Warhammer 40 000: Boltgun releases May 23, new gameplay details revealed

blog.playstation.com:

Hi everyone, Grant Stewart here, lead designer at Auroch Digital. We’re developing Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a bloody and frenetic homage to the retro shooters of yore, and we are super thrilled to share a new gameplay trailer and announce the game’s release date: May 23! The game is available for pre-orders on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, so load up your boltgun!

In Boltgun, you play as a battle-hardened Space Marine on a perilous mission across the galaxy to fight against the Warriors and daemons of Chaos. You’ll unleash a devastating Imperial arsenal as you blast through an explosion of sprites, pixels and blood, in glorious boomer shooter-style. Here’s a bit more about how the game delivers a unique Warhammer 40,000 experience with a perfect blend of classic, frenetic FPS gameplay and stylish visuals from your favorite 90s retro shooters.

In past classic shooters, enemies were simply dropped into the environment for you to shoot like a very sophisticated target range. Boltgun features a modern take on this. On top of plenty of classic locations with enemies diligently hand placed, there’s also areas where waves of heretics are dynamically spawned by an intelligent system to seek the most exciting positions to challenge the player. In these situations, designers pick the enemies using a “nodegraph” and construct escalating “encounters”. They then populate the combat “arenas” using “spawn points”, to denote locations where the enemies can appear in the world and “zones”, controlling the positions they should try to move to during combat. As the fight progresses the AI looks for the most suitable zone and attempts to move to it and engage the player.

A tactical marine and his finite state machines

In early