Backrooms director Kane Parsons is currently working on ‘3 dream projects’ while wearing a Valve hoodie—suspicious

Fans of horror or obscure liminal spaces have been eating exceptionally well this year, what with all the outstanding horror games and movies—one of which being Kane Parsons’ silver screen debut, The Backrooms film. As a fan of Parsons’ YouTube series I was pretty confident that this film would nail the Backrooms, and I was…

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Arc Raiders’ executive producer was ‘a bit skeptical’ about adding PvE, but after the successful test the team needs to decide ‘what we want to do going forward’

I enjoyed having the palate cleanser that was Arc Raiders limited-time PvE test for the short week it was here. It provided a chill alternative to the usual chaos and cheater-laden PvP, where I could fight some tough arcs, enjoy the map, and interact with players without the fear of getting ratted. And clearly I’m…

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World of Warcraft was meant to have viable levelling gear from professions way back in 2004, but the designers on raids and dungeons ‘cheated a little bit’

The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn’t a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate. Such was the case with Blizzard where, as…

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