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Luminous Productions, the team behind this year’s powerfully middling Forspoken, is going quietly into that good night. In a tweet posted yesterday, the studio announced that, “Beginning on May 1,” it would “join Square Enix to deliver new, innovative gaming experiences across the globe”. In other words, it’s being folded into its parent company and ceasing to exist as a separate entity.

In the two months between now and May 1, Luminous says it’ll be “entirely focused on Forspoken,” and that it’s “currently working on the previously announced patch to address overall game performance”. Given that some of Forspoken’s previous patches didn’t really do much to optimise the game for some players, we’d better hope this last one is a doozy. The studio also said that Forspoken’s upcoming…

Chad Stahelski, stuntman and director of all four John Wick movies, will be taking a break from his Keanu-packed schedule to make a Rainbow Six movie. Called Rainbow, it’ll be based not on any of the recent games, but on the original Tom Clancy novel. 

That is the same story the first Rainbow Six game was based on, however, so fans of that 1998 tactical shooter may get a thrill seeing it recreated on the big screen. Michael B Jordan is starring, and it’ll serve as a follow-up to his 2021 film Without Remorse, which was also based on a Tom Clancy novel.

It’ll be Stahelski’s first non-John Wick movie as director, and while bone-crunching action is pretty much guaranteed, I do question what his approach to the story might be. Both the novel and that first game are essentia…

People did a lot of things to pass time during the early pandemic lockdowns: learn to play the guitar, make sourdough starter, spray their groceries with disinfectant. Among those popular pandemic activities was identifying murderous space goons in Among Us, and if you’ve set the social deduction game aside since then, you might be interested to know that there’s still lots of activity around it—most recently, a collaboration with a bunch of big indie games.

Announced this week, Innersloth is doing a new Cosmicube that features cosmetics from Celeste, Undertale, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Untitled Goose Game, A Hat in Time, Castle Crashers, and Alien Hominid.

A Cosmicube, for the uninitiated, is Among Us’s version of a battle pass. Once you purchase the cube with Beans,…

The 2024 Steam Summer Sale is over, and that clears the way for the next big seasonal event in Steam’s lineup: The Team Fortress 2 2024 summer update.

Just like last year’s TF2 summer update, this one is chock full o’ stuff made not by Valve, but by the community: 10 new community maps (Embargo, Odyssey, Megaton, Cachoeira, Overgrown, Hadal, Applejack, Atom Smash, Canaveral, and Burghausen), 23 new “community-contributed items” in the Summer 2024 Cosmetic Case, four new community-created taunts, and 38 new community-made Unusual effects: 18 for hats and 20 for taunts.

Valve contributed to the effort too, of course. Somebody had to collect all this stuff together, ensure it complies with all requisite rules and regulations, and that it doesn’t actually break the game in any m…

The life simulation game in development by Rod Humble and team at Paradox Tectonic, Life By You, is sliding back a few months in the release calendar of new 2024 games. Previously planned for early access in March, it will now launch on June 4. 

In a video message to fans alongside the announcement, Humble says, “As a team, we are so stoked for this date change,” which is definitely unlike the apologetic tone that delays are usually couched in. “It gives us a little bit of extra time to really focus on a quality player experience and a fun game right from the start of early access.”

In the blog post announcing the delay, Paradox outlines quite a few areas for improvement from player feedback that it wants to spend the extra few months addressing. As…

The first Helldivers 2 balance patch went live recently, and it hasn’t gone over well with some players. Those embers of discontent were fanned by a few members of the Helldivers team: A moderator on the game’s Discord server, for instance, said “watching u all cry, amuses me so much,” while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of “skill issue.”

In response to complaints these comments, including one developer’s self-confessed “trolling,” Arrowhead Games CEO Johan Pilestedt, the de facto public face of the studio, has taken to Reddit to tell the community that “this is not a message that the studio stands behind” and that steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

To my reading, it comes off as developers …

Despite being based on one of the most iconic RPG series of all time, there’s something oddly dry about the upcoming board game Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz. Set during the events of Mass Effect 3, the premise is basically a sidequest that never was—taking place over the course of a single night as Shepard and crew board and fight their way through a crashed Cerberus ship to recover research data.

Even for those who can still remember the specific story details of a game that came out 12 years ago, the stakes here feel low. Why does this pretty minor mission matter, when we already know how the wider story plays out? It’s a serviceable excuse for a series of linked combat missions, but there’s no drama to it or any hook to pull you in. And from what I’ve played so far of …

In an event the songsmiths will someday call ‘the shot heard around the world,’ an Overwatch hostess club has been unceremoniously scrubbed from Twitter (via Automaton). But not to worry, it lives once more.

Named OW_CabaretClub, the club wasn’t some kind of Overwatch-themed physical location but rather a Twitter-based service that let Overwatchers hire women to play alongside them for a fee. Punters could, if they were so inclined, get in on some flirtatious multiplayer or fall asleep with their partner in voice chat. 

The idea comes from Japanese hostess clubs—which any Yakuza player will be familiar with—where people (mostly if not entirely men, let’s be honest) can turn up and find a drink and a lady who will pay rapt attention to whatever they say.

<…

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I’ve been playing Elden Ring’s new DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, for about 15 hours or so—this leisurely pace is because I’m not the one who put together our Shadow of the Erdtree Review, nor am I our illustrious guides writer Sean Martin, who appears to have an infinite well of time and has seen nearly all it has to offer.

However, I feel like I’ve been getting pretty far. After an hour or two spent refamiliarising myself with the game’s controls and beating Mohg (without the anti-nihil flask, because I’m stubborn), I’ve knocked over several legacy dungeons and fought a smorgasbord of bosses. My map is flooded with sites of grace in the dozens. So when I sat down to watch the launch trailer, I expected to see a whole bunch of familiar faces. Clearly, this didn’t happ…

Less than two months after releasing The Callisto Protocol’s first (and last) story expansion DLC, developer Striking Distance Studios has laid off 32 employees.

As noted by VGC, the layoffs first came to light after numerous employees reported being let go by the studio. Striking Distance parent company Krafton later confirmed with IGN that a total of 32 employees had been terminated. That’s a not-insignificant percentage of the studio’s total headcount, which according to Striking Distance’s “about us” page currently sits as 144 employees in all.

“Striking Distance Studios and Krafton have implemented strategic changes that realign the studio’s priorities to better position its current and future projects for success,” Krafton said. “Unfortunately, these changes have…

Steam has been on a roll over the past couple of years. This time last year the platform reached 28 million concurrent users, an increase of three million over the year before. Over this past weekend, SteamDB recorded that number rocketing up to a new peak of 33,078,963 players all logged into Steam at the same time.

A four million concurrent user increase over 12 months is some damn good growth, and it’s not the only record that Valve’s platform smashed over the weekend. While the 33 million concurrent users is just for the number of players logged into Steam, Eurogamer reports that there were also 10,284,586 people actively playing something on January 8. It’s the first time the platform has surpassed 10 million concurrent active users.

Regulars like CS:GO, Apex Legends, D…

Even in a fantasy world, the short kings, queens, and monarchs in non-binary finery among us don’t get the treatment they deserve. This time, the injustice is taking place in Baldur’s Gate 3, and it’s perhaps the worst violation yet of the rights and dignity of our comrades of diminished stature: They can’t kiss Karlach, the game’s resident hot Tiefling girlfriend.

Spotted by Kotaku, it seems that Faerûn’s gnomes and halflings—a hobbit by any other name that remains as short—are running into a little difficulty when it comes to romancing Baldur’s Gate 3’s big red one. A tweet from Prima Games associate editor Jesse Vitelli illustrates the issue: Their gnome character’s head is eye-level with Karlach’s torso, transforming what should be a sweet, c…

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN today that the company has not closed Kerbal Space Program 2 developer Intercept Games or OlliOlli maker Roll7 despite a recent report that said the studios had been shut down.

“We didn’t shutter those studios, to be clear,” Zelnick told the site. “And we are always looking at our release schedule across all of our studios to make sure that it makes sense. So we are being very judicious because we are in the middle of a cost reduction program that we’ve already concluded and are now fully rolling out. We’ve announced that we’re saving $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven’t shuttered anything.”

What isn’t clear from his comment is whether Zelnick genuinely means that Intercept and Roll7 will continue to operate as they …

If you’re looking for new ways to scratch your Baldur’s Gate 3 itch, and can get to London somehow next May, then the recently announced Symphony of the Realms concert is worth knowing about. The game’s soundtrack, composed by Borislav Slavov will, for the first time be performed live in concert at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, on May 4, 2024.

“Let yourself be charmed by the captivating music” and “you ABSOLUTE-ly need to be there,” reads the Game Music Festival’s punny announcement.

The soundtrack will be performed by the Philharmoina Orchestra and Hertfordshire Chorus, with Robert Kurdybacha as conductor. The show is a part of the 2024 Game Music Festival which also includes a Last of Us concert.

The Southbank Centre’s website d…

Survival games have had to be ever more inventive with their settings in recent years—just look at Sons of the Forest’s mysterious island of hidden bunkers and screeching cannibals. But Ferocious, from tinyBuild, is an FPS survival game with one of the most appealing settings I’ve seen in quite a while: it’s Skull Island. Okay, it isn’t actually Skull Island, but it’s pretty darn close.

All you need to do is look at the jagged cliffs with their rusting shipwrecks and giant deadly crabs, plus the green forests of the inner island filled with deadly dinosaurs, to appreciate the prehistoric vibes. In terms of its setting, Ferocious is heavily influenced by movies like King Kong and Jurassic Park, and seems to be channelling that whole ‘lost world’ vibe, as you try to survive a …

Thief: The Dark Project is 25 years old, but it’s still one of the best stealth games around, with an active community making fan missions for both it and The Dark Mod, a standalone recreation made with the Doom 3 engine of all things. The Black Parade is for Thief Gold rather than the Dark Mod, the definitive 1999 rerelease with extra maps, which is the version you’ll find going for seven bucks on Steam today.

The Black Parade is the work of a team called Feuillade Industries, led by project director Romain Barrilliot. Barrilliot currently works as a level designer at Arkane Lyon and has credits at 3D Realms and Streum On, but he’s also a modder, having worked on Sven Co-op for Half-Life and one of my favorite Thief fan missions, The Sound of a Burrick in a Room.

Rather tha…

A demo of upcoming city builder Synergy has released on Steam, and it’s looking like Synergy might just play as good as it looks. The game is about leading your people, inhabitants of a harsh desert planet widely hostile to human life, to a new region where they must reconsider how to live and thrive. Much of the game is about analyzing the resources you find and how to best use them in a sustainable way.

We first got a real look at Synergy back in 2022, when it was announced, but haven’t heard much new since then. The demo dives into several major aspects of the game like exploring, analyzing flora, and building a production chain.

The demo takes about an hour to beat and has a “research system, 8 exploration events, 7 elements of flora to analyze, 20+ buildings, and 20 res…

The people making artificial intelligence say that artificial intelligence is an existential threat to all life on the planet and we could be in real trouble if somebody doesn’t do something about it.

“AI experts, journalists, policymakers, and the public are increasingly discussing a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI,” the prelude to the Center for AI Safety’s Statement on AI Risk states. “Even so, it can be difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks. 

“The succinct statement below aims to overcome this obstacle and open up discussion. It is also meant to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously.”

And then, fin…

Last week EA finally set the record straight on The Sims 5: There is no Sims 5. There’s just The Sims 4—forever. EA plans for The Sims 4 to be the “foundation of our future growth strategy,” but this game needs a serious overhaul before it can be the foundation for anything.

The multiplayer Sims game currently in development under the name Project Rene is still in the works, and EA plans for it to live beside The Sims 4. They’ll share creator tools, a gallery, a marketplace, and some kind of social network. Instead of winding down The Sims 4 and rolling out The Sims 5, EA says it’s “disrupting the sequel model” by continuing to invest in the current game with years of more DLCs and updates.

The sentiment in The Sims fan spaces so far is mixed, as ever. …

Somehow I missed this until just now, but Larian Studios has put up a Baldur’s Gate 3 advent calendar, with prizes and an epic Christmas-themed poem being doled out daily until December 24.

The Baldur’s Gate 3 advent calendar started almost a week ago, on December 13, but the good news is that you can catch up: Just head over to the site and start your quest on December 13. It’s not just as simple as clicking on a date, however. To claim your prize you’ll also need to solve a card-matching memory puzzle. They’re quite simple, though (so far, anyway), so you don’t need to worry about missing out.

The prize for the first day is chapter one of How the Gremishka Stole Christmas. A gremishka, for the record, is a small, cat-like creature created from unstable mag…

Foxhole developer Siege Camp has unveiled a new project called Anvil Empires that promises to let players take part in massive medieval battles of up to 1,000 people at a time in an open-world sandbox “with no safe zones or other artificial barriers to combat.”

The game takes place in the fantasy realm of Calligo, a persistent world in which three “desperate alliances” exist in a constant state of war. The continent contains an array of different landscapes and dangerous creatures, as well as “dark secrets” of indeterminate types for players to discover.

Medieval warfare is about more than just clubbing people in the face with heavy objects: You’re not going to do very well if you don’t have your supply situation nailed down. To that end, players will also have to build and …

The upcoming Tekken 8 recently held a closed network test (CNT) that had a PC version, which of course meant that the game pretty quickly got cracked, datamined, and played beyond when developer Bandai Namco wanted it being played. The publisher has subsequently issued a statement acknowledging some players accessed the game beyond the CNT, warning that unauthorised downloading or distribution is illegal, and threatening bans for accounts found to have accessed the CNT after it ended.

The director and presiding spirit of the Tekken series is Katsuhiro Harada who, outside of the official statement, decided to take matters into his own hands. Like Clouseau with sunglasses the developer stalked Twitch looking for streams that were broadcasting gameplay from the CNT after the p…

A preview for D&D’s upcoming sourcebook, Bigby Presents: The Glory of Giants, was posted on the D&D beyond website last week—and the community is none too pleased. Fans spotted signs of AI generated artwork, with a tweet from NeverNotDM gathering over 7,000 likes after highlighting shoddy elements in the book’s art.

There are a lot of problems with artist Ilya Shkipin’s work, here: one frost giant’s legs simply devolved into wispy, confused brushes. Another giant’s foot is twisted at an impossible angle, while their wolf companion sports painted human toenails in the place of fluffy paws.

Tabletop fans weren’t exactly jazzed about the prospect of future books getting flooded with grubby AI work, plagued by uncanny anatomy and Schrodinger’s feet. The comments on…

Todd Howard said a lot of stuff during a recent Kinda Funny interview, including—crammed in amidst all the talk about Fallout—that a new Starfield update was being revealed this week. Today it arrived, in Steam beta as is the tradition, with an array of fixes, tweaks, and as promised, some new options for your space-buggy.

This update is not the big one, which is to say Shattered Space, the full-on Starfield expansion: Howard said that’s expected to be out sometime this fall. It’s still a fairly substantial update, though, with new options enabling more granular difficulty adjustment, improved surface maps that will hopefully make it easier to find your way around, improved inventory management, and a new “Ship Decoration Mode” that will let you tart up the interior of…

Bethesda has released the first hotfix for Starfield that will take on “a few top issues” with the game, including potential quest blockers and stability and performance issues.

“This is a game we’ll be supporting for years and years to come, so please keep all the feedback coming!” Bethesda said. “Even if we don’t get to your requests immediately, we’d love to do it in the future, like city maps. Our priority initially is making sure any top blocker bugs or stability issues are addressed, and adding quality-of-life features that many are asking for.”

To that end, Bethesda has rolled out the first Starfield hotfix, taking the game to version 1.7.29. It doesn’t make a lot of changes but it does take on a trio of problems that can prevent quests from being co…

Remember that one-of-a-kind Magic: The Gathering card that was unveiled in March as part of the Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth crossover set? If you’ve got it, Dave and Adam’s Card World wants it, and they’re prepared to give you $1 million for it.

This particular Magic card is literally as unique as it gets. Only a single copy of the 1 of 1 Ring, as it’s known, will be printed; it will then be tucked away inside an English-language Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth collector booster pack, and fired off into the world. That means whoever finds the card will be the only person on the entire planet to own the card.

That extreme rarity gives it a certain inherent value, particularly to collectors—collectors such as, for instance, Dave and Adam’s, a collec…

Get ready for some close-up card-driven brawling, because battler Fights in Tight Spaces has a sequel-spinoff coming: Knights in Tight Spaces, a fantasy themed throwdown that’ll have you take a party of ruffians engaging in a tactical brawl against not just action movie mooks like the first game, but skeletons and wizards and rock monsters.

It’s just as stylized as the first game was, though definitely refined into something even prettier than before, with a hybrid kind of lined and woodcut print looking aesthetic that’s much easier to read than the prior game’s black-and-red-on-white.

“Knights in Tight Spaces is a tactical deckbuilding game in the same universe as Fights in Tight Spaces, the successful game by Ground Shatter. It is a standalone title that sends us back to m…

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If things go according to schedule, we’ll be playing Oblivion remade in Skyrim next year. The latest trailer for the Skyblivion project shows it looking pretty smooth (apart from one discolored face and a horse walking while going nowhere), highlighting two quests in and around the town of Chorrol. Chorrol itself looks lush and colorful, with some real pretty windmills on the outskirts and an impressive fountain outside the Mages Guild. Everything is so nice to look at that it makes the blandness of the actual quests in this quest showcase stand out.

First up is Fingers of the Mountain, one of way too many quests you have to complete to earn commendations so you can begin the Mages Guild storyline, which is even more boring than the main questline of Oblivion. This is a g…

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When AMD announced the Ryzen 9000-series CPUs at Computex, one particular little nugget caught my attention. The 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X was given a very respectable 65W TDP. That’s well below the 105W and 120W TDPs of the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D respectively. 

A new rumor suggests AMD might have jumped the gun on that, at least when it comes to gaming performance. AMD’s Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Consumer Processors Donny Woligroski confirmed the 9700X won’t have the grunt to beat out the 7800X3D in gaming, even if it’s stronger in non-gaming workloads.

According to information given to Wccftech, AMD is considering a very late 9700X spec change by giving it a 120W TDP instead of the previously announced 65W. That’s not exactly a welcome change, but if…

In my first 9 minutes of Sons of the Forest I grabbed some gear, made a crappy tent, ate a poisonous berry, fell in love with Kelvin, and had the crap scared out of me by a shrieking cannibal.

Naturally some players are getting a lot more done in that same timeframe, particularly speedrunner Benjamin Romero. Sons of the Forest has been out for less than a week but Romero has already beaten the game in under 9 minutes. You can watch the current record-holding speedrun embedded above. It won’t take long.

Note: Spoilers for Sons of the Forest’s ending below.

It’s what’s categorized as an Any% Normal Glitched run, though it takes a while for those glitches to become apparent. In the video, at 2 minutes in, Romero has essen…

“How do I craft a backpack?” is typically the fifth question I ask when starting a new survival game, following “How do I craft an axe?” and “Where can I find water?” and “How do I make a campfire?” and the all-important “What the hell was that noise?” 

That’s because when carrying resources and food and tools and junk around in your pockets you tend to run out of room pretty quickly, so a backpack that gives you extra inventory slots is an essential early game survival staple.

Except in Rust, that is. The multiplayer survival game has been around for 10 long honkin’ years and it’s only now just getting around to adding backpacks. Which isn’t to say the concept just occurred to the developers: according to Rust guru Shadowfrax, backpacks were first proposed about…

The devs at Creative Assembly have had a rough time of it recently. Back in September, the studio was blindsided by the sudden cancellation of its upcoming live-service shooter Hyenas, barely two weeks after it had concluded an open beta and one month after an appearance at Gamescom. The result was layoffs, uncertainty, and now the studio is going to attempt to pivot back to what it knows best: real-time strategy.

As part of a presentation to investors (via Eurogamer), CA’s owner Sega attributed the studio’s ill-fated push into live service to “the favorable winds of the early Covid-19 period, coupled with the strong performance of each title,” which led Sega down a path of “accelerating more, even in areas where those studios have not tried yet for further growth.” In other words…

This article was updated on May 12 with a comment from Respawn.

Is the point of battle royale games to survive, or to eliminate competitors? The latest season of Apex Legends has centered that question with a new ranking system that’s stupefying top players. To “prove how bad the system is,” NRG pro sweetdreams challenged himself to hit the game’s highest rank, Apex Predator, without scoring any kills. After playing for almost 19 hours, entirely livestreamed, he succeeded.

“I mean, that is just so dumb,” said sweetdreams after climbing into Predator rank on the stream. “I don’t even know what to say, bro. I don’t even know what to say. That is one of the dumbest screenshots in the history of the game, on the right side of your screen [where his rank is displayed].”<…