Dying Light is a zombie game. It does a lot of other things that frustrate or sort of disappoint me, too. But I can’t help loving it in a very reserved sort of way.
Stardew Valley turns 4 years old today. It’s been sixteen seasons since it arrived on PC, kicking off a wave of similar casual farming games on PC. Developer ConcernedApe is celebrating the anniversary with a casual announcement that the sun is not setting on his continued work planting Stardew’s future. He says that with Stardew Valley’s extremely large 1.4 update now available on all platforms, another free update (1.5, naturally) is already in the works.
We’ve not heard a heck of a lot about Diablo 4 since it was officially announced at BlizzCon last year. Blizzard have now published a development update which they’re hoping to do quarterly going forward responding to feedback from the BlizzCon demo and introducing a nasty family of melee monsters. The update also gives a pretty in-depth look at a few pieces of Diablo 4’s interface.
The Game Developers Conference website has been updated to assure attendees that the event is “moving forward as planned,” despite new preventative health measures issued by the city of San Francisco related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).
The director of Destiny 2 has dropped another of his sporadic 4000-word thoughtdumps reflecting on the state of the MMOFPS, its successes, and its failures. One big problem Luke Smith acknowledges is that the latest seasons, starting with Season Of The Undying, create a disappointing “feeling of ephemeral private activities and rewards that go away” rather than the exciting “evolving world” they’d wanted. Bungie will try to fix that with the next year, he says, and they have some other big changes planned. It sounds promising but I wish he’d addressed Eververse’s role in FOMO.
The original Wasteland hails from the 80s those rose-colored years before RPGs set in the nuclear apocalypse were an entire genre of their own. Wasteland Remastered is almost (almost) an entire do-over with dramatically updated graphics and some ancient bug fixes. InXile proclaim that Wasteland and the remaster are “punishing” as old RPGs are wont to be. The remaster is out as of yesterday, so you can head back to one of the old guard versions of irradiated America.
Platinum Games have announced a new big monster game in the works led by Hideki Kamiya of Viewtiful Joe and Bayonetta fame. Kamiya has a long history of action games, and this new one looks to have plenty more where that came from big monsters clashing with giant heroes and all. This next action ’em up is provisionally titled Project G.G.
Just before Generation Zero released nearly a year ago, things looked great for the game. Its trailers and screenshots promised a dynamic and expansive open-world cooperative shooter, with robots to fight and a beautiful and detailed 1980s Sweden to explore. And it was made by Avalanche Studios, a developer long-known for its open-world action games. Aside from a little controversy when artist Simon St lenhag pointed out its thematic similarity to his distinctive art, everything seemed in place for a successful launch.
We felt really good, product owner Paul Keslin tells me. But that feeling soon changed. The game was beset by crash bugs and complaints of repetitive play, and its Steam review scores tumbled. For its small development team, the reception was a shock – Immediately, the feeling was not a good one . The post-launch plan was thrown in the bin, and so began the long job of turning the game around in the eyes of its players.
We’re not really looked too much at Teamfight Tactics for quite a while, but with the upcoming season change, it only seems fitting to update our item cheat sheet to reflect the game as it currently stands. There’s been a lot of updates, so study that sheet well.
I played 1997’s weirdly named Theme Hospital a fair amount in my teen years, but despite my love of both management games and very silly things, I never got around to playing 2018’s spiritual sequel, the equally weirdly named Two Point Hospital. With the game coming to consoles this week, however, I thought now would be a fine moment to dive in and see what I’d been missing. The answer is: a management game that’s so silly, it makes me stop worrying about actually managing.