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MiHoYo appear to be eternally busy. After printing copious amounts of money with games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, they are continuing to do so with future releases like Petit Planet (or Not Animal Crossing) and Honkai: Nexus Anima (Not Pokemon). Now, it turns out, they’re also working on an MMO, seemingly codenamed Genesis, that seemingly in some capacity incorporates AI, it’s just unclear what kind.
The Falconeer turns five years old next week, and ahead of that its developer Tom Sala has put in the work for a pretty big update. Update undersells it a touch I think, because it’s being billed as a full-on remaster, complete with a touched up look, and plenty of mechanical changes. So, let’s detail those details!
Slightly serious one here folks! The studio behind Blue Prince, one of this year’s best received games, is asking for some help for one of their lead playtesters, Matthew “Iggy” Kowalski. As shared on Bluesky, Iggy has polycystic kidney disease, leaving him with only a few months to find a living kidney donor.
I know, I know, change is difficult isn’t it? It upset me just the other day that YouTube has changed videos so that they have rounded corners instead of being perfectly rectangular. It’s sacrilegious! A feeling I will continue to have until I ultimately forget about it because life moves on to the next grievance. Still, subtle changes like that can often set some kind of internal alarm bells off, something you might have been experiencing with store pages on Steam looking a bit… wider.
Even as the consortium led by Donald Trump’s haunted finger puppet Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund proceed with their wildly leveraged $50 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble would like everybody to know that we’re just fine, you guys.
Blizzard are adding a new premium virtual currency to World Of Warcraft alongside player housing in the MMO’s forthcoming Midnight expansion. It’s called Hearthsteel, and is “purchased with real money using your Battle.net balance and used in turn to buy Housing items from the Battle.net shop and in-game shop,” as detailed in a blog post this week.
Europa Universalis 5 has its first public patch, which encompasses over 350 fixes. Among the bigger things it smacks with the heal-o-spanner (an actual game development tool, traditionally carved from the base of a Taito arcade machine) is the Steams achievements system, which will no longer shower players in plaudits they haven’t earned. On the plus side, you’ll now earn achievements even if you activate the “allow ahistorical” game rule.
I was nosing around for a feelgood story to perk you up after this morning’s depresso news stew. But then I thought: what have you done for me lately? So instead, we’re going to write up the release of Diggergun, a life sim platform game about burrowing for lithium, in which you lose a portion of your take-home pay to costs based on real-world current UK tax, national insurance, debt and household expenses. Glorious! That’ll teach you to show up here, expecting some kind of escapism.
Final Fantasy developers and publishers Square Enix have announced plans to lay off staff, with workers across “nearly all areas” of their Western business arms being affected. More than 100 UK staff are reportedly expected to be affected, with an indeterminate number of US-based workers also reportedly facing a future that’s up in the air. The reasoning given for the cuts centres around that depressingly ever-present word nowadays – restructuring – as Square look to cut costs and consolidate their focus around their Japanese development base.
You’ve probably noticed that there’s been only a sporadic amount of Nic Reuben in your RPS lately, and we’re sad to say that Nic is leaving the treehouse to resume his glittering freelance career. Please join us in saying goodbye and wishing him well before he jets off on his solid rhodium pleasure plane, never to return (unless we ask him very nicely to review a Warhammer game or something).
