Gaming: Red Dead 2 shows off new lands, Kingdom Hearts III gets a VR boost, Assassin’s Creed goes old school

Waiting for next month’s release of Red Dead Redemption 2 just got a little bit tougher. Rockstar Games has unveiled a trove of fresh looks at the Old West locations it’s created for its newest sprawling, open-world adventure, and the new images put a ton of graphical distance between the upcoming sequel and its last-gen console predecessor.

Using both stylized, vintage postcard treatments as well as actual screen shots, the studio showed off seven of the cities and towns that’ll dot its expanded map, which grows on the previous game’s fictional western territory of New Austin. Check out a handful of the previews here, and visit the game’s newly-update website for tons more:

While John Marston, the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption, is set to make a return appearance, RDR2’s main story will follow newcomer Arthur Morgan, a bandit whose Van der Linde gang holdup goes south at the start of the game, sending him on the run with bounty hunters always a mere step behind. You can saddle up with Morgan and his band of outlaws starting Oct. 26, when RDR2 releases for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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As if Kingdom Hearts fans needed any more incentive to get on board early for the next mashed-up adventure spanning the highlights of the Disney and Final Fantasy universes, Sony recently revealed a neat little extra: a PlayStation VR add-in that lets players wield Sora’s legendary keyblade from a first-person point of view. 

As a short, standalone bonus, it appears the Kingdom Hearts VR Experience doesn’t directly integrate into the gameplay arc of the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III. But it’s still a cool use of Sony’s Move controller, as well as a way to revisit some of the previous games’ most memorable moments. You can see it in action in PlayStation Japan’s gameplay clip below:

Kingdom Hearts III arrives on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on Jan. 25 of next year.

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Finally, if experiencing Assassin’s Creed on the small screen only scratches the surface of your deeper itch for all things associated with Ubisoft’s history-bending franchise, board game maker Triton Noir may have just your thing: an Assassin’s Creed tabletop game that’s shaping up to be a full-featured dive into an all-new, 16th century storyline.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Venice is readying a Nov. 13 Kickstarter campaign to win support for an all-new, 20-hour cooperative campaign that packs in detailed playable miniatures of AC characters like Alessandra, whose figure and playing card Triton Noir revealed ahead of the game’s crowdfunding launch.

Based on “untold stories of the Venetian Brotherhood,” the game will unfold during the Renaissance period that picks up with the end of Assassin’ Creed: Brotherhood and runs up to the beginning of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. 

Fans already should be well acquainted with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the next game in the franchise, by the time the Kickstarter launches. Odyssey releases for PlaysStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on Oct. 5.