Eternal Strands is a great reminder that creative tools and reactiveness in big open-world sandboxes trump content bloat - Related to great, series, bloat, s, is

Eternal Strands is a great reminder that creative tools and reactiveness in big open-world sandboxes trump content bloat

Eternal Strands has quietly become one of early 2025's biggest surprises. While it's not topping the sales charts nor dominating the online conversation, the sentiment which surrounds it is generally positive, and in the age of bloated open-world experiences (which are otherwise good), many players are finding great comfort in its smarter approach to world size and tightening the gameplay loop.

Yellow Brick Games, founded in 2020 by AAA industry veterans from BioWare, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and EA, has knocked out a notable game that feels neither too big nor small, in roughly four years. With the industry facing many difficulties as I type these words and polarisation leading to bigger and more expensive experiences as well as small itty bitty indies that often bite more than they can chew, Eternal Strands is the sort of rare beast that typically flies under many radars.

I arrived a bit late to this party due to my gaming commitments elsewhere, but largely positive chatter and comments that came from folks who are typically burned out from playing big-budget behemoths made me far more interested in the game than any piece of promotional material. Yellow Brick Games CCO Mike Laidlaw's enthusiasm and generally wholesome vibes on Bluesky also helped, I'll admit.

Recent disappointments with ambitious games that were built with UE5 also had me a bit worried. Could Yellow Brick Games deliver on all it had promise, while also dealing with that tech's weaker points on the first try? Well, I can say all that AAA experience didn't go to waste. Eternal Strands is a darn fine video game that feels laser-focused on what really matters most when devs don't have a 'forever' budget and creatively clueless executives breathing down their necks.

Eternal Strands' premise is simple, and even the initial cutscene keeps things concise in spite of all the colourful worldbuilding done with the text and the (excellent) voice acting: Weavers are this world's version of mages and they're not welcome in most places after some bad stuff happened long ago. In many ways, control of magic is a lost art, and while there are practitioners moving from one town to the next and looking to unearth lost secrets, the fact is that most people don't care about or simply hate these weavers and what they do.

Of course, Brynn, a young weaver, and her band of cheerful and passionate magic pals are on the move and trying to find a way to restore weavers to their former glory. Without getting into more early story details, they come across the Enclave, a region that was essentially the centre of magic in the world. Nowadays, it's a hazardous magic wasteland where nature thrives, but danger lurks around every corner. And that includes giant scary constructs called Arks, as well as behemoths such as drakes.

Yellow Brick Games' key members haven't been shy about explaining the biggest influences on their game. Shadow of the Colossus, recent Zelda games, and even Dragon's Dogma have been brought up time and again. You don't need to play much of the game to feel their DNA all over the Enclave's ruins and Brynn's abilities. There is, however, a distinct interest in making the gameplay loop breezier and far more focused than in your average open-world extravaganza.

A few hours in, Eternal Strands shouldn't be considered a small game. Its areas, which are laid out like and similar in size to Monster Hunter's, change under different weather (and even magical) conditions and are designed to be revisited during hunts and side quests. The key difference here is that they're quite easy to memorize and navigate quickly. It's not about the sheer size of all the combined areas, but about how that space is used.

The general feeling is that most of Eternal Strands' development was spent figuring out how to give players enough control over the game rather than how to keep them engaged. It turns out that, if the basic tools and loop are cool and unique enough, people will be interested in exploring more of a world. There are clear objectives driving the whole thing (exploring a lost civilization and defeating massive enemies with inventiveness) and more than enough cutting-edge tech powering the creative vision up.

Monster Hunter figured this out long ago (Wilds is about to prove Capcom right again), and Nintendo's refreshed open-world take on The Legend of Zelda was a gigantic win that worked twice because its astounding freedom wasn't limited to 'more things to do' and a striking visual presentation. Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are games that simply are fun to figure out and 'solve' in a multitude of ways. Eternal Strands feels exactly like a downsized version of the combination of those design philosophies.

The most fun I've had so far with Eternal Strands has been trying different spells on different parts of a giant automaton's body, luring giant monsters into elemental traps when my health bar was almost depleted, or seeing how much I could literally break the game's environments with the limited (but expertly crafted) tools I'd been given. It's the sort of game that speedrunners will probably tear apart sooner rather than later, and I'm fairly sure they'll have a blast trying to figure it all out, as the game actively encourages you to 'mess' with its limits and try different strategies with finite resources constantly.

Of course, the fact the mystery at the centre of the narrative is intriguing and that dialogues and exposition never go on for too long (adding to the overall breezy vibes) are big pluses that don't disrupt, and even elevate, the smooth pacing of an adventure that strikes an almost perfect balance between epic and swashbuckling. Plus, the art has a distinct, clear style and is pretty cute!

I've got my complaints, sure, but they're relatively easy to overlook when a game runs and plays so well, in addition to having that visual appeal. More importantly, Eternal Strands fully knows what its limits are and what it wants to do. I wish that happened more often.

Eternal Strands is now available on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. It's also part of Game Pass' current offering of third-party games.

The Local - Release Date Reveal Trailer - YouTube Watch On.

Sometimes, you just gotta go fast; feel that virtual wind in your hair as you launch yours......

February was a wild month for PS5 with the release of Monster Hunter Wilds, but it doesn't get any quieter in March and April.

A former boss of Amazon Games has detailed why the firm couldn't compete with Valve's Steam platform for PC sales.

Monster Hunter Wilds review

The most exhilarating and refined Monster Hunter yet, even if its attempts to balance the old and new don't always quite coalesce in its ongoing quest to please all audiences.

Let us consider for a moment the duality of Monster Hunter. At a basic level, it couldn't be easier to explain - practically everything you need to know is right there in the title! This is a series about tracking enormous beasts, clobbering them into submission, then crafting their bits into enhanced gear, fancier weapons - endlessly repeating that cycle until you simply can't muster the enthusiasm anymore. But it's also a series that's accrued such a vast wealth of interlinking and often comically opaque systems over its two decades of existence that even old-timers like me usually end up having to resort to a Google.

Monster Hunter Wilds review Developer: Capcom.

Played on PC Availability: Out on 28th February on PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

You've got your armour crafting and weapon smithing; your elemental weaknesses and exploits; an ever-stacking list of buffs and gemstone augmentations; cooking that radically impacts your performance depending on the ingredients you shove in the pot; inventories overflowing with the mildly baffling likes of deodorant and exploding poop - all crafted from materials meticulously gathered out in the world. And that's just the basic stuff. Monster Hunter is a lot - a staggeringly deep sandbox of murderous refinement, where possibilities pile on top of opportunities until you either run away screaming or it consumes you whole.

2018's Monster Hunter Worlds - a soft reboot of sorts for the series - was arguably Capcom's first real attempt at paring back some of that accumulated legacy faff in the name of long-overdue modernisation. But Monster Hunter Wilds goes even further. Nothing feels like it's escaped scrutiny this time around, with countless core systems either being whittled down to their fundamentals, jettisoned entirely, or expanded to their ultimate form. And there's no improved example of this last one than Wilds' vast sprawl of undulating sand dunes, lush waterlogged forests, fire-blasted caverns, and snowy peaks - all seamlessly connected for the very first time. That's not to say Wilds is an open-world Monster Hunter, though. As expansively labyrinthine as its individual biomes often are, they're still discrete locales linked to their neighbours by a single funnel-like point. So while it's the kind of change that sounds neat on paper, there's little meaningful impact in gameplay terms, particularly as you'll mostly be teleporting around.

Where Wilds' world design does start to feel radical is in its focus on interactivity and reactivity - weather events, wandering monsters, roaming herds, and scenery all interact to create the illusion of a living, breathing ecosystem far beyond anything the series has accomplished before. Monsters can hunt in constantly fluctuating packs to pile on the pressure; they'll scrap with huge herds of lesser wildlife, sometimes to the point the sheer amount of chaos onscreen feels a little overwhelming. Sand dunes slowly sag beneath enormous beasts, ice platforms shatter underfoot, heavy footfalls create tidal waves in rushing waters, and there's no end of crumbling spires, precarious boulders, and other environmental hazards waiting to be exploited in battle. Sure, much of this is built on the foundations laid in Monster Hunter World, but Wilds evolves those ideas to create a wilderness that's truly exhilarating in its dynamism.

Eventually, biomes grow even more frenetic as Wilds piles on rarer monsters, more exotic combinations. The world enters a state of constant flux, shifting not only from day to night but across changing seasons. Verdant fauna and abundant wildlife make way for fallow periods, before vicious electrical storms, torrential rainfall, and heat waves sweep in to herald a new season of plenty - each change impacting the monsters, endemic life, and other events you'll see. All this happens in real-time; sandstorms slowly creep across the horizon before engulfing the desert whole, while raindrops turn to torrents, transforming still forest pools into surging currents. Even the corpses seemingly rot over time! Not all biomes are created equal, mind; later areas devolve into a series of rather squalid, indistinct spaces that don't have quite the same impact or sense of life as Wilds' early forest and desert biomes. But even so, the engine of movement driving the world makes for something that can be thrillingly dynamic and gloriously unpredictable when it all comes together.

All this frenzied activity is tracked across Wilds' constantly shifting 3D map, forever festooned with myriad roving icons and incessant event alerts. More than ever, Wilds' map isn't just a reference tool; it's the heart of the experience, with Capcom taking significant steps toward jettisoning the series' traditional focus on formal quests in favour of a more ad hoc, player-driven approach - one that encourages hunters, whether playing solo or online, to grapple with the ebb and flow of its ever-changing ecosystem on their own terms.

That's not to say Wilds is completely without structure. The series' classic Low Rank progression, for instance, has now been streamlined into a linear story campaign, co-existing alongside Wilds' underlying pick-n-mix field investigations. It's here where you feel most keenly that Wilds is possibly quietly at war with itself, not quite sure how to balance the demands of returning fans with a desire to woo the untapped masses. The main story campaign is essentially a 20-hour tutorial designed to gently walk players through the fundamentals, but it's so tortuously belaboured, and covers so little meaningful ground (yup - you're still going to have to Google "affinity"), it feels approximately 20 times longer than it needs to be. It's also essentially mandatory given so many of Wilds' aspects - from side quests to Palico support skills, and even the game's flagship seasonal dynamism - don't unlock till the credits roll and High Rank begins.

To be clear, the story campaign isn't an entirely terrible way to spend 20 hours, thanks to sky-high production values, infectiously silly detours, and a genuinely endearing cast. But it takes the series' relatively recent infatuation with cinematic storytelling to fairly exhausting extremes - suffocating its handsomely staged fights between so much endless cutscene jib-jabber and on-rails traversal that even the most receptive of newcomers (let alone old-hands who've done this dance countless times before) will likely be screaming for Capcom to shut up and get on with it. And don't expect the overcautious drip-feed of familiar aspects to immediately stop once you're in High Rank either, as it takes a surprisingly long time for Wilds to settle down.

All this would be a bit unbearable, frankly, if the fighting wasn't so exhilarating. Wilds' mad alchemy of beautiful monster design, elegantly refined combat, and, yes, that wonderfully dynamic world, is something pretty special. Starting with those monsters, Wilds' varied menagerie is a triumph. Each creature is imbued with so much personality and presence, such an engagingly distinctive move set, they're a pleasure to observe even when they're not trying to rip your face off.

There's the Quematrice, a wonderfully silly reptilian rooster that merrily peck-peck-pecks its way across the arid Windward Plains; there's the gloriously named Lala Barina, a spindle-like spider whose skittering, swirling dance intermittently involves shooting paralysing pappi from the rose on its butt. You'll claw through oily sediment to battle the Rompopolo, an inflatable mosquito that uses its proboscis to blast air up through the ground. And then there's the Uth Duna, which clomps around beneath an enormous flowing mantle, turning still forest pools into devastating tidal waves. Indeed, it's a hit rate that's only slightly undone by the tiresome sub-class of monsters that favours relentless explosive area-of-effect attacks. On the whole, though, its creature design rarely stumbles. advanced yet, those unfailingly awful defence-style set-pieces that have dogged the series for generations have finally, mercifully, been given the boot.

There's the new Focus system, for instance, giving players the ability to inflict conspicuous "wounds" by wailing repeatedly on specific monster parts. In practical terms, this creates opportunities for increased damage and additional rewards, but on a more psychological level these regular crescendo moments give the series' traditionally lengthy battles a more tangible sense of progression.

Really, though, it's the smaller, less showy refinements that help make the difference, all coming together to create a more consistent combat flow. Buff-giving food can now be cooked on the go, for instance (in addition to the series' familiar meat steaks), and it's possible to retrieve mid-mission supplies, or switch between a choice of two weapons while riding on your multi-purpose bird-like Seikret (it's an ongoing travesty Rise's Palamutes didn't return, but we can save that conversation for later). All this means less returning to base and more time spent engaged in the thrill of battle - giving Wilds a certain purity of focus the series hasn't really seen before.

Monster Hunter Wilds accessibility options Colour blind assistance (trichromatic, protanope, deuteranope, tritanope). Visual accessibility (fixed and dynamic HUD element toggles, text size options, subtitle background toggle). Auditory accessibility (closed caption toggle, subtitle toggle, speaker name toggle). Motion sickness reduction (camera distance, camera shake, camera sway, and lateral camera correction sliders; auto-centring toggle, motion blur toggle). HUD and mini-map adjustment settings. Volume and voice settings.

There is, though, the sense Capcom's obsessive eradication of friction in Wilds isn't always to its benefit. For instance, it's surprising just how low Wilds' difficulty seems to skew, even beyond the cautious early curve of story mode. Granted, I've played an awful lot of Monster Hunter in my time, so your own experience may vary, but even with the absolute minimum of gear upgrades, I still haven't failed a quest some 40 hours in. And with far less reason to engage with the resource grind that's traditionally been the driving force of the series, it all feels a little insubstantial. There is, too, a niggling sense - albeit not an easy one to pin down - that all this aggressive streamlining is perhaps robbing the series of some of its distinctive personality.

But taking a step back, Wilds remains an exhilarating piece of work - so refined, so alive, so giddily, chaotically joyful when it all comes together that it feels like the ultimate culmination of everything the series has been working toward over the last two decades. And if it continues Monster Hunter's legacy of generous post-launch support - where the series has traditionally felt the freest to get daft and indulge in its more sadistic tendencies - it'll be fascinating to see how this beautiful new baseline for the series develops.

A copy of Monster Hunter Wilds was provided for review by publisher Capcom.

Monster Hunter is back with a bang on current-gen consoles. Wilds - the latest series entry - aspects a seamless open world in a series first, plus p......

Annapurna Interactive, a publisher with a stellar track record when it comes to quality releases, might have been in the news lately for its mass depa......

Eine Konstruktion, die euch so wahrscheinlich noch nicht untergekommen ist. (Bild: Youtube - James Bruton).

Es gibt immer wieder Versuche, neue Arten ......

Monster Hunter Wilds feels undercooked on PS5, Series X and especially Series S

Monster Hunter is back with a bang on current-gen consoles. Wilds - the latest series entry - aspects a seamless open world in a series first, plus plenty of visual bells and whistles courtesy of Capcom's RE Engine. So can the longstanding series hold up to current-gen pressure? And how do performance and image quality fare across PS5, Series X, and Series S?

Let's first focus on the areas where Monster Hunter Wilds excels. Capcom's latest does a generally very good job of depicting wide-open gameplay spaces without too much pop in and with plenty of flora and detailed static geometry. The crags and caves of the game's opening desert section are impressively ornate, and the game's forested second area reveals off a lush, foliage-rich environment. Wilds generally meets current-gen standards here, without hard polygonal edges or low-res texture work that might betray adherence to earlier console hardware.

The game's titular monster hunts showcase unique foes in interesting arenas, often with fascinating secondary animation that remains interesting throughout often long fights. The same level of care also extends to NPCs, with eye-catching designs, sophisticated skin shading and hair rendering, highlighted in a surprising volume of well-animated and ambitious cutscenes. The excellent animation also extends to gameplay, with effective attack telegraphing and responsive player and mount movement.

Wilds' lighting can also be pretty good at times. At its best, we get very effective large-scale light bounce and occlusion, which is most obvious in strong sunlight. Smaller-scale detail is mostly treated with screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), but archways and large rock formations seem to be lit primarily using a baked global illumination (GI) technique, which is often effective. At times, the results can be quite striking.

Wilds generally looks good and often comports itself to a reasonable current-gen visual standard then, but the visual progression is more obvious against prior series entries. 2018's Monster Hunter World was the last to be developed on the MT Framework and has comparatively basic environments, somewhat crude-looking models and particularly less realistic character rendering. Despite its naming, World also generally capabilities smaller environments than Wilds, and those environments are segmented into discrete playable chunks.

2021's Monster Hunter: Rise is cruder still, despite being built on the more modern RE Engine, as it was developed around the capabilities of the Switch and functions more basic environments. It's not a bad looking game by any means, but it definitely feels like something closer to a 360 or PS3 title than World, even though I'm capturing it here on PS5.

Relative to those earlier games, I think Wilds is a clear improvement, and reveals the advantages of focusing on more advanced consoles, along with a more generously resourced development on a more modern engine.

There are some areas where Wilds doesn't necessarily match expectations though. The first thing stuck out was just how subdued the game looks in most lighting conditions, with quite compressed brightness levels - lifted blacks and suppressed highlights - and a grey look that doesn't do the game any favours. The game looks advanced in brighter, more contrast-y lighting conditions, but not using the available Rec 709 luma space feels like an odd choice. Colour correcting the footage to remove this compression looks advanced to my eyes, and relatively minor tweaks could produce a punchier look in line with other recent triple-A titles. Beyond this, there are also weapons and armour that don't seem to reflect light properly and have a very dark colour relative to the rest of the scene in some areas, which seems like a bug.

Beyond the grading issue, there are some obvious lighting flaws, with the game's GI and SSAO being ineffective in shadowing carpets of foliage in jungle areas, for example. Other small-scale environments, such as tent interiors, aren't really lit plausibly either. Wider shots of more naturalistic environments with strong direct lighting fare best, while more cramped, indirectly lit interiors can look somewhat dated. Unfortunately, the excellent ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) from Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't make the cut here either, which would improve the game's overall visual quality at the cost of performance. Perhaps as a consequence of relying on a baked lighting system, Wilds appears to have a fixed time of day too, which is a bit odd.

Beyond any lighting quirks, I think the game's general image quality and performance metrics just aren't great for a title like this. Wilds isn't necessarily on the cutting edge when it comes to visual quality, but it runs like it is.

On PS5 and Xbox Series X, Wilds has three modes and two visual toggles to make for eight effective combinations. Frame-rate mode can be run with a 60fps cap, resolution mode can be run with a 30fps cap, and balanced mode can be run with a 40fps cap on 120Hz displays. All three modes can also run at 120Hz on PS5. Essentially though, you can think of these as the 60fps performance, 40fps balanced and 30fps resolution modes we've seen in many other current-gen console titles.

Compared side-by-side, the frame-rate mode is clearly the worst off, with a rougher and more aliased image that doesn't hold up all that well on a 4K TV - we measured it at 900p on average. The other two mode offerings are quite close to each other in relative quality - typically 1224p for balanced and 1656p for resolution - with neither being free of aliasing, despite their higher internal resolutions.

Wilds seems to use AMD's first-gen FSR to scale the final image to 4K, with some evidence of minor dynamic resolution scaling in play - eg frame-rate mode seems to be bound between 720p and 1080p. FSR 2 might have been a superior option for PS5 to resolve a cleaner final image, and the unorthodox setup for an RE Engine game the developers have chosen doesn't really impress.

Beyond the resolution tweaks, volumetric lighting quality, GI quality, screen-space reflections and draw distances are also adapted on each mode, with the latter two seeming to degrade only in the frame-rate mode.

In terms of PS5 and Xbox Series X performance, the frame-rate mode does land on 60fps most of the time, but there are frequent dips to lower frame-rates that are mainly smoothed out by VRR displays. Balanced mode is similar, hitting 40fps most of the time. Resolution mode gets closer to nailing a stable frame-rate at its target 30fps, but again drops below this in heavier scenes. Series X runs a hair behind PS5 most of the time, but.

Enabling the frame-rate caps is at least unproblematic, with no frame pacing issues as we've seen in some other titles. Running without the caps in play doesn't seem to change too much, with higher performance in some light areas, especially in frame-rate mode. Unfortunately, LFC doesn't seem to engage properly on PS5 in balanced or resolution modes with a 120Hz output, so the game feels choppier than it should - which is a bug that ought to be solved. VRR feels more effective on Series X.

One pleasant surprise is that NPCs don't suffer from the same obnoxious pop-in issues we observed in Dragon's Dogma 2, though they do animate at reduced rates when far from the player - as do distant enemies. This was an area of concern after the issues Dragon's Dogma suffered, but the smaller town areas in Wilds likely don't raise the same CPU constraints.

Ultimately, Monster Hunter Wilds is a good-looking game on PS5 and Series X, but I do have concerns about its performance. Image quality and performance metrics don't line up favourably with other current-gen software, even compared to games that are pushing out the state of the art. Performance mode in particular is of significant concern, with rough and imprecise low-resolution visuals.

The game's outlook on Series S is simpler, with a single 30fps mode that can be unlocked and/or run at 120Hz with a supported display. Wilds unfortunately looks a lot worse here than even PS5 or Series X in frame-rate mode, with SSR being completely removed and noticeable hits to texture resolution. The game typically renders at an internal resolution at or below 1080p, for a softer resolve overall than any Series X or PS5 mode as it's lacking the FSR and sharpening treatment used on the larger consoles. The game also runs with a 1080p UI, versus the 4K UI on Series X and PS5. Despite these significant visual cutbacks, the game still stumbles below 30fps for extended periods, and monster hunting at 25fps just doesn't feel great. Uncapping the frame-rate does basically nothing either.

Beyond the visual minutiae, I do have to admit that Monster Hunter Wilds didn't really grab me as a player on any system. I've played - and enjoyed - older Monster Hunter games before, but Wilds is a pretty overwhelming game in the sophistication of its gameplay systems. The combat involves a lot of complexity, there are so many weapon types, and the hotkey and menus systems are a little obtuse. There is so much to learn here, and the game seems to take it for granted that you have a deep affinity for the series and a lot of background knowledge before you pick up the controller. It's an intimidating game, with gameplay detail that rivals complex MMOs like Final Fantasy 14.

The biggest issue here is that the visuals just don't scale all that well to PS5, Series X and Series S. The lack of temporal upsampling plus the relatively constrained power of console hardware results in a less than ideal experience, at least on the tested machines. Series S in particular needs some revision, failing to reach a stable 30fps in a lot of content. We'll have more to say about the game in follow-up content, starting with PS5 Pro, but for now I'm less than satisfied with the Wilds experience on the regular current-gen consoles.

You ever play so many game demos that your brain turns into a kind of game-infused gelatin capable only of learning new controls and input schemes? We......

2K has reportedly fired 31st Union president, Michael Condrey.

Condrey - who co-founded Sledgehammer Games and joined 2K in 2019 ......

Summer movie season is starting earlier and earlier every year, and this one is no exception. This spring has all kinds of exciting movies, and maybe ......