Pearl Abyss marketing director says Crimson Desert’s rapid ‘live service’ patch cadence is business as usual for an MMO studio: ‘That is not normal in the industry. That is normal here’

Crimson Desert is a solo RPG, but you’d be forgiven if you mistook it for a live service MMO just based on the headlines it generates. It’s morphed and added features rapidly in response to player feedback—as PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor put it, “the playerbase says jump, and Pearl Abyss says how high.”…

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Fallout co-creator Tim Cain once proposed a first-person time-travel RPG where you could assassinate historical figures and create paradoxes

Fallout co-creator and prolific RPG programmer Tim Cain’s YouTube channel is a treasure trove of what-if stories. What if WildStar had shown up to the MMO craze just a few years earlier? What if Interplay made Fallout 3 instead of Bethesda? What if THAC0 wasn’t so egregiously confusing that Cain’s encyclopedic knowledge of it didn’t…

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Double Fine is the latest team at Microsoft to unionize

On May 7, Double Fine—the developer behind Psychonauts, Keeper, and Kiln, which has been under Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios umbrella since 2019—filed a petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board on May 7 (via Aftermath). The push includes all 42 of Double Fine’s “regular part-time and full-time employees.” The studio’s move to unionize…

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How a trio of Canadian modders stumbled into making an official Die Hard game: ‘I’ve had projects disappear that had 10 times the promise that this did’

Weird Weekend Weird Weekend is our regular weekend feature where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the…

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Gaussian Splatting is my new favourite thing, so I hassled an ex-Epic artist to tell me everything he knows about the low-cost ‘photo-real’ rendering technique

I’ve just learnt what Gaussian Splatting is, and I fear it may become my entire personality. At the risk of oversimplification, Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique that gives you ‘photo-real’ graphics at a fraction of the resource cost required by a number of other mainstream game development options. That fact alone is enough to…

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