Resident Evil director, Devil May Cry producer and former Tango Gameworks boss Shinji Mikami is now making games for Shift Up, developers of Stellar Blade. You know, the one with the shiny bums and quite good hack-and-slash mechanics. The one that has a DLC version of 2B off've Nier Automata (pictured). Shift Up have acquired Mikami's new company Unbound, which he founded in 2022 after leaving Tango.

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I'll be honest right off the bat. As a single player Elder Scroller, the Elder Scrolls Online's never managed to hook me for more than a few hours. I've given it a couple of goes, usually during periods when it's gone free to play, but have always bounced off its vast MMOiness. Might the slew of fresh additions coming across the next couple of years be able to change that and finally convince me to spend significant time with ESO in the same way I have Fallout 76 in the past few years? The answer could be yes, if the naval combat and underwater exploration Zenimax have just revealed are as fun as they sound on paper.

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Ho, wasteland packmules and sticky-fingered ornithologists! Embark have released a sizeable Arc Raiders update. Titled Flashpoint, it introduces a new shotgun, SMG and deployable together with a Close Scrutiny map condition, a fresh breed of Arc enemy, some cosmetic bundles, and a feeding boost for Scrappy the loot chicken, which will cause him to dig up a wider variety of more valuable items. As warned, they've also permitted all those awful Shredder things from Stella Montis to infest the other maps.

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Well, that's certainly a bold strategy. Mark Gerhard, CEO of MindsEye developers Build a Rocket Boy, has said that the studio are indeed planning to add a new mission to the game which will "share some of the evidence of the sabotage". That'd be the sabotage from a malevolent third party which the exec's been alleging MindsEye faced around launch for a while now, with Gerhard also claiming that an investigation into it is currently in the hands of "authorities" in the UK and US.

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A major French consumers group is taking Ubisoft to court over the publisher's ending of online support for The Crew in March 2024, rendering the notionally singleplayer-friendly open world racer unplayable. They're acting with the backing of the Stop Killing Games movement, who want publishers at large to stop yanking servers and taking games offline.

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Eidos Montreal, developers of the most recent two Deus Ex entries, have laid off 124 staff. At the same time, they've announced that they're "parting ways" with veteran studio head David Anfossi, who'd been in that post for just under 13 years.

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With the first few months of its latest target release year drawing to a close, the modders behind Skyblivion are looking to make some "final" and "vital" veteran additions to their team in order to get the ambitious remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine over the line. This comes after a delay late last year, which saw Skyblivion's arrival pushed to 2026, following some accusations from a former dev that it was being rushed out of the door.

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I know exactly who Kliff, the protagonist of Crimson Desert, is. During my romp through the vast expanse of Pywel, he was a distant tower enthusiast with a side interest in lonely locomotives. Aside from those things, he's rather bland. Though, the actor who played him has now outlined that throughout the game's regularly shifting development - which included a name change for its main character - he pushed Pearl Abyss to make the character more than just a stoic line-grumbler.

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An ancient, work-in-progress version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV has reportedly been discovered on an Xbox 360 development kit at a car boot sale, somewhere up Edinburgh way. Dating back to November 2007, about six months before the open world game's launch, it's said to contain a cut model for a Liberty City river ferry that once featured in a trailer.

While we only have the buyer's word that the development hardware - "a phat white Xbox 360 XDK with a Rockstar North label on it" - is legit, former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij has, at least, verified that GTA 4 was once supposed to have a ferry, though he doesn't have much to share about the presence of materials for what appears to be a canned GTA 4 zombie minigame. Cor!

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Much of the time, using social media is like fondling a wasp's nest, but sometimes, sometimes, social media is Nice. For example, Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning recently started a Bluesky thread "of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know". The replies and quote-posts include thoughts from people with credits on fairly big games.

Inevitably, they run the gamut of approachability. At one end of the spectrum, you have Apex Legends engineer Jay Stevens jauntily observing that "a navmesh is a very handy thing to have, even in a multiplayer game without NPCs", which I maybe half-understand, and sounds like it could be the opening to a Broadway song of some kind. More digestibly, you have former Marvel's Avengers and current Legacy of Orsinium developer Keano Raubun commenting that the "biggest bang for buck in (open world RPG) game writing will always be NPCs having funny ambient conversations amongst themselves".

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Epic Games' mass layoffs led a programmer with terminal brain cancer to lose his life insurance, leaving him and his family struggling to find new coverage. Following news of the situation breaking, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said the company have reached out to the programmer - Mike Prinke - and that they "will solve the insurance".

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Pearl Abyss' bashing of their massive open-world into a more palatable shape continues, with Crimson Desert's latest patch packing a bunch more tweaks to controls and adding some new animals to ride around on. It also looks to have begun swapping out those AI paintings the studio previously claimed were accidentally left in it on release, though the patch's wording around this change is fairly vague.

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The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It's an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren't just playing one way.

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It's been a little over a year since the release of Wanderstop, the debut game of Ivy Road, itself a studio made up of Stanley Parable, Gone Home, and Minecraft talent. Since then, the developer has been trying to find funding for its next game, Engine Angel, but in January announced that this had been unsuccessful, with layoffs taking place as a result. Now, the studio has announced that it is, unfortunately, shutting down.

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There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.

I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.

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Free-to-play tactical shooter PUBG: Blindspot is being shut down by developers Arc Team and publishers Krafton a whole couple of months into its early access career. Launched on February 5th, it will cease service on March 30th.

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Though there are things to love in Crimson Desert if you're open to hobbies like tower ogling or ghost train riding, the mammoth action adventure blob's story is arguably its biggest weakness. Well, aside from those AI paintings which were left in it on release. Developers Pearl Abyss, currently in the midst of trying to patch up a lot of the other holes players and critics have pointed out, have now made clear they're aware that their tale of people witrh grey manes fighting evil bears isn't the best.

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Snap. Up until now, that's been the sort of sound you only hear in Resident Evil Requiem when a spooky monster may or may not be sneaking up on you. Thanks to a new patch from Capcom, though, it could now also signify that you've just taken a cute photo of the spooky monster about to ruin Grace or Leon's day.

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As hinted at by previous peeks at it, which were set in 1915 and 1943, Like A Dragon devs RGG Studio are jumping around in time with their upcoming historical brawler Stranger than Heaven. They've confirmed via a fresh trailer that it's set in five different decades and, arguably more surprisingly, five different Japanese cities.

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The appearance of AI in art is nothing new, hell, Mr. Movies himself Steven Spielberg literally made A.I. Artificial Intelligence near the start of the millenia. But that was the Cool AI, where robots could be people, too, if we let them. Now what we have is the Donkey Bollocks AI that produces garbage facsimiles of things we know and actually like. But that doesn't mean it's not worth considering AI, and I really need you to bear with me here, within our art, as that's exactly what the team behind Pragmata did (without touching the stuff).

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