I’ve been a super sorry spy again. THAT’S AGAINST YOUR AGREEMENT, Mr Wang shouts in text form, subsequently yanking away the bonuses afforded to me by my decision to adopt the Wang way. I didn’t think working the Wang into my thang would be this stressful, to be honest.
Bullet heaven games can already be fairly chaotic. Starting with Vampire Survivors, it's a genre that joyously fills your screen with thousands of enemies and tasks you with somehow killing them all before they reach your character in the centre. While Warhammer Survivors treads much of the same ground of Poncle's original, there is a small mechanical twist at its centre that adds a meaningful extra drip of chaos to the action.
Rather than control a single character, as you pick up weapons, you assemble a small squad, all of whom act independently of you.
If you watch the Dawn of War 4 trailer showing off the Adeptus Mechanicus faction, you might have spotted a mech that's practically dancing on the spot. The excitable little thing looks to be itching to get into the fight. It turns out, it's not channeling the spirit of a warmongering puppy, it's got to keep moving for very serious lore reasons.
"They can never stop," Dawn of War 4's creative director Jan Theysen tells me. "They're always moving and always walking because the Adeptus Mechanicus fear that if they turn off, they might not be able to turn them on again. So they just keep them moving all the time."
Today, May 21st, marks the release of ZA/UM's Zero Parades, the studio's Disco Elysium follow-up arriving following years of drama and turmoil surrounding the original game and the people who made it. So, naturally, one of numerous Disco-like games which have sprung up over the past few years has chosen that day to put out a new trailer, while also shouting about having recruited another former Disco Elysium developer.
Many fantasy games deal in the prospect of sacrificing things to gods, but few dramatise the associated exciting logistical pressures. Say you want to chuck a bunch of virgins into a volcano at regular intervals, to stop the regional Vulcan pulling a Pompei. Well, how are you going to procure an adequate supply of vestals, if you keep incinerating the very means of production?
Perhaps you can obtain some from the nearby villages, in return for some steel wire from your furnaces. Ah, but the nearby villages don't want any wire; they're desperate for fish. Fine: sell the steel wire to the villages on the coast, that they may haul in a big catch and sell it to the inlanders, so they can flog their spare virgins to you. What happens when the other villagers run out of virgins? That's their problem. As Valve like to say, we cannot be held responsible for the business decisions of third parties.
While in the midst of not great financial times at the moment, Ubisoft have revealed plans to have new Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon games out at some point between now and early 2029. Boss Yves Guillemot is touting this to investors as signifying an incoming turnaround following "one of the most ambitious transformations in the company’s history", which is corpospeak for taking a bunch of money from Tencent to rearrange some corporate chairs, delaying or cancelling a bunch of games, and laying off staff.
The biggest videogames are taking longer to make, according to Diablo 4 lead engine engineer Marcin Undak, and one consequence is that there are fewer junior openings at industry dreadnoughts like Blizzard and CD Projekt, because companies prefer to hire juniors right at the start of development. This isn't ideal, Undak suggested, because "the best teams" have a healthy mixture of crabby old wizards and sparky bantlings. OK, he did not call anybody either a wizard or a bantling. Maybe next time.
