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Ok, so you remember how Stellar Blade arrived on PC and immediately there were more smutty mods than you could shake a fleshy stick at?
Well, the new Zone Kit modding tools Stalker 2 got as part of yesterday’s big patch have done something similar, but with memey jank.
French studio Don’t Nod have laid off workers across multiple departments. The full number is unconfirmed, but multiple affected staff have posted about their departures on LinkedIn, including Lost Records: Bloom & Rage principal cinematic artist Mary Pouliot, technical artist Laurent Dufrense, and QA lead Sandra Cormier.
It’s been a rocky year or so for Don’t Nod’s staff. Last September, the studio paused two unannounced games and said they’re altering others, also unannounced, to be more appealing to a “wider audience”, following warnings about an 11% decline in operating revenue for the first half of 2024. Chairman and CEO Oskar Guilbert attributed this to (the excellent) Jusant and Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden performing “well below expectations” commercially.
Kindly Father Internet has dispensed a few new details for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, Rogue Trader dev Owlcat’s recently announced RPG adaptation of the sci-fi book and TV show series. It sounds like it’s operating within the fine tradition of spin-off stories that are always a step behind or a room across from the live action celebrities.
I refer to games like The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, in which the noble human ranger Alsogorn, the stout dwarven warrior Simarli, the shieldmaiden Eowynnish and the other members of the Followship of the Ring pitch in with Gandalf, Faramir and co in scenes that might have been lifted from Petey Jackson’s cutting room floor. Except that turning the Balrog bridge fight into a five-way Final Fantasy slapfest is just naff.
Thilmann had always sneered at apocalyptic portents. Comfort blankets, he thought. The warming wool of fire and brimstone and an end to all that is and will ever be, pulled up over arrogant fools, shivering from just having come to terms with their own mortality, afeared they’d miss out on the important parts. It is the ultimate comfort, he always said, to believe that you’ll tie with creation at the finish line, celestial mechanisms sputtering out in time with your own squishy innards. And yet, he could not help himself sensing finality on the wind. Louder even, it seemed, than the goading arena crowd about them.
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Today’s lineup is stacked. Two big hits from the Lies of P series are on deep discount over at Fanatical, and there’s a shiny preorder deal for Borderlands 4 with multiple editions up for grabs. If you’re itching for fresh horror-laced action or chaotic looter-shooting, you’re in luck. Use the FANATICAL15 code and you can scoop both Lies titles for under $26 each, which is downright criminal given how much content they pack in.
A work-in-progress version of Dune: Awakening‘s first big post-release patch is now testable on Steam, so you can hop in and check out the changes Funcom’s making early doors before it rolls out for everyone in a few weeks.
A bunch of the changes the game’s devs teased or confirmed during their recent AMA and letter to players haven’t found their way into the patch, or at least this early version. Though, you’ll at least be able to try out PvE in the Deep Desert, something folks have demanded en-masse.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl has a sizeable game update that promises to finally get the game’s A-Life system working as intended. For those just joining us – perhaps because you only popped into existence the second you entered my field of view – A-Life is developer GSC Game World’s noughties-era buzzword for the pervasive simulation of NPCs throughout the open world, leading to unpredictable interactions and conflicts and the general sense that things are happening without your input.
Elden Ring Nightreign’s next Enhanced boss is Fulghor, Champion of Nightglow, developers From Software have confirmed. You’ll be able to get your teeth into him from June 26th at 4pm central European summer time, 7am Pacific Daylight Time, or 11pm Japan Standard Time.
These timezone distinctions are meaningless, of course, because there is only one timezone in which Fulghor operates, and that timezone is Butt Kicking Time. He’s one of the co-op RPG’s harder scraps, and he’ll be all the worse for being Enhanced.
Back when Matt Nava was art director for glistering mountain pilgrimage Journey, he and his colleagues at thatgamescompany took a research expedition to California’s Pismo beach, a swathe of desert that rolls right up to the Pacific Ocean. The spectacle of land and ocean overlapping did a number on Nava. “It looks like the dunes of the Sahara, you know, these massive sand dunes,” he tells me. “But it’s a beach, and so the ocean is right there. And it’s amazing visually, because you have the waves of the ocean, and you have these sand dunes, which are wave shapes, and it’s so easy to imagine them moving just like the ocean.”
Following the announcement earlier this week that Riot-backed Minecrafty sandbox game Hytale has been cancelled, a former Hypixel Studios dev has claimed that internal friction and “mismanagement” at the studio are to blame.
Hytale had been in development for a decade when Hypixel co-founder Noxy revealed that it’d been canned in a website post on June 23, also revealing that the studio will be closing in a few months’ time. The game’s release had been pushed back a number of times since 2020.
