ampersandrew

Sweet Baby Inc doesn't even remotely do what many think it does, but on the modern internet, that doesn't matter

I'd heard they spent a few years making TimeSplitters into Fortnite before making a proper TimeSplitters game, but if this was what they had toward the end of development, maybe we're better off with this game getting cancelled. And that sucks.

They still seem to be working with Microsoft on their next project, but they're hopefully in a better spot as a result of this transition.

That title sure is editorialized. Thanks, Kotaku...

I don't see a buyer disclosed, but Gearbox carries a substantial number of studios along with them.

Sold to a group of private investors. $500M sounds like too much money, but whatever keeps those people employed and making games, I guess.

This show is an aggregator of news stories normally, sometimes with original reporting from Jeff Grubb. In today's edition, Grubb brought in stories reporting that Starfield and Indiana Jones are in Microsoft's talks for PlayStation releases, with Indiana Jones being looked at for some time down the road after initial launch. Grubb adds to this reporting by saying that he's seen financial projections around acquisitions like Bethesda, and this multiplatform strategy was not always the plan. They thought that Starfield and others would do much better for them by remaining exclusive, so he posits that these changes are almost certainly in response to how the likes of Starfield did in sales and Game Pass subscriptions. Grubb also reports that Gears of War is being looked at for a PlayStation release.

To pepper in some of my own opinion here, I don't see a world where Xbox survives this as a traditional console. And as a result of that, I don't see a world where Sony left unchecked by competition will behave. I think this could be the beginning of the wildest shake-up to the video game market since it began.

Death Stranding 2, Until Dawn for PS5/PC, and more

You know how in the early 2000s, a lot of PC games got sequels on consoles, and players complained that they removed complexity from the game to make it work on consoles? This feels like that. I don't see anything here about quests, skills, character sheets, or different ways to solve problems depending on your character's strengths. The skill point system from the previous game is replaced with a more commonplace XP system, judging from the UI; note that I've never played the pen and paper game, so maybe this is closer to what the pen and paper game is or has become in the past 20 years, for all I know, but I really appreciated how Bloodlines 1 did it.

I knew back when this game was handed to The Chinese Room that something like this was possible, but I thought surely they'd respect the reputation of the project they're working on and try to do it justice. Surely they'd attempt to make an actual sequel to that game, even if they aren't good at it. It doesn't appear so.

Looks at Ara: History Untold, Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, and Visions of Mana.

I was already excited for Avowed, and now Indiana Jones looks to be as good as I'd hoped but far better than I expected, hot off the heels of Bethesda's live service endeavors.

And a look at the flawed, marketing-centric rationale behind designing games to disappear, leaving the customer with nothing.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is supposed to launch in September 2024, according to a press release from Ai Shark (formerly Game Shark).

UPDATE (in article): Both Digital Trends and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier have now reported receiving statements from Altec Lansing that seem conflictingly to double down on the Fall 2024 date and also claim the date is "guesswork." What's likely happening here is that Altec Lansing was, in fact, making an educated guess on the date of the Switch's release based on internal industry conversations as well as analyst models. Whatever the case, we'll have to wait for Nintendo's official word to find out the real date.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there's a precedent for this: a pirate MMO server has been granted an official license to continue operating legally. At the moment, it sounds like this is a deal applying to this one City of Heroes server, but hey, baby steps. City of Heroes was the only MMO I ever got really into; I had a max level telekinetic Defender named Spoonman whose battle cry was "All my friends are skeletons!" mapped to the F10 key. I don't intend to go back and play it again on this server, but this game, and every other MMO, deserves to be preserved. It should be standard that we're allowed to run our servers if we so choose, but publishers probably only went down the path of making an MMO in the first place because they were after that sweet, sweet subscription revenue.