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When Shadows of Doubt hit early access last April, we quickly became believers in the potential of its procedurally generated cities and crime solving simulation sandbox. After 17 months of improvements, additions, and tune-ups, we'll see how well that potential's been realized when the cyberpunk detective sim gets its 1.0 release on September 26, 2024.
Last week, Inflexion Games published a YouTube video in which CEO Aaron Flynn and art and audio director Neil Thomson assessed the current state of Nightingale and where the studio hopes to take its gaslamp fantasy survival game next. Inflexion's assessment was unconventionally frank: «We are not satisfied with where the game is at, we're not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we're not satisfied with our player numbers,» Flynn said.
How do you ensure a player's character-building choices feel worthwhile in an RPG, whether they dumped all their points into lockpicking or went heavy on persuasion? Josh Sawyer, seasoned RPG designer and studio design director at Obsidian, says that—like weapon tuning—it's a vibes-based art, but great documentation and a good dataset certainly don't hurt.
Good news, fans of repurposing dragons into your next pair of pants: Capcom has dropped a trio of short gameplay overviews for Monster Hunter Wilds, the follow-up to Monster Hunter: World which is due out in 2025. One video highlights the slow-moving, heavy-hitting Greatsword weapon type, while the second covers some basics of Monster Hunter gameplay, touching on the new Seikret mounts and improved arm-mounted Slinger. The third, meanwhile, has some real meat for Monster Hunter sickos, revealing Focus Mode: a new mechanic for precision-targeting attacks, highlighting monster weak points, and enabling new special moves.
Two months before this week's mass layoff of more than 200 staff at Bungie, «Payback,» the codename for a third-person perspective spinoff project set in the Destiny universe, was cancelled in order to prioritize development of the upcoming Marathon extraction shooter, according to a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.
In an interview with Aftermath, Yanis Varoufakis, former economist in residence at Valve, says that the company unintentionally prototyped the digital economic hellscape we're currently forced to languish under. That hellscape is the subject of his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, published earlier this year, and it's one he says he helped create.
Steam's dominance of digital PC game sales is fearsome. In a 2021 survey, more than a quarter of game dev studios reported that they make over 50% of their yearly revenue from Steam sales. Despite its successes, however, Valve's former economist says the company could've been even more terrifyingly powerful.
Yesterday, Paradise Killer developer Kaizen Game Works released a nine-minute gameplay deep dive video for its next game, Promise Mascot Agency. It's a gameplay overview that gets both more inscrutable and more compelling with each passing minute, and for a surreal management game following in the footsteps of Paradise Killer's metaphysical murder mystery, I'd hope for nothing less.