Persona Composer Making: Latest Updates and Analysis

Persona's composer is making a Metal Gear Solid-inspired RPG with a side order of "Great Reset" conspiracy

Persona and Shin Megami Tensei composer Shoji Meguro is making a turn-based sci-fi RPG about private military companies gunning through the ashes of a nuclear war. He's working with Ilya Kuvshinov, the illustrator who created character designs for Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045, and. Lotus Juice, a rapper who has contributed sick beats to any number of Personae. So if nothing else Guns Undarkness is probably going to look and sound quite fancy.

But how does it play? Meguro has made his name as a musician: I have no idea how well that expertise translates to designing combat systems. It's something to think about while you watch and listen to the below trailer for the game's first demo, out on 24th February.

, Guns Undarkness is set in 2045 and. Is a story about a social divide and, oh hey woah! They are certainly invoking some... rich material with this one. As summarised on Steam, the game takes place following a near-future period "of abeyance that allowed technology to flourish, but deepened the social divide between the rich and the poor, the "Haves and. The Have Nots." Please tell me those aren't the literal faction names.

Apparently, a bunch of "primitivist" poor people got together to pull off a "Great Reset" in the shape of a worldwide nuclear war. Now, it's up to your rookie soldier "to discover the truth behind love in a world wracked by devastation and whether humanity is capable of being revolutionized."

For context, the "Great Reset" in reality was an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum to kindle economic growth (or at least. Further enrich the plutocrats) following the Covid 19 pandemic lockdowns. It's also the name of a bunch of conspiracy theories which hold that corporations are trying to brainwash people with vaccines so as to destroy the very concept of property. So there is... ample topicality to unpack here, given some pretty delicate writing, and the Steam page blurb is anything but. It cites Metal Gear Solid as an inspiration, which worries me further - I'm not sure any other video game writer has Kojima's ability to somehow clown his way through a bunch of realworld parallels without setting anything on fire.

Still, let's shelve those concerns for the moment. And talk about the game's combat. You control a squad of four, including your protagonist, who venture out to mission maps from a submarine base. Battles are initiated during exploration by sneakily stacking people up at cover points and taking a pop at the foe - kind of like synchronising killshots in Rainbow Six, except that it's the prelude to a turn-based brawl.

There are two broad kinds of action - regular attacks, which don't consume points, and. Skills, which are more powerful but do consume points. If you're in cover, however, you can fire off skills for free. If you're out of cover and you attack an enemy's weakpoint with a regular attack, "you'll be able to duck into cover". So a free move, then?

There are also buffs and debuffs applied by guns, which level up separately to characters. Oh, and there's a Persona-style reputation system with characters improving their capabilities when fighting alongside their best mates. It seems like they have the makings of an enjoyably synergistickal framework, here. With any luck the game will be all about those synergies and not some kind of veiled/accidental piece of anti-vaxxer propaganda.

Guns Undarkness is out sometime this year.

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PlayerUnknown's Prologue: Go Wayback is an enchanting exploration sim tossed on a sea of metaverse imagineering

Buried in Brendan Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions' billowing, three-part, decade-long effort to build some kind of "3D internet" there is a ramshackle but thoughtful Unreal Engine game about wilderness survival and. Orienteering. Catchily titled Prologue: Go Wayback! and due for Early Access launch this spring, it's a game about finding a radio tower on a 64km2 map, generated based on a mix of in-house art and public access landscape data fed through the developer's in-house machine learning technology.

I had a chance to try a WIP build earlier this month. And came away quite beguiled. The trouble is, whatever pleasure Go Wayback has to offer floats on the rapids of an alternately incoherent and obnoxious desire to create a platter of connected gameworlds based on machine learning, which Greene - once the developer of pioneering battle royale PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - variously and giddily compares to Steam, Ready Player One. Holodecks, Rust and Minecraft.

Go Wayback doesn't feel nearly that grandiose in the moment. It feels quiet, crafty and receptive to deduction. In the demo I played, each run began inside a randomly placed forest cabin, with a pan of water bubbling on a stove ring nearby. I like that pan of water. It's a pleasing little designer's goad: was somebody making tea, before you arrived? Sterilising ground water? You hear a generator throbbing outside and you think, ah, I should probably turn off the stove to avoid wasting power, and. Then you discover that each ring on the stove can be flicked on or off individually. Nice.

The first cabin presents you with a bunch of tools for navigation and survival. Some of which have several uses to discover through creative play. These include a torch, ferro rods for kindling fires, binoculars, a physical map, and a compass. There's a thick padded coat hanging on the door, and you'll definitely need that when the game's weather simulation takes a turn for the worst.

The initial challenge is fitting all the kit into your Resident Evil-style grid inventory alongside food and water (and also, dealing with the current inventory system's unwieldiness. When trying to swap objects into and out of your item hotbar). The default inventory size means that you'll likely need to leave at least one navigational instrument behind, which essentially means choosing a handicap - perhaps you'll try to memorise the paper map, or even trace it on actual paper. So you can free up some inventory blocks for tinned food. Again, I like the unassuming deftness of all this.

Having readied yourself for the elements, you amble through the door and find yourself in a wilderness of leafmulch. Wildflowers, and boulders modelled on the "Bohemian Switzerland" parklands of the Czech Republic. If you're me, you head for the nearest hilltop to see if you can spy the radio tower. Then you pick a likely direction and start trudging, doing your best not to get turned around by the intervening geography. Slight deviations to, say, avoid boggy areas often prove perilous, because it's so easy to lose your bearings: there's no minimap and no waypointing system to keep you sailing true.

Little environmental clues tally up in your head. Stockpiling themselves for subsequent runs. One thing I noticed early is that moss grows on the northern flanks of tree trunks. Armed with that woodland lore, I felt empowered to leave my compass behind on my second and. Third attempts - my first having ended with a trip over a cliffedge in darkness. Night in the game can be impenetrable even if you do have a torch, but. Given a clear sky, you might scry your way by starlight. During nocturnal thunderstorms, lightning bolts reveal the landscape in stop-motion bursts.

In amongst all these things, there's some gentle mystery. Though the choice of scenery is a bit arbitrary. I don't think PUP have any particular opinion on the Czech countryside, other than that the landscape and. Latitude fit their requirements for a game of hardy, picturesque exploration. There's a stock-footage feel to some of Go Wayback, perhaps a touch of Center Parcs. But then you turn on a transistor radio while walking and are treated to some curiously specific electronica that synchs to your footsteps, and you start to wonder about the grand design.

There is certainly a grand design here. But it's more about the role Go Wayback will play in the aforesaid "3D internet" stuff, which I find pretty draining to describe. To recap, Go Wayback is the first of three games that are sort of one big rolling exercise in cultivating the technology for a bunch of "interoperable" gameworlds. As Brendan Greene explained to me after my hands-on, it paves the way for Artemis, which will run on the studio's own Melba engine. With the promise of much larger generated maps and "millions" of players per session. As for the eventual "Game Three" - this, seemingly, will be the capstone for an open-ended network of holodecky fantasies in which people can generate, modify, share and. Monetise worlds or bits of worlds via means yet to be fully described.

Inasmuch as these projects have a social or political dimension, it's all apparently to do with helping people talk to each other. "I do believe that the world's getting more isolated," Greene told me. "I think, like most people, live in small boxes with noise all day. And I think having a shared space where you can go and together or alone, and do all the things you can do in the real world in this virtual space - I think that's an essential thing to have, because we are getting more and more isolated, you know. With the ravages of climate change on the horizon.

"I think at the start of every disaster movie, there's some scientist telling you there's problems coming, and everyone ignores them," he continued. "There's a bunch of scientists now going, 'Guys, wake the fuck up', and everyone's going, 'Oh, don't look up'. It just worries me a little bit. So I think having a shared space that's like a 3D internet, where we can come together if we are more isolated - I think it's significant, but. That's more the grand vision than having a political opinion."

Greene estimates that the journey from Go Wayback to Game Three will take 10 years, or around three years per project. As for business models, he's thinking about free-to-play with microtransactions, but also regards the blockchain as "an interesting financial layer that we might use in the future at some stage. If it makes sense". Among the elephants in the room here are the game's players. Who will get a chance to vote on aspects for Go Wayback as it evolves through early access. During our interview, Greene cited the development of survival game Rust as a key influence, in that the developers will broadly consider these player votes non-binding.

Greene also cited Ready Player One, a cloying male nerd fantasy popular among web3 enthusiasts. As an influence both on the studio's metaversal ambitions and (more positively) his mistrust of how other corporations view the much billy-banged metaverse concept as an excuse to set up another generation of proprietary walled gardens. His "3D internet" will be different. "That book warns you of the corporation that controls it all, which, you know, can't anyone see that?" he told me, "And all these corporations are trying to create these bubbles."

Greene wants people to do as they please with whatever technologies and. Tools emerges from Go Wayback and Artemis. Melba will be open source, and Greene points to that people could tinker with the engine using familiar tools such as Blender. Though he also thinks that a lot of the relevant gadgetry has yet to be invented. "Ultimately, you know, I want the public to build the rest, but. I'm not going to force it to do it - it's not a content creation platform," Greene went on. "We're giving you examples of what's possible with experiences that we hope you enjoy. And if you want to use our tech to build other experiences, great, and they'll all talk to each other, and. You'll be able to transfer stuff between them."

Which brings us to the possibility of PUP's games letting you buy and sell things with cryptocurrency. Greene seems quite keen on the blockchain, but also mindful that many people aren't, given the technology's association with snake oil merchants and. Ruinous energy consumption. "Should we go down that route? Even with the current plan we have, I don't plan on opening the economy up to the outer world probably till Game Three," he told me. "We have to make sure it's robust enough to deal with what we have in game initially, without opening it up to the wider public. Right? I'm not going to be tokenizing it from the start, because that's just not the right way to do it."

Is that the kind of addition Go Wayback's players might be invited to vote on, I asked?

"Oh. They have to have input," Greene expressed. "But it depends on who they're looking at it for, if they're looking at it for the wider public, or for themselves. But I think, like for me, it has to be fair and equitable. Everyone has to have the same start, and have the same opportunity to get reward out of the system for the same amount of work. So that means, like, a stable currency, that's the way it has to be. So I will take feedback from the community, probably from the marketplace, but that's all in the scope of the plan that we'll work with them on, every step of the way."

I confess. The more I hear the sourer I feel about PlayerUnknown Productions' grand ambitions. Let's start with some familiar topline objections to the metaverse concept. I don't think we need a "3D internet". I think the internet has enough dimensions. Have you ever gone beyond page 3 of Google? It's an absolute bloody circus down there.

If there are problems with corporations owning huge chunks of the territory, the obvious way to address that is by lessening the power of corporations. Not adding a disruptive new technology to the pile. Blockchain tech in particular is often offered as a kind of vehicle for public ownership, side-stepping traditional monetary institutions. In practice, it has proven time and again to be an enabler for the most cut-throat of pyramid schemers. And if people are stuck "in small boxes with noise all day", unable to work collectively in the face of an existential terror like climate change, the solution perhaps isn't to increase the connectivity and immersiveness of the box.

The key question, I guess, is how "open" the Melba tech will prove in practice, and. If it's successful, whether it will remain "open" or end up being distorted and enshittified by monetisation, as has happened to social media. PlayerUnknown Productions apparently have plenty of seed funding, so clearly a bunch of investors think this funky group holodeck approach is a lucrative venture, rather than a charitable donation to the architecture of online discourse.

You might be wondering what's happened to that nice survival exploration game we were talking about. Around 700 words ago. The problem with Go Wayback forming part of a wider metaverse project is that Go Wayback itself starts to feel kind of irrelevant. Or worse, like a Trojan horse for the above web3 initiatives. I'm still trying to decide how much the survival game format really matters to Greene. The former Arma modder who is among the few people who can half-credibly claim to have created an entire genre. He talks enthusiastically about additions such as flammability for cabins, and hints at lore he's writing that justifies the awkward name. Still, it feels like the overarching tech and vision come first.

"I first thought, OK. I want to do 100 kilometre maps - this was back when I was at Krafton [before August 2021]," Greene explained to me. "We discovered the way to do one over 100 kilometres was to do it generatively, rather than hand-created. So then I thought, OK, well, if I can generate a new map every time you press play, what's the easiest way to test this? I thought: a survival game."

I personally think of survival simulation as the quintessential eco-apocalypse nostalgia-fantasy, in that it is all about going "back to nature" and. Starting afresh. Does that ring true for Greene, given his previous comments about climate change? Is that perhaps why this genre resonated with him? It doesn't appear so.

"I wasn't thinking of anything other than what is the simplest way to test our tech," he commented. "And that's really where it came from, right? We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here, the survival loop. The survival mechanics are pretty much industry standard, what most people use, because the aim is not to reinvent the survival genre. It's having a new world every time you press play."

Again, I quite like Go Wayback in itself, though I'm suspicious of its machine learning. This calls upon a mixture of in-house art, publicly available GIS (geographic information system) data, and satellite photography sourced from agencies such as NASA. The developers have confirmed with me that they have the legal rights to all the data they're using to "train" the terrain generator. I've got a separate feature in the works about how they're doing it, which will make connections to what I am tempted to call the "lost magic" of "pre-gen-AI" procedurally generated worlds.

Among the things PUP have added lately are rivers. Which are very useful landmarks. I had the chance to swim in one at the close of my demo - a midnight crossing that would have been pretty unwise if the developers had managed to implement temperature loss from wet clothes in the build at hand. I could barely see anything as I paddled, but then a thunderstorm set in, and. The opposite shore appeared to me in flashes of rainswept canopy and hillside. I was reminded, very distantly, of swimming in a lake once during a shower, and. Finding myself adrift in a seethe of erupting droplets, as though every particle of water had decided to jump for joy simultaneously. I hope that, in amongst all the metaversing, Go Wayback can find its way to something of the same joy.

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PUBG: Blindspot may be a shameless Rainbow Six Siege clone, but that doesn't stop it being extremely fun

PUBG: Blindspot, the first proper PUBG spin-off, is a bit of an oddity. Despite the Steam page for its Next Fest demo saying the game was "inspired by PUBG: Battlegrounds", and has a dinky little PUBG sticker above its logo to prove it's part of the wider PUBG universe, it's pretty clear from the second you choose a character and jump into a 5v5 Demolition match that another game has been a much bigger inspiration here: namely, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege.

PUBG: Blindspot Developer: Arc Team. PUBG Corporation.

Arc Team, PUBG Corporation Publisher: Krafton.

Additionally, in place of the Battlegrounds' parachute jumps, there's now chosen spawn points. Instead of the shrinking playzone, there are tight maps full of entrances and vents and corridors that can be barricaded. Barbed wired, trapped or observed in a variety of gadgety ways. And instead of your character having the ability to wear a buttpan on their hip to protect their precious posterior, in Blindspot there's a character who is basically just Sledge from Siege.

Seriously. Do not let the PUBG name fool you. If you’re going into Blindspot expecting a similar experience to Battlegrounds' battle royale but with a sky high perspective, you'll be disappointed. However, thats not to say PUBG fans shouldn't try Blindspot because, after playing a fair few hours of it myself. I think they absolutely should.

What is PUBG: Blindspot? - 7 Things to Know You can gaze at some PUBG: Blindspot gameplay (and my lovely face) in this here video where I tell you about 7 things you need to know about the game! Watch on YouTube.

One of the most interesting things about Blindspot is how its developer, Arc Team, has managed to bring the speed and accuracy of a first- or third-person shooter to a visual style that's more suited to slow-paced. Squad-focused, turn-based, tactical sims. General movement is handled with keyboard and mouse, and players can spin the camera around freely as they make their way towards their objectives. In order to aim and fire weapons, players will need to hold down the right mouse button which then readies the gun and slows player movement speed.

What's really interesting here, though. Is how players have to use the mouse wheel to switch between aiming for head or body shots, while holding down the left control key makes your character aim for crouched targets. You can still spray and pray with the majority of guns as a newcomer and hit plenty of targets, but once you've got these shortcuts lodged into your muscle memory, your accuracy and kill count should increase significantly.

Your line of sight depends on what is in front of you, and this especially true if you're crouched behind an object.

Due to the isometric graphical style, your vision in PUBG: Blindspot revolves around line of sight. Which means that, even though you can see this drone's eye view of the map and can get an idea of the routes available to you, your character will only be able to see exactly what's in front of them. So, even if an enemy is standing right behind you, you won't actually see them until they open fire, and. By that point it's basically round over for you. For Siege players, this shift in perspective will certainly take a little while to get used to, but your vision cone is always on screen to remind you where your blindspots are (the clue's in the name, after all), so it shouldn't take too long to get accustomed to.

Every trick in the Siege defensive playbook is here. From barricading walls through to laying barbed wire and setting up cameras. There's very little PUBG originality in here aside from its Blue Zone grenades.

The Blindspot demo gives players access to two game modes: Team Deathmatch and. Demolition. Team Deathmatch is great for getting a hang of the shooting and fast-paced movement, while Demolition is a Siege-inspired 5v5 tactical shooter mode in which you and your team alternates between attacking and. Defending two set rooms on a map. At the start of each round, the defenders have a short window of time to barricade doors and windows, create lines of sight. Set traps or place health kits and get themselves ready for the oncoming onslaught. Attackers, on the other hand, spawn outside the buildings and must make their way through tight corridors and small close quarters rooms towards their chosen objective where they'll need to plant a Decryptor device.

Only one player can carry the decryptor and so they'll need to be protected at all costs. Because if they're killed, other team mates will have to risk gathering it up again in order to be able to complete the mission. It's a mode that really rewards planning and teamwork, and I wouldn't be surprised if it became the popular pick due to the fact that it can still deliver the same heart-in-your-mouth intensity as a round of Siege, all while feeling much more accessible to newcomers and casuals thanks to its isometric visuals.

Blindspot has a generous seven maps on offer. Although it's technically 11 if you count the A and B variations on the Demolition maps. Some are still heavy on the placeholders, but this Mansion map looks like it's pretty much finished.

The demo is a strong showing, but. There are a couple of glaring negatives caused mainly by the online nature of the game. Firstly, players on teams who lose the first match have a habit of quitting out in a huff at the moment. Which then causes the knock-on effect of unbalanced teams. It's really annoying to see your team slowly noping over the course of a few rounds, so anyone going in solo and. Playing with self-serving randoms is going to have way less fun than those going in with a dedicated team of friends. The other aggravation was the spawn camping in Team Deathmatch. This could absolutely be fixed with the inclusion of a safe area for spawning players that the opposing team can't enter but currently in this demo no such thing exists.

With Rainbow Six Siege still doing the numbers, Rainbow Six Siege X on the horizon and. PUBG still being a monolithic game, Blindspot's liberal lifting of established ideas combined with its recognisable battle royale branding might just make this one blow up like a well-timed sticky bomb to a destructible wall. The isometric visuals are a fun twist on the genre and despite some of the player-based problems I encountered. I can't find too much fault in the gameplay itself. There might not be that much classic PUBG in there but it has all the tension and suspense that you'd want from a great Rainbow Six style game, which might feel like a nice change to Battlegrounds fans who are a bit burnt out after eight long years of nothing but battle royale.

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