“What it will become is the next challenge”. With origins that go as far back as 1981, Richard Garriott’s Ultima series is one of the most famous in the world of RPGs – which makes the fact that we haven’t had a proper, mainline game since 1999 all the more puzzling. The name is currently…
Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week’s new games on Steam. I’ve always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it’s also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy. But if I’m perfectly honest, the reason I’ve always loved to browse through Steam’s raw…
Sjoerd De Jong, an Unreal Engine expert from its early days who joined Epic Games full-time in 2014—first as “lead evangelist” and most recently as the senior director of an unannounced project—has left the company, he revealed last week in a LinkedIn post. “After 27 years of Unreal Engine, and 12 years at Epic Games…
Morrowind, the gloomiest and mushroomiest of all the Elder Scrolls games, is getting on in years—and it was never the most polished game in town, even upon its release a whopping 24 years ago. If you’re sick of those rough edges, you need look no further than OpenMW, a fanmade open-source engine which makes the…
Obsidian Entertainment, developer of Fallout: New Vegas, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds, is being sued in a class action lawsuit that alleges it “engaged in a systematic pattern of wage and hour violations under the California Labor Code and Industrial Welfare Commission (‘IWC’) Wage Orders.” As reported by GamesRadar, the case has been ongoing since…
Earlier this year, Pen & Sword Books released The History of the Pokémon Games, which I reviewed here. At the same time, they released the much less obviously marketable The History of Silent Hill by Samantha Morris. Similar titles notwithstanding, these are very different books. While the Pokémon volume functions primarily as a sort…
It’s not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14. Critical Hit (Image credit: Future) Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on…
I remember when Klei’s self-explanatory classic Don’t Starve came out, survival-crafting games as we know them now felt new and novel. “Surely this is a passing fad,” I must have thought. Well, my adolescent hot takes aged about as well as a Beefalo steak in the hot sun—Don’t Starve Together is bigger than ever, having…
Since the advent of generative AI and contemporary chatbots, there’s been endless debate about the ethics of using them in gamedev. But how does AI measure up through a purely pragmatic, business-minded lens? According to a blog from Game Oracle written by market data analyst Ross Burton, stigma around the technology can ward off prospective…
Disk Cleanup (Image credit: Future) Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?” Bryce Clark, game director on Poppy Playtime,…