r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 42m ago
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 45m ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 46m ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 46m ago
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Yep! About the evolution of a genre. We all love the addictive chaos of Vampire Survivors. The "bullet heaven" formula has consumed hundreds of hours of our lives. But let's be honest - most of these games are strictly 2D, flat experiences where you just stand still and watch the enemies melt.
Well, an indie developer going by the pseudonym Mixidev is looking to change that. They have just dropped the gameplay trailer and Steam page for their ambitious new project, Go Next!. This isn't just another clone; it’s a 3D action roguelike that injects high-octane parkour and verticality into the familiar horde slaying loop.
The core gameplay follows the automatic firing concept - you don't need to aim. Instead, your focus is entirely on survival through high speed mobility. You are constantly surrounded by hundreds of advancing foes, and standing still for even a second means guaranteed death.
The main character is incredibly agile. You can sprint, climb sheer castle walls, slide across the ground, perform double jumps, and dive-bomb onto boss heads from great heights. The movement system emphasizes momentum, making positioning on the arena the single most important strategic factor.
More, More, More
The developer is promising a massive amount of content for the final release in November 2026:
It’s worth noting that the promotion of Go Next! has been accompanied by some fiery takes from the developer. On social media, Mixidev has been openly roasting big-budget AAA blockbusters, contrasting their solo project’s efficiency against the rumored multi-billion dollar costs of Grand Theft Auto 6. They’ve even mocked modern upscaling tech, claiming good visuals don't need DLSS 5.
When critics point out visual similarities to other indie hits, the creator responds with sarcasm, publicly thanking "haters" for mentioning other popular titles, which inadvertently boosts their own game's SEO rankings.
In an unusual move for a Steam page, the developer has officially admitted to using AI. They clearly state that the Claude neural network was actively used to optimize the technical side of things and assist in debugging the source code.
Additionally, Go Next! will feature online co-op, full controller support, and cloud saves.
If you want to see if your thumbs can handle 3D bullet-hell parkour, you don't have to wait until November 2026. A free demo is available on Steam right now.
What about you, folks? Are you ready to take your "survivors" addiction to the third dimension?
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 46m ago
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Let's talk about the unsung heroes of game design. While we often focus on massive open worlds or branching narratives, sometimes the true genius lies in the smallest details.
Looking back at the last decade and a half of sprawling RPGs, it’s hard to ignore the massive impact of one specific mechanic: lockpicking. Specifically, the system perfected by Bethesda Game Studios.
This tactile, instantly recognizable minigame made its debut back in Fallout 3. It was an immediate hit - it felt satisfying, intuitive, and added a genuine layer of tension to exploring the Capital Wasteland. Naturally, the studio carried this winning formula over to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where it became an iconic part of the adventuring experience.
What’s truly surprising is just how influential this single mechanic became for the entire industry. The "Bethesda method" of lockpicking, involving rotating the bobby pin and finding the sweet spot with the screwdriver, was so successful that it was adopted by numerous other developers. Most notably, a very similar system can be found in the Dying Light series, proving that sometimes, you really don't need to reinvent the wheel if it’s already rolling perfectly.
It is genuinely difficult to find a lockpicking mechanic that feels more "native" more integrated into the natural flow of gameplay - than this one.
However, as much as we love the classics, it’s time to look ahead. With the highly anticipated Gothic Remake on the horizon, we are keeping our fingers crossed that its developers manage to create a lockpicking system just as addictive and popular. We need mechanics that don't hold your hand, reminding us that adventuring in the Valley of Mines shouldn't always be a walk in the park.
What about you, folks? Do you still get excited every time you start wiggling that bobby pin, or are you ready for a new challenge? Let us know in the comments!
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/khalid-fhfhlhlh • 3h ago
I really liked many games despite being unfairly called horrible games.
Take Watch Dogs 1 for example. I don't care what anyone says. I loved it.
Still I understand that players have a right to get angry and disappointed especially when they get lied to by businesses. And this is why I think producers ought not to falsely advertise.
Nevertheless I embraced Kratos' lesson.
Keep your expectations low. And you will never get disappointed.
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/daverate • 4h ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
⚠️IMPORTANT! SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE MAIN TWIST⚠️
So!
Arthur Morgan has tuberculosis. He found out in Chapter 5. He has known he was dying since before you did.
The game's final act is about what a dying man chooses to do with the time he has left. And Rockstar made a decision so specific and so cold that it took the gaming press months to articulate it fully after release.
The players who tried to be good - who accumulated high honor, who helped strangers, who returned stolen horses and paid off debts and chose the merciful option in every encounter - received a better ending. Arthur watched a sunrise. The music was gentle. The weight of what he'd done with his last days was present but resolved.
The players who played low honor - who robbed and murdered and took the violent option consistently - received a darker ending. More brutal. Less transcendent.
This sounds like a conventional morality system. It isn't.
To accumulate high honor in Red Dead Redemption 2, you have to participate fully in Arthur's life. You help the camp. You interact with the Dutch's schemes. You go on the missions. You do the things that the gang asks of you.
Many of those things are terrible. Robbery. Intimidation. Violence against people who don't deserve it. The honor system rewards helping strangers and punishes cruelty - but the main story requires you to do cruel things as part of Arthur's existence in Dutch's gang.
High honor doesn't mean innocent. It means that despite the violence you were complicit in, you also chose mercy when the choice was yours to make.
The honor system exists to measure investment, not morality.
A player who genuinely tries to be good in RDR2 has to pay attention. Has to engage with the camp, the strangers, the world. Has to care about Arthur's choices. Has to feel the weight of the violence they're complicit in because they were trying not to add to it unnecessarily.
By the time Arthur's diagnosis arrives, a high-honor player has been living inside his decisions for forty hours. They have tried to make him better than his circumstances. They have partially succeeded and partially failed. They know what he was trying to be.
The ending lands differently for these players because they have invested in the aspiration - not just the outcome.
Low honor players experience a technically complete story. High-honor players experience something closer to grief.
Rockstar knew that players who cared most about Arthur, who tried hardest to give him dignity - would feel his death most completely. The reward for moral engagement is not a happy ending. It's an ending proportional to your investment.
The honor system doesn't tell you who Arthur is. It tells you how much you cared about who he was trying to become.
And then it uses that caring against you.
What was your honor level at the end of RDR2 and did the ending land differently than you expected based on how you'd played?
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and we are all out of gum. We all remember the classic Duke Nukem 3D. It was a revolutionary title for its time, pushing the limits of Ken Silverman’s Build Engine. But what if we told you that the technology from the game has officially become reality?
Recently, a video of "gameplay" from Duke Nukem 3D went absolutely viral on social media, showcasing something truly unprecedented. The footage was published by Voxel Photonics, a company currently developing actual volumetric 3D displays. Unlike your flat monitors, these displays project physical, tangible 3D light images that occupy real space.
To show off the raw power of their hardware, they chose the legendary FPS as their canvas.
"Here is Duke Nukem 3D running in a physical 3D space on a Voxel Photonics display."
The result is nothing short of mesmerizing. Viewers were stunned to see the retro sprites and environments existing not on a flat plane, but floating as a physical object in the air.
Commenters immediately drew the ultimate comparison, noting that the real-world technology has finally brought the "Holoduke" to life. As fans of the original game remember, the Holoduke was an in-game gadget that projected a 3D hologram of Duke to confuse and trick enemies. Now, we can do it in our living rooms.
This incredible footage offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future of display technology, proving that classic games can still teach us new tricks.
What about you, folks? Are you ready to play Doom or Quake floating in the middle of your kitchen?
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
Robert Kurvitz had been building the world of Elysium since 2006.
Not as a game. As a tabletop RPG setting - a world he ran campaigns in, wrote fiction for, developed with collaborators over years of private creative work. The city of Revachol. The failed communist revolution. The political factions competing over the ruins of an ideology. The detective Harry Du Bois, whose backstory Kurvitz had been writing for a decade before anyone outside his circle knew he existed.
When Kurvitz and his colleagues at ZA/UM decided to make Disco Elysium a video game, they weren't adapting source material. They were translating fifteen years of private mythology into an interactive form.
The decision that makes Disco Elysium structurally unlike any other RPG is also the decision that most directly reflects its literary origins.
In most RPGs, skills are numbers. Higher Persuasion means more dialogue options unlock. Higher Strength means more combat options. The skills are mechanical multipliers, not presences.
In Disco Elysium, every skill is a voice.
Your Electrochemistry skill doesn't just determine whether you can analyze chemical compounds. It has opinions about drugs and alcohol that it shares unprompted. It craves. It advocates. It is a distinct perspective on existence that exists in permanent conversation with the other 23 skills competing for Harry's attention.
Your Inland Empire doesn't just affect intuition checks. It experiences visions. It makes Harry see things that may or may not be real and doesn't apologize for the ambiguity.
Your Shivers - the skill that connects Harry to the city of Revachol describe the city and it communes with it. Activating Shivers produces passages of prose that read less like game text and more like poetry, describing the city as a living entity with its own grief, its own memory, its own relationship to its history of violence and failure.
This design is only possible because Kurvitz spent fifteen years writing a world before he built a game in it. The skills speak in distinctive voices because Kurvitz had been writing in those voices - for characters, for locations, for the accumulated texture of a place, long before he needed to assign them to game mechanics.
Harry Du Bois is a fully realized character because he existed as a concept, as a figure in stories, as the subject of Kurvitz's thinking about failure and identity and the specific exhaustion of a man who used to believe in things, for years before he became a protagonist.
The result is a game where the writing doesn't support the mechanics. The mechanics support the writing. Every skill check, every dialogue option, every failed roll is an opportunity for the world's voice to speak - in the specific register of whichever aspect of Harry's fractured self is most active in that moment.
Disco Elysium won four BAFTAs in 2020. It is studied in university game design programs as a masterwork of interactive narrative. It has sold millions of copies to an audience that includes many people who rarely play RPGs but responded to its writing.
The studio that made it no longer exists in its original form. The people who built Elysium don't own it anymore.
The world Kurvitz spent fifteen years building is owned by a company he no longer works for.
That irony belongs in the game.
Which skill in Disco Elysium felt most like a genuinely distinct personality and which one surprised you most with what it had to say?
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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The AI model independently controlled the character and carefully considered each subsequent action, based on screenshots, the character's position, and the camera's field of view.
The most powerful AI model took 24 hours to complete the game and consumed tokens worth almost $600. For comparison, the average gamer completes Portal in 3-4 hours.
It seems that, in some ways, human players are still superior.
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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Square Enix has just unveiled some merchandise that perfectly targets our nostalgia centers. They have successfully re-invented the classic music box, dragging it kicking and screaming into the millennial era.
Introducing the Mini Melody TV collection. These aren't just simple wind-up boxes; they are detailed electronic dioramas that perfectly simulate playing a classic Final Fantasy title on a chunky, old-school television set.
Here’s how the magic works: each unit features a screen displaying a static, pixel-art scene from the game. When you press a button on the front, the screen lights up, bringing the scene to life, and the electronic speaker plays the iconic main theme from that specific entry.
The collection covers the first six mainline games in the series. You will be able to purchase them as a complete collector’s set or individually in "blind boxes," because Square Enix loves a good gacha mechanic.
Sales are scheduled to begin on January 29, 2027. It’s a bit of a wait, but it gives you time to save up.
It’s a brilliant piece of desk candy that combines visual and audio nostalgia in one neat package. Honestly, it makes you wonder what other soundtracks deserve to be "trapped" in this format.
Speaking of, what games would you want to see get the Mini Melody TV treatment? Personally, I’m holding out for Chrono Trigger. Let us know your picks in the comments below!
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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By the way, the physics of the "eyes" wobbling are spot on.
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
David Brevik had a vision for Diablo.
It was a dungeon crawler. Procedurally generated levels. Permadeath. A gothic atmosphere of unrelenting darkness. Players descending beneath the town of Tristram toward the demon Diablo level by level, making strategic decisions at every step.
The key word: strategic. Brevik's original design was turn-based. Every action - movement across the grid, attacks against enemies, spell casting, item use, would play out in discrete turns, like a board game or a classic CRPG.
This was not an unusual design choice for 1994. The genre precedents - Nethack, Rogue, the early Ultima games, were predominantly turn-based. The conventions of the dungeon crawler were built on strategic thinking rather than reactive speed.
The twenty-minute experiment!
At some point during early development, one of Blizzard's engineers implemented real-time movement as a prototype test. Not a design decision. Not a proposal. A technical experiment to see what the underlying systems could support.
The team played it.
For twenty minutes.
And then they scrapped the turn-based design entirely.
What they discovered?
The shift from turn based to real time transformed the emotional register of the game completely. Turn based Diablo was a tactical puzzle - thoughtful, considered, strategic. Real-time Diablo was visceral. The sound of weapons hitting enemies, the spray of blood, the constant movement through darkness, these elements became the core of the experience rather than the backdrop to decision making.
The gothic atmosphere that Brevik had designed for a contemplative tactical game turned out to work even better as the context for frantic combat. The darkness became threatening rather than atmospheric. The enemies became responsive threats rather than strategic obstacles.
So! What the experiment created?
Real time Diablo shipped in 1996 and sold 2.5 million copies. It established the action RPG genre as a commercial force and produced conventions - isometric perspective, loot drops, skill trees, procedural dungeon generation - that shaped every action RPG released in the following three decades.
Path of Exile. Torchlight. Grim Dawn. Hades. Every game in this lineage traces its mechanical trace to a design decision made in twenty minutes by a team playing a prototype that was never meant to ship.
The turn based version of Diablo would have been interesting. The game it became changed the industry.
Brevik's original vision was coherent and thought-through. The engineer's prototype was impulsive and informal. The twenty minute playtest that changed everything was conducted without agenda or expectation.
Some of the most significant design decisions in gaming history were made by people who were playing rather than planning. The experiment produced what the design document couldn't anticipate.
Which game do you think would have been completely different and possibly better or worse, if one early design decision had gone the other way?
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
Every game developer in the world has to stop using it. What are you deleting?
Pick ONE. And don't just name it - convince everyone else that you're right!
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 11h ago
Arkham Asylum in Batman: Arkham Asylum has always created a sense of dread with its sinister and disturbing atmosphere. Its eerie aesthetic was largely built around its twisted Gothic architecture - abandoned, decaying, and gradually falling apart throughout the game. Buildings and interiors that were once beautiful and imposing had been heavily altered and destroyed by the extremely rough treatment of the only people responsible for maintaining the asylum.
The facility housed Gotham City's most dangerous and disturbed criminals, and the psychiatric hospital was supposed to break them and drive them insane. But time itself had taken an even greater toll on the architects' original vision.
But did you know that the original concept for Arkham Asylum looked very different from the nightmare we saw in the game?
Originally, the asylum was envisioned as a massive castle. The structure featured its own inner gardens, and the castle's original beauty had not yet been lost. The Gothic influence was much stronger, with even more statues throughout the interior, many of which had retained their original appearance.
The main entrance was supposed to be protected by gigantic gates, with two grand staircases leading up to them. This grotesque design gave the asylum the appearance of a terrifying, impenetrable fortress - a place few people would ever dare to enter.
We never got to see this vision in Arkham Asylum.
The gigantic gates and staircases were replaced with ordinary gates hidden in the forest. We see them at the beginning of the game, when Batman and the Joker arrive at the asylum. Later, we're shown the interior in a cutscene.
By then, almost nothing remained of the castle's original, refined design.
All of the artwork was taken from the book The Art of Rocksteady's Batman.
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 14h ago
In the gaming industry, it's generally accepted that if a shooter puts a gun in your hands, the goal is to shoot everything that moves. But sometimes developers pull a fast one, and 4A Games' Metro 2033 is a prime example. This is a game carefully monitors your behavior and presents you with the bill at the very end.
The plot sends us to a grim future following a nuclear war. The survivors huddle in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro, fighting over every bullet. On the surface, mutants have taken over, chief among them the mysterious creatures known as "The Dark Ones."
Unlike humans, who are slowly degrading underground, The Dark Ones have perfectly adapted to radiation. But the main thing is that they are not mindless beasts at all. They sincerely want peace and are trying to make contact with humanity.
The problem is that their only means of communication is powerful telepathy. The fragile psyche of an average Metro dweller simply cannot withstand such mental pressure; people go insane or die from sheer terror. Naturally, in response to these attempts to "talk," the Metro declares total war on them, considering their only goal to be annihilation.
Our protagonist, Artyom, is a unique guy. Possessing a special psychic makeup, he is the only one capable of withstanding the telepathic contact and understanding the true motives of The Dark Ones. This is his mission, his gift, and his curse.
But this is where the brilliant mechanic of "hidden karma" comes into play. The game does not show you a good/evil morality meter. Instead, it keeps a tally of your actions. Do you ruthlessly finish off wounded enemies? Do you walk past beggars asking for help? Do you refuse to give a child a single bullet? Accumulate enough selfishness and Artyom will simply fail to understand the telepathic message of The Dark Ones. To him, they will remain enemies.
The finale becomes the logical conclusion of your journey. If you played as a ruthless raider, you will personally press the launch button. The missiles will fly toward the lair of The Dark Ones, erasing them from the face of the earth forever.
And that is when that exact moment hits - the credits, the screen fades to white, the realization sets in. You have made a terrible mistake. You destroyed an absolutely innocent race that was reaching out a hand of friendship to you, having succumbed to the herd mentality of the Metro. Metro 2033 brutally punishes you not with a "Game Over" screen in combat, but with the burden of a guilty conscience and the realization that the bad ending was your own, conscious (even if made in ignorance) choice.
Perhaps this is one of the most powerful moments in the history of shooters. Play good games, friends, and think about the consequences.
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r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 14h ago
