Auto Added by WPeMatico
Oh boy. Unfortunately, it’s one of those days. You might remember that last week, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom laid off an unspecified number of staff. Yep, that same Dune: Awakening that appeared to be doing pretty well for itself. Go figure! Today, there’s more bad news, as it turns out that Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders will be shutting down completely as part of said layoffs at parent company Funcom.
There is a belief that appears to crop up within the games industry that to work in it, you must be wholly aware of everything in it. You must live, breathe and die by games! That doesn’t always result in interesting games though, sometimes it’s actually quite useful to have outsiders come in to bring other perspectives. Admittedly that occasionally results in writers from the film industry waltzing in thinking it’s a one-to-one transfer, which is admittedly not great. But other times you get Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, whose writer, as it turns out, had not played a single video game in her life before writing it.
When Sega and Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation launched in 2014, I was deputy editor at Official Xbox Magazine. I remember getting the review copy from our contributor Alex “Game Over, Man” Dale, and asking him how long the game was. 35-40 hours, he said. WTF, I said. I can’t remember how Alex responded – possibly his transmission ended with a jangling scream and a burp of static, or possibly he agreed with me that 35-40 hours is indecently hefty for a horror game, even with the qualification that you can get through the main campaign in around 20. 35-40 hours? That’s a farking Final Fantasy, mate!
Over 10 years later, we finally know who to blame. Surprise surprise, it was the xenomorph all along. According to Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay, the Gigerbeast’s increasing capability during development made certain areas more time-intensive than they were originally supposed to be. There’s probably a relevant Alien quote to invoke, here, but I’m going to settle for that Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park.
“A Civ-like with neat ideas, but half-formed fundamentals and messy execution make your decisions feel less than impactful,” wrote contributor Ian Boudreau in our Millennia review from March 2024. Sounds like the kind of thing updates might fix, but alack, there shall be no more. Paradox have announced that the 4X strategy Civ-like’s eighth patch, out now, will be its last.
You there, fumbling around in the dark darkness of Elden Ring Nightreign‘s Deep of the Night. A new mod offers you the chance to channel your inner gladiator and test your strength in a dedicated boss arena.
I know, I know, you’ve spent at least 80% of your time with Nightreign thus far battering and being battered by bosses. But come on, you know you need to roll around more big blokes, with the chance to customise each bout of rolling exactly to your liking.
Last Monday I spent three paragraphs crying havoc over a shortage of tasty new releases to feed the Maw, our resident headline-guzzling cosmic kaiju. The week didn’t go so terribly in the end. True, the Maw did swallow the colour purple on Friday, but Mark managed to distract everybody with a bulky Baldur’s Gate 3 mod while I administered the emetic.
This week, several monkey paw fingers have curled, and there is an embarrassment of groovy material that spans the whole spectrum of budgets, brand recognisability and pricepointage. So let’s get right to the listing.
Remember how the upcoming extraction shooter Arc Raiders was meant to launch in 2022? Good times! And quite different times, because back then the game was PvE, seeing you and a few friends take on some nasty bots. Three years on, the game has shifted into a PvPvE experience, and the reason for 1. such a lengthy delay, and 2. a complete change in what players actually do is a simple one: the game was “not fun.”
I could probably quite safely bet some money that many of you are still happily ticking away at Baldur’s Gate 3, but for those of you that would like newer pastures to get your TTRPG fix in video game form, there’s some good news. The board game-esque tactical RPG Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked at long last has a release date!
There’s a strong chance a good few of you out there saw that initial Kingmakers trailer from last year and thought “I’ll take a piece of that pie.” You came pretty close to getting your slice too, as it was due out next week on October 8th… except the devs have announced that it’s been delayed. Indefinitely.
