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Interview

Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann Discusses Intergalactic Gameplay And Casting In New Interview

by admin September 12, 2025

Game Informer spoke with Naughty Dog president and The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann last year on the set of The Last of Us Season 2. Since then, he’s revealed he is stepping back from Season 3 of the show to focus on developing the studio’s next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which Naughty Dog revealed at The Game Awards 2024 last December.

In a new interview with Variety, Druckmann discussed a number of things about Intergalactic, including casting Tati Gabrielle as the game’s lead, Jordan A. Mun, working with Joel actor Troy Baker again, casting The Last of Us Season 2 actor Tony Dalton (who played Joel’s dad), and more.

Perhaps the most revealing statement from Druckmann came when Variety asked him about his description of Intergalactic as having “the deepest gameplay” in Naughty Dog history.

“You can look at our previous titles and see the evolution going from ‘Uncharted,’ where we’re really cutting our teeth on a realistic character-action game, third-person shooter, combined with emotional storytelling,” Druckmann said. “With ‘The Last of Us,’ we added some RPG elements, we started playing with wide linear layouts. Continue that trajectory forward, add sci-fi, and you start to get the sense of what we’re doing, and then we’ve gotten even more ambitious than that.”

My money’s on a deep, third-person, character-driven RPG with multiple open hubs to explore, and I hope I’m right.

When asked about Gabrielle’s casting, Druckmann explains Naughty Dog had an idea of who protagonist Jordan is as a character, but via documents and backstories – scripts and gameplay come much later as the team wants the space to “run experiments and prototypes and then see what works, what doesn’t work,” and so on.

“We were kind of at that stage when we started talking to [Gabrielle],” Druckmann told Variety. “That came about because we had just cast her in Season 2 [of The Last of Us], and just got the idea that she might be perfect for this role. Then she showed up, she came by Naughty Dog, I pitched her the story as it was at the time, and we kind of walked through it beginning, middle, end, and explained what her role would be.

“I asked her if she’d be willing to audition, and she was. We had her on stage, and I asked Troy to come in and read with her, so she read against Troy Baker. We were just very confident that is our Jordan A. Mun.”

Druckmann says since then, he’s been writing with Gabriella, something he did with Ellie actor Ashley Johnson and Baker when making The Last of Us. “[Gabrielle’s] been just as influential in the writing and the thinking of this character, her arc, and I believe she’s gonna be very iconic and complex and interesting in the Naughty Dog tradition.

Speaking of Baker, Druckmann says, “Troy is in the game, and it’s been five years since I’ve worked with Troy, and I’ve got to do it again, and it was a lot of fun to be on stage with him again.”

The final piece of casting information from this interview is about Dalton. Druckmann says after working with him on Episode 206 of The Last of Us where he played Joel’s dad, he DM’d him on Instagram to ask if he’d jump into a Zoom call to check out Intergalactic. “We jumped on a Zoom call, and I showed him parts of the game, and I talked to him about it,” Druckmann said. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m in. I’d love to do it.’ So Tony Dalton is there, and maybe there’s a few more [of actors from Season 1 or Season 2 of The Last of Us].”

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is due out on PlayStation 5, though there’s no word on when to expect the game.

In the meantime, read Game Informer’s interview with Druckmann about creating Season 2 of The Last of Us.

[Source: Variety]

When do you think Intergalactic will launch? Let us know in the comments below!

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September 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Interview with John Goodenough from Monster Fight Club

by admin September 8, 2025

*Audio interview, edited for clarity and length*

A couple of weeks ago, Gaming Trend sat down with John Goodenough, Game Designer with Monster Fight Club, publisher and developer of Cyberpunk: Combat Zone and Borderlands: Mister Torgue’s Arena of Badassery. John’s journey didn’t begin there, however, and for over 20 years John has been the wearer of many hats, with his creative thumbprint on many, many games. John shared his journey from humble beginnings and talked about what he’s working on now.

Gaming Trend (GT)

So, John, you’ve been in the industry for like 20 plus years, right?

John

I think when I started getting a paycheck from my first game company, it was like 2000 or so, and I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve worked as an artist, as a developer, and as a designer. I actually got my start working in the warehouse [at Fantasy Flight Games]. It was one of those opportunities where I actually feel like I’ve been a part of just about every single step in the game design, creation, and marketing process. I even know what it’s like to hand assemble games and throw bits into a box and go to the shrink wrapper. It’s been a wild ride.

We were checking out your equivalent game IMDB page on Board Game Geek, and my goodness, it has quite the list of credits for games. We’ve played many of them! Tide of Iron, Runebound, Talisman, Relic, and now Borderlands. For these games, did you design them and also do art? Were you moving around to wherever you were needed?

John

It was art first. I started off making illustrations for Rune Bound, and then continued when Fantasy Flight started getting into the CCGs. Because I was a local, I could go into the office and play test the game that I would then be working on illustrations for. I was maybe one of the few artists that they’ve ever had in the office that actually worked on the game and then played the game before they did art. It was an amazing process to me because I wanted to make sure that every illustration didn’t just look pretty but it also actually represented what was functioning in the game.

The thing that really piqued my interest for development was playtesting those games. I got to see the developer side of things because a lot of the projects and games that they were working on were primarily about world building. Fantasy Flight ultimately created worlds and created game engines for you to run around and play in. So that world building process is really what piqued my interest in getting into game design. I had designed Monopoly variants back in the day but I didn’t really have any ambition on being a game designer. I love games, and I love playing them, but I believed “you stick to the rules.” But that process of building a playground, a world for people to play in offered me more creative space to operate in than just illustrating cards or pages or card illustrations. As an artist, you really only get to take a couple of snapshots in a world being a game designer, but being able to wear this hat as a game designer gave me something to experiment with.

Which artists’ work did you learn from and get inspired by?

John

John Howe has been the biggest inspiration. We got a chance to work together on The Lord of the Rings: Battlefields expansion and I tried my best not to be a gushing fanboy. The original graphic design for the boards were not delivering a cohesive aesthetic so he went above and beyond the call of duty to create art frames at the last minute. My admiration for his artistic vision was equally matched by his integrity and dedication. TSR legends like Easley, Elmore, and Parkinson unlocked amazing worlds to explore. This list goes on and on.

What experience(s) help prepare you the most and become ok with coming up with new rules to games and being part of that design “behind-the-scenes” process?

John

Well, I think the best thing that prepared me for working on games was actually working in the warehouse. We played test games during the day, then took breaks and came back and chitchat. You got a pretty good insight into the behind the scenes. I think the biggest, most valuable lesson that I got out of that experience was watching the emotional journey. When people think of game design they think it’s very intellectual. People tend to think everything is happening in your head, but in reality, when you’re the creator, it’s a big emotional journey because you have to be passionate enough to work on it every day and carry it through.

It’s a hard job before you even get the game out there. Once you create the product and put it out in the world, you also have to learn how to step back and just let it be received. There are always gonna be people who love it, people who hate it, and people somewhere in between. These groups of fans are especially more prevalent on the Internet – it’s not 2000 anymore. The real truth is that, after you put a game out there, it’s not your game anymore; it’s not your baby now it’s theirs. You have to have a thick skin about response, too.

What kind of emotional journeys have you had or seen?

John

One of the first big projects I was involved with was an “all hands on deck” game. It ended up being the whole company at Fantasy Flight putting all of their love, and resources into this game that was supposed to be “the next big thing.” Instead of the launch even coming close to their hopes and expectations, it completely flopped. It was one of the biggest flops and bombs that they’ve ever had. To watch that emotional journey of it all, the excitement of launch, the disappointment and the heartbreak with the reception, it was a lot. I was playtesting and getting insight to the development but I was far enough removed from the core group where I didn’t have as strong of an emotional attachment as the others. Witnessing all that happened was eye opening.

The one other lesson you learn too is that this is all a marathon. If you’re gonna last in this business, you can’t do anything as a sprint. You burn out your energy quickly like that so everything you do, every step you take within any project, has to be with the mindset of it’s a marathon. If you’re in it for the long haul, you have conserved some of that creative energy and passion that will carry you forward.

The one other lesson you learn too is that this is all a marathon. If you’re gonna last in this business, you can’t do anything as a sprint.

When you’re working with intellectual properties and established fantasy worlds, like Warhammer, Borderlands, and World of Warcraft, and you’re doing world building developing, knowing passionate fans (on both ends) are there, how difficult of a dance is it for you to juggle that? The game has got to work mechanically, but then you also kind of have to have it be marketable and also something that fits within the established rules of whatever universe it is. How challenging is that from a design and art perspective?

John

Everything in design is all about balance. You also have to be a big enough fan and know the world and know the IP. However, being too big of a fan is a drawback, too, because if you try to make the game too realistic, and take the stance of “this is exactly how it works in the video games or books or movies,” then you end up starting to create things that only those super fans are going to enjoy and kind of turn all of the casual fans.

There is a lot of it that depends on the licensor. I have been extraordinarily lucky to work with many exceptional licensors, like Games Workshop and Blizzard. Every game company has its quirks, but when you’re working with the right licenser it makes all the difference in the world. When you have somebody that understands everything about the property, like they’re a walking encyclopedia on every single detail, it makes a big difference. Having people respect the rules and the board game design process makes a big difference, too. So everything has to be balanced and work for everything behind the scenes and also for the fans.

So you have this juggling between the hardcore fans, the casual fans, the board gamers, the video gamers, the licensor, etc. etc. and you, as the designer and developer, have to act as like a translator, right? How do you gauge when something is working, or not?

John

It’s actually kind of a measuring stick that I use. When I get all excited and I design something that works just like the video game, or that’s just like the scene in the movie, that’s actually a red flag. It’s usually a symptom that you’re dialing in to that aspect too much. You want the game to feel like the moment or action you’re trying to create; you want to give the impression of the thing, not the actual thing itself. In many ways, being a designer is more like being an impressionistic painter. You’re not just creating these little micro moments of doing exactly the thing that happened in the movie or game; you’re giving the feeling of it. Ultimately, what you’re doing is you’re creating a whole series of those little micro interactions so that at the end of the game, people walk away with the feeling that they were a living character in that world.

After all these years of Randy and I going to cons, we think our enjoyment comes from getting that impression, getting that ‘aha moment’ that occurs within the game, like “That was super cool!” You know, whatever happened, win or lose, we got a feeling from the game that leaves an impression. Do you get a similar ‘aha moment’ during that design process where you say to yourself “OK, this is going to work and this is going to be awesome”?

John

I’ve worked on a ton of expansions and so designing an expansion is quite different than designing a brand new game totally from scratch. I will say one of the more interesting processes was working with Rune Bound with Christian Peterson, the CEO. One of the very first things he’d want us to do is make the box art, so we would end up having the fully finished illustration pop to look at and for him to say “OK, go make the thing.” So I would print it out as a movie poster size, put it on the wall by my desk as a movie poster, and I would stare at this thing and imagine all these scenes happening in it as a movie. Then I would translate that into the mechanics and see how that would actually work in the game. These expansions I made were based off of a movie poster.

When you’re working with an intellectual property, like we’re working on Borderlands games at Monster Fight Club right now, it’s kind of the opposite because you go through the video games, go through the content, and get that impression. Merging everything in together to create its own identity is its own experience. There isn’t an ‘aha moment’ so much as there are small little ones along the way.

With your journey thus far, how did you get involved with Monster Fight Club?

John

I worked at Fantasy Flight Games for a little over a decade. When I started there were like 10 people at the company and by the time I left it was close to 100. The company was growing rapidly, and it felt like the company was hitting the pinnacle of success. While the growth was good, I realize I’m more of a small town guy than a big city slicker. I like to work at smaller companies where everybody knows their name and it feels more cohesive with departments being down the hall, not down the street. If you’re working in a creative process, I just like that type of environment more. And so I moved on and wanted to work for a smaller company, like the good ol’ days. After FFG, I worked for Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) for about 10 years until the company went through a restructuring.

Ten years in a creative position is a lot of work. There is a tremendous value in working at a company long enough to where you learn you know all the systems and processes people use, which gives you different perspectives on different ways of doing things. But moving every ten years into a different environment just kind of opens other doors and unlocks other potential. Being at AEG was more about production, and you really couldn’t design much in house like when I was at FFG. When you’re continuing production, all you’re doing is kind of giving a game a window dressing pushing it out the door to sales. So that is the nice thing about working at Monster Fight Club is I got to go back full time as a designer. There’s a buddy that I knew at AEG and so he brought me over. I guess I could mostly thank him for the gig!

How tough was it for you to leave these positions, not knowing what was coming down the road for you or the companies?

John

Fantasy Flight was a bit of a tough call because I left right when they were starting to do Star Wars. And so when I left, people were like “Well, why? Why would you leave?” But it wasn’t just one thing. One of the big things that happened goes back to balance, and this was a balance between designing and sales. Every creative company needs the ratio of the creative people and the corporate business suits. It’s not that one is good and the other is bad, you just need a balance. The only time when it gets bad is when there is an upset to that balance. Too much business, and there is not much space for creative endeavors and the games go flat. But if all you have are creative people and you don’t have any business and people, you’re gonna be wondering if you’re gonna have a job tomorrow. So this is what I saw at FFG; the company hit a tipping point where the business side just took over and we’re running the show and the creatives didn’t really have any influence anymore. Not like when I started. So I do feel a bit lucky that I kind of saw the writing on the wall and left when I did.

I left while I still loved being there. That was the hardest part because it’s not just the place, it’s the people. Bearing in mind that all of this is coming from the perspective of me, the passionate creator guy, so I’m a little biased.

So now that you’re back to world building within Borderlands, with things like the campaign and Raid bosses, how are you approaching this design with this whole balancing act?

John

The Combat Zone system is so simple and universal that just having such a good system and engine makes our jobs a million times easier. Super simple, super intuitive. It’s very easy to just kind of work out probabilities, you know, right in your head. Borderlands: Mr. Torgue’s Arena of Badassery is a cooperative game on a grid map with four Vault hunters running around fighting these waves of enemies and completing objectives. The Raid Boss fights are an interesting departure because you get to use the same system, but the new rules make the game feel radically different because you just have one big enemy on a map. So it simplifies things a lot. It makes setup really quick and easy; you can build the map with these two big tiles and just start playing. It gives you the feeling of an epic fight.

Do you have a favorite Vault hunter that you tend to gravitate towards when you’re working on and testing these games?

John

Oh that’s like a “who’s in your favorite child” question, right? I mean, we’ve covered all of the Vault hunters and then we’ve taken some characters and turned them into Vault hunters. If I had to pick a favorite, I think it would be Zero. He might be the most fun to at least play test and design for because he’s such a min-maxing character. And game designers and players both love the min-maxing. Most characters do either range or melee, or sometimes mid, but only one. Zero gives you tons of options where he can do both. You just have to time it right, plan it and execute it perfectly, using exactly the right actions and get the right dice rolls, you can do these amazingly epic moves.

Within the game design space, are you finding yourself playing the video game alongside it for inspiration? Are you mostly focused on just the board game? Is it both?

John

The expansions are a little mix of everything: you know a dash of Borderlands 1 there and then a scoop of Borderlands 3 there. The main reason why I do enjoy playing video games is mostly that it’s kind of a break. You spend all day crunching numbers, trying to get balance to work, and you just need to recharge, like that feeling of going into Gunzerker mode. Playing the games also helps to dial in the feeling and get inspiration. It’s almost like when people take a shower and they get this brilliant idea and it’s a shower. You know, there’s like ‘eureka’ moments where something just pops into your head.

So while you’re blasting away at bandits and looting and shooting, that’s your shower thought moment.

John

Yeah! When you’re in the mindless explosions and just carnage. You can come up with some of the most creative ideas doing the mindless things. Like slaughtering bandits.

That’s fantastic.

Do you find yourself recharging your creative batteries by playing other board games? Are there any go-to board games that you’ll always play, or recommend to aspiring designers to play?

John

Absolutely. I would say the best advice I could give to anybody wanting to design games is not only play a diversity of games, but play the games you hate. A lot of designers just play what they want, and you can get inspiration from that. However, actually playing the type of games that you don’t like gives you another language. Every language you learn just allows you to look at things differently and solve problems in different ways.

I had a really good buddy back in Minnesota, Richard, who had thousands of games. I mean literally like 5000 games in his house. They were on all of the shelves, walls, cabinets. I mean, he cleaned out his chimney after he ran out of room and was stuffing games in his chimney. It was a smorgasbord. Of course, like I said before, everyone has different tastes and eventually you’re going to find stuff that doesn’t resonate. It was one of those games that didn’t resonate that I played at his house that really kind of gave me inspiration. Playing it allowed me to articulate what I did like about other games better. When you create a contrast with a basis of comparison, it allows you to look at things with a sharper level of detail. There aren’t any games that I hate to play, but there are a lot I enjoy and a lot that I get inspiration from.

The best advice I could give to anybody wanting to design games is not only play a diversity of games, but play the games you hate…actually playing the type of games that you don’t like gives you another language. – John Goodenough

Do you have a ‘gold standard’ for games? Regardless of the game mechanic, is there just one you’d recommend to anyone trying to get into game design?

John

I’m not saying this is the best game or the end-all, be-all of games, but if I had to think of an example of what makes the perfect game, the one that comes to mind is Carcassonne. It’s not even my favorite game, or the one I want to play every day all day, but it is close to what I would call a ‘perfect game.’ It balances out reward patterns, where you can get quick rewards by closing off roads or you can do long term investments by building up your farms. The castles are kind of in-between. It has this wonderful pattern of bouncing between short term investments versus long term investments in rewards and it’s super simple. All you can do is draw a tile, but your decision power comes from where it and your meeples, if any, are placed. It sounds like it would get boring so quickly and so why would you want to play that game more than once? The replay value is you’re putting tiles down and scoring on three different things that can occur in a nearly-unlimited arrangement. So the game is about the pattern of flow of having these little constant rewards, but also building up to the big, big reward at the end.

That is probably the game cause I played that a lot in real life, and then on apps, because it plays really quickly. I have probably played that more than any other game in existence.

So did you play all 5000 games?

John

It was insane because I actually had a goal where I was like “there’s no way we’re gonna be able to play all these games, so I will try and play half of them.” In reality, we ended up playing several hundred games. This was during my research phase, too, where I said “I just wanna learn. Every game I play I wanna learn something new and play a different type of game that I experienced before.” So, I was learning about five games per session, which was like a drop in the bucket when you compared it to what was out there at the time in the early 2000s. Nowadays, there are 5000 new game releases every year!

I mean, to learn five games in a session… that’s exhausting. When we try to learn one game now it takes like 90 minutes… and we’re not even playing it fully. What you’re talking about is that marathon-style approach to gaming.

John

I mean, I can’t do that anymore. It was mostly the passion about wanting to game design. Like back in those days, they didn’t have education around it. You just had to go out and play games and just learn by playing. Now, they actually have game design colleges and schools where they go into game theory. I think I was just in the right place at the right time. And was lucky enough to have a friend with practically an endless supply of games.

Other than board games, what else resets the creativity? Do you like to surf? Hang out at the beach? Go hunting for treasure with a metal detector?

John

The dogs I have become the main focus of my life now. They just follow me home or kind of show up on my doorstep now. So I’m surrounded by dogs and there are more than a handful. But I love them. Another hobby is pinball, actually. It is one of those things where it’s all in the reflexes, and is quite different from video games and board games. Actually, from a designer point of view, pinball is close to board games, like Carcassonne, because it’s all about patterns. Once you hit the skill level where pinball isn’t so random anymore, it’s all about pattern development and that’s ultimately what Carcassonne. You play it, you learn it, and you master it. So once you ‘see the Matrix,’ you can predict the patterns and get into the flow. Whenever I get writers blocked or stuck on something, there is something about engaging in a game that has a really good flow of patterns that helps me. Whether it’s pinball, or Carcassonne, or Borderlands you can play it almost in a Zen-like state and just watch the patterns reveal themselves. I think it’s soothing to the brain and it just gets you into that designer mindset where you start coming up with ideas that you never would have thought of otherwise.

You know, they say that if you stare at the waves for like 30 minutes, it can help reset that brain rhythm. Do you find yourself doing that out on the beach?

John

I mean that’s an amazing example, so. When I was a kid in Minnesota, I used to go out to the water – there was something really captivating about watching the waves roll in. Something about that is like a pattern. So now when I go to the beach, I do exactly that same thing. I just watch the pattern of the waves. There is something really wired into the ways that our brains work is we just love that pattern recognition. It’s very soothing and I think it quiets and resets the brain to the point where it can then start exploding with ideas and create connections and synapses in different ways.

You’ve got all this stuff coming down the pipe and on your plate, like with the Borderlands: MTAOB 2 Kickstarter that’s coming up, so what conventions are planning on attending?

John

You know, I’ve had conventions kind of off my radar for so long, what with the mover and COVID and everything, but I’m really hoping next year that I’ll be able to hit at least some of the big ones, like GenCon and Origins. I don’t know exactly which ones, but GenCon is probably a do or die.

John, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and getting to learn more about your background and creative process. It’s refreshing to hear there are some core elements to life and gaming that are just universal. Especially from an industry professional who’s made a career out of designing games and still loves what they do after all these years. You’re still running that marathon! Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat with us and share some of your stories and your insights.

John

Thank you! Looking forward to playing games with you guys soon!

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September 8, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Tiny Chef reveals “best chapter is coming” in first TV interview since Nickelodeon cancellation

by admin September 6, 2025

Tiny Chef has broken his silence, promising fans that his “best chapter is coming” after the sudden cancellation of his Nickelodeon series earlier this year.

The puppet chef went viral back in June, shortly after Nickelodeon pulled the plug on his show despite it running for three seasons and even winning an Emmy. Just a month later, in July, creators Rachel Larsen and Ozlem Akturk revealed that Tiny Chef had effectively been “saved” thanks to overwhelming fan support.

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Since then, Chef has leaned into social media, taken a road trip, and embraced a more reflective lifestyle of meditating, strumming his banjo, and popping up occasionally online. But this week marked a major milestone for the fuzzy green puppet: Chef’s first televised interview since the cancellation.

PBS interview teases bright future for Tiny Chef

PBS News Hour’s Stephanie Sy sat down with Tiny Chef in Los Angeles, asking how he was handling life after cancellation. “Well, I’m not going to lie. Things were a little tough there for a while,” Chef admitted. “But sometimes you’ve got to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, look around at all the wonderful things in the world. I said: ‘Cheffy, you got to find the next adventure.’”

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When asked about the support from fans, Chef offered heartfelt gratitude: “I don’t even call them fans really. They’re just friends that I haven’t met yet.”

The biggest tease, however, came from Chef’s co-creator Rachel Larsen, who hinted that a comeback may be around the corner. “I just feel really strongly in my heart that the best of Chef is to come,” she told PBS, while stressing that any next step would be taken carefully. For now, the team is focused on social media, but the optimism is clear: Chef isn’t done cooking just yet.

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

The big Football Manager interview: series boss Miles Jacobson on what went wrong with FM25, and what to expect from FM26

by admin August 29, 2025

It’s been a rough year for Football Manager. This time last summer, the ambitious FM25 was still a certainty, but while the development team at Sports Interactive remained optimistic – albeit to different degrees – soon came the first of two delays. FM25 would arrive two or three weeks later than its usual early November slot, the studio announced, with perhaps one of the first clues things weren’t going entirely smoothly.

It was fully unveiled later that month. Then, less than two weeks later, given a second, unprecedented delay to March 2025, a window that would’ve seen it launch three-quarters of the way through the football season. And in February this year it was cancelled altogether, the developer opting instead to divert all of its energy to this year’s Football Manager 26. It’s the first time in Sports Interactive’s 30-plus years of operating that they’ve failed to release an annual entry into the series.

“It’s my job to get the game out every year,” Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s long-serving studio director tells me, during an hours-long conversation at the developer’s east London HQ earlier this summer. “We’ve done that for 30 years. But I failed to release something that was good enough.”

In a spacious corner office overlooking the still-sparkling development area of the 2012 Olympic Park in Hackney Wick, surrounded by framed football shirts, studio awards and a not-insignificant amount of desktop clutter, Jacobson sits facing outwards, looking over two big sofas towards an even bigger wall-mounted TV. Unlike many of the pristine, chaperoned office tours I’ve been on over the years, this one is very much the picture of a place in active use for work. And the work on FM26, which will, if all finally goes to plan, be released some time later this year, is still very much in progress.

Jacobson, after the roughest of development years, tells me he’s “feeling much, much better about things” this time around. “We’re making huge progress every day. We’re at a stage now where we are nearly feature complete.” And, crucially: “It feels like Football Manager.” For some time, with the old version of FM25 that would morph into this year’s FM26, that wasn’t the case.

Ultimately, FM25 was delayed and then cancelled for a simple reason. “It just wasn’t fun,” as Jacobson puts it. And it went through multiple delays before that cancellation for the same reason so many other games do the same as well. The goal was to make FM25 a genuine “leap” forward from the series entries before it. It was based on a new engine, in Unity. It had an all-new UI based on tiles, cards, and a central ‘portal’ that replaced the time-honoured Inbox. There was a huge visual revamp. And ultimately, doing all of that during a regular, annualised release schedule simply proved too much. “We put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure with FM25,” Jacobson says. “We were trying to do the impossible – trying to make the impossible possible – and there were times when we thought we could do it.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

A lot of FM25’s issues were picked up on, to some degree, as far back as late last summer. “I had an inkling even before we announced,” Jacobson says, referring to the official announcement of the game on 30th September last year, “but you can’t pull an announcement when it’s ready to go because you’ve got lots of things lined up – you’ve got spend lined up, you’ve got interviews lined up, you’ve got all this stuff.”

“On paper, everything looked great. The core game was there…”

And so, “we went out, we knew a few hours later – the decision was made literally one or two days afterwards that we were going to have to move the game.” 10 days later – after a delay to go through the due process of “stock market stuff”, with Sports Interactive owned by Sega, which is publicly traded on the Japanese stock market – the studio announced the big delay to the following March, and put out the roadmap for when certain aspects of the game would be revealed. Even then, the timeline was ambitious. “The shit was flying from all directions,” as Jacobson puts it. “It became really clear really quickly that we weren’t going to be able to hit the roadmap,” simply because footage of the game just wasn’t coming out well – “because the game wasn’t in a good enough state.”

The big realisation, that FM25 was simply never going to be ready in time, came over Christmas. The whole studio took a two-week break over the holidays, during which Jacobson traditionally boots up that year’s in-development version of the game to play around with it, and come back in the new year with a fresh perspective. “I knew within an hour that we weren’t going to be able to deliver.”

“On paper, everything looked great,” Jacobson says. “The core game was there.” The user experience, however, was the big problem. “You couldn’t find things in-game. It was clunky. Some of the screens were double-loading. The actual game itself was working – graphically, we weren’t where we wanted to be. We didn’t have the big leap that we wanted; it was a very good jump, but it wasn’t a leap,” he goes on. Part of the big, generational “leap” Jacobson is referring to here is down to the shift from the old, proprietary engine Sports Interactive has been using with Football Manager for decades to a new version of Unity, but again that just proved even more challenging than expected.

That said, the issues weren’t really technical. “It wasn’t crashing a lot, it just wasn’t fun. It felt clunky.” The game almost lost its famous – or infamous, if you ask the partners of one of FM’s many ludicrously dedicated players – “one more game” factor. It was “still there, but it was really painful… I’m gonna play the next match, but I’ve got to do all this stuff first, I’ve got to go through this and it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to be painful.” And then compounding all that were the issues with navigating through the new UI itself. “People were going: I can’t find the youth squad.”

Jacobson describes an awkward wait until the new year, opting to give the team a proper break rather than breaking the company’s rule on out-of-hours communication. On the first day back in the new year, when Jacobson was still meant to be off for the holidays, he came straight in and spoke to Matt Caroll, Sports Interactive’s COO, about the realisation the game wouldn’t make it for its twice-delayed release window of March 2025. Then, “within an hour,” he was talking to Jurgen Post, the recently-returned, long-running executive who’s now COO of Sega’s West Studios, telling him simply, “I can’t put this out.”

“We’ve got a fucking great game! We didn’t have a great game in December.”

Sega, Jacobson says, was surprisingly understanding. “To be fair, Jurgen was brilliant with it – he wanted to know the reasons why. There was no screaming, or anything like that.” The studio and Sega then had to “go away and work out how it was going to affect the financials,” before presenting it fully to Sega Japan, “who were also– they weren’t happy, but they were understanding,” Jacobson says. The teams together looked into a few different options. “What if we released in June? What if we released in May, does that give you enough time?” One of those was “knocked on the head by Sega,” Jacobson says, because “commercially it wouldn’t have worked.” Another didn’t give the studio enough time to fixed what needed fixing. And so they took the third option. “Bite the bullet and cancel, and go big or go home for this year” with FM26.

That process again was complicated. “There are a lot of things that have to happen,” as Jacobson puts it, when you cancel an annualised game like Football Manager, that has all kinds of licenses and agreements – and a Japanese stock market to contend with. That conversation happened right at the start of January, for instance, but wasn’t publicly announced until the next month. Japanese stock market rules also meant that the news had to go out at 2am UK time, “which was then followed by people saying that we were trying to bury it.” Jacobson also had to record a video of himself, addressed to “everyone at Sega,” explaining all the reasons why he had opted to cancel the game. “Which was not an easy video to do.”

“January wasn’t an easy month,” he says. “If there’s such a thing as crying emoji that actually cries out of the screen, that’s very much what that month was like.”

One significant upside amongst it all, however, was that the studio managed to avoid any layoffs related to the decision. But the financial impact was just as significant. “We lost a year of revenue,” Jacobson puts it bluntly. Then came all the discussions with the various partners and license owners, including the Premier League – freshly announced, ironically, as coming to the game for the first time with FM25 – “who were all very understanding – to different levels of understanding. Some of them were more ‘Hulk’ than others when it came to their reactions,” Jacobson smiles. “But again, totally understandable, the ones that weren’t happy. We took it on the chin.”

The Premier League, for their part, were “awesome to work with,” he adds. “It was getting messages of support from them, rather than anything else. And then it was, ‘we have to alert you to these clauses…'” he jokes. “Everyone who had to get paid, got paid. We didn’t shirk any of that stuff, and all of our relationships are intact with all of the licenses – and there will be more licenses for FM26… which we look forward to shouting very, very loudly about at some point.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

Beyond all those external to the studio was the impact on Sports Interactive’s own staff. Jacobson describes the mood to me as “a mixture of relief and upset.” As well as “anger at some of the decisions that had been made… totally justifiable,” he adds. “Relief was the overarching thing, but there are some people at the studio whose confidence in the management team would absolutely have been knocked.” Notably, he adds, despite expecting some people to leave, the studio “probably had less turnover this year than normal” in terms of staff.

Some of those staff were also insistent that the studio had to at least do some kind of data update – a release of new stats, player ratings, results and other database elements to turn FM24 into a kind of makeshift FM25 to tide over fans – something the studio ultimately, and somewhat controversially, decided against. “Having now scoped the work that would be required, and despite a good initial response from many of our licensors, we cannot lift assets that we are using in FM25 and make them work in FM24 without recreating them in full,” a statement on that decision from Sports Interactive read, in late October last year.

“The same applies to the many competition rules, translations and database changes that cannot be back ported. The updated assets and data would both be required to obtain licensor approval – they cannot be separated.

“This is a substantial undertaking which would take critical resources away from delivering FM25 to the highest possible quality, which we simply cannot compromise on.”

As Jacobson puts it to me here, “there’s a bunch of different reasons” why they ultimately opted against it. “For a start with some leagues, we didn’t have the rights of the license for a data update,” he explains, “because contractually, it’s for a particular year. (Even just keeping FM24 available to buy, and available on the various subscription services it was on, took significant negotiation.)

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

Then there were more technical reasons: the data that was set to be used for FM25, and now FM26, was formatted in a “completely different” way to the old games, effectively meaning the studio would have to do the work twice. “We worked out that it was around two months’ work for one of our most senior engineers – so the licensing team would have had to drop everything, switch to this, and probably three or four months of work for them.” On top of all that, he adds, there are “lots of unofficial updates out there – so we knew that people who wanted a new update would be serviced anyway. And the logistics behind it were a nightmare. So it wasn’t that we didn’t want to do it.”

Instead, the studio’s engineers continued largely uninterrupted, while others focused on post-mortems and handling the complicated messaging. “QA and design were tasked with: if we had our time again, what would we do differently? Comms were scrabbling, trying to put a new plan together… plus we’re working out: how the fuck do we tell the consumers what’s actually going on, and the timings for that?” The work in earnest, based on an “iteration plan” from those QA and design teams, started in March. July was the end date for that, and bug-fixing the final focus in the last few months up to launch.

Much of this – the realisation that the game wasn’t fun, the delays, the cancellation itself – was down to the ambitious, perhaps over-ambitious, decision to ditch the Inbox functionality that players have known for decades in exchange for a ‘portal’ that acted as your main in-game hub, and a WhatsApp equivalent for in-game communication.

The justification was sensible enough. As Jacobson put it to me last year, “it’s very rare that you see a football manager with a laptop” in the real game. “They’ve got their tablet, and they’ve got their phone, so we wanted to move into that more. The football world never really had email!”

Back in his office, Jabocson starts to explain the problems and how they were resolved, before ultimately conceding that showing is a lot easier than telling. He boots up his PC and switches on the giant television on the wall, then starts up a development version of the game. Previously, he explains, there were three windows of equal size, in vertical columns from left to right, replacing your old Inbox system of a narrow scrolling list on the left and the ’email’ itself on the right. But just parsing the information there was difficult. Most English-speaking humans want to read from left to right, but often the key information would be in the middle pane. The right-hand one would feel redundant, and the left a less-clear version of what the old email list could’ve done anyway.

Beyond that, the wider navigation around the game was also hugely streamlined. In FM25 there would’ve been a single navigation bar along the top right, Jacobson explains, which had buttons for the “portal, squad, recruitment, match day, club, and career”. Within each of those sections you’d find “tiles and cards”, the system briefly outlined with FM25’s initial unveiling last year.

Therein lay the problems. Playtesters, including FM’s developers and Jacobson himself, couldn’t find things – “if you can’t find something in-game, you made a mistake,” Jacobson says, of its UX design. “We brought some consumers in, and the consumer scores weren’t bad – we were getting sevens from the consumers. But I want nines.”

“Did we make the right decision? Yes. Did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No.”

That iteration time, between March and July this year, has made what Jacobson feels is a significant difference. Some of the changes are remarkably simple – to the point where it’s a surprise they weren’t included in the first place. There are now back and forward buttons, for instance, as there are in FM24 and others before it, that were removed for FM25. There’s a secondary navigation bar below the main one, showing you all the sub-sections within those main ones without you having to click around to find things. There’s a configurable bookmarks section, where you can add instant navigation to specific screens of your choice, and a search bar. Which, again, feels like an astonishing omission in the first place. As one developer put it to Jacobson after trying out the improved UI, compared to the old FM25 one, FM26’s feels like “a warm hug.”

Jacobson, for his part, also feels significantly better about it. “I don’t believe we’re going to be disappointing people when we bring the game out. I don’t believe that we are going to lose the reputation that we’ve worked really hard to build up in the 30, 31 years I’ve been here.” Most importantly: “We’ve got a fucking great game! We didn’t have a great game in December, and genuinely that’s what it completely comes down to. We didn’t have a great game.”

Would Jacobson make the same decision again, in hindsight – to move to the new engine, tear up the usual Football Manager playbook and go for this big, ambitious “leap” that ultimately failed with FM25? “My answer is different on different days,” he replies.

“As a studio, we’ve always been really ambitious with what we’ve done, with what we’ve tried to do. We had reached the end of the line with the previous engine, so we needed to do something.” Ultimately, he says, it was “absolutely the right decision” to change engines when the studio did – in fact they “really didn’t have a choice but to change the technology, because we’d reached that point where we were breaking the technology that we had.”

“Did we make the right decision? Yes,” he continues. “Did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No. Are there changes that I would have made to the decisions, if I had my time again? Yes. But I don’t lose sleep over those because you can’t manage them – and everything in life learns from the mistakes that they make.

“There might be some people in the studio who disagree with my answers on those, and think that we should have just carried on as-is. It wouldn’t have been right for anyone. If we had, we would have just stagnated. And stagnation is not good.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

As we wrap things up, I try to tease out a little more detail on when FM26 might finally arrive. For the first time in an age, Football Manager fans who’ve planned holidays around the series’ near-clockwork release in early November (and ‘advanced access’ period of a few weeks immediately before it), don’t have a clear idea of what to expect. A “broadly similar time of year,” is what Jacobson is willing to give up on the record, and “there will definitely be a period where people can try the game, for sure, but whether it’s called a beta or it’s early access, we will make the decision down the line.”

For now, there’s still work to do. “We’ve got some bugs to fix, we’ve got some little bits of iteration to do,” he says. “Today’s problem is that we’ve got some issues with lighting in the match engine – so I’m not going to say it’s calm, because it never is – making games is really hard.”

The difference this time, however, compared to the somewhat frazzled Jacobson I spoke to in August last year, is that he’s saying all this with most of Sports Interactive’s toughest work behind them. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he smiles. “I’m saying that quite calmly.”

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August 29, 2025 0 comments

Snake looks up while holding a silenced pistol.

Game Reviews

An In Interview With The Devs

by admin August 22, 2025

It’s an exciting time for Metal Gear Solid fans such as myself. We’re not only about to get a remake of one of the best MGS games of all time, but also a new take on the classic stealth gameplay that made it so memorable. Earlier this month, I and several other journalists were invited to a Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater event to get some lengthy time in with the game and to check out the super cool installation at NYC’s Lightbox studio that housed a recreation of the iconic flower bed of the game’s final showdown. Along with Michael McWhertor of Polygon and Destin Legarie of The Destin Channel, I got to chat with Delta’s producers, Noriaki Okamura and Yuji Korekado.

What follows is a transcript of our roundtable conversation, with some slight edits for brevity and clarity. Konami provided a translator for our interview.

Michael McWhertor, Polygon: There’s been a lot of remakes in recent years, especially at Konami, and I wondered when you started working on this project how much you wanted to do this as a reinterpretation, or as a straight remake. Did you wanna add to it? Did you want to make Metal Gear Solid 3 through the lens of 2025? What was that approach like? Was it a straight remake or something else?

Noriaki Okamura, Producer, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater: This is something we contemplated at the very beginning when we were starting this project: What would be the best way to do a remake of MGS3? And in those conversations what we ultimately decided on for Delta is [that] the concept of Delta is to be able to have new Metal Gear fans, new Metal Gear players to experience the original as is, as much as possible. Obviously we did the modernization that we need to so that it will be more fluid and more accepting to modern gamers and how they play games but in order for us to respect what was originally great about the game, we wanted to keep it as is as much as possible.

Allowing a different kind of [camera] angle, different kind of play style changes the thrill, the nervousness of needing to hide.

Destin Legarie, The Destin Channel: You’ve had a few preview sessions and you’ve gotten some feedback online. What changes have you been able to implement based on that online feedback today?

Yuji Korekado, Creative Producer, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater: So one of the things we did is that, after we announced that we’re gonna do a remake, obviously there were a lot of reactions from a lot of Metal Gear fans and one of the things that really stood out to us is some of the additional modes that were, you know, removed, and because this game has been re-released so many times, and so some of them were they really wanted Snake Versus Monkey back, or, like, the Secret Theater videos back. After we we saw that there’s so much demand for it we decided, OK, what can we do to make those modes come back and what kind of way would be best to bring them back? So we did look into that kind of feedback.

Destin Legarie: Specifically, I’ve seen a lot of feedback about some of the facial animations. Has that feedback been taken to heart?

Yuji Korekado: Yes, we did get that kind of feedback. We heard them loud and clear and especially after we released some of the earlier trailers, that’s definitely something that was pointed out to us and like I said, we want to make sure the experience that we provide in the remake is the same kind of experience that the people who played the original experience had. We wanna make sure that wow factor is still there, so after that we definitely wanted to make sure that the quality is on par to what a Metal Gear game needs to be.

Claire Jackson, Kotaku: What was it like balancing modern stealth mechanics with the stealth challenges of the original game?

Yuji Korekado: One of the things we did for Delta is to provide two types of what we call “Play Styles.” We have the Legacy Style which you can play kind of with a similar camera and controls as the original, and the new style you can play with more modern controls and a third-person camera setting. And when we allowed that new type of play style, we had to make some adjustments, some rebalancing because the way that you can now see the map changes how you need to hide and what you can see and what you can look out for. So one of the things we changed was the character animation, character motions and also the reactions and the responses of of some of the NPCs, the AI as well, and we needed to do that because allowing a different kind of angle, different kind of play style changes the thrill, the nervousness of needing to hide. So this is something that we had to go back and do a lot of testing with, utilizing modern technology to make it feel [like] that same nervousness as you were playing in the original style, but with a new modern control and camera.

Destin Legarie: Do you feel that modernization might make it too easy? Because I remember when [the GameCube remake of Metal Gear Solid, The Twin Snakes came out, a lot of the criticism was that having that extra perspective made gameplay easier and the game easy.

Yuji Korekado: To simply put it, yes, we knew this would happen, obviously. So, we had to do a lot of rebalancing between when you’re playing the Legacy Style versus the New Style, we had to make sure that the difficulty level would still match whatever playstyle you’re playing with and not make things too easy or too difficult.

The way that [Metal Gear Solid 3] was built originally was already perfect to begin with.

Claire Jackson: Does the team have a preference between the original, overhead camera or or the third person one?

Yuji Korekado: So, for [me] personally, [I love] both. Obviously modern players are more used to the third person camera and you know, specific types of controls. So for [new players] we want them to play with New Style first and because we think that this is the best way for them to get immersed into Metal Gear’s world in that way that they’re more used to. And once they cleared the game it will be fun for them to go back and replay the game in Legacy Style and see, “oh my goodness, there’s a whole new way of playing this game that I didn’t even know about,” so we would love for them to enjoy both Play Styles.

Michael McWhertor: I’m wondering if any technical issues came up developing certain aspects of the game? And I’m specifically thinking about how easy it was on the PlayStation 2 to, say, change the date, on your PlayStation 2 [to defeat the sniper boss, The End], whereas now on a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X or a PC, it’s, it’s more difficult to change the date on your system because it’s connected to the internet, and I’m wondering if you have a technical solution to that issue or if any other technical issues popped up?

Yuji Korekado: So just with how we were able to adapt [the game] to the consoles and platforms back then, we were able to do that for all the the supported platforms that [Delta] is going to come out on today, and you know there’s different features on different types of platforms and features that we wanted to incorporate as well. For instance, we like the [rumble] feedback on the [PS5’s DualSense]. These are the types of things that we did really look into to make sure that we do what we can to best adapt [the game] to modern consoles as much as possible. In terms of technical difficulties, we didn’t really have too much, yeah.

Destin Legarie: I know we’re here for Delta today, and we’re running low on time. I have so much that I want to ask but I would get in trouble if I didn’t ask about Metal Gear [Solid] 4. Is there any hope you can give for fans about MGS4 possibly being in Volume 2 [of the Master Collection] or is it being worked on in any capacity?

Noriaki Okamura: This is something that we’re always, always thinking about: What is our next move in terms of the Metal Gear series, and we are aware that a lot of fans really want MGS4 back because it’s currently not playable on any current hardware or platforms, and this is something we do want to address at some point, making sure that fans can have a chance to play it once again. Unfortunately we can’t give you any more details other than that, but yeah, hopefully in the future this is something we can do.

Claire Jackson: Were there any unique challenges or surprises when it came to preserving the cinematic flair of the original [Metal Gear Solid 3]?

Yuji Korekado: So for the cutscenes, we had to remake everything: The character models, the level, the stages, we had to do it all from scratch. And when we did that, one of our concerns was that even though everything looks amazing, if we still kept the same facing, the same camera angles, would it still hold up? And so once everything was done and we decided to create all the cinematics using the same camera, using the same background music, voice acting, we were blown away because the way that [Metal Gear Solid 3] was built originally was already perfect to begin with and the the modern graphics just enhanced that to the fullest. So we were very surprised that, you know, even to this day the way it was originally made was, you know, [it] didn’t need to be retouched.

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August 22, 2025 0 comments