Amazon’s Fallout TV series is yet to even premiere - it hits Prime Video later this week, on April 11th - but it already looks set to follow The Last of Us in being the next big-budget post-apocalyptic video game adaptation with a second season in development.
The deck-fixing roguelikelike poker of Balatro is chuffing excellent, no doubt, but my main criticism has been that the higher difficulty modes are just a bit boring. Having beat them myself, I didn't find them a fun or interesting challenge as much as an annoying one that required too much to go right. I'm glad to hear that they're being tweaked in an upcoming patch, which you can now test in a public beta on Steam, and even the lowest difficulty setting will be tweaked. Other changes include improved (hopefully) Steam Deck performance, balance tweaks, and better Joker-related Tags.
When Bethesda was working out how to turn their popular Elder Scrolls RPGs into an online behemoth to rival World Of Warcraft back in the late 00s, the initial pitch was "Elder Scrolls with friends," creative director Rich Lambert tells me. A simple idea on paper, perhaps, but one that proved to be a lot more complicated in the realisation of it. Zenimax Online Studios was founded in 2007, a year after The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion landed to universal critical praise, but it wasn't until seven years later that The Elder Scrolls Online finally released for PC in 2014. At launch "we were walking this weird line between 'online game' and 'Elder Scrolls game'," Lambert says. "We didn't do either of them particularly well."
Ten years later, though, The Elder Scrolls Online is thriving. At last count, the game has over 24 million players galloping about the plains of Tamriel, and later this June, it will receive its eighth major Chapter expansion, Gold Road, which adds Oblivion's West Weald to the game and wraps up the mystery of the new Daedric Prince that arrived at the end of the previous expansion, Necrom. But the path ESO has taken to get here hasn't been nearly as glittering, with its PC launch in particular generating "a lot of feedback", as studio director Matt Firor told press at the game's tenth anniversary event last week. In fact, it wasn't until ESO came to consoles in 2015 that the game really found its voice, says Lambert. "We had to really figure out what we wanted to be, and we chose 'Elder Scrolls'. As soon as we hit that core pillar of 'It's Elder Scrolls first, online second,' then it really just helped inform everything we've done since." Trouble is, when the thrust of ESO's development straddled the launch of two very different Elder Scrolls games, even nailing down that first part of the pillar proved to be more challenging than expected.
Exciting news for the future of everyone's favourite co-op shooter that isn't legally> an adaptation of Starship Troopers. A few days ago, Helldivers 2 issued a new major order to annihilate the Automatons, who had been pushed back like never before. And annihilate you all did, with players' combined efforts being officially recgonised yesterday on the Helldivers 2 Xitter: Mission Accomplished! The bots have been eradicated!
Botany Manor is a game that seems calculated to make me sit up on alert like a meerkat, or crash through a wall yelling like that sentient jug mascot (I am not from America, I just know he exists). It's a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy Strange Horticulture, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less eldritch, and much more gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson in the lead role. That role - which in this case is played by you in first person rather than La Thompson - is of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless inheritor of a huge manor and ancestral wealth, and so is able to spend the sunny days of 1890 pottering around the house and grounds researching weird, slightly fantastical plants almost wholly untroubled. So in this respect it is also a fantasy game. It's quite delightful, which is the sort of phrase I am confident Arabella would use.
I know some of you will quibble with the headline, so let me confirm straight away that, yes, technically Aquarist is not a game simulating being an aquarium. An aquarist is someone who builds and manages aquariums, which is your principle task in the capital A Aquarist game. It recently left early access, which is sort of unbelievable because it's very janky in the most adorable way. You can tell it was made by someone who bloody loves> aquariums, but taken at face value the career mode tells a strange tale indeed. For example, you have a very unsettling father.
According to one unofficial tracker created by video game artist Farhan Noor, there have been 8000 layoffs in 2024 so far, following an estimated 10,500 layoffs in 2023. The leaders of Microsoft, Embracer Group, Epic and other industry giants have made swingeing cuts to their workforces. While larger companies have inevitably seen the largest reductions, many smaller developers and publishers have also cut staff or even closed their doors. Circumstances vary by company, of course, but as regards the biggest publishers, there are some broad overlapping causes: reckless or, if you prefer, "overambitious" expansion and overhiring during the pandemic lockdown gaming boom; lower-than-hoped returns on new technologies and business models such as NFTs; and rising global interest rates, which have scared away potential investors.
The carnage was uppermost in Larian CEO's Swen Vincke's mind when he accepted Baldur's Gate 3's Best Narrative gong at the GDC Awards last month. According to Vincke, the layoffs can be traced straightforwardly to a pattern of executive greed that sees company leadership betting the livelihoods and stability of their workers on whatever new idea seems capable of delivering instant growth for shareholders.
A couple of months ago, we learned that Raven Software lead designer Michael Gummelt had worked on a live service Call Of Duty zombies game before it got cancelled. Details were practically non-existent at the time, but YouTuber Glitching Queen recently interviewed Gummelt about what the game could've become. Fun surprises: It would've been a free-to-play live service game featuring coliseum battles. Unsurprises: microtransactions, seasons, general background shenanigans between Treyarch and Raven.
Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 14 boss Naoki Yoshida has told The Gamer that he reckons “It’s probably about time,” for a new Final Fantasy Tactics game.
The hint at some long term wish fulfillment came up during an interview with The Gamer’s Gabrielle Castania, in which Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida spoke about Final Fantasy 16’s upcoming The Rising Tide DLC, alongside DLC director Takeo Kujiraoka and localisation director Michael-Christoper Koji Fox.
"Who will rid me of these tiresome overfamiliar combat systems!" I bellow from my balcony over the castle square. From far away across the sea comes the response: "in our game, your primary 'weapon' is a sloping railway". The game in question is Incline ～Railway of devil's valley～ and yes, it has an incredibly irritating English-language title, but how about that red-hot funicular action in the trailer? And is it me, or does this look like a long-lost Dreamcast game?