Get ready, Guardians! Bungie’s latest dev stream just gave us a sneak peek at Destiny 2: Revenant, dropping October 8, with new weapons, activities, and more!
On Twitter, Hi-Rez CEO Stewart Chisam, announced a restructuring effort of Hi-Rez Studios: Hi-Rez is making internal changes to ensure SMITE 2’s long-term success, which includes layoffs mainly in marketing, publishing, and game development teams focused on cosmetic content. The company is shifting focus to gameplay development for SMITE 2, prioritizing new modes and gods. Decisions like these are very difficult, but it does show that it looks like Hi-Rez is going all in on SMITE 2. To that effect, we’ve recently launched our revamped SMITE 2 Tier List and will be refocusing all of our SMITE efforts towards SMITE 2 to align with Hi-Rez’s roadmap and to help support a studio not only local to our parent company, but a studio that has delighted our readers for the last 5+ years with SMITE 1. We will continue to update our SMITE 1 tier list as well, as long as…
It seemed like Helldivers 2 was unstoppable but midway through 2024 it has fallen down to where Bloons TD 6 and Fallout 76 rest on the charts. This fall from the top wasn’t really from any single incident, but a collection of decisions that consistently drove player counts down from the unexpected hype of its release. You may think the account linking fiasco is what destroyed the player counts, but the game was actually in free fall long before then: HELLDIVERS™ 2 – Steam Charts. The problems were not only fundamental to the game’s design but the developers and publisher both didn’t rectify the obvious game issues rapidly enough before they lost the vast majority of players due to attrition. Note: This is only notable due to the anomalous nature of Helldivers 2 holding a strong player population for an extended period of time and then losing it, not specifically…
A X (formally Twitter) user transcribed comments from a recent “StockWatch” episode where Piotr Nielubowicz provided commentary about single player microtransactions. He made the comment that he doesn’t see them for single player games, but multiplayer it would make sense. https://twitter.com/JuiceHead33/status/1773750640797175941?s=20 We do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of single-player games, but we do not rule out that we will use this solution in the future in the case of multiplayer projects. Piotr Nielubowicz, Chief Financial Officer i Karolina Gnaś, VP ds. relacji inwestorskich CD Projekt SA – start 29 marca o godz. 11:00 (stockwatch// .pl) Community Reaction Reaction to this has been positive. With the recent backlash against Dragon’s Dogma 2’s single player MTX, it only makes sense that the community looks for leaders to make bold statements about MTX within their games. Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher III both only had cosmetic and expansion…
Players in the popular MMORPG FFXIV have been reporting Xbox account bans for using the term “Free Company” within the game’s online chat. This comes after the successful launch of FFXIV on Xbox which has enjoyed top spot in the free games category. The general thought behind this is that “Free Company” is much like “Free Roblox” or “Free Nitro” used by scammers, flagging accounts for Microsoft account bans. A popular thread on Reddit was one of the first to expose this: “Free Company” is the name of guilds in FFXIV, so this comes as quite a shock that it’s possible for the term to trigger bans. So far this seems to be limited, with a few reports of this occurring, but still, something to watch. Users Impacted by “Free Company” Beyond the main Reddit post, users on Twitter have reported similar issues: Per the advice in the thread, probably…
It seems that G/O Media, owner of Kotaku, has made the transition to AI content. This in turn has alienated the editorial staff who have taken to social media along with their union. The use of AI generative text is currently extremely controversial, with Gaming Tier List parent owner Yurika Corporation banning its use on all properties. There’s a lot of reasons for that, which we’ll get into, but first let’s get the information from the source. Relevant Tweet What Is G/O Media Doing and What Does AI Mean? We need to be really fair here for a moment and explain what the business, G/O Media, is saying instead of focusing on the hype. What they’re arguing is that they’ve begun using generative text to create articles that are reviewed and fact checked by an editor. The editor then approves the post to go live, assuming that it has been…
Everything from Final Fantasy XVI to Path of Exile are having their conventions return to their regular cadence. During 2020-2022 it was rather rough for travel and events. Now, in 2023, it seems that more and more games are returning to their yearly fan meet-ups. That’s awesome! To celebrate, this year’s Final Fantasy FXIV Fan Festival is rather awesome: You get a small tote, some nice pins and a stress ball of grapes. This joke is not only rather neato but it also is a return to the things that make the video game community awesome. For some context, some grapes in FFXIV had bugged out and were rendering in their low-polygonal version. A lot of games will derender an asset the further you are from it since you can’t see the fidelity. In this instance, the game wasn’t properly rendering the grapes. It’s neat that games are returning back…
Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…
Starfield’s physical drama has been resolved, with Bethesda quietly updating their storage page to denote that the game disc will be included with the Xbox release. PC release will get a code in the box, which to be fair – is fair. In order to use a CD I’d have to trust it, first of all and then second I’d need to use my USB CD/DVD reader which I’ve lost. This concludes the weekend’s drama we covered earlier where they took back a post saying that there would be no disc with the physical release of the game. That is the story it seems. Except there’s more unanswered questions. Will the collector’s edition come with a disc (the likely answer is no since they call out specifically the standard edition). Then there’s like, can the game fit on a disc? Like will a single disc hold it, will be a…
It looks like the developers from Escape from Tarkov have had it with dataminers. Dataminers have been plaguing the Escape from Tarkov’s development team for a while now, but it looks like it’s gotten to the point where they’re releasing an official statement and looking to take action against those who do it. As a reminder, this is a PvP only game, so any kind of unfair advantage isn’t cool. Battlestate Games has made it clear in their statement that they won’t tolerate data mining anymore in their game. The community response is mixed. They don’t want cheaters, but it looks like some information is really desired. There’s a lot of back and forth in the 980+ replies including some of the wiki editors who got caught in a ban getting unbanned: That’s kind of a wild saga to follow. Escape from Tarkov is $49.99 as a pre-order currently with…