NetEase have shut down T-Minus Zero Entertainment, a studio founded in 2023 by former BioWare developer and Star Wars: The Old Republic executive producer Rich Vogel.
The studio had been working on an online multiplayer sci-fi action game, with contributions from a number of ex-BioWare and Bethesda staff including Fallout 76 design lead Mark Tucker and senior producer Scott Malone. However, that project and T-Minus Zero Entertainment’s on-going existence are not a good fit for “current market conditions”.
No videogame fantasy setting will ever disquiet me as much as an empty business park at night under blue and yellow floodlights. A business park, or the access road down the side of a corrugated steel warehouse, where the alcoves cast by the LEDs look like a procession of hooded figures beneath the fixed, unblinking blackness of the sky.
I can’t actually be present in that scene, mind. I don’t belong there. No being does, not even the people who come by day to fill the striped lines with cars or raise the shutters on the loading bays. Instead, I have to be travelling past very fast. Preferably, I will be looking out the window of a train that shows the place for only a few seconds. I will feel as though I’ve glimpsed another planet’s scrolling surface in a mirror. Except this isn’t right. I will never find the words for it. Nothing written above is adequate. Balls.
Remember when, back in the day, you made the trek through the ashlands to Red Mountain? Within, you encountered an unforgettable foe. “Come, Nerevar. Friend or traitor, come. Come and look upon the Heart, and Akulakhan. And bring Wraithguard… I have need of it”, they said. “Heed my words. I am Malenia. Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat.”
Okay, so maybe not, but it’s a nice image with which to open the news that a modder’s managed to port the entirety of Morrowind‘s landmass into Elden Ring. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, as you might expect given its version of Vvardenfell’s populated by copies of the same random woman and goats, but it certainly makes for a surreal watch.
Escape from Tarkov is finally emerging from an early access period that will have lasted nearly a decade, when its full release on November 15th rolls around, and you’ll soon be able to grab it on Steam.
Yep, it’s taken yeaaaaarrrssss. Tarkov’s initial alpha release came on August 4th, 2016, just a few days before No Man’s Sky arrived for the first time, and just after a little game called Stardew Valley dropped. Think about what you were doing back then. I was a teenager, still far from the job-having husk I’ve since morphed into.
Stardew Valley will get at least one more significant game update, says Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, mere months after stating that he doesn’t “want to just be the Stardew Valley guy.” It’ll be called update 1.7, and the trimness of the numbering implies that it’ll be a large one. For context, Stardew Valley update 1.6 brought eight player PC co-op, new crops, a lot more NPC dialogue, a mastery system, new pets, and the ability to give those pets hats (which caused a few problems).
Team Cherry have confirmed release times and price points for Hollow Knight: Silksong. It’ll cost $19.99, €19.99 and ¥2300 at launch on Thursday 4th September, with pricing for other regions such as the UK to follow. As an indication, the above pricepoints equate to around £17, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they charged £19.99 for it, purely for the sake of symmetry.
It’s traditional among games journalists to illustrate pricepoints in terms of high street chain cups of coffee. But this is Silksong, a game anticipated as fervently as the ancient Mayans once anticipated the coming of an eclipse, so I will resort to more ornate means of comparison: Silksong will cost you 4200000th as much as a B-52 Stratofortress. It will cost you three-sixteenths of your soul on a rainy Friday, or two-sixteenths if the sun is out. It will cost you considerably less than they could probably charge for it. I’m not saying we should be grateful, mind, but we can breathe a sigh of a relief that this isn’t being published by EA, Take-Two or Microsoft.
And I looked, and behold a pale hornet: and the game that came with her was Silksong, and release delays followed after. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of Steam, to kill with needle, and with thread, and with parrying, and with the bugs of the earth.
This week, the Maw has the great pleasure of dining upon the frenziedly awaited sequel to Team Cherry’s metroidvania Hollow Knight. James saw it at Gamescom and deemed it “faster, prettier, and harder” but also, “safe”. FOOL. There can be no safety in the time of Silken singing. The past month has been a steady avalanche of new PC games noping the heck out of early September to avoid being stung to death by this deceptively tiny predator. Here are the projects that are standing their ground.
Watch out, there’s a goblin over there! Have you dispatched him with a deceased Blade’s rusty blade? Good, we can now keep trekking through the revamped Imperial sewers dungeon that unofficial Oblivion remake Skyblivion‘s devs have just shown off.
The massive Skyrim mod‘s getting ever closer to the release its creators have pencilled in for later this year. Despite that looming, they’ve not opted to skip what’s become an annual cameo at fan-run Skyrim modding showcase Creation Mod Con, alongside a bunch of other in-the-works Elder Scrolls remake projects and add-ons.
UK gamers, I’ve failed you. In the hours between me spotting that this 32-inch Samsung Odyssey monitor was reduced by £300, Amazon has put the price up by £100.
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