Connecting Worlds will be released across the globe in the spring of next year, via Disney+.

The Hideo Kojima documentary is said to promise a "creative journey into the mind of a video games icon", giving us a "rare insight" into Kojima's creative process.

Many famous faces have contributed to this project, including the likes of Norman Reedus - who is currently working with Kojima on Death Stranding's sequel - and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

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During the Genshin Impact Version 4.3 special program, HoYoVerse showed off more details about new upcoming playable characters, Navia and Chevreuse, and the returning ones Ayaka, Raiden Shogun, and Yoimiya. As a reminder, both of the Fontaine characters will be Ousia ones.

Navia will be a five-star Geo Claymore character who works best with her allies, and she takes advantage of the Crystallize Elemental Reaction. Whenever a character in the party gets an Elemental Shard that she creates, Navia gains a Crystal Shrapnel charge. At max, she can have six at a time. The more Crystal Shrapnel stacks she has, she will fire more shots from her Skill, Ceremonial Crystalshot. You can also hold down the Skill button to manually aim. Navia’s Burst can deal AoE Geo DMG.

Chevreuse will be a four-star Pyro Polearm character who can pull out a musket in combat. She works best with other Pyro or Electro characters, and she excels in an Overloaded-focused composition. When she uses her Skill, she uses her musket to deal AoE Pyro DMG, She can also temporarily heal the active character. Like Navia, Chevreuse can also hold down the Skill button to enter aiming mode. If the party triggers the Overloaded reaction, then Chevreuse can deal more damage. Finally, her Burst can deal Aoe Pyro DMG, with secondary explosive shells dealing Pyro DMG after a delay.

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Epic has ramped up its plans to establish Fortnite as a metaverse with the launch of Lego Fortnite – the debut product of a long-term partnership with Lego, and the first of three key release within Fortnite over the coming days.

Going live as a new mode in Fortnite yesterday (December 7), Lego Fortnite is a survival-focused co-operative game where players can explore worlds made out of Lego, build villages, and take on monsters and pirates together.

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Today’s the HoYoVerse 4.3 Special Program day for Genshin Impact, which means three new Primogem codes. People can claim them on December 8, 2023 or until the number of available codes run out.

Here are the Genshin Impact Primogem Codes from Special Program 4.3

Every time one of these showcases goes on, HoYoVerse shares three codes people can redeem in the game. Each one gives a person 100 Primogems. They also all include a secondary bonus, like Hero’s Wits experience books, Mystic Enhancement Ores for weapons, and Mora. All told, you can pull once on the gacha banner if you redeem all three, as one pull is 160 Primogems.

Here are the codes you need to pop into the game:

• UBRQC4MCT4PZ: 100 Primogems, 5 Hero’s Wits
• 8BQ9CMMVS5PM: 100 Primogems, 50,000 Mora
• RS99D5LVTM6V: 100 Primogems, 10 Mystic Enhancement Ores

I don't know if you've been for a hike recently, but I often feel like I live each hike twice. There's the thinking about the hike - planning it, walking through it in my head - and then there's the actual hike, where shoelaces break, my foot gets stuck in a cattle grate, I realise I forgot something or I read the map wrong. The works.

I struggle to tell which of these hikes is more real - or rather if there's any meaningful difference in the degree of realness of each one. It reminds me of a brilliant short story - maybe my favourite short story ever - by Mark Helprin. In The Schreuderspritze, Wallich, a young photographer, I think, is lost in grief following the death of his wife and child. He goes to the Alps and decides to climb one of the trickiest mountains. He spends the rest of the story preparing - getting his mind ready, doing exercises, buying the necessary equipment. Then over the course of three nights, he dreams the ascent. Then he goes home.

This brings us - about time - to A Highland Song, which is our game of the week. A Highland Song's the latest game from Inkle, and it's about going on a journey through the Scottish Highlands, climbing peaks, scrabbling through heather, trying to cut a path through nature.

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One of the most acclaimed games of the year is finally available for Xbox, as Larian Studios released Baldur's Gate 3 during The Game Awards.

The RPG was originally only available for PlayStation 5 and PC, with Larian citing technical issues on Xbox as the reason the port was delayed. Specifically, the studio was struggling to get split-screen co-op working on both the high-end Xbox Series X and the low-end Series S.

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Nintendo has added three more classic N64 games to its Switch Online expansion pack: 1080° Snowboarding, Harvest Moon 64 and Jet Force Gemini.

With these latest additions, we will all be able to shred it on the slopes with some sick flips and spins (or, in my case, go barrelling down into a snowy heap) before nipping over to do a spot farming. Then, we can head to space, where our craft is decked out with a pair of hanging dice.

You can watch a little teaser for them below.

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Grand Theft Auto 6's first trailer has resulted in an M-class star's worth of reaction videos from YouTubers across the globe, but one that stands out from the army of gurning thumbnails is the response of Mike York. York is a professional animator who worked at Rockstar for 6 years, designing animations for both Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. Now he runs his own YouTube channel, York Reacts, and naturally he had some things to say about GTA6's trailer.

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Peacock has renewed its Twisted Metal TV adaptation for a second season.

Anthony Mackie, who both starred and worked as an executive producer on the first series, announced its renewal during last night's Game Awards. "Prepare to get your motor revving, 'cos you're going on another ride," Mackie proclaimed at the event.

Peacock went on to share its own announcement on YouTube, showing Twisted Metal's Sweet Tooth hacking away at the screen. You can have a watch below.

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Morning! With the GTA 6 trailer released, and the night of Geoff done with, we thought it might be handy to gather together a few of the other things that happened this week in case you missed them. This is not an exhaustive list by any means - it was a busy week.

Firstly, don't let A Highland Song pass you by. The latest game from Inkle is "a magical sonnet hidden beneath a game." It's unusual and very special.

And it wasn't the only game reviewed this week. Elsewhere, Ubisoft takes a trip to the world of the Na'vi, with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Our piece from Vikki is currently a review in progress.

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Bookended by the long-awaited trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI (which rapidly passed 100m views to become the most-watched game reveal ever) and the trailer-fest of the Game Awards, this week has given us a lot of glimpses of in-development games – but perhaps more than anything else, it's been a great week for aficionados of games you won't be playing until 2025 at the earliest.

With a few notable exceptions, what we saw this week was mostly the beginning of the process of building hype for games that will appear in 2025 and beyond, which makes it hard to ignore the point raised by many of the analysts James spoke to about the GTA 6 trailer this week: that 2024 is looking a little sparse on the release calendar front, and it's hard to see what the drivers of industry growth will be in the coming 12 months or so.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: re-freezing the Arctic, re-visiting cosy corners, and volleyball with toasters.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

Where I live, it's the time of year where the weather is cold, rain is constantly in the air, and generally the idea of going outside is not an inviting one. This is the time of year where I like to grab a relaxing game and delve into another world while burrowing myself under two blankets. This time around, I went back to a game that I've not touched since February 2023 - Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

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Larian Studios and Remedy led The Game Awards last night, with Baldur's Gate 3 winning six awards including Game of the Year, and Alan Wake 2 taking home three of the eight it was nominated for.

Aside from Game of the Year, Baldur's Gate 3 was awarded Best RPG, Best Multiplayer Game, Best Community Support, and the Player's Choice category, while actor Neil Newbon won Best Performance for his role as Astarion.

Alan Wake 2 picked up three accolades, including Best Narrative, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction.

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Gawd, it's like hyping yourself up before diving into a freezing cold ice lake. Okay, okay, okay. Brave face. Hey, it's time for The Game Awards 2023, everybody! Towards the end of every year, we all get to enjoy (or in our case, give up our evenings and ruin our fingers to the tune of) one of the gaming industry's biggest events. The Game Awards is not only an awards ceremony - it's a lavish smorgasbord of video game announcements, trailers, and news stretching into the early hours of the morning. At least for us Brits.

In case you don't have the time to sit through the entire multi-hour livestream, we've done the hard work and put together a list of every noteworthy trailer and announcement that was shown at this year's The Game Awards. You can get started reading; I'm just gonna... shut my eyes for a bit.

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Mecha Break is an new multiplayer co-op mech game by Seasun Games that premiered during The Game Awards tonight. Fans of games like Armored Core VI and Zone of the Enders may want to keep it on their radar. 

The game puts you in the cockpit of a variety of mech suits, which you can customize the look and weapons of, to take on other players across a variety of modes. The biggest battlefield is a 48-player battle royale. If you’d rather play alongside friends, a co-op option allows three-to-six players to team up to complete specialized missions. Other destinations include a 3v3 arena mode and a 6v6 battlefield mode. See the game in action below.

Mecha Break currently has no release window or announced platforms.

Prosecutors against Shinji Aoba, the perpetrator of the 2019 Kyoto Animation arson attack, are seeking the death penalty. The Kyoto District Court will announce its final verdict on January 25, 2024. [Thanks, ANN, NHK, Livedoor!]

As a refresher, the Kyoto Animation arson attack took place on July 18, 2019 when Aoba set fire to Kyoto Animation’s Studio 1 building. This fire killed 36 people and injured 34. This makes it one of the deadliest massacres in Japan since the end of World War II. Aoba suspected the studio of plagiarizing a novel he wrote. He had submitted it to Kyoto Animation as part of the studio’s contest but did not win. 

Always-online multiplayer shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League won’t stay that way forever. Rocksteady Studios confirmed the apparent live service game will get an offline story mode sometime after launch in 2024.

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EA have announced Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a side-scrolling metroidvania from Surgent Studios, the developer founded by voice actor Abubakar Salim. It's being published under the EA Originals label, and is inspired by the myths of African Bantu cultures. It's also something of a memorial project, shaped by Salim's own experiences of grief, though you might not get that impression from the trailer, which is a blaze of magical battles and aerial stunts.

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At The Game Awards 2023, Koei Tecmo confirmed that Rise of the Ronin will come to the PlayStation 5 on March 22, 2024. The game also appeared in a new trailer showing new gameplay elements and story beats.

The new Rise of the Ronin release date trailer featured the familiar style of Team Ninja combat, alongside some of the new mechanics such as mid-action character swapping, and mobility options like the previously shown grappling hook and a glider. You can check out the new Rise of the Ronin trailer here:

Rise of the Ronin was originally revealed during the September 2022 Sony State of Play with its first trailer. The game is a samurai action-RPG set in 1863, during the late Edo Period and the Bakumatsu, the period of conflict that brought the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Well, the good news is a new Monster Hunter's on the way - hooray! The bad news is we'll have to wait until 2025 play it - boo. Still, we do at least get an atmospheric teaser trailer to scrutinise until Capcom is ready to reveal more.

So what can we expect to see in Monster Hunter Wilds, as the "next generation" of the series is known? Well, starting off in a dusty desert world, the trailer shows off some large migrating herds of smaller creatures - far more dense than anything we've really seen before in the series - as well as a new bird-like mode of transport for Hunters.

We get vast swirling sandstorms, violent storms raining lightning down upon the earth as creatures rampage, and, well, that's about it for the moment - although I'm sure more eagle-eyed fans will have picked the whole thing more thoroughly apart by the morning.

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During The Game Awards 2023, Capcom revealed that the next Monster Hunter game is Monster Hunter Wilds. The latest installment in the franchise will be releasing in 2025 on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC.

In the social media post promoting the announcement of Monster Hunter Wilds, it was stated that this new entry will be the "next generation in the genre defining series." Wilds will be the first game in the series to be developed exclusively for the current generation of consoles.

The world premiere trailer for Wilds showed off a stampede of enemies chasing after a lone Hunter. Gliding while riding monsters, jumping on different rocky terrains, and exploring open fields was also briefly shown off in the world premiere trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3syM4tV8Xw

Monster Hunter Series Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto was at The Game Awards 2023 to discuss the latest announcement from Capcom. He mentioned that the current plan is to show more about the game during Summer 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr8Hm4dVMRw

As Dusk Falls, the narrative adventure game about two families linked together by a burglary gone wrong, hit Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC in July of last year. More than a year later, developer Interior/Night is bringing the game to PlayStation, but you'll have to wait just a bit longer to play it.

That's because As Dusk Falls hits PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on March 7, 2024. Interior/Night announced this news during The Game Awards 2023 tonight. It will also launch on the Epic Games Store and GOG on PC the same day. The studio released a new trailer to celebrate the announcement, and you can check it out for yourself below:

This new PS5 version of As Dusk Falls includes new exclusive features like haptic feedback and touchpad controls. Plus, a new audio description accessibility feature will be available on all platforms in March.

"In this uncompromising crime drama of betrayal, sacrifice, and resilience, players explore the entangled lives of two families across decades, starting in 1998 with a robbery gone wrong in small-town Arizona," a press release reads. "The story can be replayed to discover the vastly different outcomes depending on the decisions taken. As Dusk Falls has an innovative multiplayer mode supporting up to 8 players locally, online, or as a combination of both, using controllers or the companion app for Android or iOS." 

And so that’s that. The Game Awards 2023 are over. 32 awards were handed out over three and a half hours. You might think, with that much time to spare, the show took its time and truly celebrated all the creators and games nominated for what the show calls “Gaming’s Biggest Night.” Nope. Instead, more so than before,…

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The final chapter of horrifying cooperative FPS GTFO is out now, sending it off with a scream as the developers look forward to their newly announced next game. The update, Rundown 8.0 Duality includes new expeditions, new awful beings to murder you, and new weapons to attempt to stop them. It looks awful in a lovely way. Maybe I'll finally pluck up the courage to give GTFO a proper go, especially as a free trial weekend is running on Steam and the game's discounted too. I'd have to be some sort of coward to ignore that. Some sort of coward who doesn't want to creep and fight through hordes of horrid meatmonsters.

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Baldur's Gate 3 - which is now available on Xbox! - won Game of the Year at tonight's The Game Awards ceremony.

Larian's celebrated role-playing game also scooped Best Performance for Neil Newbon as Astarion, Best RPG, Best Multiplayer, Best Community Support and the fan-voted Player's Voice award.

Alan Wake 2 won three prizes, picking up gongs for Best Direction, Best Narrative and Best Art Direction.

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This year at The Game Awards 2023, there were over 30 winners in various categories for games and people to potentially claim. Aside from Baldur’s Gate, which was the Game of the Year for 2023, games such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon also got recognition.

Here is the list of winners for each category, without nominees or studios:

Best Action Game

• Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Best Action-Adventure Game

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Best Adaptation

• The Last of Us

Best Art Direction

• Alan Wake 2

Black Myth: Wukong, the visually striking Soulslike based on Journey To The West, now has a release date: August 20th, 2024. It also has a new trailer, which continues to showcase its odd, stunning character design.

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The Xbox version of Baldur's Gate 3 saw a surprise release during The Game Awards 2023. The game appeared on Xbox storefronts during the show, although no formal announcement was made during the show itself and Larian Studios waited until after the event to reveal it was available.

The Xbox release was confirmed on social media by Larian Studios. While a new accolades trailer was shown during the ceremony, it did not feature a release date, nor was the surprise release announced on stage. The focus was on showing the praise the game received from various outlets. At the end, it followed with a look at an upcoming physical edition.

An Xbox release has been in the works for a while, and Larian had previously confirmed that the release date would be announced at The Game Awards. This came after it noted multiple times that it was working to ensure this version of the game did make it out in 2023, following the PC release and PS5 debut earlier in the year. A physical Deluxe Edition for both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S has also been confirmed to be coming in 2024. The Xbox version will be released on three discs.

Capcom have unveiled the next entry in their dinosaur hat/pants/jumper-making sim this evening, and it's called Monster Hunter Wilds. A kick in the dino groin to this year's monster hunting pretender Wild Hearts, perhaps? Who can say. Formally unveiled at tonight's Game Awards, this new Monster Hunter is coming in 2025, and looks to be the jazzed-up successor to Monster Hunter: World. That's not a diss on Rise (which was excellent). Just that it's being developed for PC and consoles first, rather than Switch. And it looks rad as heck. Come and watch the reveal trailer below.

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Square Enix shared a piece of new key art featuring the full party in FFVII Rebirth, as well as new screenshots of Vincent Valentine and Cid Highwind. Both characters also appeared in new profiles in the official Japanese website for the game.

Tetsuya Nomura also commented on the new party art. He said that, while the members of the party are showing their back, the visuals are intended to represent the vast and unknown journey that they are about to embark. You can check out the new FFVII Rebirth party key art featuring Vincent and Cid here:

Hello Games is working on something completely new after spending years updating No Man’s Sky. It’s called Light No Fire and is promising a massive fantasy world players can explore together. Director Sean Murray is already promising mountains bigger than Everest.

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The winner of the horniest game of the year, and also The Game Awards’ Game of the Year, Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3, has finally made its debut on Xbox after months existing on other platforms. The team shadow dropped its tabletop-inspired RPG onto Xbox Series X/S immediately after the show.

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Baldur's Gate 3 is out now on Xbox Series X/S.

The Xbox version arrives after the PlayStation release in September and August debut on PC, and was delayed due to difficulties with split screen co-op on the less powerful Series S console.

That mode has been dropped to allow for an earlier release, but is still planned for a post-launch patch.

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The release date for the Alan Wake 2 New Game Plus mode was announced at The Game Awards 2023. It will be available on December 11, 2023.

The New Game Plus release date announcement came during the acceptance speech for Alan Wake 2 winning Best Game Direction. After Sam Lake gave his speech, co-director of the game, Kyle Rowley, approached the mic and announced the date.

New Game Plus had previously been announced for Alan Wake 2. Remedy had confirmed the new addition previously, stating that it will allows players to retain weapons and upgrades, along with new video and manuscript content and a Nightmare difficulty. Two expansions are also on the way in future.

Alan Wake 2 is out now for PS5, PC and Xbox Series X/S. New Game Plus will be available on December 11, 2023.

The post Alan Wake 2 New Game Plus Mode Gets Release Date appeared first on Siliconera.

And so the dust settles on another Game Awards. Geoff Keighley’s annual trailer-a-thon once again included some game awards shoved in between all the ads and teasers. If you want to know who won what (and who lost), we’ve got you covered.

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Final Fantasy XVI is far from over, as Square Enix announced one the Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide story DLC at The Game Awards 2023. Echoes of the Fallen is out right now on the PS5.

However, players will, unfortunately, have to wait a little bit longer to play through The Rising Tide. This second add-on is scheduled to drop sometime in Spring 2024.

A new trailer debuted at TGA 2023, showcasing parts from both add-ons. The story DLC involves Clive and his companions going on a journey to discover the origins of a mysterious crystal, which has a place in the ancient Magitek War. There will be new locations, characters, and even boss battles, including fights against Omega Aionios and The Tonberry King.

In The Rising Tide, players will also travel to the new location of Mysidia where Leviathan and its presumed Dominant may finally appear. Fans may recognize the name of this location as towns and locales from past games, such as in Final Fantasy II and IV.

Here is the Final Fantasy XVI TGA 2023 Japanese trailer:

Despite claiming that it had no plans to release DLC for Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix announced at The Game Awards that Final Fantasy XVI is getting not one but two pieces of DLC. They're called Echoes of the Fallen and Rising Tide, and the former is available to play right now.

Echoes of the Fallen adds new story chapters that takes place before the finale of Final Fantasy XVI. Clive and the gang follow the origins of a mysterious crystal to a strange ruin filled with deadly defenses tied to Eikons and plenty of monsters. Rising Tide is set to launch in Spring 2024 and is a bit more mysterious, but we do see Clive taking on what may be the scariest enemy in all of Final Fantasy: Tonberry King. Oh, and Leviathan pops up too. 

You can purchase each DLC separately or together for a discount in an expansion pass. You can read our review of Final Fantasy XVI here. 

Do you like paragliding, exosuits, loot, and tornadoes? Do you like all of those things at once? Then you might enjoy the just-announced Exoborne, a tactical open world shooter from Sharkmob, the Swedish studio behind Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt. Running on Unreal Engine 5 and set in fictional, near-future Colton County, USA, it's a PvPvE affair in which you roam a big ruined map either alone or as a team, fighting other players, NPCs and renegade "natural" elements. Published by Level Infinite, it'll be a premium game with live service elements and microtransactions, and there's no release date yet. I caught a briefing before today's announcement, and yeah, it looks all right.

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I can't remember having this much fun with a multiplayer shooter since Overwatch - not initially at least. The Finals feels so immediate in the impact it has. You load it up, you're thrust into a three-player team and then into an arena with other teams, then you're legging it through levels that are being bust apart around you, rappelling up buildings, smashing through walls, lobbing foam-expanding grenades and swinging heavy sledgehammers. Then you're legging it back another way with a safe of money you've found, trying to deposit it at a vault, all while the other teams frantically pepper you with bullets and hunt you down. There's no breathing space. There's garish colour, noise, energy, adrenaline and excitement. That is The Finals.

It really reminds me of Overwatch, actually, in how polished it feels and how the menus look. I suppose the polish should be no surprise given The Finals released today, in conjunction with The Game Awards, and I played it only a week ago. It's the final build.

But the Finals reminds me a lot of Fortnite, too, in the way it has three-player teams and silly cosmetics, and a big Battle Pass. But it's Battlefield 4 too, in the way the levels can be blown up around you. And it's Payday in the way you chase cash, like an extraction shooter, and it's maybe Apex and Rainbow Six Vegas and a bunch of other games as well. It's a Frankenstein's Monster made up of all of those things, and yet, like that Monster, it manages to be its own very distinct thing.

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Exoborne is an eye-catching new tactical open-world extraction shooter for PC and consoles, built in Unreal Engine 5 by team members who worked on Ubisoft's The Division.

It's a fresh IP from Sharkmob, the studio founded in 2017 by core members of The Division team, now working across two studios in Malmö and London. The developer's first project - battle royale Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt - shut down in May, after failing to find an audience.

Tonight's reveal at The Game Awards offered us a brief glimpse of Exoborne's post-apocalyptic world, set in a ruined southeastern US now filled with apocalyptic-looking tornadoes, lightning and sandstorms.

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