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Exciting news for the future of everyone’s favourite co-op shooter that isn’t legally an adaptation of Starship Troopers. A few days ago, Helldivers 2 issued a new major order to annihilate the Automatons, who had been pushed back like never before. And annihilate you all did, with players’ combined efforts being officially recgonised yesterday on the Helldivers 2 Xitter: Mission Accomplished! The bots have been eradicated!
I know some of you will quibble with the headline, so let me confirm straight away that, yes, technically Aquarist is not a game simulating being an aquarium. An aquarist is someone who builds and manages aquariums, which is your principle task in the capital A Aquarist game. It recently left early access, which is sort of unbelievable because it’s very janky in the most adorable way. You can tell it was made by someone who bloody loves aquariums, but taken at face value the career mode tells a strange tale indeed. For example, you have a very unsettling father.
According to one unofficial tracker created by video game artist Farhan Noor, there have been 8000 layoffs in 2024 so far, following an estimated 10,500 layoffs in 2023. The leaders of Microsoft, Embracer Group, Epic and other industry giants have made swingeing cuts to their workforces. While larger companies have inevitably seen the largest reductions, many smaller developers and publishers have also cut staff or even closed their doors. Circumstances vary by company, of course, but as regards the biggest publishers, there are some broad overlapping causes: reckless or, if you prefer, “overambitious” expansion and overhiring during the pandemic lockdown gaming boom; lower-than-hoped returns on new technologies and business models such as NFTs; and rising global interest rates, which have scared away potential investors.
The carnage was uppermost in Larian CEO’s Swen Vincke’s mind when he accepted Baldur’s Gate 3’s Best Narrative gong at the GDC Awards last month. According to Vincke, the layoffs can be traced straightforwardly to a pattern of executive greed that sees company leadership betting the livelihoods and stability of their workers on whatever new idea seems capable of delivering instant growth for shareholders.
Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 14 boss Naoki Yoshida has told The Gamer that he reckons “It’s probably about time,” for a new Final Fantasy Tactics game.
The hint at some long term wish fulfillment came up during an interview with The Gamer’s Gabrielle Castania, in which Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida spoke about Final Fantasy 16’s upcoming The Rising Tide DLC, alongside DLC director Takeo Kujiraoka and localisation director Michael-Christoper Koji Fox.
Time for another sorry week of heaving news-fuel into the Maw’s thousand-and-one gullets and urgh, what’s that brooding stench? It reeks of embargoes in here. The air is foul with it. This week is the week of the inaugural Triple-I Initiative showcase, aka the IIIIs, aka a 45-minute dollop of trailers and announcements from such studios as Slay The Spire creators MegaCrit and Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook. We know of a couple of the announcements in advance; others, we’ll learn about alongside you on 10th April.
I like close combat tactics, directing troop actions on a timeline, and breaching and clearing, but a recent revisit to Door Kickers revealed I no longer had the patience for its fiddly UI and grim scenarios.
No Plan B looks intriguing, then, for featuring all of the things mentioned above that I like, an unknown quantity of the things I don’t, and for having released on Steam this week.
Behind its DLC microtransactions, Dragon’s Dogma 2’s most divisive element is arguably Dragonsplague, the pawn-infecting sickness that your AI companions can catch while questing online and may eventually drive them to murder entire settlements’ worth of NPCs.
Helldivers 2 is getting a new premium warbond next week, offering some explosive new options to take into battle, aim at an enemy bug or robot, and then accidentally kill your entire squad by mistake. Or maybe that’ll just be me.
Relic Entertainment, the freshly-independent developers of Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Age of Empires IV, have confirmed a number of job losses. The layoffs come just a week after the studio announced their sale from former owners Sega, returning them to independence after two decades.
