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Elden Ring Nightreign‘s Forsaken Hollows expansion arrives tomorrow, December 4th. Ahead of letting folks dive into Limveld’s big hole and try out the new nightfarer classes, FromSoft have lobbed out the customary big patch.
To successfully deliver presents to every child on Earth within a single Christmas eve, Santa Claus would need to travel in the region of half the speed of light – enough to vaporise the flesh and disintegrate the sleighs of mere mortals. He’d therefore appreciate the sheer go-fastness of the roguelite running game that’s blasting out of door #3.
It’s Haste!
The $55 billion leveraged buyout which will see Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner become the new owners of EA will reportedly lead to the Saudi Public Investment Fund owning a whopping 93.4 percent of the game publishers. That’s assuming the deal goes through as planned.
Arc Raiders developers Embark have shed a bit of light on how their looter-shooter changed after shifting away from the free-to-play business model. Apparently, it made Arc “drastically easier” to design, in the sense that the Swedish studio felt less pressure to turn players into whales.
One of the first “moving pictures” ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of “chronophotographs” of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge’s work thanks to Jordan Peele’s film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner’s Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.
Muybridge – who, incidentally, murdered his wife’s lover, which doesn’t seem wholly irrelevant here – captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge’s breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex – and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.
‘If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools’ is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia’s cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software’s excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia’s Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.
In case you missed it, Hitman‘s latest celebrity elusive target mission is all about Eminem. The rapper has Agent 47 take down his blonde alter-ego Slim Shady, it’s all very meta and a tad less appealing to me than the cameos previously made by the likes of Bruce Lee and Mads Mikkelsen as Bond villain Le Chiffre.
That said, a new interview some IO Interactive folks have given to Variety, in which boss Hakan Abrak makes clear there will be a new Hitman coming once the studio have gotten some stuff off their plate, has caught my attention by contrasting Mr Nem with murderbald handler Diana.
Hey, Helldivers 2‘s just gotten a patch with some noteworthy balancing tweaks and fixes ahead of its latest warbond – Python Commandos – dropping. In short, a fair few guns now do more damage, some enemies have been made a tad less potent, and the drawback which usually comes with attachinga magnifying scope to your favourite bug blaster has been scaled back.
Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell remake has a new director who’s served as its director before. David Grivel has returned to Ubisoft and take up the role he left when he departed the company in 2022, not long after being tapped as the remake’s original director following its late 2021 announcement.
It is an incredibly difficult thing to sell someone on a game in just one sentence. What are you meant to focus on, genre, specific mechanics, an interesting element of the story? There’s not a right answer! I’m not going to figure out a recipe for success right here and now, but what I can do is at least show you a single sentence that sold me on a game called Burden Street Station quite quickly: “A surreal, narrative adventure game where you shapeshift during conversations to uncover how God went missing.”
