Month: October 2024

If you’ve not been following the journey of Embracer, let me speedrun an explanation real quick: Over the course of seven years, Embracer snapped up a bunch of companies, hit an iceberg of a sunken $2 billion dollar deal, subsequently laid off 1,400 people in six months, and scrapped a bunch of projects while selling off studios to bail water.

Recently, the hull has split three ways. Embracer will break off into Asmodee Corp, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends. This is something Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors called “the start of a new chapter”. Going forward, he’ll be a shareholder in all three companies.

Looking back on the rest of the book, though, Wingefors does seem to admit that he might have messed up. Just a bit. 

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Wingefors concedes that “as a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you’ve made mistakes and if you could have done something differently.”

While he’s “sure I deserve a lot of criticism” and that he “could take a lot of that blame myself”, Wingefors sees the aforementioned split as a way to continue the cor…

If you’re a Metal Gear fan, then chances are your stance on Metal Gear Delta so far has been cautious optimism at best. Konami hasn’t done much with the series since the departure of its creator, Hideo Kojima, but the recent release of MGS: The Master Collection Vol. 1 and the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater shows the Japanese publisher starting to reclaim its most iconic and standout series.

At today’s Xbox Games Showcase, Konami offered up the first gameplay trailer of MGS Delta, though it should be said that while this is all in-game a whole bunch of it consisted of cutscenes. The approach Konami is taking with Delta prioritises being faithful to the original game, but with a stunning visual overhaul alongside bringing the controls and some mechanics more in-line with contemporary expectations. And I probably wouldn’t have called it “stunning” before this trailer.

The look of Delta blows me away because, honestly, I didn’t know if Konami still had it in them. But the jungle environments here are visually some of the best I’ve ever seen, no matter the map layout underpinning them, with the air so moist at points you can almost feel it on you…

Like a moth to a flame, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt can’t help but tease the future of Helldivers 2 whenever he logs on to Twitter.

Today, after penning a cryptic tweet about giving Super Earth citizens “more officially regulated and mandated freedom,” Pilestedt replied to one fan’s concept for a tripod-equipped minigun with a curious insight into a different, unreleased Helldivers 2 gun.

“Gatling guns as support weapons are cool, but only if they accurately represent the insane recoil. We may, but it will require some real cool mechanics,” Pilestedt replied to one fan.

“You could add a deployable tripod that means to kill recoil, you kill your own ability to move, 3 second deploy time, 3 seconds to pack it up,” responded Twitter user FedNet23. “If you are in undeployed mode, recoil should be savage unless a 2nd player is helping you keep it stable holding a 2nd rail.”

“This was the idea for the HMG,” Pilestedt wrote back, before immediately tweeting: “Nevermind. There’s no such thing as HMG.”

While Pilestedt doesn’t clarify what “HMG” stands for, he’s likely referring to a heavy machine gun that doesn’t currently exist in Helldivers. Well, it doe…

There’s a part of me that always craves a good racing game, but I just can’t be bothered with cars. I want hoverboards, podracing, F-Zero stuff man, I get my car fix being stuck in traffic in my 2018 Kia Soul. Deathsprint 66 looks like the perfect scratch for my particular anti-automobile racing itch: this is a game where we’ll race Master Chiefs.

Sumo Newcastle’s upcoming racer looks like Mario Kart by way of Ghostrunner in its debut gameplay trailer from the PC Gaming Show: we’ve got the grungy, neon-lit cyberpunk city, form fitting robo guy armor with chunky armor bits, and one of my favorite environment features in any game, those little bits of Titanfall raised wall panels that practically scream “Wallrun on me, jerkoff!”

But instead of FPS levels or combat puzzle time trialing, Deathsprint 66 puts you in a demolition derby, racing against a gaggle of seven other cyborgs in PvE or PvP. As PCG executive editor Tyler Wilde observed after getting a look at the game at this year’s Game Developers Conference, Deathsprint is like if Nintendo stopped pretending Mario Kart was anything other than a blood sport.

The obstacle course nature of Deathsprint 66…

Premier CPU manufacturer Intel had a bad 2022 that ended on one of its worst quarters since the apocalyptic days of dot-com collapse of 2000. Industry analysts already unhappy with Intel’s financial performance are now saying that 2023 could be just as hard for the company. The company’s bad end of 2022 and low projections on its 2023 earnings have knocked $8 billion off of the company’s market value.

To be pat: Intel is having one of those years where the red line on the money chart is going down very steeply.

“No words can portray or explain the historic collapse of Intel,” analyst Hans Mosesmann told US News.

Why has it happened? As the man said, it’s complex, but the current downturn in the market for PCs is a big reason. That has led to a massive overstock of chips, and Intel’s customers aren’t going to buy too much new until they sell those. Intel’s CEO is now saying that the PC market will sell almost 100 million fewer computers than he predicted it would.

Intel’s multi-year downturn also comes alongside the rise of a massive rival outside the space gamers think of, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, now manufactures about as …

Tired of the comfortable Deck controls? Why not try playing with a pair of iPods as controllers instead? Guaranteed to add an extra layer of challenge to your gameplay! from r/SteamDeck

Don’t do this. For the love of Gabe, don’t grab a couple of janky old iPods out of your tech-hoarder’s box of old tat and plumb them into your Steam Deck. And definitely don’t use them to play Skyrim in the most awkward, hamfisted way since someone last used a baby-doll-in-a-blender to try and beat Dark Souls.

That’s the basic takeaway from watching redditor nekomichi (via SteamDeckHQ) doing just that. But, y’know, I’ve got to say I’m happy they’ve taken the hit for each and every one of us, so we at least know now to avoid the temptation to put Apple’s old music players to such use. Because we’ve all had that urge, right?

It really is one of the most fascinating things about the Steam Deck; aside from being the device which brought handheld gaming PCs into the mainstream consciousness—and encouraged the big bois of Asus, MSI, and Lenovo to get involved, too—it’s also become the tinkerers’ favourite toy. It’s an eminently afforda…

Much of the joy in writing about Baldur’s Gate 3 has been seeing its players’ absolutely hairbrained tactics play out. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons tradition old as time to mash rules together in unique and interesting ways, like one player sneaking 15,000 gold into a boss’s pockets then hitting them with an otherwise terrible magic mace, or another minmaxing a monk into a 240 damage-per-turn monster.

This is all very much intended, and something that Larian Studios’ founder and CEO Swen Vincke has been celebrating too. Vincke spoke on the topic during an interview with Dungeons & Dragons earlier this week. “We try to make our systems intuitive … if you look at our video games one after the other, we do more and more and more of that. Everybody knows about the Owlbear now—it’s heavy.” 

Vincke’s referring to the ‘Owlbear off the top rope’ combo. Players were wildshaping into an Owlbear, casting (or drinking a potion of) Enlarge, and jumping from a high ledge onto an unsuspecting victim. Enlarge brought the Owlbear’s weight to 5005kg, which scaled absurdly with height, producing 800-damage blows that could oneshot most of the dra…