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Visual Concepts Austin, the 2K Games studio behind sports franchises including WWE and NBA, as well as last year’s kart racing game Lego 2K Drive, has reportedly laid off a number of employees. The cuts come fewer than six months after the last round of layoffs at the Texas outlet.
After years without a new The Sims game, it seems like three are likely to land in fairly close proximity – sort of, anyway. We know that Paradox’s ambitious competitor Life By You will arrive this June (assuming no more delays), while EA’s own free-to-play evolution of the OG life-sim series – currently codenamed Project Rene rather than The Sims 5 – is probably still a while off yet. Dropping somewhere in the middle will be Paralives, the promising Patreon-funded up-and-comer led by indie dev Alex Massé, which has been given a fresh look and confirmation of a release date sometime next year.
Good news, star admirals with decent CPM! Gearbox and Blackbird Interactive’s strategy escapade Homeworld 3 has a demo on Steam. It’s been live for a few days, actually, but whether due to the bombardment of other Steam Fest goodies or my being led astray by the similar-but-nerdier Nebulous: Fleet Command, I didn’t try it till last night. The demo includes a tutorial mission, four maps and the War Games mode, a one-to-three player affair which essentially turns Homeworld into a roguelike – pitching you up against unpredictable opposition while unlocking new fleets and doling out Artifacts that augment your vessels.
If you played and liked last year’s excellent slice-of-life adventure A Space For The Unbound, stop what you’re doing and go and download the Steam Next Fest demo for Until Then. Go on, I’ll wait. Right, sorted? Let’s continue. Like A Space For The Unbound, Until Then is a coming of age story where the ups and downs of everyday high school life start intermingling with strange, supernatural occurences.
The latest Counter-Strike 2 update re-introduces Arms Race, a beloved multiplayer mode from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in which players level up and are handed new guns as they moider each other, with victory going to the player who levels all the way up and performs a final knifekill.
I’ve played many variations of this mode – which was originally a mod, Gun Game – over the years in other games, and it’s always a laugh, for the simple reason that it can be tuned to allow less proficient FPS players to catch up with their brethren, by introducing less powerful or harder-to-master weapons at certain levels as “speed bumps”.
The latest major Palworld update is live, fixing a range of crash and save data bugs while also addressing a glitch which saw your much-abused indentured munsters falling into an eternal slumber when assigned to a Pal breeding farm. I continue to wonder how much of Palworld is deliberate satire.
I created God pretty early on, though not until I’d first created the Big Bang and, even earlier, Batman. This is the kind of thing you can do in Infinite Craft, a browser game in which you can seemingly craft anything, and in which it’s glorious, time-stealing fun to try.
A Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, currently called “Project Orion”, is currently in the early stages of development at CD Projekt Red’s new Boston studio. Today, CDPR announced several new high profile hires were joining the project, most notably Anna Megill. Megill, who will serve as lead writer on the project, has previously worked on games such as Control, Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider, and the upcoming Fable reboot.
Dusky Depths – what a pleasant name for a game. It makes me think of sleepy suburban soap operas, slightly worrying brands of shampoo or chocolate, and easy listening radio shows on long-haul train journeys. It doesn’t make me think of getting vapourised by laser beams in an exoplanetary cave system, which is what happened when I gave the demo a try.
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Ubisoft Singapore’s piracy sim Skull And Bones started development in 2013, and during the subsequent decade-and-change it has seemingly collided with every possible reef in the ocean of videogame production, undergoing a series of delays, reboots and staff departures. Perhaps it will take you the same amount of time to sail across it: this is Ubisoft’s “biggest open world” offering, in the words of former creative director Elisabeth Pellen.
