Category: Video Games

Today, workers at Sega of America union AEGIS-CWA have announced they have ratified their first contract with Sega, less than a year after their recognition as a legal union.

In a press release, AEGIS-CWA revealed that the worker vote to ratify the contract passed, allowing the contract to go into effect. The contract includes a number of worker protections, including raises for all unit members (roughly 150 full-time and temporary employees), Just Cause protections, layoff protections including a recall list and severance, commitment to crediting all workers on games they work on, and a number of other benefits.

“One of our most notable items is our grievance process,” said Sega localization editor and AEGIS-CWA member Em Geiger. “There’s extra security knowing we have in place a system for bringing issues to the table, such as arguing Just Cause in a potential layoff. If the company wants to do something that the unit doesn’t like, we can grieve it, bargain over it, have our say before anything is finalized. And concerning Just Cause, we’re now the second unit in this industry in North America to have protections against arbitrary discipline and discharge.”

Sega of America workers first announced their desire to unionize in April of last year, citing desires for better pay, improved benefits, and workload balance. The union received legal recognition the following July following a vote, making it the largest multi-department union of organized industry workers, encompassing Brand Marketing, Games as a Service, Localization, Marketing, Product Development Ops, Sales, Quality Assurance, and other divisions.

There are times when Open Roads hits alarmingly close to home. Early on in this interactive road trip, your 16-year-old protagonist Tess turns around to reach for a bag perched in the back of her mom’s vintage station wagon – without skipping a beat, she’s accosted by her mother, Opal, from behind the wheel. The altercation flooded my brain with memories of family road trips in the early 2000s: “You can’t just turn around. It’s unsafe,” my dad would say from his vehicular throne, despite how frustratingly close I was to grabbing my Game Boy. Parental authority and nostalgia are just a few of the powerful tools Open Roads harnesses to deliver a playful and relatable story about coming of age in the early aughts, however, hastily resolved problems and the lack of an engaging mystery also make this adventure a little too predictable to leave a lasting impression.

Set in the wake of her grandmother’s passing, Tess and her mother are forced to navigate grief and economic uncertainty as they cope with the breakdown of their nuclear family. Tess’s father is distant, in touch via text alone, while her mother maintains a tough exterior for her daughter’s sake. Stuck in the middle, Tess’s optimistic outlook shines through but hides a trove of complex emotions. Open Roads’ exceptional Hollywood leads, Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever, amplify their uncomfortably raw exchanges – Russell’s Opal is believably guarded but capable of arresting warmth, whereas Dever’s Tess balances youthful naivete with spirited angst. Tonal subtext abounds as emotions run high, and I felt connected to these characters as early as the opening back-and-forth.

Open Roads’ art style leaves a lasting first impression as well. Hand-drawn 2D characters are layered on top of meticulously detailed 3D environments, giving this world a unique, dreamlike quality. Imperfections augment scribbled notes, juxtaposing them against the angular digital backdrop – and I couldn’t help but inspect the scratches and flecks of dust on a chunky iMac lookalike I came across at one point. While this trip is mostly isolating by design, the touches of life, like soot particles and trees swaying in the wind, make you feel more at peace in the solitude.

In the process of sorting through her late grandmother’s belongings, Tess uncovers a curious briefcase of relics, complete with a cryptic postcard from an unknown sender beckoning her grandma to join them. Keen to escape the immediate burdens of loss, Tess convinces a reluctant Opal to cross the country and unravel a generational family mystery. Melancholic but strangely engrossing, Open Roads almost entirely consists of rummaging through dioramas lost to time. From derelict summer houses to musty hotel rooms, each new location contains sprinklings of forgotten belongings to interact with alongside precious tidbits of environmental storytelling I relished in examining with a fine-tooth comb. An admittedly repetitive process, standout items like charming childhood drawings that mask coping mechanisms with superheroes and classic rented DVDs managed to keep me on the hook while effectively time-stamping each hazy era they were from.

A light smattering of systems allow you to engage your inner holistic detective to piece together the past – but don’t expect deep puzzles or critical thinking. Across its roughly three-and-a-half-hour run time, Open Roads didn’t get more complicated than finding an odd opening to another room or searching out a partially hidden letter. The more you scour, the more you’ll confront Open Roads’ past-meets-present storytelling that revolves around Opal’s own childhood traumas, which are finding new life in the issues now plaguing her daughter. Like phantom wounds passed down through the generations, their happy-go-lucky veneer masks troubling truths that are, for the most part, intriguing to unfurl.

Interacting with items can prompt Tess’s inner monologue and offer a window into her developing psyche, while plot-forwarding objects trigger eye-opening conversations with her mother. Seeking out as many of these touchy scenes as possible helped ground me in Open Roads story and compelled me to tinker with all the toys I could find in search of more emotive exposition. Unfortunately, such loaded artifacts were few and far between, but the conversations surrounding them felt sincere and created a nervous atmosphere that kept me guessing as the family’s secrets started to surface.

Environmental inspections are spliced between highway drives where Tess and Opal process the latest day while coasting to the next spot. Where static locations focus on Opal’s murky upbringing and faulty memory, the car conversations center around Tess’s present issues with her mom. Initially, the mysterious man’s letters and postcards appear to be the hook, but the persistent interpersonal turmoil is by far Open Roads’ defining asset.

It was disappointing then that as the player-come-passenger in this journey, I began to feel like a ghost in the machine, privy to all the surrounding context but unable to engage with it meaningfully. Even though I could radio surf, flick door locks, and text as the autumnal foliage passed me by, I felt distant from Tess as the story soldiered on. Despite the amount of time I’d spent in her head, Tess’s actions felt unusually measured for a teenager dealing with such traumatic events. I often wished that Open Roads would stop pulling its punches until, surprisingly quickly, the credits rolled. A few breezy puzzles offered fleeting resistance, but the twists and turns of the story didn’t provoke the emotion I expected when they finally arrived. The pieces of this quilt never quite stitched together for me.

This feeling is most frustrating when you’re offered options in dialogue. I was often keen to chase certain plot threads, but my choices always tended to lead to the same place, and the inconsequentiality of what I thought was important subtext became disheartening when I realized this in my second playthrough. The investigative spirit in its early-game explorations was never nurtured during Open Road’s conversations. Heavy discussions about mental health felt like an opportunity to level the playing field between Tess and her mother, but such moments aren’t allowed to breathe in a believable way. A safe and disappointing climax only confirmed my fears, providing an easy answer that felt like a messily applied band-aid over a far more complex wound. I was left longing for more of the ugly, believable humanity we all partake in, but Open Roads decidedly orbits.

As a massive fan of survival games and Dune, I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical about an open-world survival game that takes place on the famously barren planet of Arrakis, but after an hour-long presentation of the upcoming Dune: Awakening, those concerns have disappeared entirely. Based on the hands-off showcasing of what’s to come when this MMO survival game hits early access later this year, it certainly appears that developer Funcom has taken their hard-won learnings from the underrated Conan Exiles and applied it to this ambitious multiplayer world set in one of sci-fi’s most beloved galaxies. Whether it was the impressively detailed character creation options, the intricate RPG systems filled with skill trees and craftables, or the absolute insanity of trying to outrun a Shai-Hulud or escape a massive sandstorm, Dune: Awakening appears to be on track to become the sci-fi survival game I’ve always dreamt of, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

How do you make a survival game set in an utterly desolate wasteland of sand? Well, according to Funcom, the answer lies in the “hidden spaces” of Arrakis. Described in Frank Herbert’s novels, these hidden pockets of shade and refuge are home to life and micro-biomes that will be altogether unfamiliar to those who have only seen the movies, but Dune: Awakening hopes to lean pretty heavily on their existence to fill the massive desert with things for players to do – whether that be finding a pocket of shelter to build a base in, delving into a cave that’s home to hostile creatures, or taking down remote enemy bases in search of loot and resources. In fact, the wide-open empty spaces filled with hot sand might be more of an asset than a hindrance, as it allows for a heat stroke mechanic where players are punished for spending time in direct sunlight with some pretty devastating debuffs, meaning players will instead need to dart from shelter-to-shelter, battling the elements as they explore the world and its many hidden spaces.

Combined with the forever game of “the floor is lava” that is dodging sandworms on Arrakis, players will need to remain on the move constantly, and develop strategies for managing their water reserves, protecting against the heat, and, of course, engaging in the never-ending struggle for all-important spice. In one leg of the demo, players worked together to claim a massive deposit of spice while keeping an eye out for the ever-looming threat of the Shai-Hulud, drawn to their activity in the desert…only to be unexpectedly overwhelmed by a sandstorm instead, which swallowed them and their precious cargo along with them. In another section, a group of players worked together to infiltrate a high-level facility filled with rare materials and dangerous enemies, making sure to harvest the blood of fallen baddies to replenish their rapidly depleting water reserves. Before the demo, I had a lot of questions about how a Dune survival game would even work without becoming extremely monotonous in short order, but by the end I found myself wondering why in the heck someone hadn’t made one sooner – seeing all the clever ways Dune: Awakening plans to make brilliant use of Dune’s unique lore made me a believer.

Beyond the major things Dune: Awakening aims to get right, the demo also included all these little details that took my hype to the next level, like how they showed off an incredibly detailed character creation engine that included things like choosing your home planet and origin to decide some of your starting traits and aspects of your appearance, or how the in-depth skill trees and crafting system allowed you to drastically augment your playstyle from a telekinetic mentalist with a bag of supernatural tricks to run-and-gun soldiers with a bag of high explosives. As someone who has spent a good deal of time with the Dune tabletop RPG, dreaming up the characters I’d like to portray in that universe, this looks like it’ll scratch an itch I’ve had for decades, and I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on it when it hits early access later this year.