Author: Game Infliction

Stardew Valley LEGO Build Recreates the Entire Pelican Town

A Stardew Valley fan has recreated the entire Pelican Town using LEGO in a 75,000 piece build that even brought out developer ConcernedApe.

The build premiered at BrickCon 2024 and includes every iconic building such as the Wizard’s Tower, Community Center, JojaMart, and, of course, the player’s farm. An enormous version of the Stardew Valley title screen was built from LEGO and placed behind the model too.

Creator Steve Jensen told PC Gamer the build took around two years to complete, and his favorite elements include the Hat Shop, “because I was able to make [it] almost entirely hollow, so you can look through the cracks and broken parts and see through to more such openings on the other side, just as a rundown, abandoned structure would be,” Jensen said.

@beyondthebrick Huge LEGO Stardew Valley by Steve Jensen #lego #stardewvalley ♬ original sound – Beyond the Brick

“Another fave is the Wizard’s Tower. I was able to get the shape I wanted, including a peaked door, and vines growing up the sides, the cone-shaped roof in blue, everything.”

The effort certainly impressed the LEGO community as the Stardew Valley build earned the People’s Choice award at BrickCon, and it even attracted the game’s creator. Eric Barone, the one man developer behind ConcernedApe, turned up to admire the recreation of his own work, something Jensen said was “even bigger news than an award.”

Stardew Valley is a beloved farming simulator blended with role-playing game elements that was dubbed a masterpiece in IGN’s updated 10/10 review for 2024. “More than just a cozy farming sim, eight years of updates have grown Stardew Valley into a modern classic with an endless list of enticing activities to complete and a deeply satisfying time management challenge to take on,” we said.

These updates have slowed down progress on ConcernedApe’s next game Haunted Chocolatier though, as Barone said in August he hasn’t worked on it “in a long time” due to the grandiose version 1.6 update.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

In handsome metroidvania Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists you are a dryad fighting the corpse of capitalism

Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists opens with paired quotes from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Mad Max: Fury Road – a blend of influences that would typically get you kicked out of the Creative Writing Club for being simultaneously too fancy and too obvious, but the game beyond the epigraph looks pretty swish.

It’s “a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order”. It uses a square aspect display ratio calibrated to give wizened Game Boy enthusiasts the shakes, and is made up of 200 single-screen rooms that “slot into the larger puzzle-box of the world”. Also, you play a thorn witch who looks a bit like 1950s Tinkerbell, with a touch of Betty Boop. Here’s a trailer.

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Sony ‘Forcing’ Bungie to ‘Get Their Heads Out Their Asses’ and Run Destiny 2 Like a Business Is Very Much a Good Thing, Studio’s Ex-Lawyer Says

A former Bungie lawyer has commented on upcoming improvements to embattled live service looter shooter Destiny 2, saying the role of parent company Sony in “forcing” through these changes is very much a good thing.

Last week, Bungie unveiled what it called “major changes” to Destiny 2 that it hopes will win back players. Bungie has reportedly struggled to meet key financial targets, with Destiny 2 significantly underperforming last year. The Final Shape expansion reportedly sold less at launch than last year’s critically panned Lightfall.

Destiny 2 will now adopt a new model that includes the release of two medium-sized expansions and four major free content updates annually.

“This evolution aims to enhance the player experience through a new multi-year saga, introducing a non-linear story, more systemic innovation, and significant improvements to core game activities and rewards,” Bungie said.

One of the problems with Destiny 2 that Bungie has now identified is that it’s nigh on impenetrable to newcomers. Speaking in a blog post, game director Tyson Green admitted Destiny is “too complex.” “With literally hundreds of activities, you practically need a PhD to decide what to play and how to get rewards you’re looking for, Green added, before revealing plans to modernizing Destiny 2’s user interface “to make it easier for everyone to find and launch into great activities.”

This is the future I thought the company should embrace after the Sony acquisition.

In a LinkedIn post, Don McGowan, the former general counsel at Bungie, reacted to a Kotaku article rounding up the Destiny 2 changes to say he was pleased with Sony’s apparent influence here, which, he said, means the studio is finally “running the game like a business.”

“Much though it pains me to say this, it appears that Sony’s inflicting some discipline on my former colleagues may have forced them to fix the things that were wrong with their game,” McGowan said.

“To be clear: I’m not talking about the layoffs, I’m talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like: implementing a method of new player acquisition; not just doing fan service for the fans in the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business. Good. I still have friends in that environment and I’d like them to keep jobs.

“This is the future I thought the company should embrace after the Sony acquisition: a studio, not an ‘independent company.’ But there were a lot of egos for whom it was important to pretend that ‘nothing would change.’

“I remember sitting there during the deal saying ‘do you think Sony describes this as them getting to pay $3.6 billion for the right to have no input into what Bungie does?’ That was exactly what a lot of people thought. I guess they’ve been given cause to understand that that’s not how things work. Good. The changes described in this article are the things you do to run a franchise, not to keep making the game you and your friends have mastered, or to chase trends.”

IGN has asked Sony for comment.

Bungie’s Destiny 2 changes come amid a period of speculation and unrest within the Destiny community about the franchise’s future. Uncertainty grew when Bungie announced plans to cut 220 staff in late July, with an additional 155 workers planned to move from Bungie into Sony Interactive Entertainment in the coming months. That left the developer with around 850 employees.

“I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape,” controversial studio head Pete Parsons said in a statement. “But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.”

Bungie reportedly has no plans for Destiny 3 and has canceled a Destiny spinoff project known as Payback. Development on its Marathon revival is said to still be ongoing.

In December, IGN reported on an apparent scramble by Bungie studio leadership to avoid a total Sony takeover. Then, in March, IGN reported on a leadership shakeup on Marathon, which included the removal of long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett from the game director role.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Mars First Logistics has turned into a Martian railway builder, with some very pretty, 100% authentic clouds

Efforts to render Mars commuter-friendly proceed apace as Mars First Logistics embraces the magic of trains. The latest update for the physics-based open world build-a-car game introduces a mountable theodolite, which lets you stitch together monorail networks you can then ride about on.

If monorails strike you as frivolous, don’t worry. It’s more of a Shelbyville idea. And in any case, the theodolite also lets you construct networks of pipes, power lines and rail-less tarmac roads – the ready-salted crisp of the road family. It’s a chonky expansion that, in the words of lead developer Ian MacLarty, has only “scratched the surface of where this new system could go”. I am predicting an eventual pivot into either themepark management or factory simulator.

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‘Team Past’ Takes The Gold In Splatoon 3’s ‘Grand Festival’ Splatfest

So long, and thanks for all the squids.

Update : After a whopping 72 hours of end-to-end splatting, Splatoon 3‘s Grand Festival Splatfest has found its champion.

Team Past walked away with the win in this one, pulling in an impressive 500p which left it head and shoulders above the competition. Team Present landed in second place with 370p, while Team Future brought up the rear with 0p.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Looks Like Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Is Finally Coming to PS5

A rating for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide on PlayStation 5 suggests Fatshark’s co-op focused looter shooter is finally coming to Sony’s console.

Darktide launched on PC first in November 2022, before coming out in October 2023 on Xbox Series X and S and straight into Game Pass. Perhaps a PS5 release is set for October 2024, which, if true, would come one year after the game’s launch on Microsoft’s subscription service. Gematsu spotted the Darktide rating in Taiwan.

While Darktide launched with a number of problems, Fatshark has continued to update the game and on Steam it now sits on a ‘mostly positive’ recent user review rating, with an overall rating of ‘mixed.’ Improvements were made to everything from progression to performance, with the loot system and crafting complketely reworked. Darktide’s next big free update is called Unlocked and Loaded, and launches September 26.

It’s busy times in the world of Warhammer 40,000 video games, with Saber Interactive’s Space Marine 2 breaking Steam concurrent records for the setting. Darktide, on the other hand, puts the perspective in first-person and lets players become one of four classes, none of which is a Space Marine: a Veteran, Zealot, Ogryn, and Psyker.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Satisfactory 1.0 review: yes, it is

I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute – now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.

Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.

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Resident Evil and No More Heroes creators join long list of devs who think Metacritic is bad for game dev

Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda – of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame – reckons a focus on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently alongside survival horror genre maker-upper Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform’s cultural cache.

“Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game,” Suda51 told Gi.biz.

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Splatoon 3 Regular Updates to End 2 Years After Launch, Nintendo Says

Switch exclusive Splatoon 3 will no longer receive regular updates, Nintendo has announced.

Nintendo signaled the end of these updates for the Switch exclusive in a tweet that reassured players that the game will remain online, and that Splatoween, Frosty Fest, Spring Fest, and Summer Nights will continue with some returning themes. That suggests fans will get four seasonal Splatfests a year from now on.

Updates for weapon adjustments will be released “as needed,” and Big Run, Eggstra Work, and Monthly Challenges “will continue for the time being.”

Nintendo’s announcement comes two years after Splatoon 3, a third-person team-based shooter that revolves around firing ink-based weapons, launched on Nintendo Switch. As of the end of March 2024, Splatoon 3 had sold an impressive 11.96 million copies.

The end of regular updates for Splatoon 3 comes ahead of Nintendo’s hotly anticipated reveal of its next-generation console. Nintendo has indicated the Switch 2, as it’s called by the community, won’t be released before April 2025. Given the popularity of the Splatoon franchise, it seems likely that another game in the series will be released at some point.

While Nintendo has yet to say anything about the Switch 2 itself, it has said it expects to have plenty of stock available for launch, which in turn will hopefully combat scalping. Recent alleged details on the power of the Switch 2 weren’t the first rumors to spread about Nintendo’s new console. Other allegedly leaked details have suggested that the device will feature magnetic versions of the Joy-Cons and maybe even let players use their old controllers. If these recent rumors are to be believed, you’ll also be able to enjoy your physical and digital games on the Switch 2, including Splatoon 3.

For more on what may eventually become the Switch 2, you can read everything else we know about the company’s next console.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

This action roguelite’s demo has more stuff in it than some full games, plus some very good goblins

For all the nightmarish enshittification modern life throws at us, we can at least feel warm and fulfilled about the resurgence of demos. Bountifully they await on Steam, like a friendly worker offering you toothpick-skewered cheese chunks at your local supermarket. And, oh, would you look at that: this cheese has some guns in it. Deeply customisable guns! SULFUR is a shooty roguelike with some excellent goblins and a deep RPG equipment system. And, if the Steam reviews are to be believed, some players are squeezing out dozens of hours from the demo alone.

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