Author: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Gears Of War: E-Day and Outriders developers People Can Fly are cancelling two video game projects and laying people off due to “a lack of communication” from one game’s publisher, and “a lack of prospects for securing organizational resources and funds” for the other.

This week is the week of Summer Game Fest and its entourage of accompanying showcases. As such, the feeling right now is of preparing for an avalanche. Join me as I play out the next few days in my head.

All is calm beneath the Treehouse, and yet, there is something in the air. I look up from my game of dark fantasy creature collector Voidsayer and watch a single leaf cartwheeling along the forest floor. I frown and turn my attention to budding Beyond Good & Evilalike, Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody.

A few more leaves flitter down from the canopy. The ground seems blurry and something peculiar is going on in my lower intestine, but it’s not enough to distract me from 80s business builder Rise Of Industry 2.

Across the clearing, Brendy breaks off from his tentative nosing of Deltarune Chapters 1-4. He sits on his hindlegs, lifts his muzzle to the sky and begins to howl.

There is no time to consider Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma, as Nic and Oisin burst from the undergrowth in a circus of blindfire and swearing. Nic has taken a boulder to the knee, so Oisin is carrying him over one shoulder while he unloads a sawed-off into the vibrating shrubbery. How many times must we tell you, Nic, that you can’t defeat natural disasters with shotguns?

All of a sudden the daylight vanishes as no less than three video game showcases rear above the canopy in furiously mechanical succession. First, the Access-Ability Summer Showcase at 8am PDT, 11am EDT and 4pm BST. Then, Summer Game Fest Live at 2pm PDT, 5pm EDT and 10pm BST. Then, Day of the Devs SGF Edition at 4pm PDT, 7pm EDT and 12am BST. The individual fragments of rock and ice all sport the sleepily smiling face of Geoff Keighley. I see Graham on a surfboard high above the trees, carving the froth of advertising.

The weekend offers no reprieve from the tumult! Ollie and I have made it back into the Treehouse with bloody elbows and a few broken ribs. The tree itself bends sickeningly but does not break: the Founders chose their primeval refuge well. Three more showcases – Wholesome Direct (9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 5pm BST), Future Games Show (1pm PDT, 4pm EDT, 9pm BST) and Green Games Showcase (1pm PDT, 4pm EDT, 9pm BST) – sweep through the woods like dervishes.

Hell is empty, and all the marketing VPs are here. The Xbox Games Showcase (10am PDT, 1pm EDT, 6pm BST) and PC Gaming Show (12pm PDT, 3pm EDT, 8pm BST) obliterate all the lesser trunks that remain. Ollie and I let off signal flares. Where is Jeremy? Is that his fist emerging from the fusillade of Keighley particulates, forming one last defiant thumbs-up? Oh look, here’s James in a helicopter. He brings word of a secondary calamity: the other side of the mountain has been annihilated by Ian Games Network Live.
What are you up to this week? If you plan to steer clear of all of the above, my hearty congratulations to you.

Yooka-Laylee developers Playtonic are laying off staff across their operations, as they wrestle with what they call “a period of profound change in how games are created and financed”. It’s not clear what these “profound changes” are, exactly – soaring budgets? Evergreen service games drinking up all the oxygen? Falling interest in the genre of mascot platformer Playtonic are best known for? Either way, the outcome is that a bunch of artists, game designers, narrative designers, producers and UI or UX people are now looking for work.

Dispatch is a swanky visual novel with light strategy game elements in which you manage a bunch of reformed supervillains, assigning them to pop-up emergencies around town. So far, I have asked a dancing French assassin to rescue a balloon from a tree, sent a randomly transforming literal batman to thwart a boat robbery, ordered a golem and an invisible woman to break up a barfight between rival vigilantes, and tasked a light-manipulating popstar with cutting a supermarket ribbon.

We managed to retrieve the balloon and open the supermarket with flying colours, but the boat is now at the bottom of the harbour. The golem and the invisible woman tried to resolve the barfight firstly by proposing that the participants form a Dynamic Duo, and then by way of a drinking competition. Now, the bar is in ruins. Also, the team’s Human Torch equivalent can’t go on break without starting a fire.

A modder is asking for help resurrecting Borderlands Online, an MMO version of Gearbox’s comedy gun-runner that only ever saw daylight in China. It was announced in 2014 and shut down in 2015 alongside development studio 2K China, but footage of the abandoned project appeared online earlier this year. Now, intrepid digital archaeologist EpicNNG is trying to overcome “thousands of errors” and restore the MMO to a playable state.

I was 20 minutes into the demo before I realised that Becoming Saint is that most terrible of things, another roguelike, but that’s OK, because by then I’d been burned at the stake for heresy after failing to convert the homely town of Spoleto. The presiding Inquisitor very kindly let me off 100 years of purgatory because I’d mostly rebelled against the Emperor, not the Pope. But then he slapped on 68 years for “minor sins”.

I’m not sure which sins. Possibly my being a bit parsimonious with the bread rations on the road to Spoleto? Possibly my favouring the company of a majestic wolf, “strong as he is beautiful”? Regardless, the happy ending here is that after 968 years in purgatory, I was eventually canonised as a Saint in the year 2317. Today, 29th May, is in fact Saint Edwina’s day. If you would like Saint Edwina’s blessing, know that she accepts all major credit cards and is also happy to be paid in vouchers for Cafe Neros.

The Ukrainian government-run Center for Countering Disinformation have released a warning about a new free-to-play shooter, Squad 22: ZOV, which they say is a blaring propaganda instrument for the Russian military that “mythologises” the country’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine since 2022. The accusation actually dates back to February this year, but it has resurfaced and picked up pace online now that Squad 22 is on sale via Steam. Valve have yet to comment.

Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as… Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production – roughly defined, the point in a game’s gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they’ve actually started making anything that’s supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.
The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that “Cyberpunk 2” will be the project’s final name – as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 “just means it’s another game in the Cyberpunk universe.” But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that “Cyberpunk 2” is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.