Skyrim stealth archers and NCR Ranger wannabes rejoice: I’m 45 hours into Avowed’s hardest difficulty as a glass cannon gunslinger and I’ve loved every minute of it

Avowed might be one of the best wizard games around, with exciting, strange spells translated from Pillars of Eternity into a zoomed-in, action format. It’s hard to pass up stuff like Pull of Eora, a souped-up Mass Effect Singularity that yoinks enemies into an anti-gravity whirlpool. But I’ve been on a ranger kick lately, and…

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Bobby Kotick says he’d never have raised World of Warcraft’s subscription by even a dollar because ‘it’s a prickly audience, you don’t wanna do too much to agitate them’

Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard, made a recent appearance on the Grit podcast discussing his career in videogames. One of the threads is Blizzard Entertainment, a studio that Kotick clearly feels is capable of best-in-class entertainment but also one that was in some respects mismanaged: This is, of course, from the perspective…

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Elden Ring Nightreign director didn’t want to ‘encroach too much’ on the lore fans hold sacred by including Dark Souls bosses, but admits ‘I thought it’d be kind of fun’

There’s no end to the lore-driven theorizing that the most devoted FromSoftware fans can spin out of the characters, item descriptions, and cut content of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and the developers know it. As I detailed in my big Elden Ring Nightreign explainer after playing the game in December, the new roguelike spin-off…

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Neil Druckmann wasn’t going to cast Laura Bailey in The Last of Us Part 2 because ‘she’s in everything,’ but changed his mind after studying her audition ‘frame-by-frame’

Laura Bailey is one of those prolific videogame actors whose voice you’ve probably heard whether or not you’ve heard her name. A few of Bailey’s recent credits include Marvel Rivals, World of Warcraft: The War Within, and Spider-Man 2. For that reason, Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann says the developer almost didn’t cast Bailey…

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Unreal Engine often gets flack for games running poorly or stuttering, but as Avowed demonstrates, it’s really about how devs use it and the pressures of time

Here’s a simple question for you: What do Black Myth: Wukong, Frostpunk 2, Palworld, Stalker 2, Tekken 8, Silent Hill 2, and Avowed all have in common? Yes, that’s right, they were all made using the game development package Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). Something that they also have in common is variable and somewhat confusing…

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