While there may not be as many sales today as last weekend for Memorial Day, there are still many deals to be had. Whether you’re after a plug-and-play mic to take your streaming game up a level or want a new controller for your PS5, we’re seeing some deep discounts. With Father’s Day only a couple of weeks away, maybe you’re looking to snag a great gift for the father figures in your life? Portable chargers, a grill set, or even new lawn mower might be right up their alley. Check out all the best deals we’ve found today:
TL;DR: Deals for Today
Pokémon Destined Rivals is here, and we’re already seeing chase cards crash in value, leaving some with pre-order regrets. But that means you can just grab some single cards rather than shelling out a ton on booster packs. Still want a sealed pack? We’ve got you. Plus, there’s a Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy Bundle pre-order available from Walmart that’s not a bad deal.
PlayStation DualSense Controller
The controller that comes packaged with the PlayStation 5 is at its lowest price of the year, setting you back under $55 for 27% savings. This wireless gamepad is comfortable to use, compatible with a range of gaming devices, and full of reliable controls. Haptics and adaptive triggers are baked in, amplifying your playing experience further. Plus, you can remap buttons, customizing the controls to give you a leg up in certain games.
JLab Talk Pro USB Mic
Kick your game streams up a notch, as the JLab Talk Pro USB Mic is on sale for over 77% off on Woot, making it just $34.99. This plug-and-play microphone is easy to set up and features four directional patterns. Whether you’re looking to record podcasts and music or take phone calls and do ASMR, it’ll be the perfect partner. Sound quality will even be optimized for whatever you’re recording, and the mic features volume and gain controls, ensuring you come across crystal clear.
Cuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool Set
Summer means it’s grilling season, so it’s always a good idea to have a grill tool set on hand. Right now, Cuisinart has a great deal on a high-quality set for just $23.99. The reputable brand includes all the barbecue essentials in the kit, like a spatula, grill fork, cleaning brush, and tongs. Each of the tools features a sturdy wooden handle and stainless steel for a premium look and feel, while a case is included for safe storage. If you’re on the hunt for a Father’s Day gift, it also makes a great gift for those hard-to-buy-for dads and father figures.
Metaphor: ReFantazio PS4 & PS5
PlayStation’s Days of Play sale is still in full swing, offering discounts up to 75% on top games. While countless titles are included in this sale, we’re particularly excited about Metaphor: ReFantazio. This action-packed adventure takes place in the medieval fantasy realm of Euchronia, where you’re on a journey to save a cursed prince and determine a new king in a Royal Tournament. It deals with social and political issues, mirroring the real-world issues we’re facing. Right now, you can grab it for only $45.49, saving you $24.50.
bella PRO 10.5-qt. Touchscreen 5-in-1 Indoor Grill & Air Fryer
Whether you live in an apartment or just don’t have a way to grill outside, bella PRO offers an airfryer that brings the grill inside, and it does a whole lot more than that. It has a spacious 10.5-qt capacity, five cooking modes, and eight presets to make everything from fish and chicken to bread and fries. When it comes to grilling, the temperature is adjustable up to a toasty 500°F, allowing for the searing and char-grilled marks you expect from a BBQ. Best of all, $100 has been knocked off the price tag, so it’s only $69.99 for a limited time.
Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1
If you’re a fan of the horror video game, Five Nights at Freddy’s, a new graphic novel series from the creator, Scott Cawthon, is already discounted to the low price of just $8.90. This volume brings some horrifying and detailed comics to the story from the bestselling series Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex, featuring the under-construction section of Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex, a Tube Maze, and some chaos.
It’s lawn mowing season, and battery-powered lawn mowers are beginning to take the reign from their gas-powered counterparts. You might think that these electric mowers offer less oomph, but the EGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower Kit will prove you wrong. It’s self-propelled, has a multicut blade system, and runs for 60 minutes on a single charge. A second battery is even included, so you can keep mowing while the other battery charges. Right now, you can grab this kit for its lowest price ever, $599.99. That’s 43% off.
Charmast Portable Charger with Built in Cables
Portable chargers are great and all, but if you forget the right cord, they’re pretty useless. Charmast fixes this problem by offering a 10,000mAh power bank with USB-C, Lightning, and MicroUSB cables built in, so it’s ready to top off just about any device. Plus, there’s a USB-A cord for charging up the power bank. Each of the cables also has a slot for storage on the portable charger, preventing anything from getting snagged when on the go. Now is the time to buy, too, as it’s back to its lowest price, costing just under $20.
Pokémon Destined Rivals Sealed Products and Single Cards
After the best market value on Pokémon Destined Rivals sealed products? Some great deals are available from TCG Player, as big box stores continue to hike up the prices.
Don’t want to deal with the ripping open boosters to find a chase card? TCG Player has a bunch of single cards available, and the prices continue to fluctuate as I write this.
MTG Final Fantasy Pre Order
Pre-orders for MTG Final Fantasy continue to pop up occasionally at retailers, but selection is pretty limited at the moment. However, this bundle from Walmart is an excellent deal ahead of the launch in a couple of weeks.
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When George R.R. Martin crafted the world of Westeros back in the 90s, he probably didn’t think his words would go on to spawn graphic novels, TV shows, action figures, video games, and more. Moreover, I doubt the author expected his works to be adapted into a mobile-friendly action-RPG built to prioritize predatory microtransactions over the rich lore he’d spent decades perfecting. Yet in 2025, we have Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, a visually striking open-world exploration game that looks compelling in motion, but hones in more on menus and currency than fantasy adventure. And, as you push deeper into its sizable campaign to uncover a plethora of in-game currencies and progress-halting hurdles, the neo-medieval jaunt starts to feel more like a lesson in asset management than a thoughtful RPG.
Kingsroad takes place during season four of the HBO TV series, putting you in the fur-lined boots of a northern-born bastard of House Tyre. With your father sickly and your inheritance caught up in the strict succession rules of the realm, the only hope for the safety of your people is to borrow, beg, and steal your way into the hearts of the lords and ladies of Westeros. Naturally, things aren’t as simple as just asking, and you’ll have to go round the houses (literally) to solve land disputes, find missing soldiers, and knock together the heads of vassal-house warriors on your way to earning your flowers. Alongside a cavalcade of curious NPCs, there are also White Walkers, mythical beasts, and traitorous Boltons to butt heads with. Thankfully, Westeros’ misfortune makes for an enticing landing pad for you to start from.
Before you dive into the cobbled streets and open roads of Westeros, though, you’ll first need to pick a combat archetype to play as: a brutish Sellsword, a skilful Knight, or a nimble Assassin. Fuelled by my love of Brienne of Tarth and Dungeons & Dragons’ Barbarian class, I opted for the axe-wielding Sellsword, whose heavy strikes can easily wind gaggles of enemy forces. Indecisive? Good news: Kingsroad does allow you to switch between archetypes at any time, and your inventory is shared across your three possible characters, so you can boost your alts with your main’s hard-earned loot. That said, I was disappointed to find that once you finalise a character, you can’t delete them and start that class over, or change their name, a feature that bit me in the butt when testing how unsightly I could make my Knight.
With your combat destiny chosen, Kingsroad’s decently impressive character creator lets you use a mixture of face-contorting sliders and colour-pickers to specialise your plucky hero. It doesn’t have the depth of something like Dragon’s Dogma 2 (although that’s an admittedly high bar), but I am glad I was able to bestow my characters with an identity that felt personal to me – which is to say moody, and tastefully adorned with smudgy eyeliner and edgy facial scars.
You'll explore an impressively recreated map of Westeros.
Kingsroad wastes no time teaching you the basics of its combat and platforming with a tight but comprehensive tutorial, which takes you beyond the wall and back again. That’s where you’ll meet the first of many familiar faces for any fans of the show, as Jon Snow and Samwell Tarley do a decent job of filling in the narrative gaps for those in need of a season four recap. While the digital renditions of these well-known characters aren’t the most flattering, their conversations felt thoughtfully written and helped to establish my lowborn place within the setting.
Soon enough, though, Kingsroad lets go of your hand and allows you to roam free across the countryside, providing a choice of campaign quests and side missions to follow, as well as plenty of points of interest to chase on your map. The open world of Kingsroad gave me the freedom to explore this (mostly) faithfully reimagined Westeros, and I enjoyed riding across snowy plateaus and uncovering the secrets of curious stone architecture nestled on the horizon. But the initial exhilaration of high fantasy galavanting wore off quickly as the edges of developer Netmarble’s fantasy panopticon started to show.
For every delicate snowflake at Castle Black or butterfly dancing in Winterfell, there were plenty more low-poly fruit trees, bouncy grass patches, and possessed weapons to pick at the sheen. I admire the sheer scale of the open world Kingsroad is offering, but it’s lacking the visual consistency to make it realistic and immersive. As I soon noticed those cracks in the facade, Kingsroad started to feel like a game full of pulled punches, despite how promising it seemed at a distance.
This lack of polish extends to your movement on both foot and horseback – ice skating would be the most fitting comparison. When exploring the frosty reaches of the North, this sensation is strangely fitting. However, it became wholly frustrating when it persisted while charting the sunny coastal areas near Highgarden, especially when attempting to complete the occasional platforming puzzles dotted around the icon-covered map. Typically, I was only one slip away from falling down an unscalable hillside, or worse, into a camp of fierce opponents with no way out. Up close, the animations also err on the eerie side in cutscenes. My character would often deliver a wide-eyed death stare, and I couldn't take them seriously as they’d burn holes in the townsfolk’s skulls as they explained their heart wrenching tragedies.
Memorable characters surface as uncanny valley clones of themselves.
Speaking of the citizens of Westeros, their heads and eyes wobble around like strange marionettes during conversations, which dampens the atmosphere considerably. It’s a shame, because their dialogue does a great job of affirming the grim, corrupt cloud that hangs over the continent as winter approaches. I felt particularly bad laughing when an old lady thanked me for saving her daughter from being eaten by Ramsay Bolton’s dogs. Unfortunately, the most egregious offenders are often Kingsroad’s recreations of characters from the show. Memorable players, like Nymeria Sand and Varys, surface as uncanny valley clones of their likenesses. I’ll be seeing yassifed Cersei in my nightmares for many moons to come…
Beyond exploration, the bulk of your time in Kingsroad is split between investing in complex resource management systems at your homestead and completing multi-stage quests and battles out in the world. As such, you can find a plethora of challenges that boost both of these areas, like dungeon crawls, bandit camps, occupied villages, and giant mythical beasts, all of which reward you handsomely for spilling blood by the gallon. How efficiently you blend your time between these two aspects is integral to maintaining a solid pace within the grind-heavy progression system – alas, a lack of technical balance makes succeeding in this endeavour profoundly painful.
The trouble begins with the combat, which is a total mixed bag. While your actions feel pleasantly grounded, and rugged blows always arrive with flashy particle-heavy animations, the process begins to feel overfamiliar fast. Despite the solid variety of moves available – light, heavy, and special attacks, as well as decent dodge and parry options – inaccurate hit boxes consistently hampered my attempts at strategy. Occasionally, I would need to use my head a little and skulk around an area to remove edge threats, though those tactical moments arrived few and far between. It says something unflattering that Kingsroad feels almost identical at 60 hours as it did at 20.
You can specialise and upgrade your moveset in combat with traits and skill trees, too, but they do little to impact how the combat feels in motion. Kingsroad gives the impression of having useful Traits by putting options like learning to parry and crafting arrows up at the top of the trees, but as you work your way down, many of the lower options offer small percentage-based improvements to defense and attack that barely make a dent. So as your sparkly slashes lose their lustre, you’re often left cycling through the same few enemies and combos until the battle is won. It seems as though the architecture of a solid combat system is there, but much like the rest of Kingsroad, it’s all facade with no foundation.
What hampers the fun most are the frequent and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks.
Still, what hampers the fun of Kingsroad most of all are the frequently appearing and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks. Similar to Destiny’s Gear Score, Kingsroad tallies up the quality of all your equipment, accessories, and skills into one neat number called your Momentum Score. These pesky little digits are the cruel gatekeepers of story content, forcing you to scour the map for dull side objectives that can juice the numbers and shuffle you towards the next episode.
While I’m more than happy to invest in grind-heavy games like World of Warcraft Classic and no stranger to mobile-minded progress gating, the Momentum system in Kingsroad is a particularly brutish arbiter that doesn’t allow you to get crafty or punch above your weight by taking on more challenging enemies. Instead, imposing forces appear with a skull icon over their head, their damage and health ratings untouchably high. But as soon as you inch over the Momentum line, the fight shifts dramatically in your favour. This black and white process neutralises any sense of gamesmanship, and frequently forced me into hours of toil to get back to the story I was, for the most part, enjoying.
When you’re ready to take some time out from the combat, you can invest more in the slower-paced aspects of Kingsroad, namely the tedious Estate Management side game. As the last remaining heir to Lord Tyre, his homestead, Renan’s Rest, becomes your project. As is to be expected, helping this dilapidated village flourish rewards you with the tools necessary to beef up your arsenal, and gives you a place to spend all those resources you’ve been hoarding by completing missions – though the process of cleaning up this town is about as much fun as cleaning your actual room.
While the jeweller and the forge are convenient additions that allow you to craft wearable items, the most valuable activity is embarking on gacha-based Artefact Expeditions. You’ll spend resources to hire workers and send them into the wild to find more resources, as well as historical items called Relics you can then leverage to further bolster your Momentum. Similar to other gacha game systems, you’re guaranteed a high-quality item after a set amount of runs, but a standard expedition takes eight actual hours to complete, which is a frustrating turnaround when not every run guarantees a good haul. That is, unless you’re willing to pay real money to speed things up.
That brings us to the elephant in the room. Almost every activity in Kingsroad can be expedited with the use of cold hard cash, which translates to Iron Bank Marks in-game. Of course, you can pay to complete an aforementioned expedition early, or buy higher-rarity expedition wagons by the dozen that don’t take time to complete. Stuck behind a Momentum block? Just purchase Gold to speedrun your jewellery maker’s upgrades and smelt higher-rated necklaces and rings to jolt your score. Typically, you can only fast travel by making your way to a special signpost first, and there’s a copper fee for each warp – but you can fast travel from anywhere for free if you pay for the premium option. Behind nearly every aggravating system in Kingsroad is a far more user-friendly one, but only if you’re willing to cough up the dough. It seems intent to toe the line between being intentionally frustrating and passably functional, subtly egging you on to pay up rather than sit through the repetitive, time-consuming activities necessary to proceed.
While it’s to be expected that there will be premium aspects in a free-to-play game available on mobile devices (in addition to Steam), the overwhelming flood of paid subscriptions, resource packs, and confounding currencies feels like a heartbreaking affront to Game of Thrones fans, like myself, who have been begging for a fully-fledged Westeros RPG similar to this. Across the 60 hours I’ve played so far, I’ve felt guilty for slashing down innocent defectors and filled with joy for feeding the starving smallfolk. It's clear Netmarble wants you to feel like you’re making a difference in this world, but it’s also just as keen to remind you that you can make a difference quicker if you’re willing to enter your credit card details first. It’s sad to see so much effort put into the underlying concept of a Game of Thrones adventure like this only for it to be tarnished by microtransactions and the repetitive gameplay loops that enable them.
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Elden Ring Nightreign is upon us! Time to choose your Nightfarer and set out into Limveld in hopes of defeating the Nightlord before you’re lost to the rains. We’ve teamed up with Maxroll to bring you a variety of guides to help you get started, introduce you to each of the Nightfarers and help you navigate the dangers of Limveld.
Getting Started in Nightreign
Maxroll’s Nightreign beginner's guide goes over everything you need to get started: an introduction to each of the 8 playable characters, an explanation of the game's central hub, nagivating Limveld, the basics of combat, and how to handle the Nightlords, before wrapping everything up with a bit of information on Nightreign's metaprogression systems.
Maxroll Nightreign Character Guides
Learn more about each of the game’s Nightfarers, how their skills work, and some additional information about each of their unique playstyles.
Wylder
Wylder is a well-rounded character, suitable for beginners. His Sixth Sense passive allows you to cheat death and stay up through one instance of fatal damage. As a generalist, he doesn't excel with any specific weapons, but can use most martial armaments. His favorite weapon is the Greatsword.
The Guardian is Nightreign's tank class. He's most comfortable wielding a large shield and a weapon that can be used while guarding, such as a Halberd, Rapier, or Hand Crossbow. The Guardian deals less damage than the other Nightfarers, but has immense durability and multiple ways to disrupt foes.
Ironeye is the bow specialist, though his high Dexterity makes him proficient with a variety of other melee weapons such as daggers and curved swords. Unfortunately, his low durability makes him a poor choice as a front-line fighter, so use melee weapons with caution. Overall, his abilities are simple to use, making him an excellent choice for beginners.
The Duchess is a dagger-wielding Nightfarer who excels at evasive action to weave in and out of combat. Her starting weapon comes with a potent character skill, enchanting your blade with the Magic affinity for extra damage. In addition, she can adeptly wield Glintstone Sorceries due to her high intelligence, and she has decent Faith scaling for Incantations as well. For the Duchess, look out for weapons with the Magic or Frost Affinity, and those that can trigger statuses like Frostbite or Blood Loss.
The Raider has high Strength and uses large/colossal weapons to smash his foes. While he can use a variety of martial armaments well, his FP is extremely low, making it difficult to use weapon skills. The Raider's inherent durability makes him difficult to stagger, helping him ensure that his blows connect.
The Revenant is a support class, though her high Faith allows her to use offensive Incantations with ease. However, her ability to deal damage is limited as she has no method of FP recovery. Her passive ability summons the shades of foes to fight at your side, distracting enemies and dealing damage.
A spellcaster adept who can use her character skill to restore FP, the Recluse excels at unleashing devastation from afar. Her stats favor Sorceries and Incantations, but she can use Magic, Frost, Fire, Holy, and Lightning affinity weapons. This character is a bit more difficult to play as you don't have as many defensive options, and need to manage FP in addition to your Health and Stamina. However, if you do everything correctly, she deals significant damage.
The Executor excels in single combat. He has high Dexterity and Arcane, giving him access to a majority of the game's smaller weapons. Look out for Katanas in particular, as these scale off of Dexterity while also triggering the Blood Loss status to enemies. Position carefully because the Executor has low durability.
The Limveld map is teeming with points of interest to explore. Maxroll’s Limveld Map & Key Locations guide teaches you about the various encounters, what mob types to expect, and the rewards you can earn for clearing them.
As you explore, you'll encounter random events known as Raid Events which often involve fighting a challenging foe. If you clear the raid, you earn a valuable Power for the remainder of your run; learn more with Maxroll’s Raid Events guide.
Defeating Nightlords unlocks Shifting Earth events. Each of these events transforms a quadrant of the map into a unique zone, frequently filled with lots of bosses to fight - and similar to Raid Events, they award a special power when cleared. Learn more with Maxroll’s Shifting Earth event guide.
Nightreign Resources
Explore Roundtable Hold, Nightreign’s main hub area. Here, you can switch your characters, perform Relic Rites to prepare for the next expedition, test things in the Sparring ground, read up on the game with the Visual Codex, explore your character’s story at the Journal, and set out from the Table of Lost Grace to do battle against a Nightlord. Learn about all this in Maxroll's Roundtable Hold guide.
Relics and Vessels are part of Nightreign’s metaprogression system. At the end of each run, you earn Relics and Murk, which you can spend at the Small Jar Bazaar. Some Relics have random affixes that may or may not be useful, whereas others (often earned through character quests or by defeating bosses) have fixed stats and are quite powerful. As you progress in the game, you also unlock additional Vessels, letting you equip a different Relic combination on your Nightfarer. Learn more about this system with Maxroll’s Relics and Vessels guide.
Many of the Sorceries and Incantations in Nightreign belong to a specific Spell School. The Spell School determines which modifiers buff your spells - for example, a Glintstone Sorcery won't benefit from bonuses to Godslayer Incantations. This isn't very clearly explained, though, so if you’re curious on how to buff your Spells, check out Maxroll’s Sorcery and Incantation School Guide.
Maxroll's Nightreign Database
Browse Maxroll’s Elden Ring Nightreign Database to learn more about the Weapons, skills, spells, Relics, Vessels, Relic modifiers, Talismans, passive traits, and Nightfarers available in the game. Each item has a page with expanded tooltip information, which you can use to discover hidden secrets about Nightreign’s weapons (or just look for fun lore tidbits).
Roblox farming simulator Grow a Garden is attracting millions of players across PC, mobile, and console devices, eclipsing numbers achieved by some of the most popular games on any platform – so what exactly is it?
If you load up Roblox at any time on any day in the next week, there’s a good chance around 2 million people will be playing Grow a Garden in some capacity. That’s according to the official user tracker found on all Roblox experiences, which plants the colorful free-to-play game firmly atop trending charts in a variety of categories. These are numbers that see the free-to-play game leaving other Roblox projects in its dust, with the second-most-popular “Playing Now” experience, Brookhaven RP, showing 590,000 players at the time of this piece’s publication.
Pulling 1.5 million players is an impressive feat, and it’s also on the low end for Grow a Garden.
The farming simulator peaked at more than 8.8 million active users last weekend, annihilating only competing experiences but multiple active user records, starting when it crossed the 5 million active users mark earlier this month. The 16-year-old behind Grow a Garden released it March 25, 2025. It has since been visited 3.4 billion times.
For comparison, Counter-Strike 2, currently the most popular Steam game, reached its all-time peak just last month at just under 1.86 million players (via SteamDB). PUBG: Battlegrounds holds the trophy for the highest-ever active player count on Valve’s PC storefront, and even its peak topped out at 3.25 million players in 2018.
Grow a Garden is still trailing behind the free-to-play battle royale megaton that is Fortnite, which boasts a peak active player count of 15.3 million from an event held in 2020. Grow a Garden isn’t quite at the top of the mountain, but it is climbing – and fast. It’s at least another significant piece of evidence that the Roblox platform is one to be taken seriously, as millions continue to flock to the dense forest of content it offers.
What Do You Do in Grow a Garden?
In Grow a Garden, you – if you can believe it – grow a garden. There’s little complexity to the gameplay formula currently setting Roblox ablaze. It’s not yet another anime tie-in or tower-defense experience but instead a straightforward farming game with a tutorial that lays out everything you need to know in just a few seconds.
Each player is plopped into a server with a handful of other Roblox users, with everyone granted their own plot of land to begin their garden on. While new players are gifted 20 Sheckles, Grow a Garden’s in-game currency, to purchase simple seeds for vegetables like carrots, it’s also almost immediately clear how far you can take the premise, as other players’ fenced-in areas will often be brimming with towering trees, bamboo, lively fruits, and more. Growth takes time, but gardens will continuously flourish, even when a player is offline, until picked.
Grow a carrot and sell it, and you’ll profit a few Sheckles. Rinse, repeat, and earn enough for blueberries, then mangos, then orange tulips, then grapes, then peppers, and so on. The satisfaction comes from the tangible growth you can see in your garden – and money – in real time. It’s a far-from-unique cycle distilled into its purest form, though there is more to do for those looking to dig for it.
Customizing a garden can be as simple as organizing your yard by color, height, or type, or flavor can be added with optional cosmetic items, tools, and pets. Updates and events keep players coming back for more, as do weather modifiers that can potentially increase the value of your crops. Every gameplay wrinkle is part of the formula that has seen Grow a Garden’s player base balloon to levels unheard of in Roblox’s blocky world. Not everyone understands it, but the success is undeniable.
Who Made Grow a Garden?
The 16-year-old who first broke ground with Grow a Garden remains creatively involved in what it’s become but is no longer the only name attached. Sharing responsibilities are Roblox experience management company DoBig Studios and popular developer Janzen Madsen (a.k.a. Jandel) and his network of creators at Splitting Point. These are major players in the space, but Grow a Garden stuck out to Madsen before it exploded.
“The game was developed by a 16-year-old in a few days, and we saw the game when it was on about 1,000, 2,000 CCUs,” Madsen tells us, describing Grow a Garden’s active players, “and we just partnered with that developer, built in a live-ops plan, did some general updates to the game, and, pretty much, the rest is history.”
It was here the now-gargantuan farming experience began to plant its roots, as the 20-person team at Splitting Point began to help create a foundation for growth. That’s not to say the original, anonymous developer stopped being involved.
I actually think they’re, creatively, pretty incredible.
“I actually think they’re, creatively, pretty incredible,” Madsen said when describing how development responsibilities are shared. “I think they bring a pretty unique perspective to the game, and I think there’s maybe a generational gap between me and them. Everyone has… I would say it’s almost equal, honestly, in terms of, we get on a call, we plan an update – it’s probably not what you’d expect. Sometimes we’re planning the update week to week, you know?”
Madsen can’t nail down what triggered Grow a Garden’s meteoric rise, mostly because “it happened so quickly,” but points to tight update strategies and events as reliable draws for Roblox players. Recent examples include bringing in a DJ for entertainment and organizing a mass dance party in hopes of breaking a world record. Every update presents an opportunity to create a moment that sucks players in while making them feel involved in the journey.
This goes out to all the haters at GDC from 2022-2024 if you aren't taking Roblox seriously then you are getting left behind! pic.twitter.com/6MeE1vVABL
The small free-to-play project with humble beginnings eventually exploded into the biggest game in Roblox history. There’s a full-on operation maintaining its success to ensure its millions of fans continue showing up, and the developers aren’t tending to it for free. Although Madsen declined to share the details regarding Grow a Garden’s earnings past an acknowledgement of Roblox’s previously established cut of in-game spending, the experience offers more than a few clear ways for players to spend real-world cash.
Nearly every item of interest can be purchased with the Roblox premium currency known as Robux, Grow a Garden’s primary source of income. On PC, $5 translates to 500 Robux, with seed prices ranging from seven to 715 Robux and decorations like crates and campfires asking for 119 and 149 Robux. There are also seed packs and eggs that can be purchased one at a time or in packs, essentially serving as loot boxes containing special crops and pets, respectively. Most these items can still be purchased with in-game Sheckles, even if the price tag can sometimes reach numbers higher than Grow a Garden’s player average player count. It’s unclear how much players are spending to kit out their farms, but with at least 1.5 million users playing at any moment, we can guess it’s probably a lot.
Climbing the Beanstalk
Grow a Garden is pulling attention the likes of which Roblox has never seen, but success is far from a foreign concept on this platform. New experiences flood in every day, and while many of them never reach the top of trending charts, plenty of others, such as Blue Lock: Rivals and Dress to Impress, still boast hundreds of thousands of engaged players months after release. Roblox isn’t a gaming fresh phenomenon – it’s been here for years, and it’s only attracting more attention.
Still, reaching around nearly 9 million active users is so unbelievable that many have questioned the legitimacy of Grow a Garden's success. Some have suggested bots have played a role in inflated numbers and fabricated popularity, but Roblox says this isn’t the case.
“Grow a Garden's global success is fueled by exceptional user retention, vibrant social interactions — with friends driving play — and strong Robux engagement,” a Roblox spokesperson told Game File. “Our preliminary analysis confirms genuine popularity, not artificial inflation, validating the game's authentic community-driven growth.”
Look at AAA. No one takes big risks, you know? Every day on Roblox, there’s a new concept or a new game out – I think it’s kind of cool.
While those on the outside raise eyebrows at Roblox's attraction to gamers, Madsen says he has worked to legitimize the platform he calls home for the majority of the time he’s been in this space. He sees Roblox as both a slice of gaming that’s gone ignored and a hub for creativity.
“Most people’s first impression of Roblox is, ‘This is a silly platform for kids, and there’s no depth to the gameplay or games,’ and I think legitimately some of the best game designers in the world are on Roblox making games,” Madsen explained. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, they look simple, but they’re actually like… they’re solving hard problems there in the platform. They’re pushing the boundaries.’
"Look at AAA. No one takes big risks, you know? Every day on Roblox, there’s a new concept or a new game out – I think it’s kind of cool. I think it’s easy to judge from the outside without really taking a few weeks to look at it.”
Even if Grow a Garden has already bloomed to its fullest extent, it’s no doubt planted the seeds for other Roblox experiences to reach or even exceed its high bar. While we wait for it to grow, you can read up on all active Grow a Garden codes here.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
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Today, over 300 unionized quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Media, who work on everything from The Elder Scrolls to Doom, have announced they have reached a tentative deal with parent company Microsoft on their first contract since forming their union two years ago.
ZeniMax Workers United, which is unionized under Communications Workers of America (CWA), said the agreement includes "substantial across-the-board wage increases," minimum salaries, protections against arbitrary dismissal, grievance procedures, protections around use of artificial intelligence that could impact workers, and a crediting policy to ensure QA workers are appropriately credited in games they work on.
ZeniMax Media owns publisher Bethesda Softworks and development studios Bethesda Game Studios (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield), id Software (Doom, Quake, and Rage), Arkane (Dishonored, Prey, and Redfall), MachineGames (Wolfenstein, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle), and ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online). Microsoft acquired ZeniMax Media for $8.1 billion in March 2021 and operates it under the Microsoft Gaming division.
“Video games have been the revenue titan of the entire entertainment industry for years, and the workers who develop these games are too often exploited for their passion and creativity," said Jessee Leese, a member of the bargaining committee.
"Organizing unions, bargaining for a contract, and speaking with one collective voice has allowed workers to take back the autonomy we all deserve. Our first contract is an invitation for video game professionals everywhere to take action. We’re the ones who make these games, and we’ll be the ones to set new standards for fair treatment.”
The tentative contract is contingent on ratification by the union members in a vote which is expected to be concluded by June 20.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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The Epic Games Store is giving away a beloved indie title and the most recent Borderlands game as part of its weekly rollout of free PC games.
It’s an especially notable addition to Epic’s long-running free game promotion, which sees the company dropping a variety of titles for all Epic Games Store users at no additional cost every week. This week, PC users can add Playdead’s breakout video game, Limbo, and Gearbox’s Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Borderlands spinoff, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, to their libraries.
Both titles are available to nab from now to next Thursday, June 5, at 8am PT / 11am ET, at which point they’ll no longer be free to own. Even if you don’t find yourself playing games on PC very often, you might as well sign into an Epic Games Store account and claim both games for the future just in case.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a Borderlands side story that launched for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S in early 2022. While previous entries in the series see players team up to loot and shoot across twisted sci-fi settings, this spinoff drops fans into a fantasy setting with a few gameplay shakeups, such as new weapon types and fleshed-out character customization, to keep things interesting. Thanks in part to a surprisingly star-studded cast that includes Andy Samberg, Wanda Sykes, Will Arnett, and more, we felt Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was a fitting addition to the Borderlands universe, giving it an 8/10 in our review.
Limbo, meanwhile, is a much more scaled-down adventure that sees players controlling a small child as they trudge through an unforgiving, colorless world. It’s a short story that HowLongToBeat says takes just over three hours to complete, but it’s been more than enough to leave an impression on gamers for nearly 15 years. We gave it a 9/10 in our original review.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
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Karate Kid: Legends opens this week, bringing together both the Karate Kid films of the '80s and the 2010 reboot -- which at one time was not meant to be in the same timeline/continuity as the original franchise.
With both Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan now teaming up as karate and kung fu senseis Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Han, respectively, Karate Kid: Legends is bridging these two worlds in ways never before imagined. So in honor of this new culmination, we've ranked all five Karate Kid films for you!
And yes, to answer your burning question, Netflix's Cobra Kai still remains canon for Legends as well. That doesn't mean Cobra Kai characters will be popping up there, but Legends doesn't do anything to discount or deny the goings-on in Cobra Kai. Taking place three years after the Cobra Kai finale, Legends involves Chan's Mr. Han seeking out Daniel LaRusso for help in training and guiding a student, Li Fong, played by Ben Wang (American Born Chinese).
So which is the best Karate Kid film? The originals all feature the late, great Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi, mentoring Daniel (or Hilary Swank's Julie) through life's violent conflicts, while the reboot brought in Chan and Jaden Smith to echo the early Miyagi/Daniel roles. Here are the all the Karate Kid flicks ranked!
Honorable Mention: Cobra Kai
It's a steaming series, so it doesn't qualify here, but Cobra Kai is a massive miracle in the realm of legacy sequels. It's a six-season follow-up to the first three Karate Kid movies that brings back just about every old character you can think of, redeems them, sheds new light on them, and spins them around in wondrous ways. All while also introducing a whole new generation of karate students and their own interpersonal drama. Cobra Kai is so fun that it created a new fanbase for the franchise, many of whom started watching not even knowing the movies the show was based on.
5. The Next Karate Kid (1994)
The one true outlier of the Karate Kid saga involves Mr. Miyagi in Boston, offering to house swap with his old war buddy's widow so that he can try to weirdly monitor her angry, grief-stricken granddaughter, Julie (Hilary Swank).
Yup, nothing's more ideal than a traumatized teen girl, who just lost her parents to a car crash, living with an elderly stranger because her grandma couldn't deal with her and needed a break. The Next Karate Kid isn't a terrible movie, per se, but no one was clamoring for Miyagi wisdom in the mid-'90s (especially when part of it was "transforming" Julie out of her angry phase and into a girl who wears dresses) and no one was suffering the fools that were the Alpha Elite -- a squad of uniformed teen bullies allowed to roam the halls of Julie's high school, led by some weird Colonel named Dugen who apparently had free reign to beat up children and/or command them to bungee-jump dive-bomb the school's prom. Anyway, Julie, who already knows a good bit of karate before Miyagi trains her, kicks their butts.
4. Karate Kid Part III (1989)
There's been more and more retro-appreciation for Karate Kid Part III over the years, and some of that might have to do with Cobra Kai and how that show, specifically, has redeemed (or at least called out) a lot of this film's more bizarre elements.
By 1989 -- and especially given how crowded Summer '89 was with big blockbusters -- the Miyagi/LaRusso shtick had worn a bit thin. It wasn't the right time for a new Karate Kid movie and it certainly wasn't the right time for these two best friends to have a falling out, with Daniel briefly giving into his Dark Side anger.
But Part III -- even though it involves a millionaire toxic waste magnate cartoonishly seeking emotional and physical revenge on a teenage boy because he humiliated his old army buddy -- still has its (Terry) silver linings. Sure, Daniel, as the All Valley Champ, weirdly gets a bye into the final round (it's a dumb new tourney rule), but the movie still culminates in a big showdown. Grown-ass men, and Karate's "Bad Boy" Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan), try to destroy the life of a teenager and it, just barely, blows up in their face. It all results in Cobra Kai getting banned from the All Valley and... well, you'll have to watch Cobra Kai for the rest. It does get better.
3. The Karate Kid (2010)
2010's Karate Kid was an effective, satisfying reboot that one would think, given the box office success, would have gotten a follow-up much sooner than 2025. One that might have even continued with Jaden Smith as the star.
One of the more surprising things about this Karate Kid is actually how faithful it is as an actual remake. Like, all the same story beats are there from the original 1984 film. From the mom trying to get her son excited about moving to a new place to Smith's Dre getting revenge on his school bullies with water to his new girlfriend's disapproving parents to... it's almost all a one-to-one. Which isn't usually what we expect now from reboots. Everything's usually a new take on old material. Nope, not this. It plays the hits.
Again though, everything still works. Smith's Dre is a likable new lead, Chan is great as Han (though his backstory here seems a bit too dark), and the China setting gives this story a nice karate-to-kung fu refresh.
2. The Karate Kid Part II
The Karate Kid Part II is a stellar sequel, sending Miyagi and Daniel to Okinawa and embroiling them both in old Miyagi girlfriend drama. It made a ton of money, had a huge hit song (Peter Cetera's "Glory of Love"), and sweetly continued the story of Daniel and Miyagi's offbeat friendship. Ending Daniel's relationship with Elisabeth Shue's Ali off-screen felt like a typical sequel cheat, but Daniel, for our money, has an even better summer fling romance with Tamlyn Tomita's Kumiko.
While not as singularly great as the first film, Part II delivers the goods as a follow-up, recognizing that it's Daniel and Miyagi that fans care about, no matter their location. Daniel's mom is sidelined (though not as hilariously as she is in Part III) and the rest very much echoes the best beats of the first movie: new girl, new bully, secret move, final fight (to the death this time!), etc. It actually has more in common with the 2010 reboot than you'd think. Still though, Part II is more or less the exact sequel you'd want if one was getting made.
1. The Karate Kid (1984)
In 1984, Rocky director John Avildsen (who'd go on to direct two Karate Kid sequels as well) gave us another rousing, emotional underdog story, this time about a teenage boy, freshly transplanted from New Jersey to LA's San Fernando Valley, who forms an unlikely friendship with an elderly Japanese man and wins a regional karate tournament. The Karate Kid was a soaring sleeper hit, and garnered Pat Morita an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of war veteran/karate sensei Mr. Miyagi.
You know how in Back to the Future they never explain how Marty and Doc Brown are buddies? Like, this kid and this old weirdo are BFFs and no one blinks an eye? The Karate Kid actually dives into this and make you invest and believe in the close bond formed by a tormented teen and a reclusive handyman (who's secretly a karate master). When Daniel, who's found nothing but trouble since moving to California, tells Miyagi that he's his best friend, you believe it. And you buy novice Daniel LaRusso being able to make his way through a karate tournament with, like, just a month or so of training as Miyagi gives him the bare basics of what's needed to fight and win (a strong emphasis, strategically and ideologically, on defense).
The Karate Kid is one of the most fun and inspiring movies of the '80s. It's got a great script, powerful performances, and an exhilarating come-from-behind story. First love, a quintessential '80s bully (played by William Zabka), and an iconic special ace-up-the-sleeve kick.
It's still the best around.
What's your favorite in the series? Add your tier list above, and let's discuss in the comments!
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The final stop for our IGN First trip to FromSoftware was the sound room where Lead Composer Shoi Miyazawa crafts the wonderful soundtracks that fill The Lands Between and Limveld with notes of hope, melancholy, and strife. Here's our interview touching upon what goes into creating a FromSoft soundtrack, what specifically were the notes from the director given with regards to Nightreign's music, and Miyazawa's own personal influences.
IGN: So I just wanted start off by asking you about how you fell into the world of composing music for video games. Are you a big fan?
Shoi Miyazawa - Lead Sound Designer on Elden Ring Nightreign:
I was a fan of the Armored Core games. So when Hoshino-san approached me about recruitment at FromSoftware, I was very interested. I'm a big fan of the Armored Core music. Also, I like some other titles from my childhood such as Ganbare Goemon and Secret of Mana. So I'm always putting research and trying to find inspiration from these titles as well. The Castlevania series, as well, was a big musical inspiration.
Along those same lines, do you have any favorite composers that have also maybe inspired your work? Not just video games, just in general.
I've always been a fan of King Crimson and Marilyn Manson. I like these kinds of different sorts of vibes within music.
Switching gears to Elden Ring and Nightreign, what's the process for composing for something like Elden Ring? Are you given concept art for a boss or a location and then use that inspiration for the sound? Or are you given specific notes of the feel or mood that the director is looking for?
There are several approaches we can take such as that you mentioned. Sometimes the director will give a quick description of the mood or the location he wants. Sometimes it's from the existing concept art of the game. And sometimes it's a simple text-based order such as a description of a boss's backstory or the arena that they fight in or something like this.
Has working on the soundtrack for Nightreign been any different from the experience of working on the soundtrack for the main base game?
Of course it is an Elden Ring spin-off, so we wanted it to transfer or carry over certain elements from Elden Ring and the sort vibes it gives off. I had many direct talks with the director himself discussing the aspects of Elden Ring and how we should approach Nightreign. And I think while he wanted this to be quite distinct from the Souls titles, he also wanted it to be catchy in its own way as well. So this sort of catchiness and offering something that was distinct from Elden Ring was quite important in our work.
Can you describe maybe some of the notes that you might have been given from the director with regards to the sound and tone of this soundtrack? Were there any recurring themes that you wanted to hit?
Yeah. So seeing as night was an important theme of Nightreign, we wanted this feeling of being out of place, this feeling of loneliness, this sense that comes with the darkness or the sort of loneliness of nighttime. These were elements that we wanted to incorporate into the music.
Among the many projects that you've worked on so far at FromSoftware, which has been your favorite, and which has been the most challenging as well?
Of course I have lots of fond memories of working on titles at From and it's really hard to lock in on a particular title. But there are a couple that have stuck with me, a couple of pieces in particular. One of them being when we composed Consort Radahn for Elden Ring. What I like to do is I actually like to compose in a sort of dark room, in a dimly lit room. So I had this feeling while I was composing that track of there always being somebody there in the shadows and looking over my shoulder. So this kind of came through in the piece for Consort Radahn.
I actually like to compose in a sort of dark, dimly lit room.
Another one would be the track Takes Me Anywhere from disc three of the bonus soundtrack from Armored Core VI. I know this is a bit different from the fantasy music that we've made with our games, but for me, as I said, Armored Core was a series I was particularly fond of. And as I entered the company, From just happened to kind of put that series on hiatus for a little bit. So I had something, had some ideas going there, but AC IV was a long-awaited game. It was a long time coming. And Takes Me Anywhere was one of the original tracks we produced for that bonus all-encompassing disc set. So it was something that brought back memory of those days and it was a track, it was a piece that I actually had in my mind since coming to From and since I started working a little bit on those titles but didn't quite get to fully develop into those games. So it reminds me a lot of those days and everything we went through with Armored Core. And so hopefully people will give that a listen as well.
There are several composers that are credited with working on Elden Ring. Can you talk a little bit about how collaborative of an effort it is to compose music on games like Elden Ring and Nightreign? Do you each work completely separately or do you work closely together despite being responsible for different pieces?
Generally when we compose music at From, it's one composer to one track. That's the general approach we take. But of course we can get advice and sort of exchange ideas with the other members of the sound team. But ultimately on the credits, you'll see the person credited to that track is the one who took it through to completion. But Nightreign was a little bit of an exception here. So we have multiple composers working on a single track in some instances.
One of the bosses that we got to check out today as part of our visit was Libra: Creature of Night. And I was wondering if you had any kind of insights or stories as to what went into the creation of that track.
Actually with Libra, it was one of the rare cases where a particular musical direction or ideas was given within the character brief. So that was one that stood out to me. We had these themes of trying to bring something as the appearance and as the boss fight itself suggests, some themes of an exotic nature or these impressions of madness or like a demonic nature to the boss. And again, introducing this duality that you find both before and during the boss fight, considering elements of victory and defeat, that trade-off, that risk and reward. We try to create a harsh contrast with a lot of our bosses, but in particular we wanted to take it to extremes for Libra.
The contrast between day and night during boss fights is very striking, and it's apparent in the music as well. Could you tell us a little bit about how you approached composing these pieces?
So of course we have this day and night cycle and this three day structure to Nightreign. So as we mentioned earlier, we wanted the player to feel like there's this imposing sense of danger. Enemies and bosses are getting stronger as the night approaches. We wanted this feeling of being more and more out of place, more and more out of your depth. These are things that we try to, feelings we try to convey through the music of Nightreign.
We wanted the player to feel like there's this imposing sense of danger.
Is there any particular song or anything that you're really excited players to experience for the first time when they play that you worked on?
So one thing that compares to the music we did for Elden Ring and the DLC was really focusing on the individuality of each of these boss fights that players are going to be encountering numerous times. So we wanted to really push the limits of the music as well for each of these fights. And sometimes it was a case of can we really push it this far? And I think in the end we did end up really expanding those limits and really pushing the boundaries of the music at From in our fantasy titles. So that's one area that I hope players look forward to.
Going back to your own personal tastes, do you have a favorite musical instrument or something that you like to incorporate into your compositions?
It's not an instrument, but actually when I first started dabbling in music, it was with a personal computer and it was with DTM software. So that was my first real contact with making music and especially professionally. So as a creator, software like this allows me to really concentrate on the finer elements and really fine tune these pieces down to every last note and pitch. So I think this is something that I'd like the player to understand or hopefully notice when they listen to these pieces. Because I really do get way too into it, probably too much that is healthy for work.
One of the things that I've been asking everyone that I've been talking to at FromSoftware has been what your favorite game is. We know we talked a little bit about video games from the music side, but do you have any games that really stand out as just your favorite game of all time?
One of the games I remember fondly is Myst. Adventure games like this, they usually have this quite, maybe only some readers or viewers will remember, but these kind of pre-rendered scenes that kind of transition one from the other. But you're going through the world and you're solving the puzzles on this adventure. This really stuck with me as a player. So yes, I think Myst would be a good example.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter@JurassicRabbit
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Hasbro wants to take Marvel Legends fans for a ride this year, as they've revealed a new wave of Marvel Gamerverse action figures inspired by the classic Marvel vs. Capcom games.
Check out the slideshow gallery below for a closer look at these stylish new figures, including new takes on Wolverine, Thanos, Venom, Captain America, Juggernaut, and more:
These figures will be released as both two-packs and single figures, depending on the size of the figures in question. The full Marvel vs. Capcom lineup includes:
Wolverine vs. Silver Samurai
Psylocke vs. Thanos
Captain America vs. Venom
War Machine vs. Omega Red
Gargantos (formerly known as Shuma-Gorath)
Juggernaut
While Hasbro has released most of these characters in Marvel Legends form in the past (save for Gargantos), these figures are embellished to better capture the dynamic sprite designs from the classic games. For example, Wolverine has the exaggerated claws and mask, while Venom is decked out in his game-accurate blue color scheme. The Psylocke figure in particular showcases the extreme articulation possible with these new figures.
Obviously, not every character from the Marvel vs. Capcom games is represented here, but collectors can always look to past Marvel Legends releases to fill out their lineup. At this point, even relatively more obscure characters like Marrow and Blackheart have been featured in the Marvel Legends line. The bigger challenge is assembling the Capcom side of the roster. Might we recommend Jada Toys' Street Fighter line when it comes to Ryu, Chun-Li, and the rest of the Street Fighter gang?
Hasbro also showed off their line of The Fantastic Four: First Steps figures, which includes the titular foursome along with Julia Garner's Silver Surfer. Check them out in the slideshow gallery below:
Preorders for The Fantastic Four: First Steps figures will open on the Hasbro Pulse website and other retailers on Friday, May 30 at 10am PT, with the figures slated for release in Summer 2025. Preorders for the Marvel Gamerverse figures will open throughout the month of June, with the figures expected to release in Fall 2025.
Funcom asked us to "let them cook," and going on last night's Dune: Awakening showcase, the developers did. With just a few days to go before early access players get their "head start," Funcom put on a livestream showing off Dune: Awakening's mid-to-endgame, and a wide tour of the Hagga Basin "to emphasize the size and variety players can expect," including the "lush O’odham, the forbidding Hagga Rift, the tall spires and imposing rock formations of Jabal Eifrit, to name just a few."
Inspired by Denis Villeneuve and Legendary Entertainment’s blockbuster films, Dune: Awakening lets players explore Arrakis in an open-world game for the first time ever. Up until now, even beta players have only seen around 25% of Hagga Basin, so the stream showcased "these huge and diverse landscapes" in all their glory.
"Before even considering the vast dunes and dangers of the Deep Desert, players will experience a full-scale survival game," Funcom teased.
"They will rise through the ranks of the Atreides or Harkonnen; build powerful strongholds; brave Imperial Testing Stations; craft advanced schematics; explore and harvest in a variety of vehicles, and much, much more." Furthermore, the "Landsraad feature allows anyone to contribute in the effort to impact their entire faction, whether they prefer PvE or PvP."
Dune: Awakening is an open-world survival MMO set on the most dangerous planet in the universe. You'll learn to survive the desert by learning the ways of the Fremen, and expand your potential through combat, spice, building, and trade. It's set to release on June 10, 2025, on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S after a three-week delay to fix issues identified during its beta testing. Players with an "early start," however, get to play five days early from June 5.
"As a longtime fan of Dune, it also just feels so good to explore and learn more about a world that I’m quite fond of, and Funcom has clearly put a ton of effort into worldbuilding and lore, even despite taking quite a bit of creative liberty by placing Awakening within a parallel reality and canon than the books/movies," we wrote in IGN's Dune: Awakening closed beta impressions preview.
"There are little details that have a massive impact on gameplay. I won’t go into spoilers, but this kind of attention to detail touches just about every aspect of the world, including the factions and characters you meet along the way, which should be a treat for any fan of the setting."
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her atBlueSky.
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FromSoftware games have always had a very distinct visual style, So much so, that it's usually pretty easy to predict when that iconic "FromSoftware" logo is about to pop up after a sudden fade to black, even in an announced game trailer for an upcoming FromSoft game. This is thanks to the many talented artists at the studio, and during my time at their office, I got a chance to sit down with one of them, Concept and Environmental Artist Saori Mizuno, to talk about her inspirations, the art direction she was given for Elden Ring Nightreign, and how it differed from her work on previous FromSoft games.
IGN: So generally, what was different about working on Nightreign versus the base Elden Ring game, or and anything prior that you have worked on with FromSoftware?
Saori Mizuno - Concept Artist on Elden Ring: Nightreign: In general, for Nightreign, we would receive an order for a design and then if it was myself in charge of that particular concept, then I would iterate on that image that I had, that interpretation of the design and then I would align and collaborate with the other designers and eventually produce the final design. I think one aspect that changed a lot on Nightreign's design process is that we had a lot of back and forth, a lot of brainstorming in person, actually speaking about these designs rather than just getting text-based feedback.
Interviewer:
Can you talk a little bit about the setting of Nightreign and how you approach making it feel distinct from the base Elden Ring game, despite it being a spinoff that uses a lot of the same assets?
We didn't want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring, as it used that as a base for the design and the setting. But one specific direction we did get early on was to create something that first feels and looks familiar and gradually transforms into the unfamiliar and into the unknown. So that was a nice sort of policy or a direction that we had to approach with the design.
Elden Ring had this sort of very gorgeous painterly feel to a lot of the environments, but we wanted Nightreign to feel like at a glance beautiful, but if you look a little bit deeper, there's something sinister and there's something darker there. Elden Ring, maybe there's a lot of bright colors in the scenery and in the sky box and such, but we wanted there also, the player to feel a sense of darkness there as well. So that was another aspect of the design that differed slightly from Elden Ring.
"We didnt want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring."
One of the locations that really stuck out to me was the Roundtable Hold, which is such a familiar location in the base Elden Ring, and it has such an interesting twist in Nightreign. Can you talk a little bit about what went into the new design for the Roundtable Hold and what were some of the inspirations behind some of those changes?
With Nightreign's new kind of speedier, high-tempo gameplay, we wanted the Roundtable this time in particular to feel like somewhere you could relax and take your time and sort of cool off after that intense three day/night cycle. So we wanted it to feel, from a design perspective, more cozy and more welcoming, more at home. One inspiration was the Fire Link Shrine from Dark Souls 1, where you feel sort of more embraced by the atmosphere. You feel like you are coming home after these hardships, after a hard fought battle, and safe more importantly than anything.
So from a design perspective, we used techniques such as gentle lighting, a feeling of the surrounding environs as well as the Roundtable Hold itself. And also while a lot of the place is in ruins, we didn't want it to feel completely destroyed and desolate. We wanted it to feel like it was a safe place to come home to and that the player could relax and take their time there.
Another impetus for the design of the Roundtable Hold in Nightreign was this feeling of early morning, so a sort of daybreak, dawn, the player setting off on a new adventure. So that came into some of the lighting and architecture choices that changed in Nightreign, and we wanted the player to be aware of this. We wanted them to be conscious of this when setting out on this new adventure.
So when the player hits day three, they're transported to this brand new location that is really unlike any other in Elden Ring. One that is predominantly white, mixed in with a very colorful sky box full of orange, blue and purple kind of all mixing together. What's the story behind this environment and what were some of the inspirations that went into that work? If you need a visual representation, I have this one.
So one of the first requests we got from the director regarding this environment was that it should feel like a sense of finality and we should get this feeling of buildup before a storm. And that we should also feel like the impression you got from the sky box is that the sky is falling, this calamity is coming to an end. So it's the boss at the end of the third day, so we wanted the player to feel this tightness in their chest like they're getting ready to embark on something greater than themselves and hopefully this culminates and comes through in the design.
To add to that, looking again at the colors and the composition of the sky, we wanted it to feel like something was about to be born from that chaos, from that chaotic scene. Again, the boss culminates at the end of that third-day struggle. We wanted the player to feel this from the use of color and the use of these design elements. And some of the inspirations we took from that were from real-life cosmic events. So something we can't quite understand, something that's very distant and abstracted from regular human perception and we wanted it to feel just as abstract and just as grandiose even within the world of Nightreign.
Just speaking personally, what's something that you yourself are very proud of that you've worked on in Nightreign?
Personally, one of my favorite areas is actually the area we just talked about, the environment that you enter just before facing that boss at the end of the third day. One of the keywords we found while exploring the design for this environment was this concept of shedding skin. And so this was something that really resonated with me and stuck with me. This idea of personifying the surroundings and the building into something that was once living and has now since been petrified or gone through these ages of time and gone through this whole process. And we wanted players to feel this sense of age, this old fantasy feel from this particular set piece.
One of the things that surprised us about Nightreign was the environmental variety, despite it being a much smaller and more condensed kind of world. Was it difficult to achieve this kind of variety in such a small, confined space?
So generally with these kind of emergent map changes and these kind of terrain effects and events, we wanted it to feel like something immediately fresh and exciting, just at a glance. So the player will know there's been an impactful change to the map and to the scenery and they'll have an immediate idea of what they need to do to progress. So for instance, the volcano, the crater that appears, you'd need to sort of dig deeper into it. Or for the snowfield terrain change, you'd need to sort of climb right up to the top of it, this sort of thing. We wanted this to be immediately effective and change the way the players approach and behave in the map just by changing that sense of space.
And then personally as a designer, who are some of your favorite artists, either classic or contemporary, and are there any people that you can point to as being particularly influential on your work?
One of my personal favorite traditional artists, or classical artists is Zdzisław Beksiński. I took a lot of inspiration from his various expressions when designing my work. Also with the concept of Nightreign and battling the Night Lords after these repeated plays, I felt like this is inherent to the game design. And so I wanted this feeling to come through in the designs I created as well. And one sense I got from that was from watching the film Spirited Away from Hayao Miyazaki. This feeling of being unable to go home, unable to escape from a dream. This sort of feeling I wanted to kind of harness while designing these worlds and tried to get that through to the player as they play through the game.
Even when designing Limveld, that initial map, that initial environment on the first day, I wanted it to feel beautiful. Like from an outward glance, it looks beautiful and inviting, but pretty quickly you feel like something's off or something's not quite right. So I think that is a part of the inspiration that we definitely got across in the design of Nightreign.
So switching to video games really quick, can you just talk about what are some of your favorite video games that may have inspired your work as well?
I enjoy Diablo II and other such multiplayer games. I enjoy open world survival games where you have to sort of start from scratch and build your own house and things like that world. I like a variety of indies and I've also had a fondness for a Legend of Zelda since childhood, games like Majora's Mask, which kind of are obviously really fun to play, but they sort of have this… again, this sense of repeat play and this kind of sense of darkness to them as well. I think that's stuck with me since childhood. So yeah.
And then a final question. A lot of designers and artists like to make their own personal imprints on a game. Are there any secrets or Easter eggs that you managed to sneak in yourself into the game? Or is there maybe anything that you hope players will see and enjoy as they play?
Yes. I don't think you'd call this a sort of a signature as an artist, but one important thing that I paid attention to while designing Nightreign was this sort of all encompassing theme of the night and how we go about expressing that. We obviously tried various things and various methods and Limveld is ultimately a place that you keep coming back to as a player. So we thought one way we could express that was these changes throughout the three-day structure and what players can notice as their journey progresses. What keeps them coming back and what keeps them interested.
And so to talk a bit more about that theme of night, we had to explore what night meant to us as designers, like as a base concept. So of course, night brings with it some negative connotations, like the dark and fear and the unknown, things like this. So we wanted at first when the player jumps into this world to feel those kind of negative feelings conveyed quite directly and have that sense of anxiety and that sense of fear of the unknown.
"We had to explore what night meant to us as designers, like as a base concept."
So we conveyed this straight up with things like the imposed time limit and the encroaching circle of rain, things like this. But we found that night is, we didn't want it to be fully negative. Again, once the players get used to that cycle and they get used to what they're seeing, we wanted it to be more than that. We wanted players to kind of begin to almost yearn for the night and sort of look forward to this encroaching darkness and maybe even feel a sense of comfort from it, from getting used to this rhythm and these aspects. So as the game progresses and the player is kind of getting used to these things, that's definitely an aspect of the design that we wanted to incorporate and be a part of that player experience.
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