In 2025, Monster Hunter fell prey to profit

Capcom couldn’t have hoped for a better environment to release Monster Hunter Wilds into. Monster Hunter was already ascendant: World was a breakout success that thrust the series into global awareness, and after glutting itself on Elden Ring the gaming public had a mainstream interest in precise, demanding third person combat and systems-heavy buildcraft. At…

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Not only does Todd Howard not hate Obsidian, it was his ‘only choice’ to take up Fallout’s reins in the wake of Fallout 3

There’s a type of myth that survives not because there’s any evidence for it, but because it flatters the preconceptions of a particular group of people. Take the notion that Todd Howard, head honcho over at Bethesda Game Studios, clearly seethes with resentment about how much Obsidian knocked Fallout: New Vegas out of the park….

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Playing Code Vein 2 made me wonder why more soulslikes don’t have guns, even if I could do with a bit less anime melodrama

There are two obvious reasons you could already be excited for Code Vein 2. One: it’s a soulslike made in-house by the publisher of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. Two: anime melodrama. If you love characters scream-crying through their emotional beats more than reading FromSoft flavor text like “If the soul is the source of all…

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No Rest for the Wicked lead spends New Year’s Eve picking a fight with former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra over Diablo 4, who points out: ‘You need to chill’

No Rest for the Wicked is an interesting game—a lovely-looking and, by my colleague’s accounts, genuinely promising roguelike. Its biggest obstacle, however, seems to be its project lead and developer CEO Thomas Mahler, who is once again taking to social media to get into fights with people (thanks, Gamesradar+). The person in question is former…

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Arc Raiders dev says it uses ‘aggression-based matchmaking’ to pair bloodthirsty, PvP-minded players with each other

Arc Raiders has gotten plenty of praise for being a touch more chill than other extraction shooters, and that’s by design—right on down to the game’s matchmaking system, which takes notice of how aggressive you are and tries to match you with like-minded players. This was confirmed in an interview stream Games Beat conducted with…

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Fallout designer Tim Cain reckons his subsequent 3 projects were buggy games ‘or, as people called them, flawed masterpieces’ because ‘we had a lot of feature ideas, we did not edit ourselves at all, and we were a small team’

After heading up development on Fallout 1, project lead Tim Cain split from Interplay to found a new studio, Troika, alongside fellow Fallout devs Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky. In a recent vlog on his YouTube channel, Cain dug into why Troika’s output lacked a certain spit shine polish compared to their previous games and…

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Quake modders banded together to release the third Brutalist Map Jam, with two campaigns’ worth of FPS goodness in ‘a megalithic community project more than a year in the making’

At some point, fan retoolings of classic games are just whole new games in their own right. In 1996, Quake released with 32 levels and 6 deathmatch maps. Today, Quake Brutalist Jam 3 released with a ludicrous 77 maps tributing both id’s classic shooter and brutalism, an architectural style defined by moody harshness and concrete….

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