The Dark Souls team took to Twitter today to tease the announcement of Dark Souls 3's first DLC expansion: Ashen Ones. According to the official Dark Souls Twitter account, the DLC will be revealed on August 24. You can see the tweet embedded below:

Ashen Ones will be the first major piece of DLC released for From Software's action-RPG Dark Souls III, which first launched back in March and received a positive review here on GameSpot, despite some early issues with the PC version.

A previous announcement indicated the game's first post-launch DLC would hit this fall, so the August 24 announcement could potentially confirm that window or even set a firm release date. We also know this expansion will be the first of two thanks a to a $25 Season Pass option that popped up in digital storefronts back in February. The expansions will likely be available individually as well.

According to an earlier leak, this DLC may contain--as you might expect--new maps, bosses, and weapons, but we'll likely find out for sure next week. Be sure to check back August 24 for our full report.

Telltale Games has launched an iOS and Android tie-in game for hit TV show Mr. Robot. Developed by Night School Studio, the team behind Oxenfree, it is a companion app that lets players "join the revolution and take down E Corp through the immersive, story-driven, extended narrative."

"Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltratiOn extends the narrative experience of the award-winning TV series, allowing players to become personally intertwined with the characters of the underground hacker group, fsociety," reads a press release.

"Players will be using the mysterious new E Corp Messaging App over the course of a week, playing in real time, and carefully communicating with its members as they race to recover data that is critical to their goals of hacking the multinational company Evil Corp." Watch the trailer below.

"We're some of the biggest fans in the world of what Sam Esmail and the teams at Universal Cable Productions and USA have created with this series," said Night School Studio co-founder Sean Krankel.

"Working hand in hand with Sam, series writer Kor Adana and UCP, we've created an opportunity for players to meaningfully interact with characters like Elliot (Rami Malek), Darlene (Carly Chaikin) and Cisco (Michael Drayer), truly feeling like they're joining the hack at a critical moment in the TV series. As fans, it's nothing short of a dream come true for us."

"Night School Studio is one of the most promising small developers in the industry, and seeing Telltale alumnus and writer Adam Hines writing alongside the team at UCP and USA on an interactive story with our partners at NBCUniversal makes us proud to present this to MR. ROBOT and Telltale fans everywhere," added Telltale Games' Steve Allison.

"There's a distinct Telltale style to all of the character interactions that our fans will find familiar, and fans of the show will be engrossed all through the night as they race to help fsociety pull off the unthinkable."

Telltale recently released the debut of its Batman series. In GameSpot's Batman: The Telltale Series Episode One review, the season premiere earned a score of 8/10. In addition to Batman, the studio is working on season three of The Walking Dead, which will be available this year, and a Marvel project.

Konami has announced Metal Gear Survive, a multiplayer stealth game coming to Xbox One, PS4, and PC in 2017.

The announcement was made during Gamescom 2016, where Konami showed off a trailer for it. Much of the footage featured in the video was set during the ending of Ground Zeroes, confirming it is set after the Metal Gear Solid 5 prologue.

Players are sucked into random wormholes and other fellow soldiers, as well as chunks of Motherbase. They transport players into alternate timelines, where desert landscapes and half-formed structures sucked in along with you. Up to four people must work co-operatively to survive the in the new harsh wilderness.

The stealth mechanics core to Metal Gear will remain a key pillar of the experience, and covert operations must be employed to escape massive biological threats In the trailer they were presented as zombies, but a Konami.

There will also be the opportunity to master new weaponry, some of which is completely new to the series, such as the bow and arrow. New animations have been created for these.

Konami has said Survive will explore "themes and pursues a fresh spirit of exploration in unique gameplay mechanics."

"We are delighted to announce another exciting addition to the Metal Gear franchise," said Tomotada Tashiro, European President for Konami Digital Entertainment. "Metal Gear Survive the series' famed stealth elements but within a unique co-op setting that is designed for a truly engrossing multi-player experience."

A press release adds: "In a struggle to stay alive on this harsh terrain filled with deadly creatures, soldiers who were previously on Motherbase now must work cooperatively in order to survive. Metal Gear Survive continues the pedigree of Metal Gear Solid 5's highly praised gameplay design, with a unique blend of stealth and co-op play mechanics.

"Players can strategically manage massive threats with the help of four-player online cooperative play. New weaponry will also be introduced to combat charging creatures and lethal environments as well."

Konami did not provide any further details on the game. From our very brief presentation, Survive looks to be leveraging a lot of the work done on Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain's single player and competitive multiplayer, and reshaping it into a new co-operative experience.

As alluded to previously, however, new areas and weaponry is being created specifically for survive, in addition to unique animations for them. As of yet it is unclear who is working on the development. Series creator Hideo Kojima left Konami in 2015, the LA studio responsible for Metal Gear Online was also shut down after the game's release.

It's been nine years since we first went to Rapture. A lot has changed in the time since BioShock first launched. Game design has shifted considerably, hardware has gotten better, graphics look more photorealistic than ever before. But while our world is constantly in flux, the world of Rapture is just as atmospheric, haunting, and oppressive as you remember it. The tyrant, Andrew Ryan, is just as Ayn Rand-ian. Big Daddies still hulk and lumber with their creepy girlish companions, Little Sisters, at their feet.

I went hands-on with the remastered version on PS4 coming in BioShock: The Collection, and it felt like I had been transported back to the first time I played the game. 2K has gone back and spent a lot of time with the original, sharpening it up and generally making it feel more modern. It's not just a fresh coat of paint, though: in addition to increasing its resolution, the publisher has added new details to the environments. For example, when you enter Rapture at the beginning of the game, you're surrounded by ocean life. Jellyfish swim by you; starfish hang from the city's structures; schools of fish move through the water.

Rapture itself looks even more menacing and mystical. The original game had environments that didn't just look good, but also imparted little pieces of narrative that fleshed out the world and gave you more grounding in the story. Irrational Games built a masterpiece of environmental storytelling back in 2007, and the remaster emphasizes this. The levels you move through are gorgeously rendered, and the small hints of the cataclysmic events that had befallen Rapture have received care and attention to make them look as good as possible.

It's beautiful and atmospheric, but even more than that, it just doesn't look like an "old" game anymore. Its graphics won't blow you away, but it's hard to see rough edges and signs of age. The full effect of the remaster only really hits if you go back to the original and see how much has been reworked and overhauled. But that's okay: the remaster doesn't need to make a nine-year-old game look incredible according to 2016 standards. But it does need to do enough that you aren't distracted from the beautiful art and entrancing world of Rapture. And at that, it succeeds.

Helping matters, the remaster now runs at a solid 60 frames per second on consoles. Since BioShock is a first-person shooter, this makes a significant difference in gameplay. As a result, in addition to looking better, the remastered BioShock also plays better. 60 FPS makes shooting and moving smoother, and its fast-paced combat benefits greatly from this change. It eliminates some of the relics of its age that makes returning to the original game less fun than you'd wish.

It's worth noting, though, that while I love the story and world of BioShock, Irrational made certain design decisions that caused me to never finish the game, and these parts of the game still remain. The oppressive atmosphere of BioShock is its strength, but I still don't think that backtracking through rooms full of infinitely spawning splicers complements that tone. Fetch-quest missions and the weird level that tasks you with taking photos of certain enemies, too, feel anachronistic, design choices of an older generation of shooters.

For people like me, who weren't terribly impressed with BioShock's gameplay, the far more action-y BioShock Infinite is also included in BioShock: The Collection. If you owned the game on PC, you won't notice much difference: this version of Infinite is essentially the PC version. But if you played it on a console like me, this remaster shows that Infinite is, at least graphically, the crown jewel of the BioShock series.

Even though it's been more than three years since BioShock Infinite launched, the game looks almost like it could be released tomorrow. Columbia is gorgeous, full of vibrant colors and minute detail, and the constantly moving cloud city looks just as interesting as ever. And although character design shows a bit of age--eyes and faces are generally expressionless--the game as a whole looks incredible.

Infinite plays great, too. It clearly shows the lessons that Irrational learned about shooter design over the six years between the first BioShock and Infinite. For example, guns are snappier and more satisfying to shoot, and the Skyhook makes for both a brutally entertaining melee weapon and a tool for opening Columbia to rapid exploration and movement. Infinite also now runs at 60 FPS on consoles, which makes its rhythmic, rapid combat feel even better. BioShock 1 received the most work in the collection, but Infinite got enough of a remaster that it's well worth returning to it. I loved playing through the first few hours of Infinite again, exploring the world and discovering secrets that I had never known existed.

If an overhauled BioShock and a better-looking Infinite aren't enough, BioShock: The Collection also comes with a remastered BioShock 2. I didn't play much of BioShock 2, but I played enough to verify that it looks considerably better than its original console versions. It, too, runs at 60 FPS, and its levels are more detailed and look sharper. However, it has not received the same amount of attention as BioShock 1, and its cutscenes and some of the smaller environmental features show the game's age. But if you're like me and never actually played BioShock 2, this is the best way to try it now--especially since it comes in a pack with BioShock 1 and Infinite.

If you're not interested in the core BioShock 2, though, its addition in the pack ensures that you'll also get access to the well-received DLC, Minerva's Den. Minerva's Den is arguably the most notable DLC in the series, lauded for its great narrative and tone and developed by people who later went on to make Gone Home. In fact, The Collection comes with every piece of extra content released for every BioShock game (besides BioShock 2's multiplayer, which isn't getting ported).

As it brings all of these pieces together, BioShock: The Collection is shaping up to be a fantastic monument to the series. In my time with the three games, I realized that this is so much more than simply a remaster of a beloved title. It's a preservation effort--a way to experience a series that meant so much to so many people and that influenced future games in so many ways. The Collection lets you replay (or play for the first time) games that are largely considered masterpieces of storytelling and worldbuilding. And it doesn't stop there: every piece of single-player BioShock content is included in this, and BioShock 1 even features director's commentary with game director Ken Levine and lead artist Shawn Robertson.

Remasters get a lot of flak these days, and not without reason. But BioShock: The Collection includes enough that it's well worth the price to return to prettier, but just as haunting, versions of Rapture and Columbia.

With the release of BioShock: The Collection only a month away, 2K has released a video comparing the remastered version of the first game with the Xbox 360 original. You can see it for yourself in the video above.

The video shows off BioShock's opening scenes in both their original and remastered forms. From the plane ride and swimming towards the lighthouse to diving into the depths of the ocean and arriving at Rapture, the trailer shows a much sharper-looking version of the first game. The video then ends with a montage of scenes and gameplay from all three BioShock games.

BioShock: The Collection features remastered versions of all three games in the series and all of their single-player DLC--BioShock 2's multiplayer is not included. It releases on September 13 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC as a standalone product, while those on PC who already own the games will receive upgraded versions for free.

If you already own BioShock, BioShock 2, and/or the Minerva's Den DLC on Steam, you'll be upgraded to the remastered versions once The Collection releases. BioShock Infinite is not set for a remaster on PC, as "it already meets current-gen consoles standards and runs smoothly on high visual settings," 2K says.

Additionally, the three games run at 1080p and "up to" 60 FPS on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out new screenshots of the three BioShock games on PS4 below.

As far as quality goes, BioShock received a score of 9 in GameSpot's review for its "absolutely amazing atmosphere and visual design," BioShock 2 got an 8.5 for being "fantastically atmospheric and creepy," and BioShock Infinite earned itself a score of 9 for not only being a quality game but an important one for its depiction of "uncomfortable, relevant themes in an effective way."

You can read our preview of BioShock: The Collection here. GameSpot's Alex Newhouse said, "BioShock: The Collection is shaping up to be a fantastic monument to the series. In my time with the three games, I realized that this is so much more than simply a remaster of a beloved title. It's a preservation effort--a way to experience a series that meant so much to so many people and that influenced future games in so many ways."

Early next year Ubisoft will launch For Honor, a hack-and-slash game that takes players on a tour through a fantastical world that visually and spiritually resembles our own. Three factions--the Vikings, the Knights, and the Samurai--have been scattered to the corners of the earth after a massive cataclysm and have just begun to spread out again. As they seek to reclaim their former territory, they find themselves butting heads, all scrabbling to fight for the honor of conquering the world.

After a recent hands-on session with the game, we sat down with director Jason VandenBerghe to talk about the work that went into creating the game. For more than a decade he's been working on For Honor in some capacity, pitching it to teams and refining his central ideas, slowly moving forward on the title that he refers to as his "bucket-list game." VandenBerghe opened up to us about the challenges of balancing For Honor's intricate combat, as well as his thoughts on playable female characters and his hopes for his audience.

GameSpot: The first thing I noticed during the demo was the art direction. What kind of research went into putting all those environments together and adapting those cultures?

VandenBerghe: I did vast, extensive research. It's essentially: each culture offers a very different problem, right? With the samurai culture, we have all this wonderful reference material, and we're also trying really hard to be sure that we have Japanese people on the team and we're collaborating with Ubisoft Japan to make sure that we don't make any of the obvious mistakes. It's really easy to screw that up. But we've got a lot of great guidance on it. What's weird is that with all of our cultures, we're not trying to be true to history exactly. We're trying to evoke your fantasy of history, right? We're trying to go, "See, this is what you wished it had been like." That's how we're trying to do it. It's wonderland. It's warrior wonderland.

It's not a historical game. It's not our world and it's not alt-history. It's like you've gone through the looking glass, and now we're on the other side, and now everything is rearranged. It's also just rearranged for warriors. We did the same thing for each of our cultures. We look at all the source stuff and we ask ourselves what makes those cultures iconic. What are the iconic shapes and the iconic stuff that makes us go, "Yeah, that's the thing!" And then we just work it, we just work it in the art, and we start to think about it in the context of our world story, which is this story about coming out of the darkness.

But it's very different for each culture, because of course the Vikings never made castles. That didn't happen, and so we were like, "Well, f*ck it, yes they did, here they go, this is what a Viking castle looks like." We have lots more examples to follow.

How about the armor and the classes you've chosen? Obviously, all of the gear is very intrinsic to that culture as we think of them. So when you were researching armor, when you were trying to decide on these are the armor archetypes that you want hooked up to this particular factions...

It's tough. The short answer is that we spent a lot of time thinking about what is it in the mind of our populace. Like, in our minds, what are the keys that trigger those associations? What are those things you see? We did a bunch of experimentation and analysis, and we found that each culture had aesthetic codes that, if you see those codes, only means knights, or a Viking, or a samurai. And we focused down, and we ended up having to come up with this bible about the things only Vikings do, and then we held ourselves to it--these things need to be here on this character to see them as a Viking. It's funny, you can take that character and you remove the fur, you're like, well, that could be a European. Put the fur on, you're like, that's a Viking! The same with the [Viking] horns. Even though the horns are made-up culture, still we expect to see them, so we see them.

We did a bunch of thinking and work around that, around what are those codes, and then being sure they didn't overlap. Because we really want the experience that you're seeing, where you go "Oh my gosh, that's the Viking in my mind."

And I noticed that you have female fighters.

Yes.

When did you decide that you wanted to vary up the lineup?

Twenty-five years ago. [Laughs] And that's where we start, because this game isn't about us creating characters and imposing them on you. This game is about you. And so what kind of warrior are you, right? You can change the skin color of your Vikings, too. You want to have a black Viking? Knock yourself out. It's who are you. I want you to be able to be in that game. I play the female warden. That's my favorite character, because she's great. And it's always been, from day one, it's been the core value of the team, and we've been doing this for a while.

We have all our heroes now. We have 12 now. Each faction has four heroes each. In each faction there are two heroes that are dual gender, male or female, and then there's one hero that is male only and one hero that is female only, for all 12, so it's 50/50 all the way across.

Going back to the story and the through-line: What came first for you, the idea for the story or the idea of, "I want to have a game where it's like a cool dueling game?"

Definitely the dueling. My original pitch for this game... I was making this pitch for 13 years. I've been wanting to make this game for a long time.

Why did it take 13 years?

Because people said no. It's going to be 14 years by the time we ship it. I can't believe that, but it's true.

I took a course in German longsword. German longsword is this rediscovered martial art [in which] we've decoded how the knights fought with long swords. There's this organization called the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance, or the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts in the States, that's a research organization that figured this out. And so you now can just take classes, and it's just martial arts where you fight with the longsword. My wife got us a one-year membership to this dojo. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is the best!" So we go, and I start learning this form, and I'm walking home one day... And I started thinking about the form and how you could take it... I asked myself what would happen if I took this shape, these cuts, and we mapped them to the right stick on the controller. I was walking down the street holding a wooden practice sword, pantomiming a controller, babbling to myself. It had to be spooky. It had to be quite a sight. But I'm getting all excited about it, because the basic controller scheme, it all just clicked into place.

So I got really excited about it. I then started pitching the game to anyone who would listen. The answer was no, no, no, no, we don't make that kind of game, no, that would never work, no, no. Until I pitched it to Yannis Mallat, who is the GM of Ubisoft Montreal, and he said, "No, but I have somebody I want you to meet." And he introduced me to Stephane Cardain, the producer, and his team. And I pitched it to them. They said yes. And now five years later, we're here and we're making it. This is it. This is my bucket-list game.

Obviously, you had to come up with a story that sort of brought all the factions together, so how did you do that?

I just invented it. I worked with a bunch of collaborators. We brought in some great writers and we worked and worked and worked it. Our big challenge was, how do we get the samurai here? How do we do that? How does that work? Because I don't know if you know this, but the Japanese never attacked Norway. [Laughs] That never occurred historically. That's a fiction. And so we had to find a way to do the thing. And so the concept of a cataclysm was always floating around as a nice way to sort of reset the board. And I loved the idea of the samurai as outcasts, as having an exodus. So we just worked that, and it produced all this great stuff about the knights in our world.

Going back to combat, with all the different styles, all the different weapons, and the cultural nuances of each faction, what is the most difficult thing to balance? What are the difficulties of balancing the combat, in general?

So balancing is extraordinarily challenging. The key to balancing is play-testing. It's just to play-test and play-test. First you have to have a theory. You have to say, here's my structure, and then you have to play-test, play-test and play-test. I don't know how to answer the question about what the most difficult thing was to balance, because the truth is once we got our core theory right... Well I guess it would be that.

It was getting the right set of mechanics. Getting to the place where we had the right mechanics, not too many, not too few, the right stuff in the right place, then balancing became straightforward. It's never easy, but it becomes a matter of doing play-tests and making adjustments until the playing gets even. Balance is impossible if you have characters that have powers that don't have answers. If one can do this, then I have to give another character a way to counter that, right?

So I'd say that was the hardest part. The hardest part is selecting your power kit, selecting your verbs. It's the most difficult part. Once you get the right set of verbs, then it becomes a lot of f*cking work. It's just working really hard. There are common pit traps. Like, too much speed is always a trap. Too much damage absorption is always a trap. Just going too far with your differences is always a trap, so you have to be moderate in your differences, but you have to keep those differences so that they're wide enough so the player really feels them and feels like they matter. It's tricky, but again once your verb set is right, then it's in good shape.

What kind of research went into creating the fighting styles?

What we did is we ended up inventing our own martial art in a way, because the way that the weapons come together and the way that we strike each other in this game needs to be a set of consistent physical rules, it needs to make sense in a 3D space. And so what we ended up doing was we would bring in people who were experts in each of these weapons. We were very lucky to find that we had a guy in the company, actually, who knew a huge amount of almost everything, and is a long-time fighter. Or if he didn't know the weapon, we would bring another expert. What we would do is we would just sit down with him and say, "Okay, tell us how you would use this weapon."

And we would have them teach us how you would use that weapon, and we would look at form and space. We would do this with game designers, with animators, myself, creative direction, game direction. We would just have this big conversation around each of these weapons. The hilarious thing, of course, is that it sounds super cool, but really what was happening was that we were programmers over here, over on this side of the room we had this open space where we're doing our play testing where it's us with sticks, yelling at each other at the far end of the room. It's just hilarious. It was super fun.

So we would just have these conversations about that, and then we would gradually start to work it into our system. The weird shit about our system is that our martial art has one fatal flaw: you tell your opponent where you're going to attack. You move your weapon over here and you telegraph it, it's built in, and that's a game design thing. That's to get you to pay attention to your enemy, and it works really well in the game. But of course that's not how martial arts works. It's in fact the opposite to how martial art works.

But it just works really well for the video game. So we would take those attacks and those defenses of how we fight and we would try to slip them into our stances, long, medium, and short range, the guard-break system, and we would just talk it through with the experts, and then we would come up with a set of proposals, and then we would go and we would look at it. And we take all the mocap, and we would put it back on the character and see how it works, and we would see how it would play. If it didn't play, we would have a conversation about it and go back and try it again.

What do you really hope players pick up on?

I hope that people pick up on how much diversity there is in this game, both in terms of your ability to customize and how much choice you have in all the styles. It's easy for people to look at the game and say, "Oh, that's ok," and brush it aside. And it's really a game for everybody, is really is, we want that to be a game for everybody. It's so easy for people to say, 'Oh, it couldn't be true, they couldn't have full gender representation and different ethnicities in a game like this.' So we put a lot of time and effort into that, and it's a core value on the team, and a list of things I'm proud of. I hope that reaches people.

But that's not the point of the game. This game isn't about politics. It's a personality test. Are you a knight, a viking, or a samurai? What is your warrior? That's what the game says. Is there a warrior in there?