The long rumoured Castlevania Advance Collection has been revealed, bringing four classic Castlevania games to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and PC. It's out today and costs $19.99.

The collection brings together three much-loved games made for the Game Boy Advance – Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow – and throws in 1995 SNES game Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss (known as Dracula X in the Americas).

Released as a celebration of the Castlevania series' 35th anniversary, Advance Collection has been co-developed with M2 (the studio behind the well-received Sega 3D Classics ports on 3DS) and Konami promises "the best possible recreation" of the originals. The new ports will also allow you to "record, replay and rewind" gameplay.

It sounds like a very complete package, giving players access to a full 71-song soundtrack of all the music from the games, allowing you to create customizable playlists of tracks. An in-game gallery includes never-before-seen art, package designs, sketches, work-in-progress drawings and more. The game also comes with an encyclopedia comprising all four games, offering information on enemies, equipment, and more.

All three Castlevania GBA games scored at least a 9/10 in IGN's original reviews, with Aria of Sorrow our pick of the bunch. "Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was a fantastic intro to the series on the Game Boy Advance, and an excellent launch title," we wrote in 2003. "Harmony of Dissonance was, and still is fantastic. Aria of Sorrow is better."

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

A modder has put the Super Mario 64 engine inside of Minecraft, creating a playable version of Mario in the game.

@pdxdylan posted on Twitter, showing off his work to get the polygonal plumber inside the blocky world of Minecraft. You can see Mario running around multiple biomes, showing off his triple jump, long jump, swimming, climbing, and more moves straight from the classic N64 title.

I'm working on a #Minecraft mod that runs the Super Mario 64 engine! It's very WIP right now but here's some highlights pic.twitter.com/QCfzl10ip0

— Dylan (@pdxdylan) September 13, 2021

IGN spoke to Dylan, who says he was inspired to make this project, simply because he knew it was possible, and that it would look a bit funny.

"I've done other work with Super Mario 64 before on other engines, but the thought of Mario in a completely different game intrigued me, so I decided to do it as a fun project," Dylan said. "I've always been into tinkering with games, figuring out how they work, and making mods for them."

Dylan says that this project was made possible by the n64decomp community, a group of fans and modders who reverse-engineered Super Mario 64 to decompile the source code. However, due to Nintendo's history of issuing cease and desist orders for fan projects, Dylan doesn't have any plans to release the Mario Minecraft mashup.

"I really do wish I could release it to the community. There's a lot of potential for this mod, especially ideas like players being able to build their own courses for Mario to run around in, or speedrunners trying to beat Minecraft as Mario in the quickest time," Dylan said. "However, due to Nintendo's strict enforcement on fan games and mods, I don't believe it will ever reach that point."

Dylan says his personal end goal is to make Minecraft playable from start to finish as Mario. In a follow-up tweet, he also said he'll continue posting videos of the project online, to keep giving the community glimpses of this fun mod.

Didn't expect this to gain traction so quickly so I should prob. clarify: Due to how Nintendo deals w/ Fan projects (DMCAing em) I sadly can't promise a download, either now or in the future. The most I can do now is post silly videos of what I do in-game with it

— Dylan (@pdxdylan) September 14, 2021

For more wacky Super Mario 64 mods, you can watch the gameplay of Peach's Castle as a playable level in GoldenEye 007. Or, for something Nintendo encourages you to build and modify yourself, check out the recently-revealed LEGO Super Mario 64 playset.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

PlatinumGames would love to port Wii U's Star Fox Zero to the Switch, but it would want to respect both Nintendo and Miaymoto's wishes in regards to an updated version.

Speaking to VGC, PlatinumGames studio head Atsushi Inaba said that it would have interest in porting 2016's Star Fox Zero to Switch - which remains one of the few big-name Wii U games yet to make it to Switch alongside remasters of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess - if Nintendo wanted it. However, any "potential changes would be up to Mr. Miyamoto."

“It’s not cool that people aren’t able to play older games because they’re locked out of the platform, so of course if anything was possible we’d like to bring over any of those older titles to the newer platforms," Inaba said. "It kind of depends on what’s in the realm of actual possibility, but yeah, if the chance came up it’s definitely something we’d like to think about.”

"The important thing to remember there is that because it's Nintendo's IP, the ideas are coming from Miyamoto-san himself. We have to respect what Miyamoto-san wants to do." Inaba continued. "Of course, at that time there was a lot of discussion between Platinum and Nintendo, but if the opportunity came up to bring Star Fox Zero to the Switch again it would be more of a question of what he would like to do in that opportunity, and of course we would respect that again."

Star Fox Zero would need to be more than just a simple port, as the Wii U version had players using both the TV screen and the Wii U gamepad to play. The TV would should traditional third-person Star Fox gameplay, while the Wii U's screen would provide a cockpit view that was used to aim and use motion controls.

In our review of Star Fox Zero, we said that was one of the weaker parts of the game.

"The problem comes when trying to maintain control as you move your eyes between the two screens, especially since the perspectives affect how you aim." IGN's Jose Otero wrote. "Even though the TV shows a larger field of view, sometimes using it to take an unassisted shot that looks like it should hit will completely miss. In those cases, you have to look down at the GamePad to line up a precise volley, then look back up to take in your surroundings and push forward."

Star Fox Zero's new features had mixed reactions from others around the industry, including Giles Goddard, one of the programmers on SNES' Star Fox. He said that he would be very interested in working on another Star Fox, but one that would "just dial it back a lot and not in gimmicks like, you know, the stuff Star Fox Zero had, and maybe not even put in the free roaming aspects and stuff like that."

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

September has officially become IGN’s Best Video Game of All Time Bracket Month, and that means we need YOU to help us decide which of the 64 games selected by IGN staff really are the very best.

Throughout the month, we’re tallying our followers’ votes across IGN.com (On the bottom of this page!), and IGN’s YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram accounts to determine which game is the actual best and is capable of beating all others in a March Madness-style bracket tournament. We’ve sorted these 64 games into four randomly selected groups, and we’ve then ranked those games in the groups by what we believe are the best of the best.

We’ve included games from all systems and generations, and we really wanted to try to pick many of the most beloved games from all different types of genres. While voting officially begins tomorrow, September 10, you can get a headstart by voting in all of the first round's 32 matchups on the bottom of this page. The polls will close at the end of the day on September 11, and voting for the second round, which will see the 32 games with the top vote counts moving forward, will begin on Tuesday, September 14. The full schedule is as follows;

• Friday, September 10 - Round of 64 Voting Begins
• Tuesday, September 14 - Round of 32 Voting Begins
• Thursday, September 16 - Round of 16 Voting Begins
• Monday, September 20 - Round of 8 Voting Begins
• Thursday, September 23 - Round of 4 Voting Begins
• Monday, September 27 - Round of 2 Voting Begins
• Wednesday, September 29 - Winner Declared!

Now onto the first round. We’ve decided to call the groups by their #1 seed, so we will begin on the top left of the bracket with The Red Dead Redemption Group. While Rockstar’s legendary western took the top spot, there are some big challengers it will have to beat to make it to the next round. Not only will it have to secure victory over the likes of Journey, Chrono Trigger, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but it will have to contend with the ever-growing popularity of Fortnite.

Oh, did we forget to mention it also has to beat World of Warcraft, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and the multiplayer classic title Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64? That’s a tough one.

The bottom left of the bracket is The Portal 2 Bracket, and it also includes some timeless classics like 2018’s God of War, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - aka the game that has been on everything including Amazon Alexa.

Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, which is perhaps the most iconic “one… more… turn…” game, also stands tall in this round alongside BioShock, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Inside, and Minecraft - the game that has sold over 200 million copies worldwide.

The top right of the bracket is The Super Mario World Bracket and that classic SNES title made it to the top of IGN’s Top 100 games of all time list and starts off on top of this bracket in this tournament. There are some other big Nintendo games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Pokemon Yellow, and Super Mario 64, so it does have its work cut out for it.

It will also have to compete with the likes of The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Halo 2, and Grand Theft Auto V - which itself has sold over 150 million copies worldwide.

Lastly, we have The Super Metroid Bracket, which is another legendary game from Nintendo taking one of the top spots of this list. Not only will it have to potentially face off against other Metroidvanias like Metroid Prime and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but it won’t be able to take the crown if it can’t beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Final Fantasy 7, Bloodborne, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Tetris.

Remember, you only have until September 11 to cast your votes below or on IGN’s YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram accounts for this first round, so be sure to choose carefully and let us know which game you think will claim the ultimate prize and why you chose the games you chose in the comments below!

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Welcoooome to Nintendo Voice Chat! A brand new WarioWare hits store shelves this week, and Casey DeFreitas is joined by Tom Marks, Taylor Lyles, and Rebekah Valentine to talk all about Wario's latest wacky game. Plus, hear about IGN's reviews for Life Is Strange: True Colors and Baldo: The Guardian Owls. And, a new interview is shedding light on Nintendo's involvement with Retro Studios during the development of Metroid Prime. All that and more, this week on NVC!

Check out the full interview from Kiwi Talkz for even more tidbits about Metroid Prime and Retro Studios.

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You can listen to NVC on your preferred platform every Thursday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Have a question for Question Block? Write to us at nvc@ign.com and we may pick your question! Also, make sure to join the Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast Forums on Facebook. We're all pretty active there and often pull Question Block questions and comments straight from the community.

Logan Plant is the Production Assistant for NVC. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.

LEGO has revealed a new Super Mario 64 playset that takes the form of one of the game's iconic Question Mark blocks, with a hidden secret centre.

Announced on LEGO's website, the new playset is a fold-out version of Super Mario 64's famous Question Mark block. When opened up, fans will find four distinct levels from the game: Peach's Castle, Bob-omb Battlefield, Cool Cool Mountain, and Lethal Lava Trouble. The set weighs in at 2064 pieces with both the block itself and each of its levels buildable.

In addition to the various Mario stages within the set, there are also microfigures of different characters from across the game that can be placed around the set. A number of them can be seen in the playset's official trailer, including Mario, Princess Peach, King Bob-omb, and a selection of Cool Cool Mountain's penguins.

Pablo Gonzalez, Senior Designer at the LEGO Group spoke further about the set and why its inclusion within the wider Mario LEGO collaboration felt important to the company. “It’s difficult to imagine the Super Mario Universe without the classic game’s iconic levels full of discovery and secrets. With this amazing set, we’re building on the exciting play experience of LEGO Super Mario, both to bring a bit of nostalgia for those who played the Super Mario 64 video game, but also to introduce these wonderful levels to a whole new audience of Super Mario fans."

The new set is the latest in a number of sets created in a partnership between Nintendo and LEGO. Previous releases in the series have included LEGO's own take on Bowser's iconic Airship. The collaboration also produced an interesting take on a LEGO-based co-op mode when the Luigi Starter Set launched earlier this year.

Fans will be able to get their hands on the upcoming Question Mark Block set from official LEGO retailers and the LEGO website when it releases on October 1. The set will then become available at other stores around the world in 2022. LEGO has set a recommended retail price for the set at 169.99 USD/EUR.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Metroid Prime is nearly 20 years old, but a new interview is shedding light on the development of the groundbreaking series.

Former Retro Studios developer Mike Wikan went on an episode of the Kiwi Talkz podcast to discuss crunch within Retro during the development of Metroid Prime, as well as the effort from Nintendo to change the Metroid Prime Trilogy's writing to fit within the Metroid Prime universe.

The 'Nine Month Death March' at the End of Metroid Prime's Development

Discussions surrounding crunch are at the forefront of video game discourse in 2021. From Naughty Dog to Rockstar, to CD Projekt Red, more employees, writers, and fans are speaking out about a problem in the video game industry that dates back to long before the wider public noticed it.

In this case, it dates back to 2002, when the Austin, Texas-based Retro Studios was developing the first-ever 3D Metroid game in partnership with Nintendo. Wikan, who worked on the game, said that crunch was a big problem during the development of Metroid Prime.

"I had two times where I was there for 48 hours straight with one hour of sleep, and then a couple of 36 hour days," Wikan said. "The last nine months we were pretty much there 24/7, working on the game."

After Metroid Prime shipped, Wikan says morale was low within Retro's ranks. In fact, according to Wikan, many team members were ready to quit, and Wikan himself even had multiple job offers on the table. Then, things changed for the studio when Nintendo stepped in.

"To their credit, Nintendo realized what was going on, and they came in and took over the company, [they] bought it out," Wikan said. After Nintendo bought Retro, Nintendo of America's Michael Kelbaugh was put in charge. Wikan says he asked Retro employees to give him a few weeks to turn it around, and he eventually, "restored faith in leadership."

The turbulent past of Retro Studios pre-Nintendo is well-documented. The studio has a history of layoffs, crunch, and unrealized ambition prior to Nintendo's decision to step in and put Kelbaugh in charge, who is still President of Retro Studios today.

According to Wikan, the change in ownership and leadership worked, and the studio began following healthier work practices. However, it still wasn't perfect. "In fact, after Metroid Prime 1, we rarely crunched," Wikan said. "We had some crunch but it wasn't like the nine-month death march at the end of Metroid Prime 1. That was the worst."

Nintendo's Involvement in Reworking Metroid Prime Trilogy's Script

Also in the interview, Wikan revealed he was part of a four-person team tasked with reworking the three mainline Metroid Prime games into a collection. The package was released in 2009 on Wii as Metroid Prime: Trilogy.

Besides changing some boss fight balance issues, and some small technical problems, Wikan and his team left the three games largely unchanged. At least, until Nintendo came in and started reworking the script. Wikan says Nintendo combed through the scans from all three Prime games and created a spreadsheet analysis of how it fits within the Metroid Prime universe.

"They sent us hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of edits and changes for all the text to make sure everything harmonized and worked in the Metroid universe. That’s the level of detail that they put into it," Wikan said. "Probably 50 to 60% of the work we did on the Trilogy was changing those dang scan files."

Wikan is no longer with Retro, but the studio is now working on the delayed Metroid Prime 4. At E3 this year, Nintendo said they're "working hard" on Metroid Prime 4, which lead to the announcement of Metroid Dread; a new entry in the mainline 2D Metroid series. Dread is wrapping up the story of Samus and the Metroids, a story that is largely unrelated to her adventures in the Prime games.

Check out the full episode of the Kiwi Talkz Podcast for more insight from Wikan on his time at Retro Studios making Metroid Prime.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

A newly discovered glitch in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gives a one-finger salute to gravity, opening up fresh possibilities for speedrunners to beat the game as quickly as possible.

As reported by Kotaku, speedrunner LegendofLinkk recently shared a new glitch on Twitter that allows Link to fly around the map as they please – and explained how to achieve it with relative ease:

Unpause, Aim your Bow and cancel with B, head over to a ledge link will climb up, start holding B and climb the ledge, if you go neutral on the control stick or stop holding the B button link will start falling normally.

— LegendofLinkk (@iLegendofLinkk) September 4, 2021

Previous means of getting around the map in the air have been affected by both gravity and stamina bars, whereas this new glitch allows players to remain at a consistent height as they travel freely above Breath of the Wild's open-world landscape.

The glitch is new enough not to have a formal concensus around its name – although some have taken to calling it bow lift smuggle sliding (BLS Sliding) – but it's already being widely hailed as a game-changer for speedrunning in the game. YouTuber and speedrunner JoeDun, who managed to complete a 100% no damage run of the game earlier this year, made a video on the new BLS Sliding tactic, saying it "might be the start of something amazing" for the speedrunning community.

JoeDun spoke further in the video about how the changes could affect different areas of speedrunning within the game. "What does this mean for Breath of the Wild speedrunning?" he says. "Well, a lot [...] my favorite category 100% might actually be changing a lot just due to this trick alone. Since you can basically use anything you can pick up to start this trick, things like the letter quest and Ruta will be super easy and fast". JoeDun went on to speak about a number of other popular speedrunning categories that could be opened up to new possibilities following the discovery of the glitch.

Twitter user @RicitosDeCaoba further suggested that BLS Sliding could even bring about its own speedrunning category in the game as it's used by more and more players, suggesting that this would be similar to "no limit" runs attempted by players in the game.

And I believe that new category will be the same as the "no limit" runs but including the new glitch, so... I don't know, time will tell. Depending on how broken is comparing to bomb launch.

— ☀️Helienne☀️Se pronuncia /E-lién/ (@RicitosDeCaoba) September 7, 2021

How truly useful the new glitch is will likely be found out over the coming weeks, as speedrunners across the community look to integrate it into their runs. For now, it seems that members of the community are getting to grips with the new skill and enjoying exploiting it for every grain of time it saves.

Some more speed! pic.twitter.com/7xXJ1aF5SH

— Ferrus Cube (@Ferrus_Cube) September 4, 2021

For more on Breath of the Wild, you can check out our dedicated page for the game where you'll be able to find a range of the latest news and clips surrounding the title and catch up with the story so far.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone says that he is currently focused on creating a new, unrevealed game rather than fresh updates for his immensely popular farming simulator.

Speaking recently to Zach Hartman on Twitch (as reported by Eurogamer) following the conclusion of the first official Stardew Valley Cup, Barone explained that he's currently not working on future Stardew Valley updates because he has been focused on a new game.

"I'm not saying there's going to be another Stardew Valley update," Barone added during his response to a fan's question surrounding future updates and marriage options within the game. "I don't even know at this point. Right now I am focused on my next game. So, we'll see."

Whilst Barone kept details surrounding the new title close to his chest, he did provide fans a few details to mull over in the lead-up to an official reveal, which he then teased may end up coming sometime in the near future.

"I may announce it fairly soon, what it is - no-one knows at this point," he said during the stream. "What I will say is that it's another pixel art game, a top-down perspective similar to Stardew Valley. In some ways, it is kind of similar to Stardew Valley, but it's also not a farming game. It's something different."

As previously mentioned, details surrounding the new game come off the back of the first Stardew Valley Cup. The event, which was co-ran by Barone and Hartman, marks the game's first official competitive tournament and had a prize pool of just under $40,000. Following the conclusion of the stream, Barone congratulated the winning team, Sandy's Candies on Twitter.

Congrats to Sandy's Candies for winning the Stardew Valley Cup! It was a lot of fun. Hope everyone who watched had a good time!

— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) September 4, 2021

Stardew Valley has seen monumental success since its initial release in 2016, building up an impressive and dedicated community. The game has not only reached almost every major modern platform gaming has to offer through ports for Switch, mobile, and home consoles, but this year it also received its own board game.

If Barone's new title features the farming simulator's charm, charisma and replayability, then he'll undoubtedly have a loyal fanbase ready to flock toward it – and another winner on his hands.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Welcooome to Nintendo Voice Chat! This week marked the 30th anniversary of the Super Nintendo's launch, and we've got a special episode of NVC to celebrate the occasion. Join Seth Macy, Peer Schneider, Sam Claiborn, and Kat Bailey as they discuss their best memories with Nintendo's 16-bit powerhouse. Plus, hear the verdict on No More Heroes 3, impressions of the WarioWare demo on Switch, and more.

Timecodes!

• 00:00:00 Welcome! Pokemon Legends Discussion
• 00:36:17 Diamond and Pearl Remakes

• 00:51:45 More news
• 01:05:12 What we've been playing

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You can listen to NVC on your preferred platform every Thursday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Have a question for Question Block? Write to us at nvc@ign.com and we may pick your question! Also, make sure to join the Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast Forums on Facebook. We're all pretty active there and often pull Question Block questions and comments straight from the community.

Logan Plant is the Production Assistant for NVC. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.

Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley, has officially announced the Stardew Valley Cup — meaning that the famed relaxing farming simulator has now become... an eSport?

The Stardew Valley cup will pit four teams against each other: Sandy's Candies, Pierree's Cherries, Pam's Yams, and Krobus's Crocuses. The four teams will compete against one another in the Cup on September 4 where they will complete a range of tasks to earn points and a shot at almost $40,000.

In collaboration with @UnsurpassableZ, I'm pleased to announce the 1st official Stardew Valley Cup! It's a competition of skill, knowledge, and teamwork, with a prize pool of over $40k. See some of Stardew's most dedicated players in their element! Main event is Sept. 4th 9am PST pic.twitter.com/qtDW5e5LvD

— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) August 21, 2021

The competition is being run in coordination with Unsurpassable Z, a YouTuber known for creating content about the game. In a video on YouTube, Unsurpassable Z explained that they had come up with a list of a hundred different challenges that the teams would have to complete in the Cup. Each completed challenge is worth a varying number of points which Unsurpassable Z has calculated and assigned it based upon the difficulty. Each of the teams is set to compete compete simultaneously to rack up as many points as possible across the duration of the tournament.

Challenges in the Stardew Valley Cup range from completing tasks in the community center to reaching floor 100 in the Skull Cavern. Each of the teams has been granted a two-week period to view the challenge list and prepare their strategies accordingly. In addition to the task list already provided, Unsurpassable Z has said that there will be an additional five challenges added to the competition that teams won't know about in advance. With approximately $40,000 on the line, we imagine that the competitors will be revising possible contingency plans for the unknown tasks across the coming weeks.

With the immense popularity of the game, it's perhaps not surprising to see an official competitive tournament announced for Stardew Valley. Having been previously ported to Switch, mobile, and consoles, Stardew Valley will make its debut on Xbox Pass later this year whilst a Stardew Valley board game was released earlier this year.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Earlier this year, game developers across the industry weighed in on Twitter on a seemingly innocuous question: What's the problem with doors in video games?

It turns out, a lot. A seemingly boring feature such as usable doors can be absolute hell for developers to put in their games for numerous reasons. Everything from physics to functionality, from AI to sound, comes into play while making a single door in a single video game work. And not just work, but work in such a way where the player never has to think about it. Building a working, forgettable door is an incredible game development undertaking.

But it will probably not surprise you to learn that doors are far from the only seemingly simple feature that prove to be unexpectedly challenging in the development process.

A few months ago, I asked developers across the industry the question, "What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for game developers to make?" I received nearly 100 responses representing a wide breadth of industry experience, ranging from solo developers to those who had tackled issues within teams of hundreds.

The pool of responses similarly included a number of varied problems, but also a number of similar issues popping up among many projects. Those I spoke to described challenges in making games look and sound good, storytelling, movement and interaction with objects, menus, save systems, multiplayer, and all sorts of intricacies of design that are so rarely discussed outside of studios themselves. Many noted that they’ve received angry player feedback about the topics they mentioned, with their audiences asking, "Why don't you just do X?" The answer is, almost always: because it's really, really hard.

So if you've ever wondered why the maker of your favorite game didn't simply fix one of the myriad issues developers mentioned below, here's why those seemingly simple problems are hardly simple at all.

Getting from place to place

As the original topic of game development headaches focused on doors, it made sense that many of the developers I spoke to had issues with other methods used to connect a person from one place to another.

For instance, elevators. Multiple developers told me about the frustrations of elevators, whether they're taking players up a single floor in a building or serving as pseudo-loading screens between two major game areas. Bill Gardner, creative director of The Deep End Games and lead level designer on BioShock and BioShock Infinite, explained the elevator problem as follows:

"First off, you have to summon [an elevator] via a button or whatever. By calling the elevator, you open the opportunity for the player, objects, or AI to wander underneath it and get squished or trapped. So suddenly you have to deal with that. It's an invitation to make your enemies or companions look dumb, for physics objects to go flying, or for quest items to get stuck.

"So let's say you try to solve the AI issue by excluding them from elevators. Well, how then do they avoid looking dumb as soon as you cross the threshold inside the elevator? They'll either stand there, or need some sort of custom behavior.

"Then, if the elevator can take you to multiple floors, you have to feed back when an elevator is 'busy' or allow it to queue up floors to stop on. Now let's say you decide to get off on the second floor, then jump down and hit the call button again. Suddenly you have to feed back that the elevator is busy. Even then, the player is used to having things respond nearly instantly, so there's a good chance they'll get frustrated and call the thing broken.

"None of this is even getting into handling the [elevator] doors and what happens when those open and close and trap the player or other objects in the doorway."

The team at Skydance Interactive, behind The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, ran into a similar problem as the one Gardner describes, but again with doors, and in a VR game no less. Fortunately, they were able to turn a challenging collision problem into a fun new feature:

"One of the bugs I had was when a walker was trying to get through the door at the same time that a player was trying to open it," said Bill Ferrer, Skydance senior AI gameplay engineer. "This is sort of like a situation when two opposing forces come against each other, immovable object vs. unstoppable force.

"Our solution was every time the player would try to open the door and a walker was trying to go through that same door was to break the door. As a result, this actually created a jump scare moment. The result was basically a happy mistake."

Well, if doors and elevators are too complex, why not just have players take the stairs? Josh Davis, quality assurance at Guacamelee developer Drinkbox Studios, says that's an issue too.

"They might not be as bad as doors, but can oftentimes be immersion breaking. I was thinking how most of the time they're just ramps people just slide along; they can sometimes mess with how jumping and movement work because of angles/collisions. And how to deal with their realism can get a lot more complicated for some styles of 2D games like ours, because we've had and continue to have bugs for them."

All these means of transport are a potential nightmare, but there's yet another mode of getting around areas that's causing developer agony: moving platforms.

"Moving the player with a controller isn't hard; moving the player on a platform isn't hard," says Kyle Donnelly, a programmer at Land of Screens and Doki Doki Literature Club Plus studio and publisher Serenity Forge. "Putting them together you now have two things that want to dictate how the player should be moving. What should you do if the platform pushes the player up into a ceiling? Push the player through the platform? Squish the player? Stop the platform from moving? Force the player to crouch allowing a little bit more time before squashing? What about from the other side where the platform comes from the top down on the player pushing them into the ground? Should it behave the same?

"You can add multiple moving platforms into the equation too. What if the player is standing on two platforms going in opposite directions? Should the player be split apart? Ride on the fastest moving platform? Ride on the platform that the player is most on? Once you decide how the platforms should move it's a whole other ballpark of issues implementing them with the physics system you're using."

With all of these forms of movement being challenging, what about just...regular old walking to get from place to place? Andi, a programmer with Unknown Worlds, said that even this could get very complicated and go horribly wrong.

“It's not really ‘hard’ to write something and get a character to move, but it's tricky to tune all the values so that the result feels right. It took quite some time to find our values for acceleration and drag that we were happy with [in Subnautica], considering all the speed modifiers we have in the game (sprinting, seaglide, currents, wind etc).

“On that topic, I discovered an interesting bug a few weeks ago: sometimes the player froze in midair at the peak of a jump. Turned out part of our movement code, which we used now for over seven years, had a bug that only could manifest once hardware got fast enough. Everything was fine, until you reached ~200fps.”

Anything interacting with anything else

Another problem that an overwhelming number of developers cited to me is the simple idea of any "object" in a game interacting with any other object. That means that something as simple as a character picking up an item or two characters making contact with one another is actually unbelievably complex, never mind what happens when you get into more complicated interactions between two things.

Ben Wander, designer on Airborne Kingdom at The Wandering Band, explained the issue as follows:

"The objects themselves aren't real -- they have no density or physical bounds -- so if you want a character to, say, hold an apple, the artist has to go in and change the character's fingers to wrap around the apple perfectly. Want them to hold a kiwi instead, or how about a grapefruit? Make a different animation! That's why you'll often see characters hand-generated quest items to other characters just below the camera, or sometimes why a character's hands will go through a door handle or something."

Audrey LePrince, co-founder of The Game Bakers, affirmed this in a way that perfectly captures her work on Haven, a game about two romantic partners who have a lot of affectionate, physical contact with one another throughout the game.

"Touching, holding hands, hugging, it’s already hard in cutscenes but in real-time gameplay it’s a nightmare. Haven was a great example of that. But still it seems so natural for players, and something that we should have more of in video games.”

Maebe Sewell, lead technical design animator at Gearbox, pointed out another example of this: petting the dog. There's been an ongoing trend of excitement around games allowing this feature, in part sparked by the Twitter account Can You Pet the Dog?, but Sewell noted that this can actually be very challenging due to the aforementioned issues around two characters making any kind of contact with one another, not to mention things like AI pathing, UI, and more.

Objects and characters moving and interacting together can be a problem whether you’re aiming for realism or a specific visual style. For a very specific example, Glitch Factory artist and animator João Esse offered a problem from upcoming game No Place for Bravery, in which protagonist Thorn carries his son Phid on his back. The two characters have independent animations, where each character can perform separate actions at the same time. For example, Thorn might be fighting an enemy, while Phid is pointing to something of interest.

“The duo's spatial relationship ends up being very complex in some animations, especially when Phid moves forward or backward in different frames. We have to go through every frame in every animation to correct each characters' position to solve this.

“The real problems start to appear when Thorn makes a very complex movement, like the one in the GIF below:

“Phid and the Shield are between Thorn and the Hammer, and everyone's also rotating together to create the illusion of the Hammer's blow.”

Things get even more complex, Esse says, when Phid is absent in certain sections. Thorn can’t just be left with his animations minus Phid, because items like his shield are animated specifically to account for Phid being in the way, and look funny with Phid just taken out. So there’s an entirely separate set of animations for these sections.

“We are talking about 142 animations, 941 animation frames divided into 97 layers, all of this only in the main character!” Esse concluded.

Though not an object itself, a body of water presents another set of difficulties in allowing for, or preventing, interactions. Unknown Worlds co-founder Max explained that most players appreciate how hard it is to make cool water in games, but added that what's often overlooked is how hard it then is to keep said water out of places you don't want it.

"Water in the real world occupies a volume and in video games we typically represent those types of volumes with simple shapes," he said. "In the case of an ocean, this might be an infinite plane sitting atop a box which extends downward forever. Every point inside this box is considered filled with water when drawing the scene or simulating buoyancy. Using these types of simple shapes to describe the water makes it feasible within the limits of a real-time game.

"As soon as you introduce boats, submarines, underwater bases or caves into this water world you encounter a problem. The space occupied by the hull of these objects should not contain water (unless you have a leak!) and needs to be carved from that simple water volume. Often different approaches are used for each of the systems that interact with the water. For gameplay code, there might be a series of checks to determine if the player is able to breathe at their current position. Is the player inside the ocean volume? Are they inside a boat? Is the boat sinking? Answering the question 'is the player inside water?' in Subnautica became a remarkably complex code path.

Telling a Coherent Story

Another easily underestimated element of making games is storytelling. The ways in which game writers and narrative designers have historically been overlooked in all but the biggest blockbusters (and even then!) is an entire article unto itself, but let’s just say it’s all a little more complicated than sitting down and writing some dialogue.

Arone Le Bray, former quality narrative designer at BioWare, told me a fascinating story about the challenges in making games like Mass Effect, with choices that are expected to impact the story. He says that these create challenges in “tracking reactivity,” or ensuring that if A or B happens, then C or D happens. Most of the time this works fine, but every once in a while an edge case can throw everything off.

Le Bray explained how a decision made in the original Mass Effect could cause a bizarre scene all the way down the line in Mass Effect 3, simply because of one of these “edge cases” that didn’t originally get caught. In the first game, most players would meet up with party members Garrus, Wrex, and Tali on the Citadel, with Tali joining the party along with either of the other two. Whichever one didn’t join would show up at the Normandy later and ask to join, but it’s possible for players to decline to take the third member with them at that point. Only an “extremely small minority of people” made that choice, he said.

For those who did, there might have been a game-breaking bug had BioWare not caught it very late in development. In the unlikely set of circumstances that Wrex is in the party on Virmire, Shepard doesn’t have enough Paragon or Renegade points to stop him from attacking, Liara hasn’t been recruited, and Garrus was previously rejected on the Citadel, then killing Wrex would make it so the player doesn’t have a full squad and can’t proceed.

“Luckily we caught it before we shipped,” Le Bray said. “...But we didn't catch Zombie Tali.” he continued.

Zombie Tali refers to a romance scene in Mass Effect 3 where Tali, despite being dead, would show up to talk to Shepard just before the final mission, and it happened for similar reasons as the Wrex bug Le Bray described above. The scene, he said, triggered if a character passed a certain invisible check in which they were in a relationship with a given character, and would show the scene if they had reached a certain stage before the final mission. But what it didn’t check for was if a character was alive or dead.

“In order to encounter this, a player would have to actively pursue a romance with Tali in Mass Effect 2, actively continue the romance in Mass Effect 3, side AGAINST Tali and her race (Quarians) and watch her pass away, and then NOT pursue a romance with any other characters. We patched it, but we still shipped with it in the end,” he said.

Another narrative problem related to player choice occurred in The Elder Scrolls Online, which during its development had as a main design point a mandate that the player could "change the world." As Matt Firor, studio director at ZeniMa Online Studios tells it, one example of this was that if a player encountered a village that was under attack and in flames, they could choose to help the villagers, resulting in a nice, peaceful, not-on-fire village. To do this, they had to essentially make two different copies of the same village, one for players who had helped, and one for players who had not done so.

This worked out well in testing, but when the game launched, things went awry very quickly.

"As soon as real players started roaming through Tamriel, they ran into problems with this system almost immediately," Firor said. "Players -- friends, guild mates, etc. -- don’t always go through content together, and it was very common that someone in your group had not done the quest yet, but you had. In this case, players who hadn’t completed it yet would 'disappear' as they were separated onto the on-fire version of the village, and even worse, the players who had completed the quest couldn’t help their friends because they were physically separated from them. This problem was magnified because we had quests and points-of-interest all over the game that used this technique, more than a dozen per zone. So the player experience quickly evolved from 'I can change the world' to 'why are my friends disappearing?'"

According to Firor, the team had to go back over each quest that used this technique -- over a hundred at the time! -- and restructure them so player impact was dialed down. A few still remain in the game, mostly in starter areas where players are less likely to be in groups. But the whole process of fixing this issue took The Elder Scrolls Online team over a year.

Choice-based systems aren’t the only places where narrative and writing can create challenges. Harebrained Schemes producer JC Lau answered my question by saying, “I want to be super glib about this and just say ‘getting a single line of text onto a screen’ because as someone who works with UI/UX, narrative, accessibility, and localization, this never is as smooth and obvious as you might think.

Lau explained the very basic idea of communicating a concept to a player can mean different things to both design and narrative teams, and requires communication between the two to ensure something is clear in every way.

“When I worked on Battletech, the font pack we used for Russian somehow had all the Cyrillic characters two pixels taller than the Latin alphabet characters, and this was enough for them to break their text boxes and the Russian text just wouldn't render and we couldn't figure out why until UI looked at it and was like, ‘Yep, it's because this font is indiscernibly taller than English because... reasons.’”

Issues like that, she said, are why localization quality assurance is so important.

“When I worked at Xbox in localization, it was when the console rolled out its friends list feature and there was a little popup that said, ‘Socialize with your friends’ directing people to use the friends list. In Polish, that got translated to ‘Support socialism with your friends,’ which was thankfully caught.”

Multiple people I spoke to mentioned the struggles involved with localization. Joe Mirabello, director of Terrible Posture Games, called translation “deceptively complex,” citing issues ranging from puns that don’t work in other languages to problems with words being different lengths in different languages.

“Planning ahead helps, but nothing will prepare you for German,” he said. “German destroys your best laid plans. German will defeat you. That text field you thought would only ever need a single 10-20 character word? Nope. German has a unique word for that and it’s a hundred and twelve characters long. We even have a native German developer on our team and he refuses to translate our games into German. This is all said tongue-in-cheek, of course, just to illustrate a point, and that is; whatever scaling flexibility you think you’ve planned for in your UI to account for localization? It’s not enough. It’s never enough.”

Getting the Player to Do What you Want

One nightmarish place where writing intersects heavily with design is whenever a developer needs to get a player to do something specific to progress, and has to clue them in. Kevin Zuhn, creative director and writer at Young Horses, told me about the complexity of hint systems.

"Hints are surprisingly hard to get right!” they said. “You can't just tell players what to do, you need to shift their thinking in the right direction. It takes a light touch and subtle reminders. That means rigorously testing to find out where players most commonly lose their way. And what you write needs to be very precise! I've seen the wrong word choice send players spiraling off into strategies that'll never work. And then it's twice as hard to get them back on track from a bad hint!"

Alexander Horn, narrative director at Impulse Gear who has previously worked on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, also immediately thought of tutorials when I spoke with him, saying that they tend to be so fourth-wall-breaking that he “gets physically ill just thinking about it."

“The beginning of [Amalur] serves as a tutorial, and the first objective in the first room used to be to loot a sword from a dead body partially to teach looting mechanics. My friend, who is a pretty competent gamer, did some playtesting, and spent almost ten minutes stuck in that room, unable to find the sword and exploring every nook and cranny of the room. It was agonizing to watch, because you wanted to scream ‘It's right there!’ but [it was] invaluable feedback. We ended up putting the sword in the door, so that when the sword was looted, the player-character was able to leave the room. It was an organic gate more easily found by players.”

Letting the Player Do What They Want

Player freedom is generally touted as a positive, but letting players do what they want, even when it’s as simple as attacking an enemy, introduces a whole new set of problems.

Måns Olson, game director for Minecraft Dungeons, echoed this sentiment in explaining what he called one of the most complex systems in the entire game: the code that lets players click on enemies to attack them.

“Ideally, a click should simply perform whatever action the player intends, without any complications. In short, it should ‘just work’. Behind the scenes, figuring out what that intent is means sorting different possibilities and often making a large number of calculations. You clicked an enemy, sure, but is there also an item nearby that the user might have intended to pick up? Did you mean to attack the enemy, or just move towards them? Are you in range? Was the mob previously pushed back by another attack, in which case we may want to add a temporary buffer to the player's attack range to prevent them from stuttering forward? And most importantly: What did the player really mean to do? Did they correctly click their intended target? Did the timing of that click carry intent?”

To detect player “intent,” the Dungeons team put in place several layers to sort out all the different possibilities, guess what was intended from clicks that missed their mark, and more.

Remedy senior gameplay designer Sergey Mohov described how crafting Control’s gunplay led to a rabbit hole of questions the developers needed to answer.

“Do we allow you to aim down sights? Do we allow hipfire? If yes to both, what should the change between those two modes be? Do we move the camera when switching between them? Do we change the camera field of view? By how much and how fast for each weapon? How does the animation for that look? How about weapon dispersion and recoil – should those change too,” he mentioned.

“In third person, does the bullet come from the gun or the middle of the screen? If it's from the gun, we need to display a second crosshair because there might be something between the weapon and the target. In Control, you always shoot from the camera instead. And don't forget to add an option to switch shoulders in either case, but make sure that all the other abilities and player actions still work on the other side, or at least remember to switch back – we had a bug about this.”

Those questions are then further complicated by aim assist and how it works, as well as the fact that Control has players occasionally shooting parts of the environment not classified as enemies.

“At this point, we haven't even fired a single bullet yet! If we did everything right, the player doesn't notice any of this, but it can ruin the whole experience if there's a bug or mistake somewhere.”

Paul-Emile, lead FX/environment lead on Absolver and art director for Sifu talked about giving players the ability to jump, saying it was something the Absolver players kept asking for...and made the entire team laugh.

"Seems like a simple request from the outside (just add a basic action), but it's the kind of thing that, added late, challenges the whole combat system, and may unbalance the whole structure of the world.

"This is the kind of request that on the player side is sometimes naively worded as 'just add that little feature', while on the dev side it roughly means 'make another game'."

Saving the Game

Another group of developers came back to me with issues born from game saves, checkpoints, resetting, and reloading. Fernando Resco, senior software engineer at Armature Studio was another developer who rattled off a list of questions developers have to answer when ideating saves and checkpoints (and the bugs that they can cause).

"From a design perspective, do you allow just one save slot chosen at the start of the game? Do you allow the player to change the slot? What is the UI for that? Do you also allow manual saving? From an engineering perspective, what state do you save? Most of the time you can't just save everything. Do you save the music state? Particle effect state? In-flight scripting? What needs to happen when loading the checkpoint to make sure that things keep on working properly?

"It is incredibly simple for gameplay scripting to run afoul of the saving system and lead to bugs. For instance, I worked on a game where if you reloaded immediately after defeating a particular boss, you would get locked into the boss room, because the door leading out of it was not keeping its open state correctly. Another instance of doors being tricky, too."

Squidly, developer of Renaine at Octosoft, added that "People don't think about how hard it is to make sure things that are dead don't stay dead, and all those things you've already done are no longer done. It takes a lot of thinking to just put everything back to where it has to be.

"That's kind of why [some of the earliest games] games didn't have saving. Actually, original games just had a set RAM and if you ever restarted your Pac-man cabinet or whatever the entire score table would be wiped. It wasn't until Zelda and co. rolled around that non-password-based saving became popular because it was just that hard to do."

Remedy QA manager Arto Suominen also brought up saving games as a particular headache for the team working on Control. He said that the complexity of saving games is so overwhelming that when the team tried to answer my question, they ended up with an entire page of notes -- and that wasn’t even the start of the amount of work that goes in. So instead, he gave me an example of how things can go wrong.

“After completing the Ashtray Maze [in Control], we found that when the player fast travels to the Research Sector, the walls were shifting where they shouldn't be. We had a long back and forth between QA, level designers, engine programmers, and around and around again, to try and figure out what was wrong.

“We tried to reproduce this bug by starting the game at different points, dying at different times, restarting different checkpoints. We tried to see if it was a problem with how the game world was loading in, or how our building shifting mechanics were set up. The level designers were saying it wasn't them, the gameplay team was saying it wasn't them either.

“We dug into the code until one of our engine programmers figured out that our scripts were saving a restore point named ‘Research’ when the player fast traveled to the Research Sector after going through the Ashtray Maze. However, all of our save games for that sector by default went into a save game chunk called ‘research’. Because the names were case-sensitive, the game didn't recognize what the world state around the player should be, and the walls were shifting where they shouldn't. It took us a month to figure out that's what the problem was. That's how complex save games are, and how many facets of the game they can affect.”

Playing With Others

Multiplayer, whether online or local, also proved to be a recurring, difficult theme among the answers devs gave. Nine Dots Studio CEO Guillaume Boucher-Vidal said that incorporating split-screen play into games “makes every design decision a lot more complex than it appears.

“If you let players play in split screen, what do you do with your menus?” he said. “Can you pause the game for one player while it keeps playing for another? How do you handle story progress and rewards? Do you force players to always play together or does the game allow you to drop in and drop out? How do you plan every single quest with the possibility that a new player could join in at any moment? Which exploits do you let in the game in order to avoid friction for legitimate players? When both players are within the range of a sound, how does it play?

“When we started working on Outward, we didn't really have any example of an open-world RPG with split screen, so we had to find which solutions would work for us and no matter what we'd choose, there would be players who disagree with our decisions, because there was no standard to follow. Still, in the end it was definitely worth doing. We see stories of couples, friends, or siblings playing together and it made it worth all the extra development challenges."

Moving onto online multiplayer games, Phoenix Labs senior programmer Chris 'Chhopsky' Pollock brought up the problem of servers, and how everyone thinks adding more servers is a magic fix-it button when really, it's far more complex.

"Every live game falls over day one," he said. "The internet screams, 'Add more servers,' and the number of servers is quite literally never the problem.

"People think of it like: a server can handle X players, Y people want to play, so X * Y = number of servers = problem solved, right? Simply: no. There are at least four more layers of complexity to a live game, and each one amplifies any of the previous layers' problems."

Pollock broke down the various layers for me, which include issues like the amount of information each server can hold for the entire playerbase, communication issues between servers, sharding, the actual ability to create more servers, and, aggravatingly, problems created by players themselves:

"I could confirm my login service can handle 100,000 requests per minute, but what happens when that's happening at the same time as a heap of players logging on that are all on the same database shard? What happens when that database shard tries to back up its changes, and the backup takes longer to run than the frequency it runs at?

"For example, a game I know loads a menu when you hit escape. Every time you hit escape it requests the contents of the menu from a service, which hits a database, which goes to a shard, and brings the info back. It turns out, people like to spam hammer the escape key when they're waiting in queue. So each person is now generating 30x the load you expected on the service, then the database, then the shard, and the network in between it all."

Olly Freeman, VP of engineering at 1047 Games, brought up matchmaking in competitive games, especially ones that don't have thousands of concurrent players at all times.

"There’s a constant balancing act of how to prioritize short queue times, low ping, and well-balanced games. Is it better to wait ten minutes to get a perfectly balanced game on a server in your region or to wait one minute to get a poorly balanced game quickly? Is it better to get a well-balanced game with 100 ping or a poorly balanced game with 50 ping? There’s no right answer, but there are many wrong answers, and it’s something we are always improving and tweaking."

Menus and UI

Next up, independent developer and former game director at Q-Games Liam Edwards discussed main menus, something he described as a “recurring nightmare” while making games.

“You always have to consider so many factors when making a main menu. Not only is it the first thing a player will ever experience when playing your game, so first impressions are important artistically, tonally etc. It’s also the first time they will read your words, move your controls and attempt to interface with your designs and experience it. You have to be wary of the universal language of games and not making players confused by trying to be experimental or different. If you avoid using words such as ‘play’ and ‘settings’ or even ‘options,’ players won’t know how to start the game! Imagine if you changed the controls so that you used Y and B to scroll through the menus instead of the stick or d-pad? It’s weird minute changes that can literally make or break a player wanting to continue even to the game part."

Kitfox Games' Tanya Short drilled it down further, calling out working Settings menus as especially difficult but taken for granted "even in the jankiest Early Access title," further complicated by adding other crucial elements like accessibility settings or hardware-specific pieces.

Multiple developers including Eastshade creator Danny Weinbaum and Panache Digital Games user experience director Etienne Beaulieu mentioned overall UI as troublesome because of how seamlessly players expect it to integrate into their experiences contrasted with the amount of information it needs to convey.

"Think about every button frame, background, gradient, drop shadow, border, marker arrow, icon, gizmo and do-hickey in a UI," Weinbaum said. "Somebody has to make all those! And then each one is brought into the engine, and carefully hooked into the UI."

A type of menu many games have is inventory systems, and senior technical designer at Firesprite Fred Horgan explained how difficult these can be, not just for letting players interact with them easily, but also for when they translate to the rest of the game world, like when a player wants to throw an item away.

"Dropping items in the world can be super tricky," Horgan said. "Depending on the game it may not even have the concept of saving the world outside of the player character...If you can just drop things into the world wherever you want we need to make sure those items are dropped safely so they can be recovered, maybe we'll just opt to have some items flagged as 'undroppable' if they're items critical to a main quest or whatnot. Do the items that are dropped have physics enabled? If so, can they be used to do crazy things like build stairs to otherwise out of reach areas or used to blockade areas to prevent NPCs from getting in or out of somewhere? If this isn't behavior we want, how far are we willing to go to restrict what the player can do to 'preserve the vision of the game'? If these items don't have physics we need to make sure that when dropped they abide by specific placement rules so they don't all occupy the same space or start clipping into terrain, etc.

"Now let's consider the actual look of these items. They should represent the item being dropped, right? What happens if hundreds of unique models are now dropped in the world? All of these models and their textures need to be loaded -- does the game have the overhead for all these extra models suddenly, is this data even handled in a way that allows them to easily be loaded/unloaded just for the sake of being thrown on the floor? But if we have all items looking like little bags then there's no way of differentiating from all of these things now sat on the floor without inspecting them."

Putting It All Together

These and many more developers I spoke with offered a varied, complex, and expansive look at just how difficult every facet of game development can be, in ways players may have never thought of while affecting both the biggest and smallest aspects of the games we play. Three of the many fascinating anecdotes I received may best sum up the clash between player expectation and reality.

The first comes from Johnnemann Nordhagen of Dim Bulb Games, behind Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, who answered my question about what game development challenge players underestimate with a very simple answer: what happens when a player pushes a button?

"Something I've spent many hours on is player input. It seems simple -- you press spacebar; you jump. But then you start to fall into all the special cases. What if the player is crouching? What if you want the spacebar to also activate items that the player is standing near? What about players using controllers instead of a keyboard? What about letting players remap their control scheme? What happens when the game is paused, or in a menu? What if, God help you, this is a networked game and you need to send that to a server? It turns into a system that requires multiple layers of abstraction to be able to handle all the possible things that might happen in a game when a player wants to jump, or presses the spacebar."

The second answer is from Mitch Dyer, a writer on Gotham Knights and Star Wars: Squadrons, who found a way to answer my question about game development challenges that somehow encompassed just about everything. (Disclosure: Mitch Dyer is a former IGN editor.)

"Imagine you're writing a scene for a AAA game where two characters just need to meet and exchange some information. The boring version is them standing there doing nothing but talking to each other. Baseline, this is still expensive and difficult to make, because you still have to have facial animations for believability and performance capture so they don't look like robots,” he explained.

"To make it more interesting, you decide this scene should be set in a cafe. They meet to discuss something over coffee, great. As a writer, you've now just created an entirely new set -- the coffee shop needs assets like chairs, tables, menus. The server is a unique outfit, and if it's a themed diner (say, 50s diner, like Pop's in Archie stuff) now you've got new textures for your checkerboard walls, your vintage coffee machines, etc. etc.

"’Hang on,’ the art team says. You want them to actually DRINK coffee? We don't have liquid simulation, so if you wanted the waiter to pour a cup, or see the coffee behave believably in a mug, forget about it. Never mind we need steam VFX, maybe some decals for the table to show coffee stains or tattered cushions in the cafe booths.

"Decisions that seem small -- two characters discuss an event at a location -- can have MASSIVE downstream effects. Sometimes you can afford to build the diner (and by god if you can reuse those assets elsewhere, DO IT), and hire the VFX and animators to make a 'simple' scene like this work. Sometimes you can't!

"None of this is PLAYER FACING in a meaningful way...but that kind of rocked my world. Every single action a character makes in every moment of the game needs to be thoughtfully considered before committing to make anything...because it's a lot of work, from a lot of disciplines, to allow a character to just drink a cup of coffee.”

And finally, there's the answer given to me by Beans co-founder Gabriela Salvatore, who opened her response to me by telling me that when she posed the question to her team, "Art more or less just said 'teeth', followed by a bunch of crying emojis. Production added 'getting an artist to open JIRA' (our task tracking and project management software)."

But the bulk of the Beans response via Salvatore so perfectly embodied the spirit of the original question: What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for developers to make?

Her answer? Fun.

"It’s hard to make something, it’s harder to make something that functions, it’s even harder to make it fun," Salvatore said.

"When something feels good in a game, it’s because 1000 micro-decisions are working together to create a seamless experience for the player. When talking about it with friends, we tend to boil this down to the most obvious description of the mechanic: jumping as Mario feels good -- it’s fun!

“But how much of that fun is impacted by the level design, or by the metrics that define the maximum height and distance that Mario is able to clear with his jump? Does just barely making a jump feel better than easily clearing a huge gap? How much of the fun comes from the game-feel? The controls? The controller mapping and inputs? Is pressing 'A' to jump more satisfying than pressing 'B'? Is long pressing to jump higher more engaging than pressing the button twice to jump higher? How much of the fun comes from the animation? From the design and look of the character? From the height of the character? What about the air time? The jump height? How much of the experience is enhanced by the sound of jumping? The interaction of jumping like landing on a Goomba, or hitting a block? The pause in air when you’ve jumped into an item? What about the enhancement of a super jump? Running into a jump?

"If you were making a game and one of your main mechanics was that your character could 'jump,' what are all the questions you’d have to answer to be able to make it function, let alone feel good? Every mechanic starts a long list of questions like the above, 1000 micro-decisions that have to fit neatly together and when it’s working properly players aren’t supposed to notice -- all this just to create the experience of a satisfying jump."

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

When David Fenn and Mark Foster, the two halves of Acid Nerve, released Titan Souls in 2015, a lot of critics and players uttered the common refrain that's now become a bit of a joke in gaming circles: "It's like Dark Souls."

"I mean, we were kind of asking for that," Fenn tells me, referring to the names of the two games being rather similar. "We actually came up with it in the 30 minutes before the deadline for the game jam it was originally part of, and we just never got around to changing the name."

Foster and Fenn are hearing similar comparisons with Death’s Door, which launched on Xbox and PC last month. Like Titan Souls before it, Dark Souls is once again coming up as a comparison point, usually nodding at the game's gothic atmosphere and challenging combat. But it's also getting a lot of Zelda comparisons, given that the two are both top-down adventure games with some tonal and structural similarities.

"I think every game gets compared to Dark Souls now," Foster says. "There's always a way to compare it to Dark Souls, or anything, really. You can always kind of compare any game to any other game because they're all games at the end of the day."

I had originally reached out to Fenn and Foster having loved my playthrough of Death's Door and seen the many comparisons, wondering if they had any particular thoughts on the repetitive joke of a refrain of "It's like Dark Souls" when Death's Door was so clearly a distinct piece of work. What I learned from the pair was that while they aren't bothered by the comparisons, Death's Door is inseparable from the legacy of the classics that came before it, both in its similarities but also, more importantly, in the ways in which it challenges player expectations of the games it invokes.

Foster and Fenn originally met at a games event in Nottingham, where they lined up to see Fez creator Phil Fish. Upon discovering they were both game makers from Manchester, they started doing local game jams together until, as they describe it, one thing led to another and they had a publishing deal with Devolver Digital for Titan Souls.

The two quickly found comradery in their mutual love of polish and attention to detail. While game jam games tend to be rough on purpose — the goal is usually to conceive and develop a functional, usually unpolished game in a short amount of time — Foster says the pair would often spend half their limited time making a game, and the other half polishing. It's a tendency that comes through in Death's Door, which is replete with details like sign posts that appear cut in half if you try to read them after, well, cutting them in half.

After Titan Souls, Fenn and Foster spent a lot of time prototyping different ideas for their next game, and originally ended up with an early version of Death's Door that had no crows at all and was very boss-focused, with a Howl's Moving Castle-like door that changed where it took you each time you used it. After some time, they finally settled on a simple combat prototype that made them happy, to which they eventually added a rough model of a crow.

Though still an early version, they had been sitting on it long enough they felt they had to pitch to Devolver soon or the publisher would forget about them. But turns out, Devolver had been eagerly waiting for whatever it was they would make next.

"I think they said, 'Finally, God, we were waiting for you to pitch us something. Come on,'" Foster says.

Fenn adds: " Before we sent them the pitch we were really nervous thinking like, 'Oh, what if Devolver have moved on?' Because it had been a few years. They might be full now. And then we sent them the pitch, we put loads of effort into it, and then Nigel [Lowrie] just sent us back a GIF of a guy rolling in money. Does that mean they like it? What does that mean?"

With the funding and support they needed, Foster and Fenn were able to create their new, crow-filled action game. Foster tells me that the seed of his original idea was as a sequel to their challenging, top-down adventure Titan Souls, a game where the player only has one health and only a single arrow to attack with. That DNA is still in Death's Door if you follow the story to certain conclusions. But beyond that, the composition of the game's story was largely organic, he says.

"We just have an idea and then we'll just put stuff down, see what works and prune away the stuff that doesn't work. It's like growing a plant or something, you just feed it, and water it, and then trim away the leaves and stuff that are dying, and then just let it grow."

With that kind of progression, it's natural that the two drew plenty of inspiration from other games they love. Foster, for instance, is a big Dark Souls fan, though Fenn doesn't care for the series as much. And both love Zelda.

"You could say Dark Souls is a sequel to the very first Zelda game, really," Foster says. "It's taking that formula, and then moving it along into the modern day. You could say that the games are all related in some way."

But comparisons aside, one of the elements that makes Death Door stand out from both its inspirations are the ways in which it directly challenges their conventions. On the surface, Death's Door has all the look and trappings of an aggressive, punishing challenge: the combat is difficult, you have very little health, you collect "souls" from enemies you kill that can be exchanged for upgrades in what seems to be a direct nod to Dark Souls, and when you die, an enormous "DEATH" text overlays the screen, emphasizing your failure.

But Death's Door is, by design, far gentler than it appears. You don't lose your souls or anything else from dying, for one. You just reset to the last door you visited, which is very often quite close to where you died given how generous the game is with shortcuts. Your health may be low, but the game provides a generous number of places to heal yourself, and easy access to revisit them as needed.

Then there's the aesthetic, with characters and ideas that are at points reminiscent of a Ghibli film (an inspiration Foster confirms), and a soundtrack that leans often on gentle piano melodies. All of this makes Death's Door, in many ways, more of a cozy game than a punishing one.

This is, Foster says, all on purpose. He tells me that a lot of developers instinctively follow the Dark Souls model of causing players to lose everything on death because it worked so well for that game. But Fenn hated that model, and Foster wasn't opposed to ditching it either. He says that while he's spent hours fighting hard bosses on the more challenging difficulties of Bloodborne and Dark Souls, as he's gotten older, he's become less patient with that kind of game. With Titan Souls, it was a "really hip thing at the time" to make a really challenging game. But with Death's Door, he wanted to make a game he would personally enjoy playing more.

"I think it tends to be a lot easier to make something really hard," Fenn says. "And that's something that we've kind of fallen into the trap of as well. Because whenever you're making something for a game you always make it way too hard, and then there's an art to trying to figure out what it's going to be like for someone who isn't as experienced in the game as you, and then just tweaking and iterating with that in mind. That's something that we've probably become better over time as well."

Foster adds that this ultimately makes games more accessible, too, because they can design something that's challenging and engages players' brains without being so difficult that players get frustrated and give up after losing 20 or more times. And that kind of game, he says, is more fun to make.

Death's Door, then, is both an embracing of legacy and a challenge to it — a mix of the history of the games its creators love, and an answer to the ways in which they've changed and grown over the years. And while Death's Door does this in very overt and specific ways, Fenn says that this is something all games inevitably have in common.

"I think a lot of it is subconscious," he says. "I came from a music background, but one thing I really became aware of was that loads of people wanted to break grounds and be completely unique. But then those people just ended up making music that meant nothing to anyone, because they weren't using the same language that people know.

"I like the idea that everything you make is an amalgamation from all the things you've experienced and learned. In the case of games, all the things that you played throughout your life, and that's a language that you've developed, and the language that most of your target audience have as well, because most of the time the audience have played similar games probably. So we're using that to create our own thing."

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Welcome back to IGN Game Scoop!, the ONLY video game podcast! This week your Omega Cops -- Daemon Hatfield, Sam Claiborn, Seth Macy, and Justin Davis -- are discussing how they determine their favorite games, Axiom Verge 2, Picross Genesis Edition, and more. And, of course, they play Video Game 20 Questions.

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Stardew Valley, the wonderful game that combines a farming simulator with RPG mechanics, will officially be released on Xbox Game Pass in Fall 2021.

Revealed during today's /twitchgaming Showcase: ID@Xbox stream, Stardew Valley is just one of the many new games headed to Xbox Game Pass alongside Aragami 2, Evil Genius 2, and Pupparazzi.

Stardew Valley was originally released on PC in 2016, and in our updated review in 2018, we said, "Stardew Valley is a beautiful, fun game that, when all of its parts are pulled together, make for a wonderful countryside adventure. Whether it’s rainy, sunny, snowy, or dusted with pollen drifts through the air, each day offers an abundance of great activities ready to be collected or mastered and new friendships waiting to be made."

The game, which is heavily inspired by Harvest Moon, was released on PS4 and Xbox One later in 2016 and since has been released on Switch, Vita, iOS, and Android.

This announcement was just one of the many at today's /twitchgaming Showcase: ID@Xbox stream that also shared new looks at such games as Lightyear Frontier, Sam & Max Save the World Remastered, OlliOlli World, and much more.

For more on Stardew Valley, check out the announcement of the Stardew Valley Board Game and everything added in the game's version 1.5 update, including splitscreen co-op!

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Rumors that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is in development are picking up steam, with an announcement possibly due before the end of the year.

According to a new report by Fanbyte, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was set to be revealed earlier this year, but as with many other games it has reportedly been hampered by issues related to the pandemic.

Monolith Soft has also reportedly had difficulties optimizing the game for Nintendo Switch. It is said to be aiming for more character models on screen than any game in the series to date.

The rumors are supported by earlier comments by voice actress Jenna Coleman, who plays Antiqua in the original Xenoblade Chronicles. In a video first released back in June, she talked about how she first got the role, and hinted that a third game might be in development.

"It was through my voiceover agent and I did it… god, when was the first game? Ten years ago? It was a long time ago," Coleman said. "I did it pre-Doctor Who days and then when they did the second one, they asked me to come back."

"And I think they're going to do another,” she added. "Common knowledge? Don't know... Yeah I think they're going to do another... Not sure if I'm allowed to say that."

First released in 2010, Xenoblade Chronicles has found success over the past decade as one of Nintendo's flagship RPGs. A sequel was released shortly after the launch of the Nintendo Switch, with a Definitive Edition remaster launching last year.

The Definitive Edition's Future Connected DLC heavily hinted at the possibility of a sequel. According to Fanbyte, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is unlikely to make its original 2021 target, but it could arrive in the first half of 2022.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN.

Welcoooome to Nintendo Voice Chat! This week, Metroid turns 35 years old in Japan, and Casey DeFreitas, Peer Schneider, Kat Bailey, and Logan Plant are here to discuss their favorite games in the franchise. Plus, The Nintendo Switch just keeps on selling, and the crew breaks down the latest financial numbers. Stick around to hear Peer and Logan's thoughts on The Great Ace Attorney, and much more.

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You can listen to NVC on your preferred platform every Thursday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Have a question for Question Block? Write to us at nvc@ign.com and we may pick your question! Also, make sure to join the Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast Forums on Facebook. We're all pretty active there and often pull Question Block questions and comments straight from the community.

Logan Plant is the Production Assistant for NVC, and he sincerely hopes you enjoyed his one line on NVC today. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.