Things are potentially looking up for Arkane, depending on how you feel about Ubisoft (and depending on who actually ends up acquiring them). I mention the Assassin's Creed developer because, reportedly, they're interested in buying the studio from Microsoft, having even made a bid for it. I'll go out on a limb here and say it's the whole being French thing, but uh, I'd really rather someone else bought Arkane.
You might have seen that for today's grub, Edwin decided to in part feed The Maw with Food Devils, an incredibly salacious, foodie take on Fire Emblem, as it was meant to release today. The only problem is, it's not actually out yet. That might prompt you to call Edwin a rotten liar and march up to his castle at the top of the hill on a dark and stormy night with pitchforks and torches, but I beseech you to wait, because it's actually Steam's fault. And potentially, it's the fault of all those awful AI games that have been flooding Steam recently.
Following not the inherent liberal capitalistic framework of city builders like SimCity but instead a revolutionary (sorry) interpretation of planning and logistical simulation that prioritises centralisation and minute detail, Hooded Horse and 3DIVISION's Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic offers a tense, socialist look at what a citybuilder could be. Fellow contributor Sin Vega, in her 1.0 review, described it like this: "You have to build things to demolish things. That might be Workers & Resources in a nutshell. You're not managing budgets (money is exclusively for imports/exports), you're organising stuff." Now, having previously expanding out of the Soviet Republic and across the globe with the World Maps DLC, the next step for socialist citybuilding is, of course, space. Our Edwin outright predicted this two years ago, correctly calling that "the logical endgame here is to go to space." Good on him.
Compulsion Games parted ways with former owners Xbox, having landed on the long list of things Microsoft were determined to ditch as part of multi-round mass cuts this year. Now, South of Midnight creative director David Sears has suggested that an eventual pulling of the rug was something he feared throughout the game's development, to the point where he seemingly doesn't think he'd have funded it if he'd been in the shoes of Xbox execs.
itch.io has unfortunately, much like Steam, long had an issue with genAI content being uploaded in droves, drowning out perfectly good games made by human hands. The apparent standard method against this, voluntary genAI disclosure, has been itch's primary tool to combat this wave of low-quality slop, but hasn't worked out too well; itch revealed a few days ago that 'the number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past two months'. Now, in attempts to further combat this, beyond just game assets requiring a genAI disclosure to upload as they have for two years, itch will be expanding the mandatory disclosure to tabletop games, books, comics, and soundtracks, as well as adding a 'no AI' filter directly into the search function.
The team behind Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion are being threatened with legal action by a former volunteer on the project, according a video posted by current lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel. The situation looks like it'll need resolving before the mod, which was originally set to release last year, can finally make its way out of the Imperial City sewers.
Legendary outpost builder Dwarf Fortress is getting a meat biome. A terrible netherworld of bone and artery. A sunken redoubt of gristle and gizzard. An appalling labyrinth of squirt and squelch. Honestly, the biggest shock here is that Dwarf Fortress doesn't appear to have a meat biome already. It certainly has plenty of florid descriptions of fatal injuries.
