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Some upsetting news from the past weekend: Bithell Games, the Mike Bithell-founded indie studio behind Thomas Was Alone, John Wick Hex, Tron: Identity and the just-released Tron: Catalyst, are laying off 11 developers. That’s “The majority of our full-time staff,” according to a post on Bithell’s personal Bluesky account.
Everybody stay calm. You’re about to read about landlords and the prospect of paying rent. Don’t worry, there probably aren’t any landlords in the room right now. There are, however, new landlords in Cyberpunk 2077, should you choose to install this mod that introduces a whole bunch of expanded mechanics and details when it comes to cyberflats.
It’s called Eviction Notice, and it’s a substantial overhaul of how housing works in the futuristic RPG. Gone are the days of just living for free in Megabuilding H10, or walking up to one of the newer pads added in by the 1.5 update and paying a one-time fee for permanent access. Clearly these options are too idealistic, and your merc with a toaster transplanted into their face needs to battle their most terrifing foe yet: fiscal responsibility.
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’m obviously using regular in the metafictional sense here but my intentions are pure, I promise.
If I went to hell, I can’t imagine the first thing on my mind would be trying to pull off a bank job with a crew of fellow damned souls. However, in freshly announced tactical RPG Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, that’s the sort thing you’ll be doing, with plenty of choice and consequence if things go pear-shaped.
Thousand Hells is the latest cool thing from Six Ages and King of Dragon Pass devs A Sharp. While they’re working with Kitfox Games as publisher again, there’s plenty of different stuff going on, including a move away from world of Glorantha as a setting. That’s in favour of fantasy pastures new, inspired by myths of the ancient proto-Indo-European, Norse, and Mesopotamian varieties. Oh, and a dash of Hieronymus Bosch’s lovely paintings.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has reaffirmed 2K Games’ assertion that the reportedly troubled BioShock 4, currently in the works at Cloud Chamber, will make it to release.
The reassurance follows a report from Bloomberg earlier this week which reported that the game had failed a recent internal progress check, with the story specifically being tapped as an aspect that needs reworking, and some of the devs working on it have been reassigned to non-BioShock roles.
To speedily summarise a lot of very knotty reporting, last month a bunch of credit card companies and payment processors forced Steam and Itch.io to alter their definitions of acceptable sexual material in PC games. Seemingly faced with the prospect of having all transactions blocked, the two storefronts now require developers to comply with the extremely open-ended adult content policies of their financial partners. This has led to a spate of delistings or outright takedowns across Steam and especially Itch, with projects affected ranging from anime stepdaughter fantasies on Steam to bundles of self-described “games for girlthings with something wrong with them”.
Waiting’s been a bit of theme during the early stages of the Battlefield 6 open beta, which has otherwise been earning a lot of thumbs up from FPS heads. If you’ve recently run into an never-ending loading screen while trying to jump into a Conquest match, the good news is that the devs have been working to solve those issues.
While EA reckon the problem’s specific to that game mode and the Siege of Cairo map, that doesn’t look to have stopped plenty of players from running into it over the past 24 hours. Cue a number of frustrated Reddit posts that boil down to the word ‘stuck’ being yelled so loud it could bring down a helicopter.
Wake up, it’s the 90s again. Ok, so maybe I’ve lied to you there, but two classic shooters from the decade that I as a child of 1999 definitely remember fondly have been re-released as one handy bundle with some extra features. Heretic + Hexen is out now.
The surprise re-release of these virtual spell boxes came as part of QuakeCon, with Nightdive Studios and id Software collborating to revamp more old school shooty things after doing the same with Doom and Doom 2 last year.
Microsoft have brought development work on Contraband, the co-op smuggling game that Just Cause developers Avalanche Studios announced back in 2021, to a standstill. That’s the official line, while a report from Bloomberg claims the game’s been cancelled outright.
Nothing had been been seen or heard of Contraband since its reveal to the world at E3 four years ago, and this sudden status update comes just weeks after Microsoft cancelled Perfect Dark, Everwild, and an unannounced MMO from ZeniMax as part of mass layoffs that saw around 9,000 staff lose their livelihoods.
As an old man yelling about deals at the clouds, I’ve often felt a bit jealous of these back-to-school sales. By my recollection, unless you wanted a new writing pad, some stationery, or a backpack, these deals didn’t really exist.
