Gen Design – the developer led by Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian creator Fumito Ueda – has posted what may be an image of its new game.

Underneath a Happy New Year message on the Gen Design website there is the image of a girl (or perhaps boy) sat in the dark on a kind of stone altar, radiating a beam of light. Far more eye-catching, however, is the massive chubby fist of a giant off to the right.

In the website’s source code (via Resetera) the picture is named “Beauty and the Beast 2018”.

I met Fumito Ueda at the Gamelab conference last summer, where he talked about his process of making games and how traditionally he created an image early on to represent what he wanted to achieve. Perhaps this new image is it?

The Last Guardian, then referred to as Ico 3, was teased with a visual image as long ago as in 2008.

However, Ueda also told me the tools available today make it possible to quickly whip up a prototype for the same purpose. Perhaps the image, then, is taken from a prototype?

At the time he couldn’t say much about his game. “About the new project,” he said, “I can’t say many things, but until now the priority for me is visual image. Now I change a little bit the process so I intend to make a prototype because there are many tools to facilitate making one.”

He did say, though, he intended his new game to be “very different”, although as with Ico and Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, there may end up being a familiar look and feel to it – as there appears to be in the image.

“The last three games we created, I didn’t intend to be very similar to each other,” he told me. “When I start to create our games, always I think we will create something different. But as a result, in the three games there are some similarities, a feeling. In the process of operation there’s a moment when one game links with another. But I don’t put it in at the start – it happens in the process.

“So now I think I’m creating something very different, but the result? I can’t say.”

How long it will take Ueda and Gen Design to make the new game remains to be seen. The Last Guardian took a famously long time to make, the result of “many problems”, Ueda told me – presumably the PS3 couldn’t handle it, hence the leap to PS4.

But again, the prevalence of good tools today means development could be significantly quicker. “I would like to finish a game as quickly as possible,” he said. “Traditionally or conventionally when we start to make a game, we have to start from zero, but nowadays there are many tools to facilitate the creation of game, so in this sense perhaps we have to change the method of creating the game.”

Currently, Sony is remaking Shadow of the Colossus for PS4, and the game is due out remarkably soon, on 7th February.

As it has a tendency to do most days, Humble is hosting a wealth of discounts on some of the finest indie games available for PC this week.

The Indie Mega Week sale features ‘up to 80% off’ some of the previous year’s highlights, as well as some older gems. In amongst the rabble, you’ll find Cuphead with 15% off, Hellblade with 25% off, Heat Signature with 20% off, Undertale at half price and more.

At the time of writing, you can also grab a free copy of Layers of Fear along with the game’s soundtrack. That’s 100% off if you’re not keeping track.

Here are some highlights:

• Stardew Valley for ?7.25 / $9.89
• Slime Rancher for ?10.04 / $13.39
• Undertale for ?3.74 / $4.99
• Heat Signature for ?9.19 / $11.99
• A Hat in Time for ?20.69 / $26.99
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice for ?18.74 / $22.49
• Cuphead for ?12.74 / $16.99
• Hollow Knight for ?7.25 / $9.89
• No Man’s Sky for ?15.99 / $23.99
• Gang Beasts for ?11.99 / $15.99
• The Witness for ?14.99 / $19.99
• Crypt of the NecroDancer for ?2.19 / $2.99
• Owlboy for ?11.39 / $14.99
• Axiom Verge for ?7.49 / $9.99
• Hyper Light Drifter for ?7.49 / $9.99
• Duck Game for ?3.99 / $5.19

Indie Mega Week Sale from Humble Store

In addition to that, you can still pick up this month’s Humble Monthly for ?10 / $12, which will get you access to Dawn of War 3, Quantum Break and The Long Dark along with a stack of other Steam keys once the month is over.

If you’d like to grab a last minute gift, we’ve got our own Christmas gifts for gamers guide as well, with some last minute ideas.

Assassin’s Creed Oranges owners will notice a 3GB update being piped to their consoles and/or PC today. It contains a selection of handy updates and changes.

First up, for folk who’ve noticed the game has struggled loading textures at a distance (we’re looking at you, 2D trees), there are various fixes on the way to hopefully make things prettier.

Among the detailed patch notes are points including “Improved texture streaming selection to allow for more high-resolution texture”, “Fixed loading grid setups for tall palm tree fields to improve their view distance” and various improvements specific to certain in-game locations (Siwa, Alexandria, and more).

Xbox One X owners get further improvements, as Ubisoft increases the “texture and terrain memory budgets”.

As previously announced, today’s patch brings with it Ubisoft’s free Horde mode addition, a fresh Nightmare difficulty, and the option to scale easier enemies up to your level.

(Side note: we’re expecting the Chocobo horse update next week.)

Other handy improvements I spotted in today’s patch notes include the ability to filter via “uncompleted locations”, which will help if you’re trying to nail down that final achievement/trophy, and the ability to hide more elements of HUD.

A third-person action-RPG with XP loss on death, bonfire mechanics and a taste for the grotesque, Code Vein has been billed as Bandai Namco’s in-house alternative to the Souls series, trading Bloodborne’s fetid strain of European Gothic for a world of anime vampires. Witness the marketing tagline, “prepare to dine”. So it’s a slight shock to find that the new game breaks one of From Software’s unwritten core principles straight out the gate. Integral to every Souls game is the experience of loneliness, that sense that you are the only moving object in a cyclopean expanse of dead architecture and stagnant myths. True, you can summon allies to aid you, but these are presented as fleeting, ethereal interactions, and you never feel like you have “companions”, exactly. It’s more a question of being haunted by kindred spirits as you set out through the wasteland alone.

Code Vein also deals in wastelands, but you’ll have plenty of more persistent and straightforward company throughout, for better and possibly worse. The game is set in a shattered semi-urban environment where amnesiac Revenants search for the Blood Tear fruits they need to subsist without feeding on humans, battling hordes of misshapen Lost vampires who have been consumed by their own bloodlust. Each Revenant you meet in the eponymous Vein has different capabilities and is on a quest of their own, often involving their missing memories. You’ll be able to recruit some of them as co-op buddies, and as I discovered, these buddies are a little on the chatty side.

During my demo I was paired with Mia, a baby-faced predator with a powerful rifle. She kept up a running commentary as we explored, responding to everything from lower player health through collecting items to opening the inventory screen. Her remarks were always brief and to the point, in fairness, and the script has a certain, pleasing self-awareness to it: at one stage, the character praised me for swinging at a corpse to ensure that it was genuinely dead, one of the more time-honoured Souls player traditions. Still, it’s easy to imagine that trickle of small-talk becoming an annoyance as you push deeper into each dungeon. This kind of thing makes sense in an Uncharted game, but when I’m probing the ghastly secrets of post-apocalyptic catacombs, the last thing I need is background patter.

You can always travel without a buddy, but if you do that, you’ll miss out on some fun mechanics. Mia is an effective support providing you keep her out of the mincer, casting buffs on you as monsters approach and doing her best to draw away a little aggro or interrupt attacks as you barge into the throng. Even better, she’s a walking bloodbag, sharing her health pool with you when you’re about to cop it, providing she won’t kill herself in the process. You can return the favour if you have the means, which leads to some great split-second decision-making when the heat is on. Is it worth having Mia around to overclock your attacks and run interference, or should you conserve that precious health and try to muscle through the last third of a boss battle by yourself?

You’ll probably need a hand more often than not, because Code Vein is every bit as arduous and arcane as a Souls game, happy to dump you back at a Mistral checkpoint without all your XP if you take its many combat variables for granted. Attacks and dodging burn stamina quickly, and running out will leave you winded, obliging a careful balance of aggression and evasion. Enemies have pronounced trigger zones, and it’s usually wise to rile them one by one, picking off archers and grunts before you tangle with anything big and scary. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface – weapon power scales with certain character stats, and the customisation screen is a gristly stew of resistances, weight caps and impact types.

Buried in amongst the Soulsy elements are bursts of original thinking that lean on the vampire premise. You can perform a variety of flamboyant charge attacks to drain enemies of Ichor, which allows you to replenish your payload of spells (ranging from flame blasts to elemental weapon buffs) beyond the starting maximum. Still, this is a travel-worn recipe on the whole, and before long, the sense of over-familiarity begins to tell. Ambushes, for instance, are frequent yet never all that surprising. Any veteran of Cainhurst Castle or the Tomb of the Giants will know exactly what to look out for: enemies with their backs turned toward you oh so invitingly, innocent-looking treasure chests near piles of corpses, and grotty slime creatures that drop from the ceiling.

Talkative companions and that slightly slavish adherence to formula aside, Code Vein’s aesthetic has its ups and downs. Reminiscent of Bandai Namco’s old God Eater series, it’s a strange mix of extravagant and murky, spiking concrete grey and oily blackness with puddles of electric blue and orange. Some of the enemy designs are wondrous – my favourite so far is the Queen’s Knight, a boss character composed of thorns and chitin with a distressingly long reach – but the weapons (especially the larger double-handed swords) and outfits are occasionally busy to the point of distracting, like they’ve been thrashed out in isolation from the rest of the art direction. I’m hoping that later environments will introduce a bit more brightness and clarity, though the possibilities are obviously hindered by the choice of a vampire as protagonist.

Code Vein is a game I’m confident I’ll enjoy, and one I’d so far recommend to Souls fans and newcomers alike, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be captivated by it. The combat has plenty of teeth, and the partner system could be rewarding if the other Revenant buddies are as robustly designed as Mia, but those diminishing returns do take their toll, and what I’ve experienced of the narrative and world leaves me scratching my head. The greatness of Souls and Bloodborne is that every component feels like the expression of a single, abiding enigma, some vast metaphysical truth that informs everything, and which you piece together at a largely subconscious level as you roam, fight and die. For all the elaborateness of the art and talk of recovering lost memories, I don’t yet get that sense from this game. There’s plenty of blood pumping through Code Vein, but I’m still searching for its heart.

How do you follow a game like Knights of the Old Republic, the most famous original Star Wars tale a video game has ever told? Forget about Obsidian’s sequel for a moment and imagine it was BioWare staring at a piece of paper wondering how to follow a twist like Revan’s. Because once upon a time BioWare was – and it came up with an idea.

Yoda. Not the actual Yoda, because canonically he’s untouchable, but someone a bit like him; we know so little about Yoda’s almost nonexistent species even someone in his likeness would have the same effect: trust. “We felt like Yoda was the ultimate – everyone trusts Yoda,” James Ohlen tells me, lead designer of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

James Ohlen was also lead designer of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins, and director of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the online game. These days he’s creative director of BioWare Austin, and he’s working on Anthem. He’s BioWare through and through.

Yes, Yoda would have been the perfect tool for deceiving you.

“The initial twist in the first two-page concept we had for Knights of the Old Republic 2 was you were going to be trained by a Yoda-like figure,” Ohlen says, “someone from the Yoda race. That character was going to train you in the first part of the game but then you were going to discover this Yoda figure was actually not the good Yoda you expected…

:: The best Micro SD cards for Nintendo Switch available now

“He was training you to essentially be his enforcer, a Dark Lord to conquer the universe, and he was going to become the main villain.” Dun dun duunnn!

But this KOTOR 2 concept never made it any further. BioWare bosses Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk called it off. “It was a very smart decision on their part,” Ohlen says. “In order for a company to be successful and control its own destiny you need to own your own IP, and we didn’t own Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars. Mass Effect was something we decided we had to do instead of another Star Wars game.”

Everyone from the core KOTOR team moved onto Mass Effect except James Ohlen. He had another crusade to pursue. “I was the only person who left to eventually start concepting on the Dragon Age universe and game,” he says. “I was like, ‘We need to make a Baldur’s Gate! We can’t give up on it – we need to make something inspired by the Baldur’s Gate franchise!'”

From the death of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic 2, Mass Effect and Dragon Age were born.

Originally, Star Wars was only one of a few licenses BioWare was considering. It was the year 2000, the turn of the Millennium, and BioWare was trying to figure out what else it could do.

“Strangely enough, before we picked Star Wars, I remember Ray [Muzyka] coming into my office and throwing a couple of books on my desk and telling me to read them because we were negotiating with the authors,” Ohlen recalls. “And one of them was the book A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.

“That never went anywhere,” he adds, “but that’s how I started reading it – after the first book I was like ‘holy s***!’ and ran downstairs to the bookshop.”

(Coincidentally, Obsidian also seriously considered A Game of Thrones a few years later.)

BioWare settled on Star Wars because it was, and probably is, the world’s most well known fantasy. Publishers know it, banks know it and shoppers know it. “And,” Ohlen says, “we were all enormous Star Wars fans.”

The game LucasArts signed up for, however, was quite different. “When we first signed the deal, all that was known was it was going to be a Star Wars role-playing game done by BioWare,” he says. “What LucasArts had initially expected was us to do a paintover of Baldur’s Gate, and it was going to be a 2D, side-scrolling Star Wars game.”

But to BioWare, Star Wars meant movies. “It wouldn’t feel true to Star Wars if it wasn’t cinematic.” It meant bringing the camera down behind the player and showing a full 3D world. It meant cutscenes and fully voiced characters. More than any other BioWare game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic paved the way for the cinematic style we know BioWare for today.

The Star Wars movies also presented a problem. “We wanted to be able to tell an epic story,” he says, “because that was always something we fought for. Even during the Baldur’s Gate days we were being pushed to do a very down to earth, non-epic story, and we were like, ‘No! You’re going to be the son of the God of Murder and it’s going to be epic.’ We feel like with escapism, you want it to be larger than life.

“But with Star Wars it’s harder to tell a larger than life story during the movie era because all of the big events – Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader – happen in the movies.”

The solution came from a Dark Horse comic series called Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, set thousands of years before – and well out of the way of – the Star Wars films, in an era known as the Old Republic. All BioWare had to do was bump the timeline forward a bit in order to implement technology more familiar to the films – “the comic books had Lightsabers with cables attached to a power belt, and starships with sails” – and hey presto! it had a perfect setting for its own story about a ragtag group taking on an empire.

The next thing BioWare needed was a twist. This was of utmost importance. Of all the moments in the Star Wars films, Ohlen’s favourite is Darth Vader telling Luke Skywalker he’s his father at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. “It feels like Star Wars, an episodic movie series, needs cliffhangers and twists,” he says, “so we wanted a twist from the start.”

There were a lot of boxes a twist needed to tick. “We needed a twist that was incredibly epic in scope, that when it happened it was like, ‘Whoa! that is going to have a big effect on the galaxy’; we wanted a twist that was personal and meant a great deal to the player; and we wanted a twist that made you feel better about things, a twist that made you cooler.”

What if…? Eventually someone hit the nail on the head. “The initial idea of the player as the villain came from Cam.” That’s Cameron Tofer, who was going to be the executive producer on the game, but who left BioWare to co-found a small studio called Beamdog nearby (a studio which enhances some of BioWare’s old games). If Tofer hadn’t left, Casey Hudson wouldn’t have stepped in to fill his executive producer shoes, and if Hudson hadn’t stepped in then he might never have gone on to spearhead the Mass Effect series in the way he did. It might never have happened!

Tofer’s initial idea was fleshed out by Hudson and lead writer Drew Karpyshyn, “and the twist,” Ohlen says, “was in the very first two-page Word document for the game”. Revan, however, wasn’t. He might be gaming’s most famous Sith Lord but the twist, unequivocally, came first.

BioWare didn’t spend much time on Revan at all. “Darth Revan was less of a character because he was going to be the player, so we didn’t actually want to develop him too much,” Ohlen says. “Darth Malak was the one we spent more time giving a character arc to and a background to and a personality to.” And no prizes for guessing which wheezy movie Dark Lord he’s modelled on with his large stature and robotic jaw, albeit with splashes of red instead of all black.

Revan’s name took all of about three seconds to conjure. “The funny thing is, people on message boards will try and guess at the incredible depth we went to name the characters,” Ohlen says. Could Revan be an old English spelling of ‘raven’, and mean a dark-haired and thievish person? Could Revan come from the noun “Revanchism”, which means “a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory”?

“What they don’t realise…” Ohlen adds with a chuckle. “Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing this because it wrecks the mystery!

“I think I flipped through a book and there’s a villain in one of my D&D campaigns – a lot of the names came from my old Star Wars campaign I ran as a teenager – called Revanac, and I was like, ‘That’s not very good, I’ll just lop off the last part.’ Revan, boom, done.”

There was one Star Wars movie character BioWare knew Knights of the Old Republic couldn’t do without – and one whose inclusion would have a far reaching effect on both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series.

“One of the cores to Star Wars is the Millennium Falcon,” Ohlen says. “The Millennium Falcon is as important a character as some of the main characters like Han Solo and C-3PO and all the rest. We wanted to have the Ebon Hawk be your own Millennium Falcon, we wanted it to be a core of the game. It was, essentially, your home base.”

Being in the Ebon Hawk made you feel like you were flying around space, but you weren’t, it was an illusion – you only ever saw cinematics of the Ebon Hawk flying down onto planets or away from them. It was also an area you could have, as Ohlen says, “more intimate conversations and character moments”.

“It worked out really well for us,” he says. “It was a good place for you to roleplay with your companions and to make the world feel bigger than it actually was.” The idea stuck and BioWare would use it again and again. “The Normandy [in Mass Effect] was modelled after the Ebon Hawk; even your travelling campsite in Dragon Age: Origins was modelled after the Ebon Hawk.”

But not everything worked out well. “We had to cut an entire planet,” he says. “We were going to have a planet called Sleheyron,” which was also from his old D&D campaign, “and we actually did the content and built one of the levels for it. It was going to be a gladiator world run by the Hutts. But we were forced to cut that world.

“We also had more endings,” he adds, “but the endings were expensive so we had to get them down. We were going to have multiple endings based on all these different choices you were going to make,” a bit like at the end of Dragon Age: Origins, “but it just didn’t make sense. The ending had to be a big, epic cinematic moment with space battles and all the rest, so we cut it down to two.”

The dice-rolling D&D mechanics weren’t a great fit for a cinematic Star Wars experience either. “Some of the things were forced on us by circumstance,” he says. “Knights of the Republic would have been a better game with a better combat system, but I don’t think we would have been able to finish the game if we hadn’t been able to leverage so much stuff from Neverwinter Nights.”

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released in 2003, made by fewer than 100 people. “It was actually one of the more enjoyable development experiences,” Ohlen says. “When we started we were like, ‘We want to make the greatest Star Wars game ever made!’ BioWare, we’re very competitive, so at the beginning of any of our projects it’s always ‘we need to just blow it up!’ But by the time we got to the end, we were all exhausted.”

They’d ask themselves: “Did we even make a good game?” But they were too close. “I had played it through it too many times, like 200 times,” Ohlen says. “When you say a word over and over again it ceases to have meaning – it was almost like that for me.”

Kieron Gillen, now a comic book writer, reviewed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for Eurogamer – and he didn’t mince his words. Had BioWare made a good game? “Knights of the Old Republic is the best Star Wars game since X-Wing and/or Tie Fighter, if not ever,” he wrote. “Got that? Great. Now get this.”

Obsidian, a friend of BioWare’s, would make Knights of the Old Republic 2, and independently managed to come up with a strikingly similar story idea. “I’ve learned that there’s only so many ideas in the world,” Ohlen says with a shrug. (BioWare’s Jade Empire recycled the traitorous Yoda idea, too.)

BioWare returned to the Old Republic era years later with huge online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, which promised to contain several games’ worth of stories. But it never quite scratched the KOTOR itch (recent expansions Knights of the Fallen Empire, and Knights of the Eternal Throne, came closest). Perhaps it’s why the hunger for a new Knights of the Old Republic is still so strong – why a chorus of “We want KOTOR 3!” erupts at every mention of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘game’ and ‘story’. EA closing Visceral Games and “pivoting” the single-player Star Wars game in development there hasn’t helped.

But how likely is BioWare to ever return to Knights of the Old Republic in a proper single-player way? Where is there any room alongside the all-encompassing development of Anthem, a multiplayer game of the scale and ambition of Destiny? It doesn’t look hopeful, yet Ohlen doesn’t snuff out my hopes like I thought he would.

“Given a chance to work on Star Wars in the future, I would definitely enjoy that,” he says.

“What I would do is empower other people to tell their Star Wars stories, be the mentor who helps them bring their vision of the ultimate Star Wars story to life. KOTOR was very much a passion project, a love letter, in my mind, to the original Star Wars trilogy and particularly to The Empire Strikes Back. That’s something I don’t think I’d do again, but there’s other people’s love letters to Star Wars that could be quite amazing.

“Could BioWare do another Star Wars game?” He thinks for a moment. “That would be really awesome. The entire industry would love to see that, so hopefully it happens.”