Amidst high profile live service failures, Arc Raiders production director says he hopes other studios are ‘given the same chance we had, because it’s so hard to put a game out’

In his talk at this year’s GDC, Arc Raiders production director Caio Braga said Embark’s breakout extraction shooter hit emerged from a development cycle involving multiple massive directional pivots—points where many other game productions would have been cancelled. In a post-talk interview with PC Gamer, Braga said the high profile live service launch failures that…

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‘No matter what we changed, somebody was going to get mad:’ After hearing what an Obsidian dev went through to get RPG difficulty right, I get why nobody’s ever gotten RPG difficulty right

In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, Obsidian senior systems designer Robert Donovan spoke about dialing in the difficulty of The Outer Worlds 2⁠—a great game you ought to play⁠⁠—but one I found to have a particularly noticable reverse difficulty curve. Instead of the challenges ramping up as you get more familiar with the…

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Disco Elysium writers marvel at how a game made ‘in a f**king squalid flat’ in Estonia had such a huge impact, and welcomes successors like Esoteric Ebb: ‘We make games, but we also like them’

Disco Elysium was a singular experience when it dropped in 2019. There was really just nothing else like it: Most people who wanted to compare it to something reached back to Black Isle’s 1999 masterwork Planescape: Torment, because such intricate, hyper-verbose RPGs that work so well are genuine rarities. That’s less the case these days:…

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