Valve roll out Steam Achievement Sets in beta, splitting up games’ perpetually growing trophy masses into DLC and season buckets

Steam has a new feature in beta aimed at helping completionists feel like they've got a bit more of a handle on their never-ending quests to 100% games whose trophy lists keep on growing and evolving. Steam achievements can now be grouped into sets determined by the developers, creating a means of separating off the likes of DLC trophies from the base game's to-do list, thereby making it clearer what you've done so far and where you might want to focus next.

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CD Projekt is in "a really dangerous place", says Anthem's executive producer, pointing to ballooning costs of making games of that scope and quality

"The triple-A industry has become over-specialised, specialised to the point of hyper-fragility," Mark Darrah states in a foreboding interview found deep in the pages of the Summer Eternal Anthology, recently covered by Edwin. As a former executive producer at Bioware, who corralled teams on Anthem and Dragon Age, after starting his career as a programmer on Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire, Darrah has seen firsthand the growing scale of video game production and the challenges it can bring.

Darrah's also been vocal about the difficult development of Anthem in the past, and the struggles he had at Bioware. However, while what he says in the interview may be familiar, I found it gained sharper definition when read in light of games industry news and some of the interviews I've had with developers this year. So let me pull together some of the choice bits with the extra context from our own RPS vaults.

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Welp, all of you RuneScape folks who hate Reignited have gotten your wish, as the controversial MMO rejig has been cancelled

Welp, that was short lived. Earlier this month, Jagex made some big RuneScape announcements, namely that they're making a fourth version of the MMO (aptly, currently called RuneScape 4), but also the arrival of RuneScape Reignited, a new character type that would come with its own, new economy. The intention here seemingly was to bring new people in to breathe some life back into the game. This did not go down well with the old timers. And now, it's been flat out cancelled.

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Ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's launch next week, unionised Activision testers have voted to authorise a strike

Call of Duty testers have voted to authorise a union strike. The union, formed back in March of 2024, is made up of almost 600 quality assurance workers at Activision, and plan to strike if conditions at the publisher don't change.

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"Some people like it, some people are annoyed by it": Substructure may look like Factorio, but it changes the automation game in some fundamental ways

In many respects, as someone who has played a lot of automation games, Substructure is very familiar. It begins with you landing on the surface of an alien world and using nothing but pluck, the tools on your UI, and the schematics in your tech tree to construct a sprawling factory that claws up resources from the planet and transforms them into materials and components to build ever bigger machines.

But it also hints at more.

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Ubisoft reportedly look to cut 100 more jobs by proposing voluntary redundancies at studios including lead Anno devs Ubisoft Mainz

Ubisoft have initiated talks over voluntary redundancies at three German studios under their banner, reportedly seeking to cut around 100 workers via the move. Ubisoft Dusseldorf, Ubisoft Berlin and Ubisoft Mainz are the studios set to be affected, with talks over the plans between Ubisoft and a works council representing staff having been initiated by the publishers last week.

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Ubisoft are making layoffs at Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced studio Ubisoft Singapore while closing Trials creators Redlynx

Update: Following a request for comment, Ubisoft have confirmed that they are proposing to close Redlynx, affecting "up to 52 positions", subject to negotiation under local labour laws. As regards Ubisoft Singapore, "70 positions have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs". Ubisoft's statement stresses that the Singapore team "remains an important part of Ubisoft’s global production organisation."

Our original story continues below.

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