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Whatever comes out of Brendan Greene’s sprawling 10-year trilogy of projects at PlayerUnknown Productions, it won’t be a successor to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, popularly known hereabouts as Plunkbat – the grandfather of battle royales, which Greene developed as creative director at Bluehole, a subsidiary of Krafton.
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, the saying goes. (This is why so many games journalists are unemployed – ba-dum tish.) Thankyfully the next expansion for The Sims 4 seems to understand the permeable boundary between passion project and career as purely aspirational. It’s called Businesses & Hobbies and it lets Sims open their own tattoo parlour, pottery studio or – if you have the right complementary expansion – a cat café.
Answering GDC’s 2023 survey, 78% of respondents said they considered the harassment and toxicity developers receive from the public to be a serious issue. A simple sentiment is often the most effective, and the title of Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah’s latest video cuts right to the heart of it: “Your $70 doesn’t buy you cruelty.”
You don’t have to like a game, and you don’t have stay quiet if you have complaints, says Darrah. You’re entitled to be angry, and you’re entitled to express that anger. “If you are mad at that Ubisoft game, be mad at Ubisoft,” he says. “Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it.” (Thanks, PC Gamer and GamesRadar)
We’ve known that HBO’s Last Of Us adaptation was getting a second season since 2023, but now it has a release date. The first episode will air in the US on April 13th.
I can never remember the technical term for that wibbly effect you get in PS1 games when you sidle up to surfaces and look askance at the textures. I thought it was “dithering”, but Brendy says that’s not what dithering is you sap, you absolute dunce. If you know the answer, please educate me in a comment. But first, try Blue Wyrm.
It’s a free first-person melee dungeon crawler from SaintPesticide. It’s awash with rich, diseased shades of ruby, amethyst and malachite. And brother, it has not-dithering to spare. Here’s a video.
The privitisation of British Rail, now that’s the real monster. Please subscribe to my Substack for more scorching social commentary. Actually, here’s a far more fun thing you can click on: a Steam demo for Monster Train 2. If you ignored the ennui-drenched tannoy announcement because you were paying sixteen pounds at Cafe Nero for a limp panini last time around, Monster Train is a card flickenin’ roguelite strategy, and one of the better ones, too. Here’s a trailer.
Cosmo D’s unwavering passion for pizza is infectious. It’s also possible that the pizza I’ve just made in the demo for Moves Of The Diamond Hand is infectious, though I have invested all my points into the cooking skill, so hopefully not. You should be able to play the demo yourself by the time you read this. It’s one for Betrayal At Club Low fans, taking the failure-is-fun dice rolling RPG systems from that, spicing them up, and letting you properly explore freely in first person this time. I first-personed my way straight to the nearest pizza shop. It almost literally killed my character, but I have baked a pie, and now I feel like a god.
Marvel Rivals is this year’s current free-to-play PC game success story, attracting many millions of players over its opening weekend and making regular appearances in the Steam Most Played top 10 ever since. It garnered an estimated $136 million in January. So naturally, it’s time to start laying people off.
Last night, one of the project’s game directors, Thaddeus Sasser, revealed that an undisclosed number of US-based NetEase Games employees had been dismissed, including level designers Gary McGee and Jack Burrows. NetEase have now confirmed the news, calling it a move to “optimize development efficiency” and assuring players that they “are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game”. Just not so much the people working on it.
This article contains moderate spoilers for the closing events of the Wedding Crashers quest in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
It’s impossible, I think, to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 without playing a boozer, even if you’re only boozing in cutscenes. The game’s 15th century world is greased by many splendours of hooch, from the wine used in potion-brewing through the finer vintages at banqueting tables to the viral pondwater they sell in seedier taverns. A lot of the time, the writing views alcohol as a means of teeing up some slapstick debauchery reminiscent of Paul Bettany’s character in A Knight’s Tale. It venerates the spectacle of having a large one, with custom dialogue and voice-acting for protagonist Henry when you woozily explain your antics to guards. But sometimes, perhaps despite itself, it expresses something about the culture of drinking and the unpleasantness of being militantly exhorted to drink.
The psychology of people who cheat in competitive games remains deeply mysterious to me, but I’ll hazard a guess it stems from a love of ruining someone’s day rather than any real sense of accomplishment. Something I am interested in, however, is the idea of play as transgression.
There is, for example, a subset of people who get very irritated at the concept of speedruns. I suspect this is because, even if we aren’t consciously engaged with a game’s story, there’s an underlying sense of what I’m going to very clumsily call ‘narrative correctness’ that’s absolutely shattered when, say, Leon Kennedy starts shuffling up stairs at superhuman speeds. Glitches, warps, and other exploits expose the shroud of storytelling conjured by every little piece of a game’s design, pulling off the mask so the underlying grey box is painfully visible. They call art a liar.
Competitive FPS Cheaters Cheetah initially seems like pure transgression against any sense of fair play or even level design, but the key here is that everyone gets cheats like aimbots, wallhacks, and spinbots. “This creates a unique dynamic,” reads the game’s Steam page, “where everyone knows everyone else’s position, leading to intense mind games and thrilling battles”. It sounds like it’s either going to be a complete disaster or incredibly interesting, probably both.
