2025

Six years ago, a bunch of former BioWare, Blizzard, and Riot developers formed Elodie to work on a game that eventually became Seekers of Skyveil, a novel blend of MOBA action and the extraction format made popular by games like Escape From Tarkov. The team at PC Gamer had positive things to say about it,…

It’s been one heck of a week for serious Valve news, thanks largely to founder Monica Harrington’s new GDC talk about the company’s early days. So I thought it was perhaps time for a palate cleanser: What’s Gabe Newell up to? Well, when he’s not fighting off sharks in South Africa, or tootling around on…

In a talk at San Francisco’s Game Developer’s Conference on Friday, Like a Dragon series director Ryosuke Horii said something simple out loud that I wish more big RPGs truly took to heart: the balance between the “main” narrative and its side stories is what it’s all about. Ask a dozen Like a Dragon fans…

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, the second or maybe third-best game in Bethesda’s long-running Elder Scrolls RPG series, turned 19 yesterday. In Canada, 19th birthdays are traditionally a very big deal: 19 is the legal drinking age in most of the country, and so you can imagine how the celebrations typically go. But in the…

One of this year’s most interesting GDC talks was delivered by Monica Harrington, a founding member of Valve and the company’s first chief marketing officer, who went over her history with the company that brought us Half-Life and Steam. There’s so much in Harrington’s career and memories to pick out, but a notable anecdote which…

Almost every element of Helldivers 2 is dripping with satire. The voice lines, story, and even individual armor pieces parody patriotism while telling a story of what could happen if corrupt governmental systems ran amuck. Well, everything except the music. “It’s jingoism, but it’s amplified with uplifting modern synth productions, and without suggesting any nuance…

You’d be forgiven for thinking REPO is a lot like Lethal Company. Both games involve fetching precious objects, hiding from things that go bump in the night, working cooperatively as nigh-identical, disposable grunts, and hollering over voice chat when things inevitably go wrong. Both games are also overnight phenomena, with REPO scrambling to adjust to…

Destiny 2 has had a turbulent history—it’s a game that, since its release in 2017, has seen many ups, downs, and outright blunders. So a GDC talk from one of Bungie’s developers titled “Rescuing a Playerbase from the Doldrums” could apply to any number of periods throughout the game’s life. At this talk specifically, though,…