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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I am still cross-referencing my way through Blood Meridian, both incredibly vivid prose-poetic alchemy of the profound and harrowingly mundane, and also a bit like if a bible ate a pulp paperback then shat out a second, stupider bible with at least twice the people getting severed dicks shoved in their mouths. I love literature so much.
Almost a year on from its initial release, Zenless Zone Zero version 2.0 has been announced, slated for release next month on June 6th. There’s a lot coming in this new update, namely a new area to head to, the Waifei Peninsula, a “remote yet vibrant district of New Eridu.” The story follows on from where the Sacrifice crisis was left off in previous chapters, seeing you “uncover the hidden secrets of Phaethon and experience new Hollow exploration gameplay that harnesses the forces of Ether.”
You know what the main thing that’s holding me back from picking up Elden Ring Nightreign at launch is? The fact it doesn’t have an option for duos. For the most part I’m a single-player only kind of person, and when I play something online I normally like to do so with just my partner. I imagine I’m not the only person this applies to, nor am I likely to be the only one who thought “I don’t really want some rando called xX_fartmaster_Xx third wheeling my partner and me.” Luckily, FromSoftware seem to be at least considering a two-player option for the upcoming Soulslike.
Have you ever immediately wishlisted a game on Steam based on aesthetics alone? I ask because that’s just happened to me with All Living Things, a stop-motion game inspired by The Ripley Scroll, a 15th-century alchemical manuscript. Doesn’t that just seem like a guaranteed feast for the eyes? Developer MOXO self-describes it as an “animated art-book puzzle game”, which feels perfectly apt for it. The general presentation is simple, this strange, alluring art book on a black background waiting for you to click around.
Lightyear Frontier launched into early access a little over a year ago, and it generally seems to have trudged along reasonably well since then. It’s not quite ready for 1.0 just yet, but a new update was announced by developers Frame Break and Amplifier Studios earlier this week that sounds like it’ll be bringing in some much needed changes.
I wasn’t expecting it personally, but it seems like the new hotness is Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, ‘ey? Sure, it’s from a studio like Level-5, who’ve made massive games from Yo-kai Watch to Professor Layton. I just didn’t expect a sequel to a 3DS game from over a decade ago to do so well. In fact, it appears Level-5 is so happy with how much money everyone’s given them, it’ll be giving away a free bit of DLC for the RPG at some point in the future.
Memorial Day weekend is here and the sales seem to be spilling out even for PC gamers. To be fair, these sales are typically a great time to find a reasonable discount on the latest gaming PCs, laptops, and everything else. While it’s not as dramatic as, say, Black Friday or Prime Day, there are still some proper savings to be had if you know where to look.
Summerfall Studios co-founder and former Dragon Age writer David Gaider has been reflecting, not for the first time, on his career at BioWare under EA. In a brisk recap of a decade-and-change of sequels, changes of direction, and mid-project reboots, he sums up EA’s difficulty with Dragon Age as basically one of having no real faith in the wide appeal of role-playing games.
Stop Killing Games are a self-described consumer movement who are aggrieved about all the games with online requirements that become partly or completely unplayable, once publishers end official server support. They’re trying to persuade larger advocacy organisations like The European Consumer Organisation to propose new laws that put a stop to such shenanigans.
To support their campaign, they’ve carried out a survey of games with online requirements to work out how many are “dead”, dying or enduring thanks to developer or fan-implemented “end of life” plans, such as patched-in offline functionality. The resulting Google spreadsheet has 738 entries, of which a whopping 70% are apparently no longer playable or destined to become that way.
An Elden Ring live action film is in the works from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, film production company A24 and game publisher Bandai Namco. It’s not clear whether developers From Software are involved, but Game Of Thrones novelist George R. R. Martin – who worked on Elden Ring’s story and characters alongside From boss Hidetaka Miyazaki – is contributing as a producer. All of this comes via Deadline.
