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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There is always a risk with a live service game, or any game with only competitive elements, that it enters the Cool For Some Zone. This is a space that exists within a given game and also around it, a place where you can pull off Sick Tricks as a result of movement tech not purposefully included in the game, but born as an incidental result of mashing buttons in just the right way. And until today, Marathon found itself in said zone, but Bungie have made the call to patch out the offending issue.

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Well, the time has finally come. After releasing almost a decade ago, The Long Dark finally wraps things up today with today's release of Wintermute's fifth and final episode, The Light at the End of All Things. It's been a long time coming (the free episode update was originally slated for the end of 2025), but it marks the end of a tough, cold journey. Sorry, what's that? It's "not the end, but also an end"? Oh, my mistake!

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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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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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Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don't want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there's Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn't think such jank should be geologically categorised.

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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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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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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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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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STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting its first proper expansion this year, titled Cost of Hope, and it looks stuffed to its icky mutant gills with classic STALKER series beats that the base game – while a powerfully engrossing survival FPS – missed out on. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant returns as an explorable, doubtless horrible addition to the game’s open world, and the story concerns the conflict between the rival Freedom and Duty factions that’s been simmering since the original STALKER.

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I dunno if you heard earlier this month, but PlayStation are reportedly breaking up with us PC folks, at least when it comes to the PS5's biggest singleplayer hitters. Asked where Returnal devs Housemarque's new game Saros - due out next month - fits into that, its director has opted to remain tight-lipped.

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Having re-launched Splitgate 2 as Spligate: Arena Reloaded late last year, 1047 Games have now kicked off early work on a new shooter. Details are scarce aside from the fact you'll be able to move around in it and that 1047 CEO Ian Proulx reckons it should appeal to fans of Titanfall and Call of Duty Blops 3. Oh, and that you can sign-up for to playtest it now.

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Up until Bethesda's announcement that it'll be getting some robot army DLC next month and the yassification of its faces by Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech, I'd not thought about seeing how Starfield's modding scene is getting on for a little while. That's now changed, because they've finally gotten seamless custom animations working.

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Following Epic Games' mass layoffs, a Fortnite producer has said that the devs left behind "cannot even fully understand" the sort of impact the job cuts will have on the game during this year and into the future.

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Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.

Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".

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Around the turn of the new year, Fallout: London developers Team FOLON teased plans to drop the second of the brilliantly British Fallout 4 mod's second DLC in early 2026, assuming no hiccups got in the way of those plans. Sadly, it seems that's exactly what's happened, necessitating the "skeletal crew" still working on the mod to push Last Orders beyond a projected April release window.

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