Bellular posts
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Daily Briefing: Monday 14th March
Square Enix Seek Feedback On Babylon’s FallSquare Enix have launched a survey to gather feedback on making a “better game experience” for Babylon’s Fall, specifically asking about the visual aspects of the game. This seems completely tone-deaf. Your live service action game launches to a PS5 Metacritic score of 42 and you ask about its graphical style after already revamping it entirely before launch? What about the fact it’s a full pri...
Daily Briefing: Wednesday 9th March
Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary Site LIVE... And A Stranger Of Paradise Demo SoonAhead of tonight’s State of Play, Square Enix have launched a site celebrating FF’s 35th anniversary. Right now, the two projects on the page are Stranger of Paradise and Chocobo GP, but under “New Titles” it says “And More...”. That’s a heavy hint towards State of Play announcements of Final Fantasy titles tonight, perhaps 7’s Part 2, or maybe the Gef...
Daily Briefing: Tuesday 8th March
A Japanese Publisher-Focused State Of Play Tomorrow!Sony have announced a State of Play, lasting about 20 minutes, will be on Wednesday, March 9th, at 2pm PT/5pm ET/10pm GMT. It’ll focus on “highlighting great games” from Playstation’s partner Japanese publishers, but will feature some updates from “other developers located around the world”. Bandai Namco, Square Enix & Capcom are the most likely to drop major updates, especially with...
Daily Briefing: Monday 7th March
A State Of Play Due This MonthWith the release of PlayStation’s first two major titles of the year, Horizon and Gran Turismo 7, a State of Play is allegedly coming as soon as this week to highlight the near-future of the platform. However, it’s claimed it may be delayed until the end of the month due to the industry’s reaction to the invasion of Ukraine. Ghostwire: Tokyo, God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are their next major exclusi...
Daily Briefing: Friday 4th March
Gran Turismo 7’s Microtransactions Are Heavy: Cars Costing $30+Gran Turismo 7’s microtransaction costs were unavailable during early previews, but now that they’ve gone live, the ‘credit bundles’ are raising eyebrows. Credits are currency earned in-game that can be topped up for real money in the store, and cars can range from tens of thousands all the way up to 3 million. The credit bundles come in between $2.49 for 100,000 and $19.99 ...
Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd March
PlatinumGames’ Babylon’s Fall Has Released To CricketsSquare Enix’s next attempt at a live service following the disastrous Marvel’s Avengers has released today.... to zero fanfare. Impressions across players of the demo are profoundly negative: “EXACTLY What I Feared”, “Depressingly Bad”, “It WASN’T Very Good...”. and more. At time of writing, despite being available on PS5, it has only 2 critic reviews, one unscored and th...
Daily Briefing: Wednesday 2nd March
GMG Union On StrikeUnion workers at Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and The Root are striking. The GMG Union has made proposals to G/O Media’s counsel five times, but rather than counterproposals, they have been sidestepped and delayed each time. They’re striking on 6 specific things: Refusing to codify healthcare improvements, paying too little to retain talent, not providing family leave, insisting on a return to the office d...
Daily Briefing: Tuesday 1st March
Steam Deck owners are reporting stick driftIn a video shared to Reddit, one user showed the test controller input screen to prove that their right stick was already drifting - they clearly let go and reset the stick to neutral, but the screen is showing input values, the same issue that has been affecting most modern controllers and most notably on the Switch’s joycons. This is despite Valve’s claims last year that they did everything in thei...
Daily Briefing: Monday 28th February
GabeN Spotted Hand-Delivering Steam Decks (And Giving Some Away!)Valve boss Gabe Newell has been spotted doing what seems like Steam promotion in Seattle, hand-delivering signed Steam Decks to customers in the area while followed by a camera crew. Multiple reddit accounts have shared stories of this, including one who claimed that they spotted him, shouted “Hi Gabe!” as he was delivering to his neighbour’s house, only for Gabe to bring over...
Daily Briefing: Friday 25th February
Elden Ring’s Launch On PC Is A Disaster, But... Still Incredible?Elden Ring’s launch on PC has hit a peak player count of 764,835 - six times higher than the previous series’ peak with Dark Souls 3. However, it’s currently sitting with 40% of reviews as negative, primarily down to performance issues on PC - frame rate problems, an egregious stuttering issue that Digital Foundry claims is down to FromSoft’s poor use of DirectX 12, and ev...
Daily Briefing: Thursday 24th February
Christian Dailey Leaves BioWare - Another Leader DownIn an update posted by BioWare General Manager Gary McKay, Dragon Age 4 is currently in “Production”, with a full pre-production blueprint that the team understand and are focused on turning into a game. They’re sad to see Dailey go, but understand that the industry is changing and sometimes, people want something new - Twitter sentiment among devs is that he’s moving on happily and lef...
Daily Briefing: Tuesday 22nd February
Bethesda Are Sunsetting Their PC Launcher - Moving To Steam!In a surprise move, Bethesda have announced they’re winding down their own launcher and moving their library to Steam - including transferring licenses for existing Bethesda.net customers. Starting in early April, players will be able to migrate games and Wallet to their Steam account. Bethesda.net accounts will still be required for some games, and the account will remain intact, but ...
Daily Briefing: Thursday 17th February
EA Internally Blame Halo Infinite For Some Of BF2042’s PerformanceIn a town hall post-mortem of Battlefield 2042 reported by Tom Henderson, EA’s Chief Studios Officer Laura Miele admitted that Battlefield failed to meet the expectations of both the players and EA. They generally believe that the issues were brought on by the massive development time on Frostbite updates and moving BF2042 to a new version of it, the impact from the pandemic, a...
Daily Briefing: Wednesday 16th February
Apologies for a lack of Daily Briefing yesterday, patrons! This one is a bit larger to make up for anything you may have missed.The Witcher 3’s Director Has A New StudioKonrad Tomaszkiewicz left CDPR last year after being accused of bullying, accusations that he denied - and after a months-long investigation, he was determined not guilty. Still, he resigned, and now he helms his own studio in Warsaw. Rebel Wolves consists of ex-CDPR staff inclu...
Daily Briefing: Monday 14th February
Horizon: Forbidden West Reviews Are InReviews are in, and it’s sitting pretty at 89 across OpenCritic and Metacritic. A throughline across reviews is that it’s an incredible improvement on the original in almost every way. Eurogamer, among others, were a little less impressed by story and characters, some criticism focuses on it feeling unfocused and more varied than makes sense, and some suggests that the RPG elements aren’t particularly u...
LOOT! February 2022
Yes, we've all got the hots for Dandelion ;)We're about to launch with out new fulfilment partner, which is going to make shipping etc significantly faster! December 2021 is shipping to them now, and January 2022 will ship to them next week. February 2022 will ship March 4th - 6th, with that timing holding for all future months.
We've Got A NEW Studio!
The work begins!
Daily Briefing: Thursday 10th February
Microsoft are keeping an eye on Activision Blizzard’s executive leadershipThat’s according to Microsoft president Brad Smith who, speaking in a new interview with CNBC, confirmed that the company want to greatly improve the work culture at Activision Blizzard. To do this, Smith says, the right people need to be in charge: “I think if there’s one thing that we’ve learned about addressing issues like sexual harassment or almost any issue ...
Daily Briefing: Wednesday 9th February
FromSoftware are fixing that Dark Souls PC exploitA wee while ago we reported on a dangerous Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit currently plaguing the PC version of Dark Souls III. The potential security vulnerability could be exploited by abusers and used to gain access to other players’ PCs, at which point they could do anything from install malware to steal personal data. We learned from various community commentary that exploits of this ki...
Daily Briefing: Tuesday 8th February
There’s a Nintendo Direct tomorrowAh, this is always an oddly fun little piece of new to give. Nintendo will hold a new Nintendo Direct presentation tomorrow, Wednesday 9th February, at 5pm EST/2pm PST. The presentation, the first since September 2021, will cover any number of things across its 40-minute runtime. Nintendo’s upcoming Switch-centric lineup (RIP the 3DS) includes games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-...
Daily Briefing: Monday 7th February
Loads of Dying Light 2 fixes are coming this weekZombie survival sandbox Dying Light 2: Stay Human may be one of the biggest games of the year but that doesn’t mean its launch last week was entirely without incident. While the game is by all accounts a solid blockbuster action sequel, it’s still a AAA game releasing in the year 2022 and so it has its fair share of bugs, glitches, and crashes. That’s not ideal by any means, but developers Te...
Legion’s Doomsayer Mystery Has Blown My Mind
Remember the doomsayers? Two expansions later, they've been SOLVED! We know what they're talking about - and they've been setting up the next step for Warcraft the whole time.
Daily Briefing: Friday 4th February
There’s a mobile Warcraft game coming this yearSpeaking in their most recent earnings report published this week (there was no actual earnings call due to the proposed Microsoft acquisition), the company stated that at least one F2P mobile Warcraft titles is set to release before the end of this year. This follows on from Activision Blizzard’s confirmation last year that “multiple” F2P Warcraft experiences were deep in development. As far...
Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd February
Skate 4 is reportedly “launching soon”That’s straight from the mouth of EA CEO Andrew Wilson who, speaking earlier this week in EA’s most recent earnings call, let slip a few key details. When discussing User-Generated Content, Wilson outlines that it’s been at the very centre of modes like Ultimate Team (Madden, FIFA, etc.) and that it will also be at the centre of Skate 4, which is “launching soon.” Well, it turns out that the new...
Dragons Are More Important Than We Thought
10.0 is (almost definitely) going to be about dragons. Why? The Age of Dragons ended in Cataclysm, right? Nope. New knowledge, and a second look at history, proves they’ve always been more important than even they know.
Daily Briefing: Wednesday 2nd February
PlayStation will launch 10 liveservice games in the next few yearsThat’s according to Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki who, speaking in the company’s most recent earnings call, outlined that “through close collaboration with Bungie and the PlayStation Studios, we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 31 2026.” As we know, liveservice games are fairly commonplace these days, and Totoki credits a recent jump in...
Daily Briefing: Tuesday 1st February
Sony are buying BungieNot to be outdone by Microsoft’s seemingly bottomless wallet, Sony this week announced that they will be acquiring Bungie - the original Halo developers and creators of Destiny - in a deal worth around $3.6bn. In a new writeup announcing the acquisition, Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan that Bungie will be “an independent subsidiary” of SIE when the deal closes, and that they will remain a mult...
Daily Briefing: Friday 28th January
Hitman 3 Steam owners get free upgrades following messy launchThe Hitman trilogy (the new one, not the old one) is a bit of an odd duck. The games have released to fairly universal commercial and critical acclaim despite the fact that developers IO Interactive have seemingly been making every misstep known to man. They caused a bit of a stink last year when Hitman managed to launch with DRM on GOG.com, a historically and philosophically DRM-free ...
The Heart of Azeroth Is Their Key
N'zoth's whispers told us more than we knew at the time. When we make our way to Zereth Mortis, we're going to smuggle the Void in too.
Daily Briefing: Thursday 27th January
Ubisoft Singapore investigation concludesAccording to new findings shared by Ubisoft, an external watchdog investigation into reports of misconduct at Ubisoft’s Singapore studio has confirmed that all allegations were handled appropriately. Last summer the TAFEP, which is Singapore’s watchdog for fair employment practices, launched an investigation into the widespread and incredibly well-documented allegations of workplace harassment at the s...
