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While the recent Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance action-RPG did not pan out well, and that's putting it gently, Wizards of the Coast is not giving up on the idea just yet. As such, they have rebranded Dark Alliance's Tuque Games into Invoke Studios and are now working on greatly expanding the team.
According to the press release, the plan is for Invoke Studios to grow from 80 to more than 200 employees by 2025 in order to ensure the studio's vision will be fully realized. That's a very good thing in my eyes as Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance had some interesting ideas, but it clearly needed a lot more time and resources to get everything polished up and ready to go.
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According to a recent announcement that came so suddenly not even the employees knew about it, Google has decided to shut down their game streaming service Stadia. While the servers will be going down on January 18th, 2023, it's thankfully not all bad news as Google will at least be issuing refunds for all purchases made through their stores.
As you might imagine, this leaves the Stadia-exclusive games in a bit of a rough spot. For a good few of them this will be a death knell as they're simply not popular enough to warrant porting to other platforms, though I'm happy to say that Stadia's very first exclusive, the horror-adventure Gylt, will persevere!
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[Update #2]: Guild Wars 2's late November update rebalanced many underperforming classes with endgame PvE and PvP in mind.
[Update]: Guild Wars 2's Halloween flavored Shadow of the Mad King festival has now arrived.
In an effort to keep the community in the loop about future content updates and major additions, the Guild Wars 2 team has now announced the Fall & Winter 2022 roadmap. The first item on the list is the return of the highly popular and Halloween themed event Shadow of the Mad King. Expect to see an assortment of spooky cosmetics and decorations to mess around with, the Mad King's Labyrinth to endlessly farm for candy-shaped goodies, a devious jumping puzzle to conquer, as well as a couple of fun races to help spice things up a bit.
Then, on November 8th, Guild Wars 2 will bring with it the remastered version of the long-lost final episode of Living World Season 1 - Battle for Lion's Arch. This will be a permanent addition to the game, and one that is free for all players. Best of all, the episode will also come with a brand new Strike Mission to undertake: Old Lion's Court!
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[Update #2]: Overwatch 2 is officially nerfing Genji, Zarya, Sombra, D.Va and Kiriko... but only in three weeks, on November 15th!
[Update]: Overwatch 2's Halloween Terror update has now arrived alongside a brand new co-op mission and sadly only three new legendary skins.
As a part of the recent developer update Blizzard announced that they are happy with how all of the heroes are performing and that they have no current plans for any changes outside of nerfing Zarya in Total Mayhem. Furthermore, they revealed that their goal is to release balance updates at the start of each season, seemingly implying that we'll only be getting one massive balance patch every two months.
With that in mind, you can imagine my surprise when Overwatch 2's Game Director Aaron Keller just went onto Twitter to say that not only will they be releasing a mid-season balance update, but that they will also be nerfing a few of the overperforming heroes! While the mixed messaging is a bit annoying given that Blizzard has vowed to be better about communication with the sequel, I'm still happy about this development as only having one balance update per season would've been utter madness for a rapidly evolving game like Overwatch 2.
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[Update #2]: Pre-orders of the upcoming Dead Space remake will come with a copy of the excellent Dead Space 2.
[Update]: The Callisto Protocol, a heavily Dead Space inspired survival-horror, has now landed onto PC and consoles.
After a whole bunch of tiny teasers and tech previews, Motive Studio have now finally given us a proper look at the comprehensive Dead Space remake. The new version has been rebuilt from the ground up in order to offer higher fidelity visuals, enhanced audio, as well as a bunch of gameplay improvements. That said, don't worry about things changing too much as the remake seems to have gone to great lengths to stay true to the original game's vision and style.
How all of this translates into actual gameplay, that you can check out through the recently posted preview. Have a gander, it's quite a pretty one:
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[Update #2]: Overwatch 2's Halloween Terror update has now arrived alongside a brand new co-op mission and sadly only three new legendary skins.
[Update]: Despite recent statements to the contrary, Overwatch 2 will be releasing a mid-season update with nerfs to Sombra, Genji, Zarya and D.Va.
If you were hoping that with Overwatch 2 Blizzard would finally change their ways and start releasing balance updates faster, I'm afraid you're out of luck. According to the latest development blog, the Overwatch 2 team will only be releasing balance changes with each two-month season. So I hope you like seeing Zarya, Sombra, Genji and Sojourn all over the place in Competitive Play, because they're not going anywhere for a while.
“While some heroes are performing better than others, and there are differences across player skill levels, we have been happy to see that no hero’s overall power level is far out of line with our goals,” explains the developer update. "Every hero on the roster has a win-rate between 45% and 55%, and we are not planning any immediate balance changes based on what we are seeing, with the exception of a targeted adjustment to Zarya in Total Mayhem which should go live with our next major patch on October 25.”
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[Update]: Spider-Man: Miles Morales has now arrived, and unsurprisingly, it's quite good!
If you're in the mood for a whole bunch of new locations to swing around and bad guys to drop-kick into all sorts of hazards, you'll be pleased to hear that Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales will soon be heading over to PC! To be more specific, you can expect to see it launch on November 18th via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
The PC version will bring with it a variety of graphical options to mess around with, unlocked framerates, ray-traced reflections and shadows, as well as ultra-wide monitor support. And if you decide to pre-order, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales will also come with two cosmetic suits, early access to the gravity well gadget and three skill points. Needless to say, none of this is even remotely mandatory, so don't feel pressured to pre-order the game if you're still on the fence.
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Much like its predecessors, No More Heroes 3 is a comedic hack & slash adventure that's all about cleaving through hordes of baddies and the occasional boss with an assortment of ridiculously flashy moves. If that sort of thing sounds like a fun way to spend the evening, you'll be happy to hear that the previously Switch exclusive No More Heroes 3 has now made its way to PC, PlayStation and Xbox as well.
Unfortunately, while the console versions of No More Heroes 3 have been updated with things like HD visuals and support for higher framerates, so far it looks like the PC version is a almost a direct copy of the original Switch game. So even though No More Heroes 3's PC port is still a nice bit of fun, if you have the means to do so you're almost certainly better off going with the Xbox or PlayStation versions instead.
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[Update #2]: Good news! Despite recent statements to the contrary, Overwatch 2 will be releasing a mid-season update with nerfs to Sombra, Genji, Zarya and D.Va.
[Update]: Unfortunately, Overwatch 2 will only be making balance changes at the start of each two-month season.
You know how people on Reddit and the Blizzard forums frequently complain about how the system is rigged and that they should absolutely, 100% have a higher competitive rating than the one they were given? Well, in a bizarre twist that I honestly never saw coming, they were actually correct - Overwatch 2's Competitive Play did indeed rank players far lower than it should!
With the October 13th update Blizzard has now thankfully corrected this massive problem, and more importantly, implemented a boost to help the affected players get to their true ranking as quickly as possible. Naturally, anyone that gains a matchmaking rank from this point forward will completely avoid the issue, so if you're in this group feel free to play as many competitive games as you want since the system should now place you more or less where you belong.
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A fair few years have gone by since Myst studio's VR focused and steampunk themed adventure Firmament was successfully Kickstarted, and I'm afraid one more year will have to pass before you can finally give it a try. According to the latest developer update, Firmament has now been pushed back to the first quarter of 2023 as the Cyan team needs a bit more time to get everything polished up and ready to go.
"Here's why: we do not want to give you anything less than our best," explains the announcement. "Our best - as is the case for game developers all around the world, large or small - takes time. Very simply, if we release Firmament without taking a little extra time to put the finishing touches and polish on it, we would not be serving you, Firmament's Backers and Cyan's devoted fans, as you deserve."