I've never been a football person, so this whole Global Mug thing that's going on at the moment is as important to me as eyelids for a fish. What I have always been is someone who likes platformers, however, even when they're all about that thing they call the beautiful game. And in the case of Kick, it seems that sidescrolling ball dribbling is actually quite delightful.
"Play is humanity's oldest technology for connection and learning," Roblox's CEO yells at me through my monitor. "Before agriculture, before commerce, before civilization, we played together." Right, so, where's this going? Oh. They're rolling out a tool on their mobile app which allows people to generate basic games by sticking a text prompt into an AI model, then do some light rearranging of said game so they can pretend it's in any way unique or artful before they publish it for others to give a go. The tool's called Build.
Last week's Microsoft layoffs, a seemingly never-ending source of terrible and sobering news, included several members of the Elder Scrolls Online's leadership team. According to a WARN notice, studio head Jo Burba is among those departing, despite having only stepped into that role around the time of last year's mass layoffs at Microsoft. With him and several other key figures on the outs, a "transition" to a new leadership team for the MMO is reportedly underway.
We've all been there. You're a pirate captain whose pockets are overflowing with freshly nicked doubloons and you fancy blowing it all on some shiny new cannons or a figurehead carved to resemble a bag of money. So, you sail on down to a port with a harbourmaster and start perusing ship upgrades. Then, when you get back to the docks, your ship's disappeared into thin air. Ah. Yarr've got to be kidding me. Completing the rest of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced might be rather difficult now. Thankfully, these impromptu mutinies are a bug Ubisoft have fixed in the title update set to arrive in the game today.
Dead Space creator Glen Schofield has decided it's time to walk away from game development, or at least "the day-to-day work of making them. Thus concludes a career which kicked off all the way back in the early 90s, and saw Schofield work on games ranging from Disney World racing to Call of Duty and The Callisto Protocol. The latter will now go down as the developer's last game, provided he hasn't got any surprise un-retirements up his sleeves.
Today, July 15th, unionised Microsoft workers are set to hold a series of co-ordinated rallies outside the offices of Xbox-owned studios, in protest of the mass layoffs the company set in motion last week. According to the Communications Workers of America union (CWA), over 400 union-represented jobs across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax, and id Software are being cut. In solidarity with the union marches, modders continue to fill Bethesda games with union logos. Skyrim was the first and Fallout 4's the latest.
RuneScape is having a bit of a home improvement moment, quite literally. An update went live yesterday that focused completely on player-owned housing, revamping how you both use and construct it, bringing it honestly quite close to The Sims in how it handles house building, amongst other tweaks and additions.
