Concord lives! Or, lived, as community efforts to revive it already appear to be on hold after some DMCA strikes

I do have to admit that bringing up Concord feels like digging up a dead dog that perished in a horrendous, preventable accident, but it feels important given how quickly it died and what the means for how we engage with it. You see, it seems that this week the largely panned hero shooter was revived through community-run custom servers. Except it seems like this may be over before it truly begins.

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XDefiant was apparently born from the ashes of a Splinter Cell game being made by the team behind Dispatch

The leads behind the, potentially surprisingly, hit superhero game Dispatch, AdHoc Studio, have been all over the place. Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, some pretty notable names, but today we’re honing in on their time at Ubisoft in particular. That’s because a recent report that dives into the long story that led AdHoc to making Dispatch revealed that before doing so, they were working on a completely new Splinter Cell game at Ubisoft.

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Cyber bunny shooter Cicadamata reminds me of nu-Marathon and Jumping Flash and has a flipping cool shotgun

Cicadamata” – yes the rogue apostrophes are part of the official title, yes I will exclude them in future because they make my thalamus itch – is one of those games that makes me incandescently sorry I didn’t spend the past 20 years studying graphics design so that I could, for example, tell you what exactly is going on with that icecream bar HUD, those landscapes of bright diodes and cubes sliding through checkerboard obelisks, those twirling android digits, that wrist-rolling Muji paperweight of a shotgun.

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Black Ops 7 single-player doesn’t allow pausing or mission checkpoints on top of being always-online

The rough beast that is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has cracked its shell and slouched towards the wincing light of day. They’ve released it, I mean. No verdict from us yet: our reviewer is still picking their way among the exploding motorbikes and mocking spectres of deceased Nicaraguan terrorists. But I can at least tell you with some confidence that if you’re a fan of pausing games or mid-mission checkpoints, you might want to give it a miss.

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The sanitisation of Skate reminds me how far counterculture has fallen and how hard it can be to stay inspired

I remember having a chat with my old barber last year about the Skate trailer. We weren’t concerned with the popular gripes. We were just stoked to record new edits and re-enter the classic Skate flowstate on a new engine that would hopefully have more grounded physics. My barber happened to be the frontman of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore band All 4 All. This was a punk rock barbershop, and fittingly, we both shared a fixation on landing tricks in Skate 3 as sketchy as possible.

To land sketchy is to land imperfectly, to look as if not in control. The leather jacket-wearing, kitchen-tattooing pro skaters in Baker, Zero, and Emerica videos were famous for making sketchy look really cool in the early 00s. I no longer live in Syracuse, but I imagine my old barber (shout out Sam, hope you’re well) is just as disappointed as I that the new Skate doesn’t even allow players to land sketchy.

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Tomb Raider developers Crystal Dynamics make yet more layoffs, with”just under 30″ workers losing their jobs

Tomb Raider developers Crystal Dynamics have announced another round of layoffs, their third round of jobs cuts this year. The studio say “just under 30 team members across various departments and projects” are losing their livelihoods, and claim this is necessary “to optimize the continued development of our flagship Tomb Raider game, as well as shaping the rest of the studio to make new games for the future”.

This year alone had already seen Crystal Dynamics lay off staff in two waves, with 17 employees being let go in March and an unspecified number of others handed their marching orders in August.

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Misery devs claim they’ve resolved “misunderstanding” with Stalker studio GSC Game World, as shooter returns to Steam

Post-apocalyptic survival shooter Misery’s Steam page is back online, with developers Platypus Entertainment claiming that they’ve resolved a “misunderstanding” which led to an alleged DMCA takedown from Stalker creators GSC Game World. Platypus say that as part of this apparent resolution, they’ve removed a helicopter model, some guitar songs, and references to GSC’s games from their game at the request of the Stalker studio.

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Euro Truck Simulator 2’s Nordic Horizons expansion finally delivers its cargo later this month

Start using maps to check out service stations in Scandinavia, as Euro Truck Simulator 2‘s Nordic Horizons expansion is set to release on November 27th.

This DLC was announced back in January 2024, and as it shuffles out of SCS Software’s ever-busy DLC pipeline, it’ll leave some coaches and a recently revealed trip to Ireland waiting in the traffic queue. The devs have also been doing plenty of cool existing area revamps.

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MacVulpes InCulkin stares at a guy spitting blood, as Fallout season 2’s latest trailer sets up many family searches

Ok, before you get angry, all I know is that the Home Alone guy’s playing someone either in Caesar’s Legion or who dresses as a member of Caesar’s Legion, not that he’s nailed on to be wolf hat bloke. I just liked the headline. Now that disclaimer’s out of the way, Amazon’s Fallout TV series has gotten another trailer ahead of its December 17th debut.

As previous trailers have outlined, this chain of episodes is set in NEW VEGAS. That’s NEW VEGAS, the setting of obscure 2010 RPG Fallout: NEW VEGAS. There are characters, factions and things from NEW VEGAS, which the established cast will be interacting with because they’re heading to NEW VEGAS. Capische?

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