The Maw 29th January-3rd February 2024
This week's new videogame releases, care of our weekly newsblog
Gamers, non-gamers and those who Walk Between – lend me your ears, eyes and other sensory organs! It’s time for another week of new videogames and videogame news, as sponsored by that extradimensional terror known as the Maw. May our children forgive us.
Here are a few games releasing this week that we think could prove special: Mad Max-ish turn-based roguelike Outcast Tales: The First Journey (29th Jan), 1970s French detective sim Chronique des Silencieux (29th Jan), raunchy gay sci-fi visual novel The Symbiant Re:Union (29th Jan), Overcooked-style workplace comedy Speed Crew (31st Jan), swooping fantasy action-RPG epic Granblue Fantasy Relink (1st Feb), co-open world superhero murder party Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2nd Feb), gilded PS2 RPG remake Persona 3 Reload (2nd Feb).
As ever, if our list seems desperately inadequate that’s because we have absolutely no taste, and you should definitely address this by leaving a comment (but not a link – beware the dread Automoderator) pointing us toward a game of note. Happy videogaming all.
Our live coverage of this event has finished.
IT IS MONDAY. The beast surfaces! Put on wellies and uncork the harpoons. FEED THE MAW.
An enterprising Palworld dataminer has discovered an unused Pal, "Dark Mutant", hidden away in the game's code. It looks like Pokémon's Mega Mewtwo Y with the brightness settings turned down. Ta, Eurogamer.
Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson reports that Crash Bandicoot devs Toys for Bob and Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games have lost around 40% and 30% of their staff respectively, as part of Microsoft's mass layoffs revealed last week.
Via VGC, Final Fantasy 7 Remake producer Yoshinori Kitase estimates that it would take "twice as long" to remake Final Fantasy 6 - as long as 20 years, even.
Nightingale is getting a limited-access stress test from 10am MT, 5pm UK, 12pm EST and 9am PT on February 2nd, 2024. Here are the details about how to sign up.
Somebody's shared videos and details of a cancelled Call of Duty game, NX1, which was apparently in development at Neversoft, and was supposedly discarded in favour of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The leak has been rubber-stamped by former Neversoft project director Brian Bright, who has replied to the tweet below.
Handsome Robert Purchese of Eurogamer (hello Bertie, I love you - why aren't you returning my calls?) has an interview with Obsidian about Avowed. Amongst other things, we learn that the game doesn't let you romance companions, so apologies recovering Baldur's Gate 3 players, you'll need to get your fix elsewhere. There's also some intriguing chat about whether players should be mindful of a developer's budget and team size when deciding the worth of a game. Should we?
The creators of Mind Over Magic - a wizard school sim that Sin deemed pretty good - have announced their update plans for 2024. The big emphasis seems to be upping the challenge.
As passed on by PCG, Rocksteady have said they don't want Suicide Squad "to feel like a life commitment or be a game where you have to sacrifice a lot to see all the content on offer, or feel like you're not making good progress in the game if you can't play hundreds of hours". The proof will be in the pudding, but this is music to my ears.
If you're one of the New Zealanders (or "New Zealanders") who are among the earliest early access players of Suicide Squad, know the game has been hit by a bug whereupon players have full story completion when they log in for the first time. Rocksteady have taken the game offline while they fix this.
Some more bad news out of Embracer today, as Eidos Montreal confirm almost 100 layoffs at the studio behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Marvels' Guardians of the Galaxy. A new Deus Ex game said to be two years into development is reported to be cancelled, too.
Open Roads, the mother-daughter road trip game from former Gone Home and Tacoma devs, will take a one-month detour before it arrives at a new release date in March. Annapurna say the delay is to “ensure the most polished experience for players”.
Another important discovery in the ongoing human quest to run Doom on literally everything: an MIT researcher has found a way to play Doom using gut bacteria. (The framerate is atrocious, mind you!)
Indie champions Day of the Devs are now a non-profit. Their first fundraising campaign is live, offering a bunch of game keys in return for helping cover costs for their line-up of 2024 showcases and in-person events.
IT IS TUESDAY. I saw a beautiful grey fox on the way back from the coffee shop just now. FEED THE MAW.
As reported by Gamesradar, Bungie have absent-mindedly suggested that they once experimented with a Destiny-themed dating sim, or at least "stuff like that", in the course of routine internal gamejams. Cat Manning of Firaxis has thoughts.
The original Dragon Quest Builders, aka Dragon Quest Minecraft, is coming to PC on February 13th. Here's the Steam page.
PSA that there are lots of Suicide Squad spoilers in the wild, now that the early access builds are in circulation. Watch out for those auto-playing videos.
As reported by PCGamer, people are getting robbed by online randos in Enshrouded. Remember to give your world a password!
Activision have published a blog about the dark art of Call of Duty match-making. Going by PvP community tendencies at large I suspect it will make everybody feel like the system is letting them down, but I've yet to dig in.
Former Volition developers have founded a new studio called Shapeshifter Games. The announcement post highlights the team's "deep experience in open-world and character action games earned while working on some of the industry’s most beloved franchises". Principal lighting artist AJ Nelson says he's working on an Xbox Games Studios project. Ta, Techraptor.
Dicey roguelike SpellRogue goes into early access on February 12th.
The Militsioner devs have written a new devlog about the act of eluding/appeasing the massive policeman at the centre of the game's town setting. An excerpt: "All immersive-sims have some form of combat through which its immersion is revealed. Fighting the giant is not an option, so the player will have to resort to tricks - flattering, lying, stealing, giving gifts to appease the giant."
Activision's former general manager of Call of Duty, Johanna Faries, is the new head of Blizzard following Mike Ybarra's departure. I share this mostly for the additional detail that her replacement as COD GM is VP of product management Matt Cox. I knew that guy had a second job.
The voice of Adam Jensen isn't surprised by news that an unannounced Deus Ex game has been cancelled.
OMG, the Palworld Pokémon modder is back with a "legally-distinct pocket creatures" Palworld mod, after apparently being slapped down by Nintendo's lawyers earlier in the month. Highlights of the mod include "Yellow Rat". Thanks EG.
Starfield's "biggest ever update" is now live on all platforms.
Spec Ops: The Line has been removed from sale on Steam, without comment from publisher 2K Games.
Meanwhile, the original Diablo and Warcraft: Orcs And Humans are now both available from Battle.net with functioning multiplayer. They had previously been confined to GOG.
As Edwin mentioned earlier, Starfield's biggest patch yet is out now with dozens of bug fixes and some updates to lighting and shadows.
Oh, there we go. A 2K Games rep has confirmed that Spec Ops was removed from sale due to expiring licenses.
Shapeshifter Games - the new co-development studio founded by former Volition Games staff, which Edwin mentioned earlier today - are working alongside inXile on upcoming RPG Clockwork Revolution, inXile have announced.
IT IS WEDNESDAY. I have just checked the traffic stats, and goodness me, people do love reading about bacterial Doom. FEED THE MAW.
Ruh roh, Long Dark devs Hinterland are teasing some kind of unannounced survival game thingy. It's being made in Unreal Engine 5 and appears to feature grand pianos.
As reported by VGC, Rocksteady are gifting early access Suicide Squad players $20 worth of in-game BatBucks (not actual name, sadly) to apologise for the anti-superhero blockbuster's launch technical troubles.
Microsoft have shared their fiscal financial results for the second quarter of 2024, as reported by the Verge. With Activision Blizzard now buoying up the company's balance books, Xbox content and services revenue including Xbox Game Pass has increased by 61%. Microsoft's gaming biz turned in $7.11 billion in revenue for the quarter, which is more than the $5.26 billion from Windows but less than the $13.47 billion generated by Office and cloud services, or the $23.95 billion generated by server products and cloud services. This is the same company that has laid off thousands of people over the past year, yes.
Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn is leaving Bungie for "a new adventure".
Inflexion have detailed the accessibility options for Nightingale, including an arachnophobia mode that delimbs all the spiders, resulting in something that looks like a really pissed-off balloon with teeth.
Perhaps ironically, Palworld clones are multiplying. Pocketpair are warning people not to be fooled by "Palworld apps" on mobile.
Enshrouded has been patched to address save data loss and progression bugs - I've read a fair few complaints about this, though I have no idea how widespread the issue really is.
It's reported that layoffs are happening at Sega of America, though we haven't had any official announcements yet.
What is news-gathering without music? Here's Legion Of Dawn, from BioWare's Anthem.
In about five hours time, Sony will host their latest State of Play showcase. Games rumoured to appear include Death Stranding 2, FF7 Rebirth, Judas (the new game from Ken Levine's Ghost Story studio) and Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake. Games confirmed to appear include Team Ninja's Rise of the Ronin and Shift Up's Stellar Blade. The focus will be on PS5 and PSVR 2, of course, but the line-up appears to be dominated by third party projects, which stand a good chance of appearing on PC. Here's the Youtube stream.
IT IS THURSDAY. Did you catch the State of Play stream last night? There's a new free Silent Hill game and Norman Reedus has gone into puppetry! FEED THE MAW.
Age of Empire players, assemble! There's a developer livestream on February 23rd to discuss plans for various Age games this year, including Age of Mythology: Retold
.Palworld has a fairly big patch, which went live on Steam a few hours ago. Major fixes include various crash bugs, stopping enemies getting stuck in the scenery, and stopping other players from poaching your pals when their health falls below 30%.
cpt_freakout says: That Palworld clones phenomenon is interesting, isn't it? Like, what fantastic abominations will emerge from a fourth-degree copy of a Pikachu (possibly made by a clueless AI)?
It is! I'm working on a piece that touches on this, as it happens.
Graham has left a note pointing us towards News Tower, a game about running your own 1930s newspaper company. It's got a demo.
The next Battlefield game is "not in the FY25 outlook", according to EA's chief financial officer Stuart Canfield, which means no new Battlefield this year. Ta, Battlefield Bulletin.
Alan Wake 2 has a new update that introduces chapter select, and lets you "tune down" the game's "horror flashes", which I'm guessing refers to those split-second close-ups of Something Ghastly.
The just-announced Sixty Four is a factory sim from Oleg Danilov with an almost Inception-esque air of cosmic grandeur. Here's the trailer.
*New Inkle game klaxon*. It's free to play in a browser, too.
PolygonClassicist says: More layoffs, this time from the studio that developed Showgunners
Daniel Linssen, whose Game Boy-style creations I've always loved, has released what is basically a Frogger FPS.
"There’s around a year left of development" for Citizen Sleeper 2, according to the latest Jump Over The Age substack.
This, admittedly, is not particularly Maw-like in theme or tone, but I'm still very pumped about Cobalt Core being this month's Game Club pick, so here's some music for the day to get us ready for the weekend.
The sequel to action RPG Earthlock has been "re-revealed" this week, with a new cinematic trailer:
Good news for Ichiban and co. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has become the fastest-selling game in the series, Sega have announced. It's sold over 1 million copies in its first week of release, and to celebrate, Sega will be giving players a free in-game T-shirt set, which will be released via an update at a later date.
Need another medieval citybuilder in your life? The Steam Next Fest demo for Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown has gone live early on Steam, letting you get to grips with its real-time combat and co-op/competitive multiplayer ahead of Next Fest's proper start date next Monday.
After five years in early access, Satisfactory will finally launch into 1.0 later this year - with no more updates or patches before the full release as developers Coffee Stain go heads-down to get it feature-complete.
There won’t be a Persona 5 Royal-style expanded edition for Persona 3 Reload, Atlus promise, calling “a complete experience” (despite missing parts of FES and Portable).
Roll into the weekend with some chill vibes courtesy of upcoming indie Tranquil Isle, a mixture of Townscaper and Islanders that's part cozy city-builder, part resource-management roguelite (but only if you want the challenge). It looks lovely.
Puzzle masterpiece Threes! is back to eat every moment of your spare time, this time on Steam Deck. Next Tuesday's arrival on Steam will also bring cloud saves, controller support and new music for its night mode. But mostly: it's Threes! It's great!
Palworld's servers have cost nearly half a million dollars to run so far according to its developer's CEO. That's a lot of ongoing expense for a game that has no live service monetisation.
Starfield is getting AMD FSR 3 support in a Steam beta update next week, with a full release to come later in the month. It launched with FSR 2 support, with Nvidia's similar DLSS 3 being added in a patch last November. FSR 3 helps increase framerate without any performance cost.
Final Factory looks like Factorio, but you build your mining operation in space, then construct spaceships, then go exploring space and battling aliens. There's a demo available right now.
News Tower lets you manage a newspaper in 1930s New York, perhaps the last time working in media might have been considered a secure career. There's a demo and it'll launch into Early Access later this month.