There's a growing field that I like to call 'digital archeology': the excavation and analysis of weird artifacts that have become buried in decades-old software or only exist on archived websites. Sometimes those artifacts just rise to the surface on their own, as was the case with an image of "mold" spotted by a Fortnite player in the game's news feed.
It isn't a picture of mold, but a stock photo of "cave pearls, a kind of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves," Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said on X in response to the question from M1das.
Sweeney says he added the texture to the first version of Unreal Engine all the way back in 1995.
"This is Unreal Engine's default texture," he said. "I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while I was developing on a 90 MHz Pentium. It's still there and shows up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture."
I assume I must have seen these cave pearls many times: I've played a lot of Unreal Engine games, and whoever messed up Fortnite's news feed is hardly the first developer to ever forget a texture. But I don't recognize the image. Not like the Source engine's missing texture icon, that famous fuchsia checkerboard, or its giant red "ERROR" text.
Maybe Unreal's default texture just evaded my long term memory by being so ambiguous: blobs of an organic-looking something. It obviously hasn't evaded Unreal developers, though. "This image haunts my dreams," said an ILM Immersive artist last year.
This is Unreal Engine's default texture. I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while I was developing on a 90 MHz Pentium. It's still there and shows up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture.November 14, 2024
The Rogue Prince of Persia, the aptly named Prince of Persia roguelike from longtime Dead Cells steward Evil Empire, is gearing up for its Second Act update, and it's probably one of the biggest updates I've seen for any game all year. The "game content will double," Evil Empire says, and the core art style, which once rendered our titular hero as the glorious Prince of Purple, is getting an overhaul.
"We're giving The Rogue Prince of Persia a glow-up!" the developer says. The "big art upgrade" does more than de-purple the prince; environments are noticeably more detailed, and the whole world looks a bit sharper and higher-contrast.
"The most obvious change of this update is the art direction where we've changed the color palettes. had much more detail added and just generally 'improved,'" a Steam post reads. "You'll also notice that the Prince is no longer purple - this change was made as the purple tone just didn't fit with the new direction. We'll go into more detail about why we made these changes next week, but we find that the art direction is now a much better fit with the game's genre, setting/story and the Prince of Persia series as a whole."
If you're gutted by the loss of the Prince of Purple, Evil Empire has good news: "there may or may not be skins coming in the future," per a YouTube comment. I'm down with both styles, personally, but I do agree with the fans pointing out that the new look is more recognizably Persian.
The Second Act short list includes more biome, bosses, story content, enemies, and localization options. "This update will mark a point where we've effectively doubled the game's content from launch," Evil Empire clarifies. "All the roguelite markers are present - gameplay loop, metaprogression, builds, difficulty modifiers and more - and we're not finishing here with development continuing into 2025!"
Our Rogue Prince of Persia review praised its slick combat at launch, but the game was crying out for updates and improvements, so it's good to see it chugging along.
Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I've heard such good things about the classic 1998 shooter Unreal and sure would like to try it, but I just don't know where to get it these days?" If so, I have good news: The Internet Archive has made it free, along with the multiplayer follow-up Unreal Tournament, and it has Epic's blessing to do so.
Word of the newly-free Unreal games was first shared at the end of October on the OldUnreal Discord, but it didn't come to wider attention until the news was shared on Resetera. An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, "We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions."
I was always more of a Quake man than an Unreal guy, but there's no denying the importance of the games. Unreal looked, well, unreal, but it was the editor bundled with the game that really locked its place in videogame history. Unreal Tournament was an even bigger deal, with dramatically improved "Internet play," as we called it at the time—an element of first-person shooters that has proved rather durable over the years.
Given all that, it's ironic that Epic's efforts to bring back UT failed so dramatically. A new game was announced with great fanfare in 2014, but despite early promise the runaway success of Fortnite convinced Epic to pull the plug.
If UT doesn't have much of a future, at least its past is well preserved. You can download and install Unreal and Unreal Tournament directly by snagging the files from the Internet Archive and then getting the patches to run it on current Windows systems from Github, all of which is detailed in full on the OldUnreal Discord. Or you can save yourself a lot of headaches by grabbing new installers from oldunreal.com—here are direct links to Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament—and letting them do the work.
I tried it, and it works: The blast of text in the DOS window that pops up during the install process was momentarily alarming, but with a few clicks (and no need to understand what "mount the game disc" means) I was off and running in Unreal Gold.
Bear in mind that Unreal and UT are very old, and so there's some unavoidable oddness at play. The default 640x480 resolution is pretty funky on 4K displays, and you will immediately notice that the mouse is inverted out of the box, which was the style at the time. It also uses the arrow keys for movement—if you want to use WASD (or whatever other Totally Normal Person system you've cooked up) you'll need to do some key remapping.
But it runs, it's free, and maybe most notably it comes at a time when game preservation efforts are running up against serious opposition from companies and organizations who are determined to stymie efforts to keep old games accessible and playable. It's not as though Epic was making any bank on them anyway—they were removed from sale along with a bunch of other old Epic games a couple years ago—so there's little here to lose, but even so I think Epic deserves props for doing something cool. Maybe it'll even inspire other game makers to follow suit.
Fortnite’s next big partnership with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is here. Epic Games already lets players dress up as the Turtles, and now, creators can publish experiences built with TMNT assets and the Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
As a demonstration of what’s possible, Paramount teamed up with Spiral House (which has made other Fortnite experiences), to make a TMNT-themed beat-em-up / roguelike, TMNT Dimensions [Rougelike], that you can play inside Fortnite right now. (You can find it by searching for code 8651-4809-2485.) A lot of user-made Fortnite experiences look somewhat amateur, but this seems like a game you might actually want to play outside of Fortnite, especially if you’re already a fan of TMNT’s other arcade-y brawlers.
A standout presentation in Sony’s September State of Play was Hell is Us, coming from fledgling Montreal headquartered studio Rogue Factor. The entirety of its inclusion was a fifteen-minute gameplay reveal trailer whereby the game’s Creative and Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête took us through the third-person action-adventure’s unique concepts surrounding exploration and combat, intriguingly surmising players will need to follow their nose and trust their instincts to navigate and survive the serene yet disturbing world of Hell is Us.
Set in the early nineties inside the fictional country Hadea, we’ll assume command of Remi as he absconds an O.N. peacekeeping mission to infiltrate the hermit state. This is a land ravaged by brutal civil war; Remi is returning to the country of his birth for the first time since his mother smuggled him out at the age of five, him having grown up within Canada’s foster system without his real mum or dad. He yearns to learn the fate of his parents, perhaps see them again, to rationalise their decision to eject him from Hadea whilst confronting the resulting trauma of their abandonment. From this premise we’re expecting mature themes but there’s more lurking in the landscape’s woodland. Whilst Hadea’s glistening pools, forests, and marshland seem quiet and idyllic Remi is soon confronted with the pitiless effects civil war has tolled upon the nation and the cruelty humanity has enacted on each other. Mass graves pile with rotten corpses, slain citizens hang from tree branches, a surviving populace display exhausted fear in their eyes. Before Remi’s confronted with the visceral horrors of war though, he stumbles upon a dilapidated farmhouse, and its tired occupant resting in the basement.
It is here Belletête proudly presents an overview of Hell is Us’ exploration, it’s reluctance to hold your hand, its refusal to offer points of interest or even objectives on a silver platter. Remi is told to trek northwards through the farmhouse’s surrounding woodland, and whilst he’s equipped with a traditional compass in his inventory (although we don’t get a glimpse of it during the gameplay trailer) the basement dweller suggests following the sound of windchimes that he’s hung from tree branches to reach the other side of the forest. See, the story is he hung those windchimes in those woods when his children were young, the intention being to provide an auditory signpost to stop them getting lost. Without the benefit of on-screen UI, maps, waypoints, markers, stuff flashing up on screen to guide and distract you, Remi – and thus you the player – must use his senses to find a way through without getting lost. It’s a more organic, natural way to explore for sure. Belletête belies an unenthusiastic approach to those more traditional waypoints and such too, exclaiming that in other games “when you find something it’s not really your discovery.”
It’s hard to disagree with the concept Rogue Factor have opted for here. If we truly put ourselves in Remi’s shoes, we’re lost in a country with no knowledge of the land and very little understanding of the tribulation lying in wait. Deploying this organic form of exploration supports this notion perfectly. We’re an alien in a hostile land, the sense of uneasiness compounding as our need to explicitly engage with our surroundings increases.
Remi has two memories with which to start his investigation: his home village is Jova and his father was a blacksmith. That’s it, although he isn’t thrust into the midst of a civil war without any help whatsoever. He possesses a tool with which he can archive information gathered: his mind map-esque data pad. This digital screen provides an overview of Remi’s knowledge, tidbits of info harvested from NPC conversations and environmental world building, although the data never presents a complete picture of what he’s been told or discovered. If there’s something not in the mind map, well, you’d better be sure to remember it.
There’s some Resident Evil style environmental puzzles to solve; ancient glyphs to decode, primeval language to decipher, and here is our first glimpse of Remi’s drone companion as it scans archaic scrawl to reveal riddles which correspond to the misaligned glyphs on a locked door. It’s all very routine stuff, but Belletête assures us that there’ll still be no hand holding. We’ll have to search environments for clues, but the example here doesn’t break the mould as much as open world exploration might.
However, exploration, as outlined by Belletête, is only 50% of the experience. The rest is combat, and whilst Belletête is clear to point out that Hell is Us is not a Soulslike he advises there’ll be a deep, nuanced combat system, one with challenge and a learning curve, yet not too difficult to master. Remi wields an arsenal of medieval weaponry – swords, axes, and the like – but he’s not getting stuck into the ongoing civil war ravaging the land. No, there’s something altogether more supernatural stalking Hadea’s landscape, and we’re treated to numerous bouts between Remi and gangs of ghostly bipedal enemies dubbed Hollow Walkers in the gameplay reveal. These faceless ghouls are flanked by umbilically attached floating hazes which Remi will need to figure out how to destroy to kill their connected Walkers.
There’s a raft of special manoeuvres he can unleash – twisting typhoon attacks, forward charges, and super dashes – plus limbic skills which perform much like magical attacks, attained via collectable augmentations that can be attached to Remi’s melee weaponry. All these tools must be utilised, according to Belletête, if players are to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of Hollow Walkers and haze-like entities. Remi’s drone also possesses upgradeable skills to utilise on the battlefield, with the examples shown encompassing crowd control. Remi can send the drone onwards to distract an enemy, break a Hollow Walker away from its attachment, and generally ease any desperation felt when battling outnumbered. From the gameplay preview, it certainly looks like Rogue Factor have balanced difficult combat without the possibility of it becoming too punishing. Enemies will obviously become more powerful as Remi himself grows his arsenal and skillset, but the battles shown in the fifteen-minute presentation never look too taxing.
As for this supernatural threat, we’ll learn the origin of the Hollow Walkers as we play through Hell is Us. For now, it’s hard to overlook their similarity to The Hiss in Remedy Entertainment’s Control, who themselves are a sentient force capable of possessing living things, objects, and even locations. The Hiss also deploy non-violent clusters which serve as healing forces for its battle-going soldiers; the Hollow Walker’s haze-like entities perhaps perform similar functions? Belletête is understandably tight-lipped on the Hollow Walker’s purpose and meaning, but we could surmise this supernatural force is something older than mankind itself given the propensity for subterranean bunkers stuffed with unfathomably old architecture dotted throughout Hadea’s fields.
Altogether, Hell is Us looks to be blending a mysterious, lore-rich universe with a demand for engaged exploration and meaningful discovery. Its combat looks decent, although not utilising as much of a unique concept as the game’s exploration if the gameplay trailer’s alpha footage is anything to go by. Still, there’s heaps of promise here, and given the passion elicited by Belletête during the presentation, there’s no reason to think this one won’t stick its landing.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
Log in
