Hi-Rez Studios have laid off an unknown number of the studio’s employees, only one month after launching MOBA sequel Smite 2 as a free-to-play beta. It looks like management has cut at least 20-30 jobs and the full number is likely higher. As a result, three other games that have been long-running staples of the studio will no longer get any updates. Smite, Paladins, and Rogue Company will have nobody to man the code cannons, so they’re being left to gather cobwebs from now on. Although they will remain playable.
What great hopes I had for the Christmas holidays. Finally, I thought, I would have time for some of the recent blockbusters I’d not yet played: Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and more would fill those dusty days and nights in the taint of 2024.
Then I mentioned in a review that I liked Picross games, which for me can dissolve hours or entire weekends like sugar in water. “I don’t know if that means I should recommend Mark Ffrench’s games Proverbs and Mega Mosaic to you, or warn you to steer clear and avoid flowing away forever,” responded commenter SeekerX.
You see where this is going. Friends, I played Proverbs for 36 hours over Christmas.
Put your red and white scarf back on the coat rack, football friends. The match has been called off. The entire season, in fact. Football Manager 25 has been cancelled because it has not met a high enough standard in time for its intended release next month, according to developers Sports Interactive. Anyone who pre-ordered the game will be given a refund, they say.
Oh no, it’s a pre-order article for Civ VII, get down! Well, it’s also just a friendly PSA, in case you’re looking for the best deal right now. The game is launching on February 11, and if you’ve been waiting to carve your place in history again, we’ve found a solid discount going right now for PC gamers.
Resident Evil Re:Verse, the multiplayer spin-off announced alongside Resident Evil Village, is being shut down. Capcom say that the game and its DLC will be delisted from stores next month and its servers will go offline in June.
In theory, these are great developments. Lower requirements mean a more widely accessible game, and the benchmark tool – which covers a good six minutes of combined cinematics and simulated free roaming – brings reassurance and accountability to this otherwise hype-reliant prerelease period. Sadly, there are two problems. One, the benchmark confirms outright that Monster Hunter Wilds will run like stagnant goulash on low-end PCs, and two, it does so to the extent that I’m not sure that the revised minimum specs are even reliable.
The creators of sci-fi corridor explorer Duskers are making a “spiritual successor” to the 2016 space game. The studio revealed their plans in a video showing three prototypes they’re currently working on. The working title for this one is “Humanity 2.0” and it’ll see you carving up derelict ships to build your own vessel and sometimes defending that ship from pirates trying to take it over. It sounds like you’ll still be the sweaty cybermaster of a bunch of glitchy drones, who now might suffer “fun personality quirks” when you install upgrades, “like not wanting to go down narrow corridors because it’s now claustrophobic”.
Sad, busted-ass space robots just trying to get by? Yes, I’m interested.
Sci-fi battle royale Apex Legends is due a “meaningful update” , according to the CEO of Electronic Arts, something he’s called “Apex 2.0”. To a normal person, adding a 2 to the end of your game’s name is the sign of a sequel. But as the attendant decimal and zero suggest, it’s not clear if that’s exactly what he means. It could mean a revamp with new features, or some other new direction for the existing game. His later words do make it sound more like this is what EA have in mind. Or at least what they’re prepared to tell folks in a financial report.
Steam early access games that haven’t been updated in a long while will now be more prominently labelled as such, according to reports. As noticed by third-party tracking platform SteamDB, Valve have begun adding warnings to early access info boxes, making it harder to accidentally spend your pocket money on a promising project that hasn’t advanced in years.
When I’ve had enough of fighting the dogs in a respectable, straightforward manner, I pick them up with my mind and – with a casualness that has to be extremely insulting if you’re a dog – drop them directly off a cliff. This ends the fight immediately. Sometimes I resort to this low move out of frustration, when a dull fight has dragged on for too long. Sometimes I resort to it out of panic, because I’ve accidentally set fire to every hard surface within ten feet, or frozen myself to a wall. Often it’s just for the pleasure of it.
In Eternal Strands, Yellow Brick Games’ debut title, you play the leader of a “weaver band”, a crew of freelance magicians, in a world where something extremely bad happened to magic. Some years ago, the Enclave, a city state acting as the isolationist heart of the world’s magic, exploded in a kind of power surge – one part tsunami, one part blown fuse – and just as quickly sealed itself off from the world outside. Somehow managing to breach the wall, your band finds themselves the first people to set foot inside the ruined capital since the calamity and sets about uncovering the mystery of what exactly went wrong.
