If you've been demanding more red pudding, then I bring good news. Crimson Desert developers Pearl Abyss have revealed a bunch of additions and changes they plan to make going forwards, as part of their continued efforts to sand off bits of their big creation which folks haven't vibed with. Boss rematches, resetting enemy camps, and new difficulty options are the headliners. The game's towers are also getting a glow up.
The CEO of Gunzilla Games, the studio behind NFT-infected battle royale game Off The Grid, has responded to accusations from former employees that Gunzilla failed to pay them on time. He's done so in the form of a lengthy tweet which contains both the words "Haters keep making predictions. We keep delivering" and "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused".
Gunzilla Games, the studio co-founded by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp and developers of NFT-infected battle royale game Off The Grid, have been accused by a number of former employees of failing to pay staff for months on end. One former animator at the studio has also accused them of attempting to "silence" workers attempting to get the money they claim to be owed.
As noted in this week's Maw, the burgeoning genre of survival shooter which involve a lot of crouch-walking in fields got a new addition on Tuesday. Road to Vostok, a single player Tarkov-ish field-croucher solo developed by an ex-Finnish army officer arrived in early access following some popular demos. According to that former armyman, the early returns on its release have already helped set up the cash reserves its development will need for "years to come".
As you may be aware if you read myself and Julian's Samson verdict the other day, the launch version of the gritty minor crim simulator included plenty of bugs - ranging from the harmlessly jany to the debilitatingly playthrough-breaking. The good news is that developers Liquid Swords are on the case, with studio creative director and long-time Just Cause lead Christofer Sundberg having announced that a big patch is due before the week is out.
Steam is, most likely, going to get a lot more prophetic about how its thousands of games might run on your PC. ResetEra user dex3108 spotted, deep within the Valve app’s newest client update, a number of unused text strings relating to a "Framerate Estimator" tool. Putting aside my sadness that no-one’s ever thought to call me The Framerate Estimator, in the appropriate title case, it sounds like this would take a rough punt on how many frames per second the user’s hardware can churn out in a given game.
While such an addition hasn’t been confirmed by Gabe & Co. themselves, it was only a couple of months ago that Steam began (optionally) collecting anonymised framerate data; I still think this began with Verified programmes for the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame in mind, though that data could absolutely feed a more bespoke tool like this. And serving up specific framerate ranges – even estimates – for any PC player, regardless of hardware, would take Valve’s performance previews into both much wider and much more detailed territory.
Back in the late 2000s, Just Cause developers Avalanche ended up in a publishing pickle with a fantasy open-worlder they were working on. It was dubbed AionGuard, and ex-Avalanche chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg reckons that had it not ended up chucked on the cancellation bonfire, the game would've done a lot of the same things which've helped make Crimson Desert a hit all these years later.
