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Unfortunately, we are here yet again with another games studio that will seemingly be closing its doors for good. A couple of years ago, Greg Street, known for his work on World of Warcraft and League of Legends, set up Fantastic Pixel Castle. There, it was announced at the time, he would lead development on an MMO codenamed Ghost, with NetEase serving as publisher. Except in a LinkedIn post earlier today, Street shared that Fantastic Pixel Castle will be shutting down.
Friendslop games may come and go, but the (for all intents and purposes) progenitor of them all, Lethal Company is still the one I think of most. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s otherworldly, literally, there’s so much mystery to it that you just want to spend time in its world. But while it will likely go down as solo dev Zeekerss’ most notable work, he did just release a brand new horror game 10 years in the making. And in a recent interview, he spoke of how he got his start in horror, and the roots that make up his latest work.
The Stop Killing Games campaign‘s petition to the UK government urging action against publishers rendering online games unplayable when servers are switched off has been debated in parliament.
The petition, which amassed just under 190,000 signatures prior to its closure in July, received a response from the UK government back in February, when it hit 10,000. “There are no plans to amend UK consumer law on disabling video games,” this reply read. “Those selling games must comply with existing requirements in consumer law and we will continue to monitor this issue.” As is the process, once it hit 100,000 signatures, it was eligible to be debated by parliament’s petitions committee.
Last month, Heart Machine announced that they would be ending development on their roguelike follow-up to the seminal indie RPG Hyper Light Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker. As a result, as is far too common in the industry these days, a number of staff were laid off – including a writer on the yet-to-be released Possessor(s). As a result, a post cropped up on the Possessor(s)’s discussions page on Steam with some expressing discomfort at the idea of buying the game post-layoffs, prompting the game’s narrative director to explain why he (understandably) would still like it if you bought it.
The Sims is in an odd place right now. In September, it was announced that the game’s publisher EA had been sold to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. This unsurprisingly was met with concern from Simmers, particularly in relation to the series’ generally pro-diversity stance, and whether or not it will retain that in the future. And in a recent interview with art director of the original Sims and a lead designer on The Sims 2, Charles London, the developer shared why he felt it was “incredibly important” the games include same sex partnerships.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that a majority of the data that various AI models train themselves on do so without getting any sort of permission to do so. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say, though in the case of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, they probably shouldn’t have taken that lesson to heart. That’s because Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that the AI developer stops using Japanese media to train its text-to-video model Sora.
Warning: Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 lie ahead.
Tabletop wizard and cool glasses-wearer Mike Pondsmith has teased having “ways” to bring Johnny Silverhand back in Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel. Actor and serial whoa merchant Keanu Reeves hasn’t been shy about being open to reprising the role were the opportunity to crash through his door waving some mantis blades about, but reconciling such a thing with the events of the first game could prove a bit complex.
This isn’t the first time Pondsmith’s let loose potential details about Cyberpunk 2, which developers CD Projekt have otherwise remained pretty tight-lipped about while they work away at it. Back in May, he alluded to having chatted to a dev at the studio about a city which “feels more like Chicago gone wrong” that’s visited during the course of the game.
Original Saints Row design director Chris Stockman is talking to the hellgods at Embracer Group about making a prequel open world game, possibly set in 1977 and containing absolutely no dildo bats. This comes almost two decades after Stockman left Saints Row development studio Volition, and a couple of years after Embracer closed Volition amid wider cuts.
We were late to the party with the last big horse game, Umamusume: Pretty Derby (I confess, I avoided it because I’m not that keen on gacha, though I am not above watching Gold Ship/Michael Jackson crossover memes on the toilet), so I’m getting in on the ground floor with Sha Beast Dressage.
It’s sure to be the next global hit. Who doesn’t want to parade around on a horse that looks like it’s made of ancient Egyptian embalming tools? Who doesn’t want to be trapped in “a perpetual cycle of non-consensual reincarnation” by a god of torture, forced to train up hellbeasts for exhibition to earn your freedom? Who doesn’t want to make the Nuckelavee do a croupade?
November is here. The sunny uplands are far behind us. The great gilded procession of Videogaming trundles and cavorts through the deep forest. The bells of the indie jesters are muffled by fog, and the CEOs peer anxiously from their carriages of scarlet and bronze, instructing their guardsmen to beware the union organisers concealed in the undergrowth. Keep watching the trees. Everytime you glance away, they look a little more like placards. Do you see the moths, idly winking on boughs? They are the Maw’s eyes. Those distant, whistling spirals of pine, somehow immobile behind the foreground trunks, in defiance of the rules of perspective? They are the Maw’s lungs. Those squirrels having shouting matches with magpies? Erm. The Maw’s thrombocytes, maybe.
Listen! The crunch of twigs and leaves under hobnailed boots. Approaching torches. It is a refugee party of freshly released PC games. Let us pick the heartiest or strangest from their ranks to bolster our forces, before the shadows close in for good.
