Oct 29

Floorboards creak, spooks spook and I harass a man with a bell in detective puzzler The Séance of Blake Manor

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ring ring. Ring Ring. Ring ring. The stern and bespectacled manager of Blake Manor's hotel appears for the eighth time. You're looking a bit narked there mate, I, the investigatorman, observe. Yes, he says yet again, I'm a bit stressed and busy on account of our telegram machine having gone kaput. Makes sense, I reply, can't think of any other reasons why you might be pissed off. He shuffles back into his office for exactly five seconds. Ring ring.

You're being haunted in the demo for spooky detective puzzler The Séance of Blake Manor, which released in full earlier this week, having had a demo up on Steam for a good while. However, I can confirm having taken in the first night of that demo that you're also give the power to do the haunting yourself.

Oct 29

Arc Raiders doesn't AI-generate guns from Youtube videos, Embark clarifies: "that's a research project, and not something that we're using in the game now"

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Let's get the hot potato out of the way without preamble: Embark's extraction shooter Arc Raiders doesn't include any gun models generated from Youtube videos, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal has told RPS in an interview about the game's usage of generative AI and machine learning technologies.

This clarification follows the partial online publication of an Edge magazine interview in which Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund made various claims for the studio's in-house tech, including the suggestion that the developers "can take a video from YouTube, feed it through our tools and pipelines, and [produce] a 3D model of the weapon you had in that video." According to Grøndal, this particular technology is not actually used in Arc Raiders. "That's a research project, and that's not something that we're using in the game now," he told me over a video call this Monday, following a sprawling and generally enjoyable hands-on.