The Communications Workers of America (CWA) are set to launch an industry-wide union of video game workers in the U.S. and Canada at this year’s GDC. The United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA) will bring together “video game artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers and beyond to build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status”.
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Forthcoming life sim InZoi – the plucky (genAI-ridden) David to The Sims 4‘s Goliath – will cost $40 at its early access launch, the developers have announced. What’s more, “all updates and DLCs will be provided for free” until the game hits 1.0, according to translated commentary from game director Hyungjun Kim.
This is being styled as a gift unto the gamers, and another way of tempting them from the clutches of The Sims, whose DLC packs commonly sell for full-game prices. The other way of looking at it is that of course early access “updates and DLC” should be free. The point of early access is that you’re paying for an unfinished game with the expectation that it’ll eventually be worth the money. Also, what’s the difference between an update and a DLC? My my, Inzoi, what a can of worms you have opened.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has come to dominate entertainment with its interconnected series of films and TV shows that all tie together to form a long-running, cohesive narrative. Marvel video games, however, do not exist in the same universe, telling stories entirely separate and unrelated to each other. Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man games, for example, have nothing to do with Eidos-Montreal’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Similarly, upcoming Marvel games such as Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel’s Wolverine, and Marvel’s Blade, have no connective tissue.
But there was once an idea at Disney to create a Marvel Gaming Universe that would do for Marvel video games what the MCU went on to do for Marvel movies and TV shows. So what happened?
Speaking on The Fourth Curtain podcast, host Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine recalled this MGU idea, which both worked on, and revealed why it fell by the wayside.
Seropian, perhaps best known as one of the founders of Halo and Destiny developer Bungie, went on to run Disney’s video game business before leaving in 2012. Irvine was the long-running writer of Marvel games, most recently working on the world-building, dialogue, and character backstories for smash hit Marvel Rivals.
Discussing his prior work on Marvel games, Irvine discussed the scrapped MGU.
“When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU did,” Irvine said. “It never really happened.”
Seropian then explained that the MGU was his “initiative,” but it never got funded by the higher-ups at Disney.
“When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these games together.’ It was pre-MCU,” Seropian said. “But it didn’t get funded.”
Irvine, who had worked on the iconic Halo alternate reality game (ARG) I Love Bees while at Bungie, went into some detail on how this MGU would have worked.
“That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it,” he said.
“And I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some ARG aspects?’ There would be a place where players could go that all the games touched, and we could move them back and forth from game to game. We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff. And then, as Alex said, it didn’t get funded. So we made a bunch of games.”
But why did the MGU fail to get the internal buy-in to move forward? Irvine suggested the idea became so complex it ended up putting some people at Disney off.
“Even back then, we were trying to figure out, ‘If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?’ And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them,” Irvine explained.
It’s fun to imagine what might have been had the MGU idea got the funding it needed to become a reality. Perhaps if it had, Insomniac’s Spider-Man games would have existed in the same universe as Square Enix’s ill-fated Marvel’s Avengers and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with characters from each game making cameo appearances across the titles or the stories all building towards some epic Endgame-style event.
Looking ahead, there are questions over Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine game. Will it be set within the same universe as Marvel’s Spider-Man? Could Spider-Man or any other character from those games end up making a cameo in Wolverine in some way?
Alas, the MGU goes down as yet another scrapped video game idea. Although, perhaps in another universe somewhere, it is a reality…
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
What’s the pettiest reason you began to distance yourself from an old friend? I once casually suggested to a mate that I found toast more filling than bread, which prompted them to bang on for far too long about how I was actually wrong, since the act of toasting necessarily diminishes the structure of bread or somesuch. I’m not sure whether that’s true and I don’t care. I was speaking my truth about toast and you undermined it. Jog on, toast denier.
Fallout 76‘s new Ghoul Within update is 18.9 GB, which may well conclusively prove that searing ghoulification actually ends up with the victim weighing more than they did previously. I wish I’d known this at the time of my yeasty bust-up, because I’d have probably tried to make the same argument about toast. We might have stayed mates then. Maybe we could have played Fallout 76 together? Why, that’s the subject of this very Steam blog! Incredible.
One more sleep!
If you’re one of the lucky few who happens to have games delivered a day or two before their official release date, then congratulations, we hope you’re having an absolute blast with Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition!
For the rest of you, there’s only one more sleep to go until you can venture back into Mira on the Nintendo Switch, whether it be for the very first time or a repeat trip. Since we were so busy yesterday getting our review all ready to go (and checking out opinions from other outlets, too), we didn’t quite catch the launch trailer that dropped from Nintendo’s official YouTube channel.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Palworld has a big new update that adds crossplay across all platforms among many other new features.
Update v0.5.0 also lets players store Pal data in the Global Palbox and transfer Pals between worlds. A new storage system has 10 times the capacity of the regular Palbox. Not only can guild members access it, but it can be used as a personal storage with private settings.
Elsewhere, you can now change your character’s appearance without affecting armor stats (transmog), there’s a photo mode, blueprint upgrading, and dedicated servers for Mac, among other changes detailed in the patch notes below.
Developer Pocketpair said it’s working on adding dedicated servers for the PlayStation 5 version and will release them at some point in the future.
Palworld has had an incredible 32 million players since its early access launch in January 2024. The studio has laid out a content roadmap for Palworld’s 2025 that looks fairly lengthy; alongside crossplay, there is an “ending scenario” and more new content on the way for the hugely popular creature-catching survival game.
Palworld launched on Steam priced $30 and straight into Game Pass on Xbox and PC a year ago, breaking sales and concurrent player number records in the process. Pocketpair boss Takuro Mizobe has said Palworld’s launch was so big that the developer couldn’t handle the massive profits the game generated. Still, Pocketpair acted swiftly to capitalize on Palworld’s breakout success, signing a deal with Sony to form a new business called Palworld Entertainment that’s tasked with expanding the IP, and launching the game on PS5.
Looming over all this is a lawsuit from Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, who seek “an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages” on the grounds that Palworld has allegedly infringed on “multiple” patent rights. Pocketpair has provided an update, identifying the patents the studio is allegedly infringing, and it has since tweaked how players summon Pals in Palworld, apparently in response. Pocketpair has vowed to take on Nintendo and The Pokémon Company in court, saying: “We will continue to assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings.”
▼New Content
・Crossplay!
⤷ Cross-play is now available across all platforms.
・Global Palbox
⤷ Store Pal data in the Global Palbox and transfer Pals between worlds!
・Dimensional Pal Storage
⤷ A new storage system with 10 times the capacity of a regular Palbox! Guild members can access it, and it can also be used as a personal storage with private settings.
・Cosmetic Armour System!
⤷ You can now equip armour cosmetically in the Antique Dresser. Change your character’s appearance without affecting armour stats!
・Photo Mode
⤷ Accessible from the Pal Command Wheel. Hide the UI and move the camera around to take stunning screenshots.
・Drafting Table
⤷ Combine low-rarity blueprints to create higher-rarity ones!
・Dedicated Servers for Mac
▼Specification Adjustments
・Buildings can now be placed even if they overlap with a Pal
・When connecting foundations or roofs, the connected pieces will now automatically align in the same direction
・Assigning an Ice Pal to the Flea Market will slow down item decay in storage and sales
・Added torches at the entrances of random dungeons for better visibility
・Players can now sit on chairs and cushions
・Some weapons that dealt ultra-high damage to trees will no longer drop items upon destruction
・Added new NPCs and improved NPC behaviour during conversations
▼Balance Adjustments
・Adjusted elemental chest rewards. Dog Coins will always drop from these chests and they also have a small chance of containing work suitability books. (Existing chests in current worlds will retain old drop tables; new ones will follow the updated table.)
・Increased EXP gained from defeating the Attack Chopper
・Increased the DPS of Flamethrowers
・Adjusted the default attack used by Electric and Dark Pals when all active skills are on cooldown, making them more in line with the other elements
・Some human NPCs now have work suitability and work animations when assigned tasks at a base
・Summoned raid bosses can no longer damage other bases
・Added Water attribute to Dumud
・NPC event rewards have been adjusted. To maintain fairness, all NPC conversation logs have been reset, allowing players to claim rewards again!
▼UI
・Favourites have been categorised into Favourite 1, 2, and 3 groups
・Holding the +/- button in the Pal Soul Enhancement UI will now continuously increase/decrease values
・Added a new sorting option for Pal Box: Sort by Work Suitability Level
・Added a “Extra Large” text size option
・Added Fullscreen Mode
▼Achievements
・Added several new achievements
▼ Bug Fixes
・Fixed an issue where players could get launched into space while climbing
・Fixed a bug where getting stunned by an enemy while riding a flying Pal over water would send the player flying into the sky
・Fixed an issue where commanding a summoned Pal to attack would also target the Black Marketeer and Medal Merchant
・Fixed a bug where Bounty Tokens with identical passive effects did not stack properly
・Fixed an issue where players would sometimes get launched upward when dismounting Azurmane
・Fixed an issue on dedicated servers where Pals could get stuck on top of feed boxes
・Fixed an issue where raiding NPCs could attack players through walls if they couldn’t reach them
・Fixed a bug on dedicated servers where Bounty Token effects were not applied upon login
・Fixed an issue where attacking some NPCs did not add to the player’s crime level
・Various many other minor bug fixes
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
You’ve crossbred Pokénots in Palworld, now get ready to crossbreed… players! Pocketpair have taken a break from their packed schedule of saloon brawls with Mario’s lawyers to update their monster-catching survival game with a new Crossplay mode, together with new storage options, a Photo Mode, a cosmetic armour system, and a new Drafting Table feature. That and a multitude of smaller tweaks and fixes.
Witness the crossplaying in the below trailer, in which a base-vandalising Astegon gets its bell rung by a group of visitors presumably running foreign hardware. That’ll learn ’em to step on my Lamballs.
Ubisoft has confirmed the global release times for Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Unlike previous games in the series and indeed Ubisoft games generally, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has a unified, actual release date. You cannot pay more for early access.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ release date on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S is 12am local time on March 20, but it’s worth noting there are separate release times for the game on PC depending on whether you’re getting it on Steam or Ubisoft’s own platform, Ubi Connect.
Pre-load is already available on Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
There is of course enormous pressure on Assassin’s Creed Shadows to do well for Ubisoft after a number of delays and last year’s Star Wars Outlaws failed to sell as well as the company had hoped. Indeed, Ubisoft has suffered a number of high-profile flops, layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations in the run up to Assassin’s Creed shadows’ release.
IGN’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows review returned an 8/10. We said: “By sharpening the edges of its existing systems, Assassin’s Creed Shadows creates one of the best versions of the open-world style it’s been honing for the last decade.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Xbox Series X and S and PS5 global release times:
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC via Steam global release times:
Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC via Ubi Connect global release times:
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
“We appreciate your continued support”.
Last month, Nintendo announced it would be discontinuing the My Nintendo Gold Points program, with it no longer possible to earn these points after a certain date.
In case you missed this, Nintendo has issued a reminder on social media ahead of the big day next week on 24th March 2025 (or 25th March depending on your location). While you’ll no longer be able to receive Gold Points from purchases, there will still be other ways to earn points:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Ready those peashooters.
Electronic Arts has already released multiple titles for Switch and it looks like the next one could be a Plants vs Zombies game.
According to a new rating in Brazil, a game titled Plants vs Zombies Reloaded is on the way to the Switch and multiple other platforms in the future. Here’s a quick look at the listing, courtesy of Gematsu:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
