Author: [email protected] (Andy Chalk)
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Open-world wuxia game Where Winds Meet is holding its first beta test in North America later this month
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We got our first look at Where Winds Meet when it was revealed at Gamescom in 2022, shortly after which executive editor Tyler Wilde said he was particularly looking forward to getting a real job in its “wuxia-style Assassin’s Creed” open world. (Hey, to each their own.) Later this month he’ll have his first shot…
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April Fools’ phenom Content Warning draws in more than 204,000 concurrent players
Content Warning, a co-op horror game in which you and your friends go viral or die trying, made an immediate splash when it launched on Steam on April 1. To an extent, that was unsurprising—it was free for the first 24 hours of release—but I don’t think many people foresaw that it would go quite…
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A software quirk caused Discord’s April Fools’ video to accidentally rack up more than 1.4 billion YouTube views, 8 times as many as the GTA 6 trailer
Like just about every other company in the Western world, Discord rattled off an April Fools’ gag yesterday about adding loot boxes to its social media platform. Fast-forward to April 2, just 24 hours later, and that goofy little clip has blown past 1.4 billion—yes, that’s billion—views. That’s a massive milestone. How massive, as the…
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US government denies ESRB’s AI-powered face-scanning ‘age estimation’ proposal, but it’s probably not gone for good
In 2023, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, along with digital identity company Yoti and “youth marketing solutions” provider Superawesome, filed a proposal with the FTC for a new “verifiable parental consent mechanism” called Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation. The FTC has now issued its response to that proposal, and the answer is “no”—for now. The ESRB’s…
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Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw finally reveals his next game: A physics-based action-adventure ‘in which the world becomes your weapon’
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In 2020, former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw joined with Ubisoft veterans Jeff Skalski, Frédéric St-Laurent B, and Thomas Giroux to launch a new studio called Yellow Brick Games. Today, three and a half years later, they’ve finally revealed what they’re getting up to: A new action-adventure called Eternal Strands. Eternal Strands follows the…
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This upcoming indie strategy game looks like Left 4 Dead in the style of XCOM
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If you’ve ever thought to yourself that what you’d really like is a turn-based tactics take on Left 4 Dead, the upcoming Dead Season might be just the thing. Unveiled today by Snail Bite Games—actually solo developer Pavel Kharev—the game promises unforgiving turn-based tactics in a world overrun by hordes of the undead. Dead Season…
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XDefiant misses another launch window, Ubisoft says a new release date will be announced after an upcoming stress test, which also doesn’t have a launch date
It will probably come as no surprise that Ubisoft’s free-to-play XDefiant will not be out by March 31—today is April 1, after all, and it’s still not here. In a weekend update on Twitter, Ubisoft acknowledged the game’s latest miss but said a brief server stress test is coming, after which a real launch date…
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Halo Infinite support studio Certain Affinity lays off employees for the first time in 17 years, blames industry slowdown and ‘reluctance of third party investors to fund games or game companies’
Certain Affinity, which has worked as a support studio on games including Halo Infinite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, New World, and Hogwarts Legacy, has announced that it is laying off 25 employees, representing roughly 10% of the studio’s workforce. Word of the layoffs came in a message from founder and CEO Max Hoberman…
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Earthblade, the next game from the makers of Towerfall and Celeste, ‘ain’t coming out in 2024’
Earthblade, the next game from Celeste and Towerfall studio Extremely OK Games, is technically not delayed, because it didn’t have a release date in the first place. We did expect it to be out this year, though, and the developers expected to at least have a firm launch date in place by now—but instead, Extremely…
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Former US senator and anti-videogame crusader Joe Lieberman has died at age 82
Former US senator and vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, whose crusade against violent videogames in the early ’90s sparked the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, has died at age 82. A statement released by Lieberman’s family (via Politico) said Lieberman’s death was the result of “complications from a fall.” Lieberman’s political career began in…