Into the Dark provides a new campaign, which sees players establishing an outpost in the subterranean depths. You can research new technologies only available in this biome and encounter new creatures and plant life. Of course, new hostiles also emerge with unique abilities, and you’ll need to use new weapons to repel them. There’s also a powerful new boss of sorts that awaits.

Into the Dark becomes available as one progresses through the base game, but for those who completed the story. Of course, those downloading the free update can still access over 70 new items and technologies, along with new weapons and towers, so there’s something for everyone.

The Riftbreaker is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. You can also download a free demo.

There will apparently be about 50 designs for the company’s Arc GPU with the likes of ASUS, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and more offering their own solutions. But most interesting is that Intel will be partnering with various developers for implementing its Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) upscaling technology. Death Stranding Director’s Cut is one such title that will support the technology with 505 Games president Neil Rally reportedly “excited” to see how it will “enhance player experiences.”

Other companies apparently supporting the technology are EXOR Studios (The Riftbreaker), Ubisoft, Techland, Illfonic, Codemasters, and more. Again, time will tell if this is all actually true so stay tuned for more details. CES 2022 begins tomorrow and ends on January 7th.

Death Stranding: Director's Cut is coming to PC and will be one of the first titles to support Intel's new upscaling technology XeSS.https://t.co/itpDJZeZDH #DeathStranding #Intel pic.twitter.com/SmfVQMUvtW

— Kami (@Okami13_) January 3, 2022

This will allow for creating new maps and missions. There will also bug fixes, quality of life changes and further balancing to the Campaign’s difficulty. A new biome will be releasing in the first half of 2022, providing an entirely new area to explore with “unique wildlife, special weather events, more types of collectibles, weapons, skills and upgrades” along with new secrets. This will be available for free but a paid expansion for the Campaign is also planned to release by March/April 2022.

Online multiplayer is also in the works and planned for launch by 2022 end. The plan is to at least implement online co-op, though the developer notes that, “If things go well and we have sufficient time it’s not out of the question that we are going to include some other game modes as well.” It will also be a free update for all owners of the base game, though extensive testing will also be required. Check out the full roadmap below for more details.

GamingBolt can also confirm that this is indeed the case. It’s still unknown whether using mods will have any ramifications on achievements, but the community certainly seems delighted at the inclusion either way. Another post on Reddit by EXOR Studios’ community manager highlights the plethora of mods already available for the game’s prologue.

The Riftbreaker is an action-adventure game with elements of survival and base building. It launches today on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. Subscribers of Xbox Game Pass on both PC and console are, of course, entitled to download and play the game right now.

The Xbox Series S version would run in 4K and up to 60 FPS as well but without ray tracing. Interestingly, the console versions include mouse and keyboard support for those who prefer the same. As for DualSense support, EXOR Studios confirmed that Impulse and Adaptive Triggers would be supported along with Haptic Feedback. This translates to feeling the recoil from weapons on the triggers along with the impact of rain and explosions.

The Riftbreaker is out on October 14th for current-gen platforms and PC. Check out GamingBolt’s interview with producer and designer Paweł Lekki for more details on the progression, crafting and overall length of the experience.

As you go about constructing your base, connecting power plants, research, mines and whatnot together, you’ll venture across various biomes and encounter numerous threats. For this purpose, you’ll need to create walls and defenses to repel invaders. The twist is that Mr. Riggs is a venerable arsenal unto himself and can be equipped with numerous weapons like swords, flamethrowers, mini-guns and more.

The Riftbreaker will launch day one on Xbox Game Pass. As revealed in the latest trailer, it also leverages the PS5’s DualSense controller for “enhanced gameplay features.” Ray tracing and 4K support are also confirmed, which should apply to all versions of the game. Stay tuned for more details in the coming days.

"The Riftbreaker has a number of predefined difficulty levels for a wide range of player skill. On top of that we have a custom difficulty mode thanks to which players can adjust the difficulty the way they like it."

Can you talk to us about how different weather conditions across different biomes will play into the gameplay? Will weather be a dynamic element that interacts with other systems, or is it a more scripted affair meant to set specific sections of the game apart?

Weather conditions are different in each biome and they affect the effectiveness of renewable energy sources like solar panels are much more effective on the desert, and much less in the smoke covered magma biome. Aside from general weather properties each biome has a range of unique weather events like acid rain, dust storms, earthquakes, blue hailstorms and others. These events can have both positive and negative effects that bring additional flavor and a bit of unpredictability to the game.

What can you tell us about the difficulty curve in The Riftbreaker? Questions about accessibility and challenge often come up where games with an emphasis on survival mechanics are concerned, so what’s The Riftbreaker’s approach in this area?

The Riftbreaker has a number of predefined difficulty levels for a wide range of player skill. On top of that we have a custom difficulty mode thanks to which players can adjust the difficulty the way they like it. For example, it’s possible to change the time between enemy attacks, their strength, the number of available resources and the amount of damage that is dealt to the player. We’ve been working on these settings together with our community to make sure that the game is accessible to as many players as possible.

What can players expect from enemy variety in the game? Will players need to adapt different strategies to combat unique threats?

Each biome has a separate set of creatures that have different strengths and weaknesses. Some of them attack in huge swarms, some almost exclusively try to hunt the player and some act as artillery support for the swarm. There are more than 20 species of creatures in the game, each with 3 subspecies and “boss variants”. This brings us to around 80 different enemy types for the game across four unique biomes.

What can you tell us about the progression in The Riftbreaker on a macro and micro level, in terms of things such as base-building and our own mecha suit, for instance?

Progression in The Riftbreaker is very non-linear. Some players may want to focus on base building and researching new defense types while evading direct combat. It is even possible to use weapon mods for base towers instead of the player’s weapons to create an impenetrable defensive line. The players that prefer a more direct approach can on the other hand invest in various weapon and armor upgrades or even offensive drones that move with the player and support him with additional automated fire power.

"There are more than 20 species of creatures in the game, each with 3 subspecies and “boss variants”. This brings us to around 80 different enemy types for the game across four unique biomes."

How extensive are the crafting and customization mechanics in The Riftbreaker?

All weapons in The Riftbreaker have randomized stats and a chance to be crafter with unique properties. These properties can be later enhanced with additional mods that can add new characteristics like enemy piercing, cluster projectiles or even projectile homing. The player can also equip various armor upgrades that can be enhanced with mods just as well. The range of upgrade combinations is really broad.

One of The Riftbreaker’s most interesting features is its streaming integration, where audiences can actively participate in and have an effect on the game in several ways. Can you speak more about this and how it materializes in the game?

Streaming integration can be enabled at any point in the game. It is transparently woven into the game’s mechanics and can allow a streamer’s audience to take control of some of the game’s randomized events. So instead of a random number generator, the audience can pick and choose from a range of in-game events that are going to happen to the player like, A) earthquake, B) a stronger attack wave, C) a boss attack, D) a new gameplay objective, and so on. Some of these events can be exclusive to interactive streams like unlocking a specific research item for the streamer, but most of them can happen in the game naturally. They can also be configured to enable or disable positive or negative events.

What are your plans for post-launch support for The Riftbreaker?

We are planning to actively continue developing the game after launch. One of the most important components that we are planning to work on is online co-op. This is a huge task and we don’t expect to have it finished within 6 or 12 months after launch, so in the meantime we are also planning to keep on working on additional content like new biomes and monsters as well as various extended game mechanics like advanced mech customization.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of The Riftbreaker be?

Right now, playing through the campaign takes from 30-40 hours. Plus there’s the Survival mode and Sandbox mode in four different biomes. And there’s really a lot of reply value in the game because of the nature of randomized environments, events, attack waves and customizable difficulty levels.

"Progression in The Riftbreaker is very non-linear. Some players may want to focus on base building and researching new defense types while evading direct combat."

Since the reveal of the PS5 and Xbox Series X’s specs, a lot of comparisons have been made between the speeds of the two consoles’ GPUs, with the PS5 at 10.28 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X at 12 TFLOPS- but how much of an impact on development do you think that difference will have?

There’s much more to console speed than direct hardware clock comparisons. A lot of the speed can be driven from specific platform optimizations and differences in low level hardware access and optimization. We aren’t far enough into the optimization process to make these comparisons yet.

The PS5 features an incredibly fast SSD with 5.5GB/s raw bandwidth. How can developers take advantage of this, and how does this compare to Xbox Series X’s 2.4GB/s raw bandwidth?

HDD speed is not so important in the case of our game because we don’t rely on data streaming in a meaningful way. In the case of The Riftbreaker game loading speed is primarily bottlenecked by CPU speed, because most of the loading time is consumed for game world generation.

There is a difference in Zen 2 CPUs of both consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz, whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?

It doesn’t look like a meaningful difference in the case of our engine architecture. However, we haven’t done enough platform specific optimization and benchmarking to be able to say this with full confidence.

The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60fps console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the graphically intensive next-gen games?

I think that with the right amount of graphics settings tweaks, the visual difference will not be that different for a gamer that is not interested in ultimate gaming graphics. The biggest hardware difference from our perspective is the amount of RAM in the XSS. It is a limiting factor for designing game logic and the size of the world.

"Playing through the campaign takes from 30-40 hours. Plus there’s the Survival mode and Sandbox mode in four different biomes."

What resolution and frame rate is the game targeting on PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S? Furthermore, will the game have multiple graphical modes?

We are targeting 60FPS on all console platforms. We can achieve this on the XSX with raytracing enabled and on the XSS with raytracing disabled. We are still optimizing the game on all console platforms, so we aren’t ready to make final statements on the native rendering resolution that the game is going to be running at in the final build.

AMD recently uploaded several video interviews with developers of games with confirmed FSR support (transcribed by Wccftech), and the one thing they all seem to agree on is that tech is very easy to work with. Pretty much every developer has been able to add FSR support in just a few days, which is something we’ve heard from Square Enix studio Luminous Productions as well, whose Forspoken is supporting FSR.

Said Mateusz Makowiec, CTO at Terminator Resistance developer Teyon: “FSR is open source, so we were able to merge it with our internal engine changes. It took maybe a day to integrate it with the engine and then some time to add the option to the UI. We didn’t need to make any tweaks, it just worked.”

The Riftbreaker developer Exor Studios’ COO Pawel Lekki said: “FidelityFX Super Resolution is great because it’s super easy to implement. The initial implementation took us two days and as soon as we got implemented we started tweaking the game, the engine, to make it look as good as possible. That additional tweaking time was about an additional week, so in total I think the implementation time was just a bit over a week. This is really not a lot in terms of game development time schedules. Regardless of the platform, we can deliver the same technology, we don’t have to customize it per vendor, it just works.”

Evil Genius 2 studio Rebellion’s founder and CTO Chris Kingsley said: “Implementing FSR in our games was very easy, it was pretty much drop-in and it was only a few days. It was remarkably easy, I think it would be fair to say.”

Teemu Jyrkinen, CEO and creative director at Kingshunt developer Vaki Games said: “As a small game studio, we want to use technologies which are easy to implement and easy to use. With AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, the implementation was easy and we could see the benefits right away from the first playtest.”

Finally, Godfall developer Counterplay Games’ CTO and executive producer Emil Anticevic said: “It was important to us that their upscaling technology is an open solution, because this allows us not only to easily implement this in Godfall but also to customize it to achieve even better results. Not only is FSR easy to implement and to see a substantial performance boost, but it does so regardless of what brand of hardware you’re running on.”

Of course, the actual impact of FSR implementation remains to be seen, but early signs seem to be promising. Here’s hoping we see positive results in the not-too-distant future. 

You can check out AMD’s partner showcase videos with the aforementioned developers below.

Exor Studios’ upcoming The Riftbreaker has looked like an interesting game since the day it was announced, thanks to its blend of survival gameplay, action RPG mechanics, hack and slash combat, exploration, and base-building (that was a mouthful). The game’s primed to launch later this year, and for those of you who’re interested in giving it a go, there’s good news.

It’s been confirmed that when The Riftbreaker launches later this year, it will be available via Xbox Game Pass on consoles and PC right at launch. We’ve been seeing plenty of third party games coming to Xbox Game Pass day and date of late, and sure, The Riftbreaker isn’t exactly as huge as something like MLB The Show 21 or Outriders, but it’s still a pretty big deal for a game that looks as promising as this does.

Speaking of which, Exor Studios have also released a meaty new gameplay trailer for the game, showing plenty of its mechanics in action with developer commentary to go along with it. Check it out below.

The Riftbreaker is out this Fall for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, with a PS4 and Xbox One launch following at a later date.

We’ve heard more than a few people in the industry talked about the Xbox Series S over the last few months, and while there are some who have expressed concerns about the console’s lower specs, others have jumped to its defence and praised it emphatically (Microsoft themselves included). The question of whether the Xbox Series S’ weaker hardware will hold back multiplatform games for PS5 and Xbox Series X going forward has been asked often, but Exor Studios CO Paweł Lekki – currently at work on upcoming survival action RPG The Riftbreaker – doesn’t feel like the system is going to present much of an issue for developers.

Speaking with Wccftech in an interview, Lekki acknowledged the fact that having a single SKU of the new Xbox would have been more convenient for developers, but added that owing to the console’s CPU being largely similar to that of the Xbox Series X, scaling games for both consoles shouldn’t be very challenging. Though he did mention the gulf in the two consoles’ memories, which can affect actual game design, and not just visuals, Lekki also added that having a cheaper console that can play next-gen consoles is a smart move by Microsoft.

“Yes, the Xbox Series S requires additional optimization,” Lekki said. “While we were able to simply compile The Riftbreaker for the Xbox Series X and it ‘just works’, the XSS requires additional optimization. Still, it doesn’t look like it will require that much work to be running well at 1080p on the XSS. The best thing about the current architecture is that the CPU power on both Xbox models is practically the same. Scaling graphical effects is a lot easier than scaling gameplay.

“The amount of available memory is a determining factor in a lot of cases when we talk about the size of a game world or about how many things can be happening within it at any given time. The size of the memory that is available in the XSS is the actual determining point for the entire console generation as gameplay features have to be fitted to the lowest spec. From the point of view of a developer it would be much easier if there was a single XSX SKU, but given the circumstances I think that Microsoft has made good choices in how to create a much cheaper console, that can still run next-generation games.”

The Riftbreaker is due out some time this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.