trap-door beneath your feet, which looks like it could give way at any time… And you’re in debt – a debt which rises each round that you play. A machine on the wall shows you how much debt you owe, and has a coin slot for you to put your winnings into, to repay it. Spin the drum, win the coins, satisfy the debt. That’s what you know. Or else.

The nuance comes from the things around you. Posters on the wall clue you into the game’s scoring, explaining that different symbols score different amounts of points, obviously, but also that you can score in multiple directions. You can match symbols in a horizontal line and vertical line and in diagonal lines, as well as in more elaborate shapes besides. This means it’s possible to score in more ways than one, at once. Fill the screen with symbols, then, and scores will ring-up like a cash register at Christmas.

Image credit: Panik Arcade

Then there are the ways in which you can affect chance, which you do with charms. These are collectible power-ups bought with tickets – tickets like the papery ones you earn at an arcade. Charms do a number of things, and there are varying rarities of them and they appear randomly in the shop-stand behind you in the room. Some charms increase the chance of getting certain symbols, whereas others increase your luck, which I think means your chance of getting symbols to match each other. Other charms, meanwhile, increase the number of spins you get, or increase the value of symbol-matches as you play (very useful).

In other words, charms are your build, much like Jokers in Balatro. They are your mark upon the game, your strategy. (A phone call between rounds bestows another charm-like boon or buff upon you, from a choice of three.) But you can only have a handful of charms at once – you’ll see them arranged on a table beside the slot machine, and some charms need charging after use, and others expire after being triggered a number of times. Your build requires your constant attention, then, and adjusting as you play.

Manage cookie settings

It’s intoxicating. I genuinely struggled to pull myself away from it, which now I think about it, seems appropriate given the nature of the game. I feel a frantic desire to pull the handle again and that seems correct. The game trades on this. Clover Pit walks a line between parody and celebration of slot machines and their addiction, and walks it well. It houses it in an intentionally unsettling atmosphere, as if we’re in debt to the devil and this is a kind of hell, and it’s a feeling that permeates through the experience. On the one hand it’s exhilarating, on the other hand, dangerous.

It’s more than I expected. Clover Pit actually brings to mind the murky card-game Inscryption, I think both for the atmosphere it creates and because you can explore a room around you. There’s mystery, there’s intrigue, and I didn’t expect that here. What I did expect was high-score fever, though, and the dopamine-popping fireworks of multipliers and combos – the kind that make Balatro sing – are absolutely here too. Don’t expect to be able to put it down. I did warn you.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

The revolutionary politics of Final Fantasy Tactics, and why Ramza Beoulve is a hero for our times

by admin October 4, 2025

Editor’s Note: While the original is almost 30 years old, please note that this article does contain spoilers for the story of Final Fantasy Tactics!

The hero at the center of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is Ramza Beoulve. The son of a proud knight and scion of a noble bloodline, Ramza has all the makings of a grand hero, but that is not how history remembers him. Far from a gallant knight, he is remembered as a heretic who stood against the church. This erasure is by design. Ramza did embody all the virtues of a knight – he fought for the betterment of even those on the fringes of society and stood against corrupt powers – and in watching his story play out, it is hard not to think of the “heretics” of today’s politics.

Watch an enhanced version of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles’ opening movie here.Watch on YouTube

It can feel gauche or out of place to do this, to tie the fictional fighting in Ivalice with the violence of the real world, but it’s not as if The Ivalice Chronicles’ creators are unaware of the fact that their beloved classic is releasing into a world of historic violence and ongoing political strife. In a much-cited statement made before the game’s release, Final Fantasy Tactics’ original director and scenario writer Yasumi Matsuno noted that, while he originally wrote the story during the time that Japan’s asset bubble-pop ushered in the Lost Decade, the remaster is also releasing into a world which is exceptionally charged and unstable.

“In 2025 – a time when inequality and division are deeply rooted in our society – I offer this story once again,” Matsuno said via social media. “The will to resist is in your hands.”

The world of Ivalice is rendered so vividly, it’s hard not to see Ramza’s tale as one applicable to the world it’s releasing into once again. As Delita Heiral, who began himself as a fellow knight, schemes his way through the war in order to both increase his own status and gain the power to end the conflict himself, Ramza proceeds with the earnest propulsion of a “traditional” RPG protagonist. History remembers Delita’s tale, honouring him as the commoner who rose to become king and unify the land, but a player’s journey through the Ivalice Chronicles reveals that it is Ramza’s honest chivalry – which time and time again leads him to speak out and confront those in power – which truly turns the tide of the war.

Here in our world, on 5th July of this year the United Kingdom’s parliament passed through a ban on Palestine Action, marking the direct-action protest organisation as a terrorist group. This came after multiple acts of protest against the ongoing Gaza war, including the vandalising of a Leonardo factory in Edinburgh and similar acts on university campuses, and breaking into the RAF base at Brize Norton to spray red paint onto two military aircraft. The parliamentary ruling criminalises fundraising and public shows of support for the organisation; 138 people have been charged for showing support for the group so far. The first three (arrested at an anti-war protest outside of Westminster) recently plead not guilty to criminal charges under the Terrorist Act.

Image credit: Square Enix / Eurogamer

While the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7th of 2023 were undeniably vicious and condemnable, the disproportionality of the casualties in the ongoing war in Gaza is equally undeniable. Official numbers state that 64,718 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured since the start of the war. Leaked Israeli intelligence data suggests that more than 80 percent of the dead as of May of this year were civilians. As a result of the violence experts have declared the region to be in a state of famine; this will lead to many more deaths. A recent United Nations commission of inquiry reported that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, as did a collection of the world’s leading scholars on the matter.

We can debate the historical realities that lead to this moment, and we can condemn, if we so wish, the tactics of a group like Palestine Action. But the casualty numbers in Gaza continue to mount no matter how much we argue. Is it any surprise that people might gather to protest against this violence? We cannot know what lies in the heart of every one of the 138 people who have been charged for showing support for Palestine Action, but I suspect that a great many of these people were motivated to protest because of the simple truth that one group of people is being disproportionately slaughtered en masse. These protesters now face jail time.

Meanwhile, in the US, where I write from, there lie even more examples of individuals being punished for political speech. Following the murder of American political commentator Charlie Kirk, Ghost of Yotei developer Sucker Punch fired a senior developer over comments made about Kirk on social media. This is also a kind of heretical branding. While Kirk’s murder was a tragic act of reckless political violence, Kirk was himself a controversial figure in American politics who, among other things, questioned the qualifications and skills of Black Americans who were “prowling” around urban America, called on Taylor Swift to “submit to [her] husband,” and said he would require his 10-year-old daughter to carry a baby to term in the event that she was raped.

It is no surprise that someone might have complicated and perhaps not entirely flattering thoughts about the man, but to speak of those things, which an honest accounting of the man demands, means risk of broad censure. Maybe the better choice is to say nothing at all (it is certainly the safer choice right now), but to many people, saying nothing would not be honest to their character or their own beliefs.

Perhaps most prominently, in the land of American late-night television, comedian Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily removed from the airwaves in what was essentially government-lead censorship following comments about Kirk on his show. Kimmel had, during a time when the motives of suspected assassin Tyler Robinson were unclear, commented on the behaviour of those he called “the MAGA gang” and what he saw as a desire to “score political points” in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination.

We should be clear that there was at least some truth to Kimmel’s words. In the aftermath of the killing, some provocateurs and even proper news outlets scrambled to suggest Kirk’s killer was a transgender person. We know this now to not be the case; the most clear thing we can say about Robinson is that he was an extremely online individual with all the muddy politics that entails. That and he, like most Americans, had quick and easy access to a gun.

This comment nevertheless drew what is now a historically significant amount of ire, not just from folks who felt Kimmel’s comments were ill-timed and disrespectful of the violent nature of Kirk’s death. It also drew them from government officials, who seem more than eager to make implicit threats about using the state’s power to silence the speech of anyone who didn’t meet the moment with politics that aligned with the current regime.

Image credit: Square Enix / Eurogamer

When talking about the potential for revoking television broadcast licenses for providers that host Kimmel’s show, United States Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”

What does all that have to do with chocobos and black mages? These people, like Ramza, are examples of the “heretics” of today. Our world might not be one of warring dukes, like Ivalice, but it is still one where standing against the tides of war can leave you a marked person. When I look at the world around me, one where protestors are charged with crimes and where creatives and journalists lose jobs for refusing to ignore hard truths, I see echoes of Ramza Beoulve. On face value that might sound silly, but truly great pieces of art reach out – and make this kind of connection-making unavoidable.

“Mayhaps you forget the ease at which men are branded heretics,” a villain warns in one scene of The Ivalice Chronicles. He makes this threat in order to convince a highwayman to ambush Ramza. The threat of social ostracisation by the church and ruling state officials is enough to drive the bandit to attack Ramza and his allies. Meanwhile, in my reality, the vaguest threat from the FCC to take action against major TV operators – some of whom rely on FCC goodwill to approve upcoming business mergers – was enough to get them to bend the knee.

Ramza’s story, as told in Final Fantasy Tactics, has a certain romantic idealism. Working initially to untangle the truth behind the kidnapping of a princess, he slowly finds himself opposing both sides of the “War of the Lions.” When asked why he stands against these forces, he speaks first of those harmed by the war. He does not fight to serve a liege but rather “the veterans, who are cast aside when their swords are no longer needed” and “the commonfolk, who are bled dry by taxes and levies.”

These words are dismissed often by other characters in the story – chiefly Ramza’s friend Delita Heiral – as childish, but as the story progresses and Ramza is marked outright as a heretic by Ivalice’s Church of Glabados, it is clear that this uncomplicated and uncompromising outlook at the war is one that the ruling powers find existentially threatening. And while the real world lacks princesses and spell-slinging swordsmen, it doesn’t lack for people who seem threatened by uncomplicated and uncompromising outlooks on war.

And so if Matsuno offers a model for how to resist, it is Ramza. The world around him might be one of shadows and plots, but Ramza consistently does the honest thing. And while his reward is to be branded a heretic by the powers that control Ivalice, Matsuno is also at pains to show the wider impact of Ramza’s frankness on that world. It allows him, for instance, to uncover a plot that Delita makes little effort to stop; as Delita oath-breaks his way through noble houses and towards his own kingdom, Ramza discovers that there are demons at the center of the war: a cadre of lords and clergymen, who fan the flames in order to search for powerful “Zodiac Stones” offering incredible powers. These stones react to the power-cravings of desperate men, invariably transforming them into said demons. Demons that the player obviously needs to dispose of in crunchy tactical boss fights! (Which, for the record, are still great nearly 30 years later.)

When we discover that someone like the Glabados Church’s Cardinal Delacroix hides one of the Zodiac Stones, the twist is not that he’s possessed by a demon the entire time. The twist is that the stone, once he calls out to it in a bid to eliminate Ramza, simply transforms Delacroix into a form befitting his true nature. The stone did not make him this way, nor has his nature been twisted. To seek political power, to seek military might, you already need to be a demon. Ramza’s “childish” drive for justice simply pulls these people into the open and makes their viciousness impossible to hide.

The chivalry at the core of Ramza’s character is one we find in all activists who take to the streets, even if they might end up in jail as a result. If we want to resist, this game says, then we need to do so. Who else will speak for the “commonfolk” if not us? It is through direct confrontation with evil – or at least cruelty and corruption, here in our world – that we draw it out of our institutions into the light and reveal it to the world. Delita and his politically pragmatic ways could never achieve this. He can claim the throne and win in the realm of politics, but it is the idealistic path that Ramza walks which ultimately redeems Ivalice.

Image credit: Square Enix / Eurogamer

Final Fantasy Tactics lives within a frame. The story is being recounted by a “modern” historian named Arazlam Durai. He is reading from the Durai Papers, an account of Ramza’s story written by his ancestor Orran Durai, who the player meets during the game. Orran himself was burned at the stake as a heretic for presenting these papers, at a church conference after the main story concluded. Just as Ramza’s path diverges from Delita’s, Orran is tried and killed simply for revealing the truth.

None of our current world, of course, was on Matsuno’s mind when he wrote this tale so many years ago, but it’s hard not to feel that Ramza is an even more resonant hero in 2025 than he was back in 1997. All you need to do, to see the “ease at which men are branded heretics”, is open your morning newspaper. Yet the revelation of this story now, from Arazlam to the player, holds hope: that in time history does recognise the “truth” of a matter. That even the small and perhaps invisible acts of goodness, which often seem overshadowed by the sheer power of status quo institutions, are sharp enough to eventually cut a path towards a better future. That while courthouses and churches and other institutions can last a long time, justice and truth will outlast them. All the more reason to stand for those principles, regardless of what they might call you.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

If Gaming Is in Your DNA, This Samsung G9 49″ OLED Curved Monitor Is $700+ Off on Amazon

by admin October 3, 2025

Dual monitors are yesterday’s setup. Triple monitor arrays look impressive but waste desk space and demand GPU resources just to manage bezels. The real power move is one massive ultrawide that replaces everything while delivering an experience no multi-monitor rig can match. Samsung’s 49-inch Odyssey OLED G93SC solves the fundamental problem gamers face: you need maximum screen real estate, perfect image quality, and response times fast enough to matter in competitive play. This isn’t a compromise solution: It’s the endgame display that removes every excuse between you and peak performance. Right now it’s dropped to $879 from its typical $1,599 price on Amazon, a 45 percent discount that brings premium QD-OLED technology within reach of gamers.

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The 49-inch curved display has 5120×1440 resolution which provides the equivalent of two 27-inch QHD monitors side-by-side without bezel interruption. That 32:9 aspect ratio dramatically reimagines the experience of games. Racing simulations wrap around your peripheral vision with opponents on each side of you simultaneously. First-person shooters give you situational awareness that is cheating-like, with flanking enemies in sight earlier than players in ordinary displays.

Gamers Will Love It

Quantum Dot OLED is the current leader in display technology, combining OLED’s perfect blacks and infinite contrast with quantum dot color and brightness. Elder LCD screens have bleeder backlights that bleed through black areas, warping shadows and hiding enemies in the shadows. QD-OLED pixels are emitting and can be completely turned off and produce actual blacks with no light bleed. DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification means you can see into deep, rich darks but still have great highlights, so you’ll notice movement in dark corridors that other players just can’t spot on their lower-end panels.

The 0.03ms gray-to-gray response time is essentially click-by-click. For context, the majority of gaming monitors market 1ms response time, and a lot of LCD panels fail to even get close to actually providing that figure. This OLED screen responds 33 times faster and removes motion blur and ghosting even during high-speed camera pans or acrobatic action scenes. Combined with the 240Hz refresh rate, you get 240 separate frames per second with each frame gliding into the next. HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort inputs provide this bandwidth in full so your GPU can send frames at full speed without disruption.

G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro support guarantee the monitor works with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, synchronizing the refresh rate of the panel with the output from your GPU in frames. This eliminates screen tearing, stutter and input lag and produces smooth motion even when frame rates are changing during fast motion scenes.

The slim build is just 4.5mm thick at its thinnest, with a premium metal finish that feels expensive sitting on your desk. The height-adjustable stand means you can position the gigantic screen at perfect eye level, and the USB hub makes it simple to plug in peripherals without reaching behind to your PC.

At $879, this is the cheapest way to get into premium ultrawide QD-OLED gaming. This monitor normally retails for $1,599, and other ultrawides with such specs cost even more.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Consume Me Review – A Delightful Diet Diary

by admin October 3, 2025

Eating disorders are an incredibly sensitive topic, so I was wary when I learned about Consume Me, a game that turns a teenage girl’s insecurities into minigames and resource management. After completing the story, however, I’m so glad it exists. Consume Me is a touching, hilarious, occasionally visceral experience told from a perspective video games don’t touch on as often as they should. Its meta commentary on the dangers of using game systems to measure complicated, real-life issues is poignant and unique. Its ending is disappointing, but it’s rare to play a game that feels so personal to its creators, and it makes Consume Me something special.

The game opens with an interesting content warning, not just pointing out the story’s potentially troubling subject matter, but clarifying that Jenny’s dieting behavior – the primary gameplay mechanic – is not something to be replicated. I have never played something like this: It’s a game about how gamifying real life isn’t always a good idea.

Jenny, based on the game’s creator with the same name, is a high schooler about to start her senior year. After a comment from her mother about Jenny’s weight, Jenny decides to start dieting, meticulously tracking her food intake and exercise habits. At the same time, she’s got to manage other aspects of her life: chores, money, and homework, to name a few. Each activity is represented as a microgame, similar to something you’d find in WarioWare, where you perform simple, sometimes challenging actions in an expressive art style. For the most part, they’re charming and fun, and even the ones I was less fond of are over quickly. Consume Me comes across as a narrative-first experience, but I genuinely looked forward to booting it back up and managing my toxic behaviors.

The game you’ll play the most often has you build Jenny’s lunch plate. Foods are represented as Tetris-like pieces you have to fit onto a grid, filling in the hunger squares while attempting to avoid the empty ones. Each food also costs a different number of bites (the game’s abstract version of calories), so you have to balance the act of fitting pieces in the grid with avoiding unhealthy foods to keep your bite count low. Go over the limit, and you’ll have to exercise later, wasting precious time you could use for other activities. Mismanage your puzzle pieces, and you’ll fail to fill all the necessary squares, causing Jenny’s hunger meter to take a hit. Despite the upsetting goal, I enjoy this puzzle, and didn’t mind playing it every in-game day.

As you get later in the story, it’s incredibly easy to see how someone like Jenny can fall into harmful spirals of behavior. If I eat a light lunch – an alternate meal option I unlock that costs fewer bites – my energy level takes a hit, but if I drink an energy drink, I replenish it. However, it turns out that over-reliance on caffeine causes Jenny to develop headaches over the day, and I can’t get rid of them unless I do something that raises her mood. The easiest way to do this is by eating a bag of chips, which puts me over my bite goal, bringing me back to the problem I was trying to avoid in the first place.

All I wanted to do was eat a little bit less, but it started an unavoidable chain of events that only makes Jenny’s problems worse. It’s a genius trap that I didn’t realize I’d fallen for until it was too late, much like real life. It’s a form of artistic expression and education that can only be communicated through a video game.

The art and animation oozes with personality, its pixels giving off a hand-drawn aesthetic to characters’ hyper-expressive faces. The player moves Jenny through cutscenes with swipes of the mouse or joystick, but you never really know what you’re about to make her do, and it’s a fun surprise to watch how she nervously picks up a dollar off the sidewalk or refuses to get out of bed. The subject matter might imply a dour visual tone, but Consume Me is anything but. It helps to offset the very real stress I have trying to balance Jenny’s life while also representing the ways that eating disorders can appear invisible to the outside world.

Moment-to-moment dialogue writing is also sharp, and Jenny is a memorable, endearing protagonist who’s easy to root for. I had no problem seeing things from her perspective, and while I started as an outside observer, I quickly found myself invested enough to get nervous about finishing my homework and earnestly hoping a boy would like me back.

Despite loving the game’s characters and early hours, its last chapter falls flat for a few reasons. First, religion is introduced as a comfort for Jenny late in the game (complete with a musical prayer sequence). Conceptually, I have no problem with this, but it comes out of nowhere and feels out of place. It’s not mentioned much beforehand, and it becomes irrelevant by the story’s conclusion. Jenny can pray once a day to remove mental blocks that keep her from studying, but it also slightly fills her mood, energy, and hunger bars. Improving her mood makes perfect sense, but it’s the latter meters that feel at odds with Consume Me’s themes. Jenny’s biggest flaw is convincing herself that with enough mental effort, she can force her body to achieve unhealthy levels of productivity, whether that’s staying up late or starving herself, and it’s inconsistent that praying would exist as a consequence-free energy booster or replacement for eating.

When Consume Me’s story does ultimately end in the disaster its content warning foreshadows, religion doesn’t seem to be a solution, and despite saving Jenny in a later chapter, it’s swept aside unceremoniously. It’s hard to end biographical narratives, especially when the subject is still alive, because real-world events that make the compelling premise to a story rarely resolve cleanly. Still, the story’s primary sources of drama sort of slip away, with Jenny ultimately outgrowing them rather than confronting them.

It doesn’t help that we play as Jenny on her spiral to rock bottom, but we’re stuck watching a slightly interactive montage as she lifts herself out of it. The whole game leads up to her inevitable crash, where she learns how destructive her behaviors are; however, once it finally happens, the game is essentially over. It’s like Mario learns his princess is in another castle, but instead of leading to a boss fight with Bowser, we just watch him beat Bowser in the end credits. The story is still there, but as a player, I’m forced to end on a loss.

Gamifying your food habits is, indeed, an awful idea, and Consume Me lays it out in a manner I found deeply compelling and entertaining. Even if you ignore the content warning, its message is clear from its opening moments. If its ending hadn’t stumbled, it might’ve been one of my all-time favorites, but there’s still a lot to love here despite that underwhelming conclusion. Consume Me is teeming with creativity and personality, and for that, it’s earned a special place in my heart.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Helldivers 2 developer explains why it’s so big to install on PC, and why that won’t be changing anytime soon

by admin October 3, 2025

Helldivers 2 takes up around 150GB to install on PC (three times larger than on console), and the game’s deputy technical director has now explained why that won’t be changing anytime soon.

In a new blog post on Steam, Arrowhead’s Brendan Armstrong explained for the PC version the developers utilised data duplication to reduce loading times, something that’s primarily used to optimise games for HDDs.

As the older storage drives use a physical arm to read data, duplicating that data can make it quicker to find and thereby reduce loading times. SSDs don’t work in this way, which explains why the console versions of Helldivers 2 take up less storage space.

HELLDIVERS 2 – Into the Unjust | Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube

However, as Armstrong acknowledged, HDDs are part of the game’s minimum specs on PC but the studio doesn’t know how many players are still using them.

“Our best estimates put it at around 12 percent of all PC gamers but the data is very unreliable and relies on a lot of extrapolations,” said Armstrong. “Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication. Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.”

Still, the studio is “actively exploring” a number of solutions for the future, although it “cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower and we do not feel that this is acceptable”.

In the short term, unused assets will be removed in the next update, though these will be replaced by new additions so won’t reduce the amount of storage space required.

A medium term solution is to bundle frequently used assets and remove duplicates, though Armstrong admitted this would increase load times for players using HDDs. In the long term, engine improvements are planned to not waste RAM loading data that isn’t needed.

A further solution would be to make the highest resolution textures an optional download. However, this isn’t natively supported in Arrowhead’s engine so would be a substantial project, Armstrong explained. As such, time on this would not be spent elsewhere on optimising performance or fixing stability issues.

“We’re taking your concerns very seriously but there are no easy solutions,” Armstrong surmised. “Until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we’re all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time. We’ve clearly reached the limits of how much duplicated data is acceptable so smarter solutions and compromises are now required. We are very carefully weighing up the costs and tradeoffs of the options we have, and we’ll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon.”

As a broader issue of game size, Armstrong’s reasoning explains why many modern games on PC now require an SSD, even as a minimum requirement. Arrowhead has instead aimed Helldivers 2 at a wider spectrum of PC specs, but this comes at a storage cost.

This blog post is the first of what the developer aims to be a series of posts detailing the technical challenges it’s working on.

An update for Helldivers 2 is due later this month to alleviate a number of performance issues players are currently experiencing, particularly as the game has grown in size and content since release.

Helldivers 2 also made its way to Xbox Series X/S consoles back in August, becoming the first Sony-published game on the platform and further broadening the audience.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

The Internet Reacts To Taylor Swift’s New Album

by admin October 3, 2025

Every time Taylor Swift, the country star turned pop royalty, releases a new album, it’s a cultural event, whether you’re a Swiftie or not. This is because the algorithm will no doubt feed you reactions and commentary just because you are, at most, one degree removed from the Band Hero star’s fandom at all times. The Life of a Showgirl is Swift’s 12th album, and turns the dial back into radio/TikTok-ready pop after The Tortured Poets Department went for a more melancholic, folky sound. But is it any good? Well, Swifties are sorting through their feelings.

Like most of Swift’s work, The Life of a Showgirl is pretty transparent in its references to her personal life. As that personal life has become so well-known in and out of her music, it’s usually pretty obvious who a song is about. So there’s some lore to unpack with a lot of these songs, but the ones that are getting the most attention right now are the ones that seem to reference her fiancé Travis Kelce’s hog and seem to escalate an apparent feud between her and pop star Charli XCX that, at least publicly, appears largely one-sided at the moment.

Let’s start with the song that is all about how well-endowed the Kansas City football player is. “Wood” starts out with a funky riff and a catchy beat, and you can already hear the Sabrina Carpenter influence in the composition. Then you hear the lyrics and you can tell that Swift is trying to emulate the Short n’ Sweet singer’s trademark graphic, sexual punchlines. Here, let’s look at the lyrics of the second verse.

Forgive me, it sounds cocky

He ah-matized me and openеd my eyes

Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see

His lovе was the key that opened my thighs

Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet, mm

To know a hard rock is on the way

And baby, I’ll admit I’ve been a little superstitious

The curse on me was broken by your magic wand

Seems to be that you and me, we make our own luck

New Heights of manhood

If the clear reference to Kelce’s New Heights podcast wasn’t enough to make it clear that this is about her man’s schlong, the reference to a “hard rock” like the one on her finger would make it pretty clear. There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother in which Marshall (Jason Segal) realizes he can’t tell any sexy stories from his dating life to his friends without everyone knowing they’re about his long-time partner Lily (Alyson Hannigan) because she’s the only one he’s really been with. Part of what makes love songs such a popular genre of music is that there’s a universality to them that people can project onto their own relationships. Who among us wouldn’t love to sing about a man’s dick lifting a curse and solving all our problems? But Swift’s very public personal life and clear references to her husband-to-be mean that I can’t hear this song without knowing whose dick it’s about.

That being said, the song is pretty catchy. What Swift may lack in Carpenter’s clever jokes, she makes up for in a fun song about love and lust. And hey, Kelce seems cool with it?

One song I have a less charitable read on, however, is “Actually Romantic,” which takes the other side of “everyone knowing your business” and seems to be essentially a diss track against Charli XCX. For those who don’t know, Charli has a song called “Sympathy Is a Knife” on the album Brat that addresses her insecurities in the pop girl space, and seemingly references Swift specifically triggering those feelings of comparison in her. “Actually Romantic” is being called a diss track aimed at the “360” singer, and at first blush, some think Swift may have straight-up misunderstood the intent behind “Sympathy Is a Knife,” which is actually fairly complimentary to her.

However, “Actually Romantic” does seem to gesture at further drama behind the scenes, even as Swift has been publicly supportive of Charli. Specifically, it references Swift’s past relationship with Matty Healy of the band 1975, which also includes Charli’s husband George Daniel, and things Charli has allegedly said about Swift in private.

I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave

High-fived my ex and then said you’re glad he ghosted me

Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face

Some people might be offended

But it’s actually sweet

All the time you’ve spent on me.

I guess I can buy that maybe there’s more happening than “Sympathy Is a Knife” lets on. It’s giving Reputation era, when Swift was very publicly calling out other public figures like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, or 1989’s “Bad Blood” which referenced her now-ended feud with pop star Katy Perry. Again, it’s the effect of someone’s personal life being so public that these songs end up weaving a story that’s already playing out on social media and in gossip magazines. Though if this is all spun off from “Sympathy Is a Knife,” then it feels like punching down.

The problem with Life of a Showgirl is that Swift’s status as a billionaire mega-celebrity clashes against the “relatable” persona she exhibits in her music here more than ever before. “Eldest Daughter” laments how mean everyone on the internet can be, when she’s enveloped in a massive cocoon of wealth and status. Like, girl, why are you even reading TikTok comments when you could be doing literally anything else with all that money?

lol https://t.co/a78pUaSvCU pic.twitter.com/quyrERr07R

— grace spelman (@GraceSpelman) October 3, 2025

Another song that really sticks out as an expression of Swift imagining threats to her status is “CANCELLED!” which I saw someone say is destined to become the new anthem of MAGA wine moms, and I can’t stop thinking about it. As the title suggests, the song is all about perceived judgments of her for who she chooses to associate with, with her singing that she likes her friends “cancelled” and cloaked in “scandal.” Broadly, this could be a song about cancel culture and how Swift is unwilling to drop people just because they run afoul of public scrutiny, but given that she has friends who are public Trump supporters, that feels like underselling or minimizing people’s criticism as some kind of petty scandal, rather than a legitimate concern.

Ultimately, all of these reactions are born from the relationship with her fandom that Swift has cultivated over her decades-long career. When your personal life is the source of the characters and stories people listen for references to in each song, every album is like a new season of a television show for which millions of people tune in just to lap up every new lore drop. But is the music any good? In my first listen, I came away thinking that Life of a Showgirl is an obvious low point in Swift’s discography. I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment, but the album has been out for all of 12 hours at this point, and people will sort their feelings out over the next few weeks or months. Tonight, Swift is putting out a movie in theaters called The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which will include commentary and context for the album from Swift. Maybe that will work in its favor. For now, the music is speaking for itself. For better or worse.

pic.twitter.com/fEAu5T8XnL

— emily (@grIgenius) October 3, 2025

every year a taylor swift album comes out and she goes roses are red grass is green i love travis and my haters are mean and her fans go Omgggggg the lyricism

— zade (@zadtwt) October 2, 2025

she did it omg https://t.co/pRaiOFRgtG pic.twitter.com/idYwgDuRH0

— Wendell (@RhodeToLove) October 3, 2025

yall im CRYINGNSIDNDHF pic.twitter.com/nC25tp2KcZ

— allypally (@allypallyxcx) October 3, 2025

https://t.co/3CIXeCfhyy pic.twitter.com/NAQvUVy9Qp

— The Coke That Made Charli xcx Brave (@Neil_McNeil) October 3, 2025

https://t.co/O23bECsSMr pic.twitter.com/iK8u3dO19T

— keira (@kettlevinyl) October 3, 2025

These aren’t lyrics born of depth, just reference points engineered to ride the current wave internet talking points like ‘eldest daughters suffer more than jesus’ and spark a shallow ‘she’s just like me’ emotion from its listener. Not moved https://t.co/cXsllaedbn

— Ara (@lefilmara) October 3, 2025

IDGAF what yall saying! I’m vibing! I’m a showgirl baby pic.twitter.com/6vupKDLFEJ

— 💫 (@heyjaeee) October 3, 2025

why should taylor have to be a girls girl when nobody shows her the same courtesy? why is it iconic when other people create mess but she has to be persecuted? pic.twitter.com/kkQCeTuMKw

— jobless men #1 hater is a showgirl (@taylorenthusian) October 2, 2025

it’s honestly so freeing being a folklore stan who isn’t chronically negative cause while y’all are acting like showgirl murdered your family i’m twirling to ophelia

— kam⸆⸉ ❤️‍🔥 (@kamirrorball) October 3, 2025

Anyway, did you know that Coheed and Cambria also put out the special edition of their excellent album Father of Make Believe today? It’s got four new songs that are all pretty good, though maybe not quite as good as the best stuff on the main album.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Here’s what’s in Skate’s ’90s-themed first season, arriving next week

by admin October 3, 2025

Following its early access launch, Skate’s first season will arrive next week, bringing new areas, events, challenges, and more.

Called Hesh & Fresh, the first season is inspired by the ’90s and will run from 7th October until 2nd December.

As mentioned last month, the season will bring an updated lighting system to ensure the city of San Van is “more grounded and lived in”, while the skate.Pass allows players to earn in-game seasonal currency (called Tix) with which to purchase cosmetic rewards.

skate. | Early Access Season 1 TrailerWatch on YouTube

Two events will be added this season. The first is Skate-o-Ween, based on Halloween (obviously) but with an emphasis on amusing outfits. It’ll run from 21st October to 11th November.

That will be followed by the 7-Ply Maple Harvest from 18th November until 2nd December, calling back to the 70s and the wood used for skateboard construction at that time.

Both events will have community parks updated in celebration, as well as themed cosmetics.

The season will also add 40 new challenges rotating weekly, new brands in the in-game store, and 21 new songs from 90s artists like Bad Religion, Dinosaur Jr., Ice Cube, and more.

Skate arrived in early access last month and has so far proven a success, in particular with players sharing their stunts on social media. It proved especially popular on its first day, leading to lengthy queues.

“After an absolute age, EA’s wheelie classic is back with great handling and a whole world of slightly jarring niceness,” reads our Skate early access review.

Skate is published by EA, which this week announced a planned private acquisition by a group of investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in a private transaction worth $55bn.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Ghost Of Yotei Makes Just Standing Still As Captivating As The Rest Of It

by admin October 3, 2025

Ghost of Yotei is a violent game about hunting down murderers on a quest for revenge. You kill a lot of people along the way. There are tons of sick showdowns in which you gracefully cut down foes as fountains of blood spurt from their slashed limbs. But what I actually love to do most in it is just occasionally stand still.

Sucker Punch’s new open-world sequel might not be the most beautiful game on PlayStation 5 but it certainly feels like one of the most visually vibrant and dynamic within the genre of hyper-realistic action adventure sandboxes. The island of Ezo is full of characters, some more interesting than others, but none more captivating than the wind.

Sucker Punch Productions / Sony / Kotaku

It wisps through the world, telling you which way to go next in what remains one of my favorite UI innovations of the PS4 era. Even when you aren’t looking for your next objective, however, it’s always hanging nearby, ruffling leaves, blowing through flowers, and pushing over tall grass to remind you that the world of Ghost of Yotei is more than just a playground for collectibles, upgrades, and quest markers.

There are so many times when I’m dashing across a field or along a river with Atsu on horseback and just feel compelled to stop, get down, and take in my surroundings. It’s rare that a game can consistently knock me off the critical path and get me to take my time exploring off the beaten path. Sometimes they try with secrets, rewards, or confusing level design. Yotei does it better than most, and without just relying on the same old tricks.

There are places in its world that make standing around look and feel so good I sometimes don’t want to stop. A rare thing for a game indeed, to make putting the controller down every once in a while feel as riveting as the rest of it.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Battlefield Studios on bringing squad play to the Battlefield 6 campaign, fulfilling class fantasies with missions, and whether we can expect a Warzone-like ongoing narrative

by admin October 3, 2025

I have not played the entirety of the Battlefield 6 single-player campaign yet, but I played enough to have a solid guess as to what the high-level goals for it were. It wasn’t until I got a chance to speak to some of the people behind it that my suspicions were validated.

It’s also very easy to guess that some of the same people who get excited about playing the campaign mode in yearly Call of Duty releases likely won’t be moved by what Battlefield 6 is offering there, and perhaps that’s fine.

After playing three missions of the Battlefield 6 campaign, I caught up with Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director at DICE, and Fasahat Salim, design director at Criterion. Much like the rest of the game, the single-player campaign is also the result of work by various teams under the Battlefield Studios banner – and DICE and Criterion are certainly among them.

Our chat mainly focused on the narrative elements of the game, but I was also curious about how such a big team split across different parts of the world and different time zones can come together in this fashion to create a major game like Battlefield 6.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VG247: The narrative of the campaign is pretty topical. I think it plays on some very real fears that people have in the world right now about NATO and the state of alliances that we once believed were ironclad. Did you intend for this?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Battlefield has always tried to be, as much as possible, an extremely grounded military experience. When we talk about what Battlefield is, kind of in its core DNA; it is grounded. It is realistic. It is looking at the world through the lens of a soldier on the ground stuck in a much wider conflict, right?

So as we’re trying to determine what the story should be, we were very, very influenced by earlier Battlefield games like Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. That took in the world as it was at the time that those games were made. And we’ve tried to do that here, too. We’ve done an immense amount of research into the older Battlefield games, topical films, documentaries, talking to current and former service members to try and understand how to create a conflict that is entirely fictional, but feels realistic, feels plausible, feels grounded, and feels really interesting for the player to be experiencing in our modern setting. So, obviously it’s set in a world that feels as realistic as possible, but we’re not trying to copy anything directly that’s going on, whilst also making it feel like it could potentially be realistic.

VG247: You mentioned some inspirations. Can you name some of them?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Absolutely. Like I said, our biggest inspirations: some of our older titles, but we’ve been watching – there are so many good, really grounded military films and television shows. Now, some of the ones that we had mentioned previously that were big touchstones for us were the film Civil War, the television show Lioness. We’ve looked at the television show Slow Horses quite a lot as well. Basically, anything that hits that place of reality, of looking at the people who are actually stuck in the conflict, not the ones who are driving it. We also watched countless documentaries and footage from conflicts around the world. Again, just to understand what it really feels like to be stuck in that kind of place.

Image credit: EA, Battlefield Studios.

VG247: So can you tell me – this is more of a logistical question – but I am curious who’s leading the campaign development. I know Motive – and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like Motive is at the top and then there’s an effort from the other two studios, Criterion and DICE (as the caretakers of the franchise). How does this split work? Is there one team leading and then people are contributing certain elements?

Fasahat Salim, design director, Criterion: It’s actually a far broader thing than each studio takes its own thing. We’re all kind of contributing to pretty much the whole project, and obviously single-player multiplayer are just two components, there’s a lot more as well in this whole package. We’ve got people in Criterion, DICE, Motive, Ripple Effect all contributing to all of it in some way shape or form.

For example, I’ve been responsible for campaign missions, but I know I’m working with people who are actually also working on multiplayer, meta and all of these other parts. So it’s such a huge project across the board. Inevitably, having all four studios come together and share resources, knowledge and tech is something that we had to do for something of this scale.

So having everyone’s expertise contributing wherever it’s needed has been super vital for us trying to get this over the line. Of course there’s been a lot of knowledge, learning and knowledge sharing between studios. Obviously, like you said, DICE obviously have the most amount of experience with it, so how can we kind of bring that ethos of what makes Battlefield Battlefield and make sure that all the other studios are ensuring that that’s part of what they’re thinking about when they’re making the content or the stuff that they’re working on.

But yeah, it’s been a shared endeavor. We’ve got people across the board, across time zones working on this thing. We’re all involved in everything pretty much.

VG247: I was surprised by some of the dialogue in some of the missions. Very early on in the New York mission, there’s a conversation between Lopez and Gecko, where he’s grousing about people being upset there’s military action in their backyard. Gecko basically responds that freedom sometimes means disagreeing with the government.

I thought that was a very relevant line. It was more nuanced than I expected in a military shooter, and I just wanted to understand: was this a conscious choice to have your characters make these relevant statements? Are we going to see some of that again in the rest of the campaign?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: So kind of like I was speaking to earlier: Battlefield has always tried to be a really realistic game. When we made the choice to set this contemporary, in order for that to feel really good and feel grounded and hit that fantasy for players, we have to bring some things that feel real to our world. Our characters have to feel like they’re connected to the world that they live in, and they’ve lived through the type of world that we have all been in.

Of course they’re going to have different perspectives, and you should see that, and you should hear that from them. That’s exactly how real military personnel would talk to one another as they’re going into a mission, they comment on it, they’re interested in knowing how everyone else that they’re fighting alongside feels about it, because you need to know that you trust that person next to you with your very life in all of those instances.

So yeah, I think that for players who are coming in, who are very up-to-date on the news and have done anywhere near the amount of research that we’ve done on what’s going on with the world so that we could create a really interesting fictional setting. Of course, they’re going to see things that they might resonate with, some things that they might agree with, some things that they might disagree with, some things that might make them think, some things that they’re going to ignore completely and will just fade into the background.

I think a lot of how you process this story is probably going to be based on how you come into it, but I hope that our players will have fun. Maybe think a little bit and walk away going, ‘I feel like I had the experience of military personnel on the ground in this kind of situation’ if something like this were to happen, but I don’t think it would, but it might.

VG247: I’m based in the UAE, and recently there was – let’s say military action – on a neighboring country; two US allies [involved]. When I got into the game, I wasn’t expecting it to be this prescient. I would imagine that the research that goes into it maybe gave you a little bit of an insight into how a potential course of action might take place.

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: We’re going for grounded. But yeah, most of this story was written multiple years ago. So if they’re extremely close to things happening right now, of course, we’re not directly referencing that. What we’re trying to do is provide something that feels grounded and like a good story.

Watch on YouTube

VG247: Are you working on a narrative element for multiplayer/BR? Can we expect a narrative element to the multiplayer modes once we’re done with the story of the campaign?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: Yes, yes, absolutely you can. So the multiplayer maps and everything that we’re releasing for the core product of Battlefield 6 is set in one universe, one conflict. The multiplayer maps are in some of the same general locations as the single-player maps. You’ll see the other side of the city or another side of the town, other side of the mountain, for example. Most of them take place either concurrently with the single-player campaign moments, or days to weeks afterwards. Essentially, what we want you to feel here is that fantasy of being that boots-on-the-ground personnel.

Between the campaign and the multiplayer maps, you can see different sides of these fronts, basically. You can feel much of the time – in the campaign – what it’s like to be some of the military personnel who are there early in the conflict, or maybe even the ones kicking things off. And then in multiplayer, it’s more… weeks later, things have continued to evolve or devolve. What’s it like now?

VG247: Are we going to see any input from these characters? Are they even gonna show up, am I gonna be able to play as Gecko, for example, in multiplayer?

So Dagger 1-3 is not currently in the multiplayer experience. However, there are characters in the multiplayer experience who are featured as NPCs and squad members throughout the campaign. So there is a direct connection with some characters between the two.

VG247: So, for the narrative content for multiplayer – obviously some of this is based on what other games have done. CoD: Warzone, for example, will have a cutscene that will set up something, can we expect more from Battlefield? To bring that narrative together? Can we expect something more to go along with the new season launching beyond just – here’s a two-minute cutscene and then that’s it, and we never hear from these people again?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: So again, we’re not gonna be talking about the live season stuff today, but I can tell you in context of what we have in the multiplayer launch. Again, these are kind of different sides of the same biomes. So very similar types of buildings and understanding.

If you really look at the environmental storytelling of what’s gone on with this conflict. Like I mentioned, some of the same characters that you see in the campaign will be playable in multiplayer as well. Even when it comes to things like potential customisation items and such, it all ties back into that same narrative. That this group of people is living through this conflict together.

Image credit: Battlefield Studios, EA.

VG247: In terms of the structure of the campaign, we only played three missions, but the Tajikistan one is different because it was completely open. You could tackle the objectives in any order you want.

The new New York mission is the highlight for me. It pretty much showed the full spectrum of [gameplay]. There were open-ish areas, sections where you can command your squad. There were tight sections in there, there was a chase. So almost like it’s a good vertical slice of what the campaign can offer. I think that mission in particular is gonna be a lot of people’s favourite.

Can you tell me what the sort of split is for the campaign? How much of it is gonna be open-ish environments versus very tight, very scripted missions?

Fasahat Salim, design director, Criterion: It’s actually a good mix. I think Tajikistan is probably the most open mission. So that’s why, just for the sake of variety, I think you got to play that at the end. Generally, across the whole campaign, there’s a good mix of exactly what you just described; that traditional Battlefield single-player campaign that you expect to really feel the big action moments, you know, over the top spectacle.

The thing that kind of is a consistent throughline through all of the campaign – including the three missions that that you’ve played – is trying to give the player that feeling of classes, and what it means to play in different roles within a squad. In each of those [missions], you’re playing as a different class, and that’s entirely intentional.

In [Gibraltar], you’re playing as an Engineer, therefore you’re supporting the vehicle. You’ve got your blowtorch. You’re trying to keep the tank alive. There’s a lot of focus on what it means to be an engineer class. Then obviously in the New York mission, you are very much front and center Assault, right?

You’ve got close combat, you’re going through the houses, you’re shooting guys through walls, they’re shooting back at you. Everything is is very much right at the frontline. So you’ve got your shotgun, you’re doing a lot of damage. There’s grenade launchers, like you said, there’s a whole spectrum of things happening.

And then obviously in [Tajikistan] it is a much bigger mission, but it also lends itself to the Recon class, which is what we’re treating as the fantasy for that mission. So you’re playing with the sniper rifle, and again, you’ve also got a drone as your gadget, so you’ve got an eye in the sky. You can use that to recon ahead.

So all of these are trying to give the player that fantasy of the different classes, and that’s very intentional. Because as you know, Battlefield is about classes. Even when you play multiplayer, it’s about fulfilling that role within a much larger conflict.

For example, you talked about squad orders. Squad orders is a big part of fulfilling that squad-based fantasy. You are a part of this squad. Your squad has specific skillsets that could help you solve the problem at hand, so use them. Depending on who you are playing as, some squad orders won’t be available to you. For example, in [Tajikistan], you’re playing the Recon. There aren’t any Recon squad orders when you open up the wheel. That’s because you are the Recon.

VG247: Do you think some people will prefer to have that sort of solo fantasy instead of the squad fantasy? I wouldn’t mistake this campaign for being part of any other shooter franchise, but I’m also aware that Call of Duty and other games tend to focus on singular individuals instead of just having the full squad. Do you think some people would’ve wanted that from Battlefield 6 and maybe aren’t fans of [the squad] element from BF4 coming back?

Emily Grace Buck, narrative design director, DICE: I think that’s exactly what we’re going for. But yeah, we were just trying to make the best Battlefield campaign we possibly could, and Battlefield has always, always been about being one of the little guys. It’s not about being in the SAS, it’s not about being in Delta Force or Seal Team Six.

It’s about being an enlisted soldier, trying to survive a really s**t situation with your mates, right? And to get your objectives done and survive and get out. That’s Battlefield. It’s a cover shooter. There are moments in our campaign where you have a smaller squad available. There are moments where it’s all four of you.

So I think there are opportunities for players – especially some of them who are really skilled, if they wanna lean into that run-and-gun fantasy – there are moments they can do it, but that’s not absolutely core to our Battlefield DNA the way that the squad play is. So that’s not the main fantasy that we’ve tried to provide in the single-player campaign.

Battlefield 6 launches October 10 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments