Just in case the whole situation surrounding Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake‘s potential Switch version wasn’t confusing enough, a retail listing spotted online now appears to show an official-looking render of the title’s box art.

If you’ve missed the story on this one, you’ll probably want to catch up on everything that’s happened so far. Essentially, a Switch version of the game wasn’t mentioned during the recent Ubisoft Forward broadcast where it was announced for other platforms, but was mentioned in a now-deleted tweet from an official Ubisoft account. Previously, it had been reported that the game wouldn’t come to Switch, but then pre-orders for a Switch version appeared on the game’s official website – before being taken down.

Confused? Yeah…

Now, this newly-spotted retail listing appears to give more reason to believe that a Switch release could be on the way after all, perhaps to be officially unveiled at a later date. You can see it at GamingReplay, where the game is said to be launching on Switch at the same time as other platforms in January. Here’s the box art:

The signs are certainly pointing towards a Switch release, but Ubisoft is still to announce that such a product exists. If and when a Switch version becomes a reality, we’ll be sure to let you know.

On the frozen moon of Europa, Eramis, the Fallen Kell exploits a dark power to grow her army’s strength. The Vanguard’s attention is demanded.

The allure of this ancient power clouds your focus and tempts you with Darkness. Stasis whispers in your ear before you even arrive. You touch down in the snow-covered clearing; the distress signal from Variks still lingering in your ears.

 

The crunch of your boots in the snow makes you aware of the silence. A silence that is short-lived. It starts as a light gust, carrying away the gentle flakes of snow that rest on your shoulders. Then, without warning, it hits you. A sudden wave of frozen air cuts through your armor. The hut in the distance seems farther away – harder to see. You lean into the wind as it grows in strength and can’t help but wonder, “Why didn’t I park closer?”

 
Europa Design Lead Alex Velicky recalls, “We were brainstorming and Ed Brennan [Europa World Art Lead] proposed the idea of a blizzard to help sell the fantasy of a harsh environment. I thought it would be awesome if design had direct control over it and it didn’t take long for everyone to get excited about the implementation.” And so, the task of making a brutal Bungie blizzard began.

 

The team tested features like slowing player movement, altering grenade paths, and even knocking players off their Sparrows. “It was painfully unfun and made doing anything in the game almost impossible,” said Velicky. VFX Lead Justin Hayward added, “We iterated a lot to find a delicate balance between it seeming dangerous but without it actually being disorienting, oppressive, or negatively impacting core gameplay.”

 

Making Europa feel like a treacherous frontier was the main goal behind this new system, so they kept digging until they struck the right balance. When they found it, they moved onto believably integrating it so that it felt like part of a living breathing world.

 

“Most weather in Destiny is fairly simple,” said Velicky. “Because of this, most of the relevant systems are things our Skies, VFX, and Lighting teams set up and then leave to run consistently.” The team wanted to play with that consistency and be able to control the weather to create some intense and dynamic moments.

 
The answer lied in scripting the weather in a way that was similar to the systems found in Destiny’s activities. “After a lot of investigation from some clever folks, we managed to do it,” Velicky said. “The resulting system is script-controlled and fully networked.”

 

“We watched a lot of reference from nature documentaries, movies, and games,” said Mark Goldsworthy, a creative lead on the Skies and Lighting Team. “Then we created our own spin on it as we imagined how this would look and feel on a moon of Jupiter in Destiny.”

 

They settled on a handful of variables that, when blended, could organically grow or diminish a storm based on the needs of the story. As a result, weather on Europa comes in three basic flavors:

The first has no storm at all. This is what Europa would look like without the new weather system. Clear skies, fresh snow, perfect skiing weather – consider this the smoothest sailing you’ll do on the icy moon.

During a light storm, the wind picks up, snowfall increases around you, and is largely aesthetic. “The light storm blots out the sun and completely obscures the starry skies above you,” said Velicky. “This alone dramatically changes the feel of the destination.”

 

“When the heavy storm hits, the sky is heavily obscured,” Velicky said. “The wind roars and the snow flurries become even more violent. The mid-ground is difficult to see and, if not for the faintly visible silhouettes, it would be nearly impossible to navigate at all. Players are encouraged to stick closer to cover and move with intent.”

 

Sjoquist used this video as an inspirational cornerstone and he began soliciting sounds from other team members and recording some of his own material to feed through a custom FX processing chain.

There were also wind loops and structural sounds added to locations in the world that were all tied to the same game inputs. These audio cues would remain silent when the storm was inactive but would slowly come to life as the weather picked up. “All of these things working together really made the Europa storm feel dynamic and unique,” said Sjoquist.

Bundle up, Guardians. November is right around the corner and it’s getting cold outside.

Every multiplayer shooter has that one particular map. CounterStrike has de_dust. Team Fortress 2 has 2Fort. Halo has Blood Gulch. There is a map, or a spot within a game, that players gravitate towards no matter how much work developers put into more complex modes or levels. In Respawn Entertainment’s Apex Legends, it’s Skull Town.

For much of the game’s year-plus-long run, players dropping into the King’s Canyon map often favored this one point in the southwest corner of the map. It’s four lanes of looting and death that orbit a set of buildings that create an array of unique fights based around the player characters’ various abilities. all situated under a giant skull that sometimes becomes part of the fight.

Skull Town was recently removed from Apex Legends in a seasonal event that replaced it with a new, high tech base that over the town’s sunken ruins. For a few months, players haven’t been able to drop in Apex Legends’ deadliest location.

But a recent alternate mode allowed players to compete in an older version of Kings Canyon set in the dead of night, and players beelined for Skull Town at unprecedented and maybe unsustainable rates.

Why did they do this? Why is Skull Town so popular? We quizzed Apex Legends design director Jason McCord about the power of Skull Town and he offered some insight that may help other first-person shooter developers design interesting, meaty maps that will resonate with players even after they’re gone.

For those in our audience who are unfamiliar, could you briefly lay out the origins of Skull Town in Kings Canyon, what the design goals for the location were, and if you thought it would become as appealing as it did?

Skull Town was inspired, conceptually, by a level I designed in Titanfall called Boneyard – a desert map covered with the playable skeletal remains of Leviathans (large creatures found in the background of Titanfall).

As developers tend to do, we began with some assets from a previous game to get started – fully aware it would probably change significantly along the way. Instead, the skull ended up driving the “Wild Frontier” theme that we sprinkled throughout Kings Canyon.

The location gets its name from a giant skull that sits in the sand, right outside of the town, and can be seen easily from the dropship. The design of the area was a giant X shape, surrounded by a ring of rocky cliffs with a number of chokepoints to enter. If you rotated into Skull Town, all roads lead to the center of town, which was dense with cover, loot and height advantage.

The spine that hangs over the town was your classic sniper perch. If you’re able to “own” Skull Town, controlling the spine with a rifle can feel very powerful and earned.

The goal for Skull Town was to be one of the more prominent locations in Kings Canyon by providing the most amount of buildings and loot, but I had no idea it would become so… hot!

Honestly, I thought Repulsor would be the hot drop of Kings Canyon. Shows what I know.

What do you think are the fundamental principles that make Skulltown such an appealing drop site in Apex Legends? Have any other locations in Kings Canyon or World’s End matched its popularity?

In the end, I think the hottest locations in Apex will always be the spots you can land to get lots of kills as fast as possible. Skull Town provides fast looting – you can basically run down the long arms of the town slurping up loot along the way. It’s very dense – enough for 4, maybe 5 teams.

One thing I didn’t consider when designing Kings Canyon (and sort of stumbled into it on accident) was that the amount of rotation options out of a location defined how accessible the area was. No matter where the ring was going, you could easily rotate out of Skull Town nearly 360 degrees, and there was a town waiting for you to loot in that direction. It’s funny, this all sounds obvious now, but this was our first Battle Royale game and we were discovering the very fundamentals of what makes an Apex map tick.

Fragment East and West in World’s Edge have probably overtaken Skull Town as the hottest drop in Apex post Season 4. It shares many of the same qualities. Name’s not as cool, though. ?

Despite its popularity, Skull Town sank into the ocean with Loba’s arrival in Season 5. Can you walk through the decision to replace it with another site?

When discussing how we want to update Kings Canyon in Season 5, anything we could think of felt overshadowed by Skull Town. It’s such a popular drop – would anyone even care if we added all these other locations?

We were sitting around brainstorming map ideas, and Skull Town’s existence was hindering creativity. “That’s a cool idea, but it’s too close to Skull Town” or “That sounds cool, but why wouldn’t I just drop Skull?” At some point I proposed, “Okay, pretend Skull Town is gone. It fell into the ocean. Now what would you do?”

After everyone finished laughing me out of the room, the ideas started flowing. The excitement was high. Skull Town had become sacred in the worst way, so it felt exciting and liberating to remove it from the equation so the designers could be more creative.

Map changes usually drive a lot of the season’s theme and story beats. Because maps need to be started so early, by the time the writing team looked towards Season 5 we were pretty committed to deleting Skull Town. A few more fun brainstorm sessions later, and the Loba story started to take shape.

Once Kings Canyon at Night was added to the September special mode playlist, every game I was in was filled with a colorful starburst of players diving into Skull Town. Did you anticipate this kind of attention for the site in this mode at all? Does an overfocus on Skull Town have any impact on an Apex game as a whole?

Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that players would be excited to visit Skull Town again. I also experienced the hot drops when the mode went live, and sort of slapped myself that I hadn’t thought to push some marketing suggestions for “Return to Skull Town!”

What I take away from the whole experience is that Skull Town feels like, to some people, their favorite deathmatch map in one of their favorite games. The YouTube videos of people remembering “the good old days” were inspiring (c’mon people, it’s only been 1 and a half seasons!).

I want to think about ways to allow people to experience the location again, in a way that is more healthy for the game overall. I have no idea what that means but I’ll be thinking on it!

Image Source: Reddit User u/chocoloctol

Lastly, are there any core principles behind designing Skulltown that you feel have helped Apex Legend’s map designers in making new locations?

The design of an Apex map location should be asking itself 3 questions – How do I attack this place? How do I loot this place? How do I defend this place?

It should also be easily identifiable from the dropship, with a big landmark to give it an identity and a theme. We try to hit these tenets on all major locations. Some do better than others, but I think Skull Town set that bar back in Season 0.

Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime has established a new game company called Dreamhaven to develop and publish original games.

Morhaime stepped down as Blizzard president in October 2018, but stayed on at the World of Warcraft developer in an advisory role until April 2019.

Dreamhaven has opened two in-house studios called Moonshot and Secret Door to create its own titles, and has filled key positions with a number of Blizzard veterans.

Moonshot will be led by Jason Chayes, Dustin Browder, and Ben Thompson, all of whom spent time at Blizzard in senior roles working on franchises like Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft.

Secret Door, meanwhile, is being helmed by Chris Sigaty, Alan Dabiri, and Eric Dodds, another trio who worked on major releases including World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Hearthstone, and Warcraft III in a variety of key positions.

Morhaime will lead Dreamhaven as CEO, and said he’s “excited to team up with such talented people who care deeply about games and their communities.”

“I’ve always believed in the power of games to bring people together regardless of backgrounds or boundaries,” he added. “With Dreamhaven, we look forward to creating and sharing new experiences with players everywhere.”

The third and final DLC pack for Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda is now live, adding a very familiar face and some new story content.

The pack is called ‘Symphony of the Mask’ and has you playing as Skull Kid as you work your way through a new map. It adds new songs and a new story into the mix, too, and Skull Kid is a particularly interesting character who can change abilities based on different masks that can be equipped.

The update brings the game to Version 1.4.0. You can find the full patch notes for this below.

PATCH NOTES

• New character: Skull Kid
• New game mode: Skull Kid story mode
• New game mode: Puzzle Mode
• New game mode: Arena Mode
• 5 new music tracks
• 2 new dungeons
• New towns and overworld areas
• New tilesets, enemies, items, traps, and more!
• Added a projectile effect to Link’s Spin Attack when at full health
• Changed Zora enemies to breathe ice instead of fire
• Changed the Tingle Tuner to always play a sound regardless of the console’s rumble settings

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue where helper characters could be stuck with no weapon in the fight against Ganon
• Fixed some cases where multi-tile enemy attacks could hit the player unfairly on stairs
• Fixed the timing of some multi-beat abilities (like the hookshot) in 2P fixed-beat mode
• Fixed some bugs related to having the shopkeeper re-appear in dungeon mode after having been defeated
• Fixed some exploits where Impa could escape the map using her vanish ability
• Fixed some localization issues
• Many other bug fixes and balance changes

This new pack is available from the eShop for $9.99 individually, or as part of a $14.99 Season Pass which also provides access to DLC packs 1 and 2. Don’t forget, a physical edition featuring all of the game’s base content and DLC also launches on 23rd October.

Will you be getting stuck into this new content today? Let us know with a comment.