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Paradox Interactive appear from the outside to be a company run by dice roll. That was the case earlier this year when they cancelled Sims competitor Life By You and closed its developers, weeks after it had missed a project release date.
“It is clear that we have made the wrong calls in several projects, especially outside of our core, and this must change,” writes CEO Fredrik Wester in an interim financial report, released today.
Demos were once a cornerstone of PC gaming and they arguably will be again thanks to events like Steam Next Fest. The latest update to Steam seeks to make those free slices of potential delight easier to find for players, and easier to promote for developers.
In a recent interview, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online said that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. “If you play that right now,” he said, “there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like ‘go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west’… And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it.” Well sir, have you heard of a little open world RPG called Dread Delusion? It’s pretty good. And what’s more, it has just added a whole new area with – let me see – a giant floating squid creature with an entire town of citizens living inside its shell.
I don’t know what the longest-running early access game in history has been (perhaps Project Zomboid?) but I know that zombie survival game 7 Days To Die is definitely up there. We first reported its appearance back in the dark ages of 2013. For context, that was the year Grand Theft Auto V came out. Whoa! Okay, calm down, sorry, I didn’t mean to panic you. Yes, the arrow of time is inviolable. We are all marching steadily towards our graves, I know. But at least now 7 Days To Die has finally released its fully baked version 1.0.
I keep seeing those adverts for that Ray-Ban and Meta collaboration, where like, they’re smart glasses that let you browse the web with your eyes? Anyway, yeah, they don’t appeal to me at all. Not as much as “Dateviator” glasses, which come courtesy of Sassy Chap Games and their upcoming dating sim Date Everything! As the title suggests: you date everything, from kitchen sponges to lampshades, as they morph into absolute fitties once you’ve donned the special specs. It looks incredibly dumb but in the best possible way.
As of today, the The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has called a strike of the Interactive Media Agreement – effectively, video game voice acting, motion capture work, and other roles, the full list of which can be found here. The strike comes after over 18 months of negotiations with some of gaming’s largest companies – including Activision, EA, Insomniac, Take-Two, and WB Games – over AI protections.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the beautifully grotty sci-fi shooter sequel from Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, has been delayed once again. It’s a relatively good-spirited delay, though: first off, it’s not that long, with the previously planned September 5th launch pushed back just a few weeks to November 20th. There’s also clever little in-universe announcement video (one which gives the fourth wall a study kick on its way out), and an accompanying promise of a meaty “developer deep dive video”, set to reveal much more of the game’s radioactive hellscape on August 12th.
Yet again, some good food. Following the news earlier this week that 241 Bethesda Games Studios staffers had formed what was at the time the biggest wall-to-wall under Microsoft, The Verge reports that over 500 World Of Warcraft developers have voted to form their own union, alongside the Communication Workers of America (CWA).
Animal caretaking sim Zoochosis is about being an ordinary zookeeper working in an ordinary zoo. What’s that? There are no ordinary zoos? My mistake. Let me start again. Animal caretaking horror game Zoochosis is about being a stressed-out zookeeper in a hideous zoo where the giraffes have tendrils coming out of their chests and the kangaroos have rows of chattering teeth in their marsupial pouch. There, got it right in the end. We’ve known about the development of this terror-heavy tourist attraction since its announcement early this year. But now the upcoming horror sim has been given an autumn release date in a new trailer.
I’ve never been a poetry guy, not because I don’t like it, I’ve just never gone out of my way to read them over books or whatnot. The poems I’ve engaged with the most are those read out during wedding ceremonies, those that pop-up before the start of a horror game, or The Tiger by 6-year old Nael that occasionally pops up as I’m doomscrolling. But thanks to the multiplayer web game “fridge poetry”, where you drag words to create poems, I might become a day-to-day poem guy. Going off my first effort, I don’t think many will appreciate my career switch.
