Right, here's your prescribed dose of actual nice news in the games industry for the week. Hytale is back from the dead! Despite a decade's worth of development, the game was canned with Hypixel Studios forced to completely shutter. Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme did say he wanted to talk to previous owner Riot about re-acquiring Hytale, and as it turns out, that's exactly what he did!

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It's been a while since Yoko Taro has made a game, hasn't it? That last public (key word here) thing he worked on was a mobile game about how Sega controls pretty much everything called 404 Game Re:set in 2023 (it shut down in 2024). Before that was a trio of Voice of Cards games in 2021/22, and before that the Nier Replicant not-quite-a-remake and also now defunct mobile game Nier Reincarnation. In terms of the big thing that everyone wants, a non-gacha Nier game, things have been very quiet, but that can be said of Taro's work as a whole. Apparently, though, that's not for lack of trying.

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Prologue: Go Wayback is due out in early access later this week, and ahead of that developer PlayerUnknown Productions laid out a little roadmap of updates you can expect in the coming… months? They didn't specify, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - I think setting expectations of when certain features may arrive encourages a more demanding audience - but they did give a good overview of what's to come.

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Sure, you could tease around the edges of generative AI videogame development, spitting out an Anno 117 loading screen here, belching out Arc Raiders NPC voice barks there, or you could just go the whole hog and hook your characters straight up to an LLM. What could possibly go wrong?

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Is this what life is now? Witnessing massive, incredibly successful companies turning to AI to get advice on legal proceedings? You don't need to pinch me, I've already done it, and this world is real. The company in question here is Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton, who you might remember are being sued by three ex-leads of the game; developer of the game Unknown Worlds are (technically) also suing this trio of developers in kind. This all came about because Krafton delayed Subnautica 2, a decision that meant Unknown Worlds wouldn't get a $250 million bonus. And it seems that the publisher even asked ever-reliable ChatGPT for advice on how they could avoid doing just that.

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I started a new Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl run this past weekend, and like most of my decisions, I now look back on it with pain and regret. Had I waited just a couple more days, I could have begun anew with the roaming FPS's new Expedition update, which is out now and spans everything from difficulty modes and inventory tweaks to enemy behaviour reworks and yet more upgrades to its A-Life simulation system.

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Last week saw Valve reveal three pieces of hardware. The Steam Machine, a console-like mini PC you plug into your TV. A newly updated Steam Controller, which combines the original's trackpad-style thumbpads with the double thumbsticks of a regular gamepad. And also the Steam Frame, a new virtual reality headset that streams games from your PC and opens up your whole game library to be played in the privacy of your own goggles.

While I have a default thrill setting that engages whenever Valve announces new hardware, it's been interesting to see the variety of responses to the hardware reveals. I was surprised, in particular, by the muted response to the Steam Machine in our comments.

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Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order are moving on from the city building series and parting ways with publishers Paradox Interactive, after 15 years of collaboration. They're handing Skylines over to one of Paradox's in-house teams, Surviving The Aftermath developers Iceflake Studios, who will take over "all existing and future development for Cities: Skylines 2", spanning free updates and paid expansions.

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November digs in. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming rattles onward through the midnight forest. The rains swept past over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, worryingly responsive, and rank with the stench of neglected deckbuilders. Several sedan chairs carrying former BioWare creative leads are caught in a wave of slop, becoming a disorderly barricade of people crying out for Femshep to come save them from the GAAS. Tencent executives rush over with handfuls of rope, but whether they mean to drag the afflicted free or bind their limbs is unclear.

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It is strange to imagine – I thought as I battled a giant vomit-spewing plant monster in a hallucination induced by a biological weapon – that Call of Duty was once, at least notionally, about the human cost of war. That was a long time ago, admittedly. There are full grown adults who have never experienced CoD's original idea that you played an ordinary soldier snarled up in a terrifying post-industrial war machine. But I don't think the series has ever been further away from that concept than in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's hideous mess of a campaign.

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