Author: Rich Stanton
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Hyper Light Breaker dev opens up about the stress of depending on a publisher under the corporate carousel of acquisitions, layoffs and closures: ‘I don’t know who I’m going to be working with in a few months’
Hyper Light Breaker, the imminent sequel to Hyper Light Drifter, is one of those sequels that over-reaches itself. The ambition is simple: Take the immaculate vibes and stylish combat of the top-down isometric original, and do it all bigger and better in full 3D. The game is due to release in early access this year,…
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Over 90 Deadlock videos have now leaked, but Valve’s still acting like nothing’s happened
Over the last week stills and clips of a game called Deadlock, which is claimed to be the next big game from Valve, have been leaking online. The 6v6 hero shooter is either legit or an extremely good fake, and the latter’s looking increasingly unlikely with the volume of material that’s been released: today, there’s…
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Helldivers 2 players getting all hot and bothered over Eagle-1’s lovely voice now have an in-game solution—Eagle Sweat, the glorious smell of democracy
While the outlines of Helldivers 2’s Galactic War are fairly clear, and the major orders give players a through-line to follow in the unfolding narrative, much of the game’s world-building is left to hints and lore snippets that players piece-together themselves. Some of this is quite serious and consequential stuff, such as whether the Automatons…
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Street Fighter 6 is launching Akuma by having thousands of Twitch viewers control him simultaneously, which I’m sure will go well
Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 is coming to the end of its first year, and the publisher’s planning a big blowout to go alongside the addition of fan-favourite Akuma and a host of balance changes. The showpiece is going to be chaos. Taking inspiration from the phenomenon that began in 2014 with Twitch Plays Pokémon, the…
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Take-Two CEO says he’s ‘highly confident’ GTA6 will make its release window, gets all philosophical about it: ‘Perfection is indeed hard to measure, it really is more subjective than objective’
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has been on the business interview circuit since last week’s financial results, reassuring all those skittish stockholders after the company announced “a narrowing of Rockstar Games’ previously established window of Calendar 2025 to Fall of Calendar 2025 for Grand Theft Auto 6.” That wasn’t a delay: the game had previously been…
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Always-online free-to-play ARPG relaunches with an offline mode, zero microtransactions, and an upfront price: ‘We’re in uncharted territory, and it’s a big risk’
Developer Airship Syndicate has announced the resurrection of its action RPG Wayfinder, but with a difference: it’s junking all the stuff players hated the first time around. In its previous form Wayfinder was always-online, featured microtransactions, and was free-to-play. Now it’ll have an offline mode, no microtransactions whatsoever, and an upfront price tag of $25…
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Hideo Kojima goes mad for the new Mad Max, says George Miller ‘is my God, and the saga that he tells is my Bible’
Game director Hideo Kojima, whose self-penned bio includes the line “70% of my body is made of movies”, has long had a sideline in film criticism. You can even buy a book collecting some of his many pieces, among which my favourite anecdote was his recollection of watching Taxi Driver as a young man, after…
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Embracer’s talk about The Lord of the Rings says one thing: ‘Fly, you fools!’
In 2022 Embracer acquired the rights to most media relating to The Lord of the Rings, a complex deal that nevertheless gives it control over pretty much everything to do with the series outside of the original books (which among other things remain controlled by the Tolkien estate). This operation is managed by a subsidiary…
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The GameStop memelord returns, stonks spike, market panics—and all he’s done so far is post a bunch of mid memes
In January 2021 something very odd started happening with the stock of GameStop, a once-beloved retail store that looked like it was stuck in bricks-and-mortar while its customers had long gone online. It spiked. And it kept spiking. Why? Anyone who offers a definitive answer would be a liar, but one major factor—and rallying point—was…
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Stellaris gets an DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it’s ‘ethical’ and ‘we’re pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don’t want to end up there ourselves’
Stellaris launched in 2016, since when it has followed the usual Paradox post-launch cycle of regular tweaking accompanied by substantial paid-for DLC expansions. The latest is The Machine Age and focuses on “synthetic ascension” and the promise of eternal life among the stars, adding various new elements to the machine side of the game alongside…