Frigate spotted off the starboard bow, Cap’n! Ready the mortars, me hearties! Fire! All sail! We’ll split her in twain with the ram! She’s not done, swing around and ready the cannons! Fire! She’s dead in the water, bring her in for a steely kiss! These are the sounds of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag at its best, and all these years on, they’re the sounds of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced at its best.
About a year and a half ago I bought a point and shoot 35mm film camera because I was getting a bit bored of taking photos on my phone in the name of capturing a memory, only to literally never look at them again. Film just has a magic to it, a magic that's difficult to capture in a game for obvious technical reasons. But how about mechanical ones? Enter SOMBRAS: negative frames, a horror-lite photography game about a Japanese-Spanish photography student who gets spirited away.
Licensed games don't really exist in the way they did 20 years ago, with three different versions of the same game being made for different consoles adapting a popular media property on the cheap to fill kids' holiday sacks. These days they've got a bit more to them, and Saber Interactive have carved out a nice little niche for themselves with licensed games, with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 being a big part of that.
Xbox aren't closing or selling off Doom developers id Software as part of their latest business teardown, but they are reportedly laying off around half the studio, with swinging cuts aimed at id's legendary technology team in particular. Even as out-going staff fulminate about the situation, studio co-founder John Romero has urged all concerned to preserve "code, assets, stories" and other historical artefacts that risk being wiped away during the restructure.
Yesterday, Xbox announced that they were spinning off five major studios in the course of the latest round of "historic" restructuring, with 1600 jobs instantly chopped and 1600 more layoffs to follow over the next financial year. It's the latest in a string of failures on the part of Xbox leadership, who have repeatedly butchered the division after an evidently overambitious acquisition spree that dates back to the 2010s. It has, at least, not yet resulted in any outright studio closures.
Double Fine and Compulsion are going indie again with a little funding from Microsoft, keeping ownership of their games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have been sold to unnamed new owners. And then there's Dishonored and Marvel's Blade developers Arkane, whose fate is still being negotiated.
Xbox laid off around 1600 people yesterday, July 6th, as mass cuts accompanied by the decision to part ways with five studios were set in stone. This substantial upheaval's also had plenty of consequences for the studios staying under the Microsoft banner, including a more concerted push to get remaining staff working on Xbox's most lucrative series. Fallout, for example. That hasn't stopped the reportedly cuts including around a quarter of the staff at noted Fallout spin-off developers Obsidian.
Yesterday brought the news that Microsoft were cutting 1600 staff, spinning out four studios, and finding a further 1600 jobs to cut in the year to come. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in an email to staff that she was "making reductions" and "shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects".Today, we're starting to learn what those cuts mean for the teams that Xbox retained, and the projects they were working on. The most public and immediate of these is Elder Scrolls Online.
In January, Zenimax Online Studios, the makers of Elder Scrolls Online, announced they would be ditching yearly expansions and moving the MMO to a seasonal release model. The team were just two days ahead of releasing Season One when Xbox hit them with layoffs so severe the release roadmap needs to be rebuilt.
