The games industry has no shortage of business roles, but few are as romantic as the person whose job is to find new talent. A former lead on Dying Light has taken on exactly that kind of position, joining the publishing division of Bloober Team. The stated ambition is striking: to find “the next Kojima.” That is a reference to Hideo Kojima, the director whose name has become shorthand for a certain kind of auteur-driven game, one with a strong personal vision and an unmistakable authorial stamp. The work sits within Broken Mirror Games, the horror label of Bloober Team. That framing matters. Bloober Team is known for horror, and a dedicated label suggests the company intends to publish games in that space rather than stray into unrelated genres. Dying Light, the game the new hire previously worked on, is a first-person survival title built around movement and scavenging in a dangerous city, so...
Read More
- Home
- One Column Standard
One Column Standard
World of Warcraft has spent two decades refining its systems, and one of the quieter consequences is that racial abilities have lost much of their weight. In the contemporary game they are so minor that they mainly seem aesthetic, chosen for flavour rather than power. World of Warcraft: Forever appears to be taking the opposite approach. According to the current teaser, Blizzard has implemented significant alterations to the game’s diverse racial skills, a change that could reshape how players think about their characters. The timing is notable. Forever’s beta phase is scheduled to conclude in just a couple of days, on October 21, yet that has not stopped the studio from making meaningful adjustments so late in the process. For anyone new to the concept, racial skills are abilities tied to a character’s race rather than their class. Race and class are chosen together at creation, and in earlier versions of the game those...
Read More
Horror works best when it unsettles you before anything actually happens, and Silver Pines seems built around that idea. The game opens in a vacant diner with no one else in view, an ordinary setting made wrong by the simple fact of being empty. That opening is deliberate. A diner is a place that should be full of noise and people, so its silence reads as a warning. It is a classic horror technique, and it establishes the mood before the player has done anything at all. The atmosphere has been compared to Silent Hill, the long-running series known for fog, dread and psychological unease, with additional overtones of Alan Wake, the story about a writer whose fiction starts bleeding into reality. Blending those influences is a promising combination for anyone who likes their scares slow and strange. What sets Silver Pines apart on paper is its perspective. This is a 2D game, and...
Read MoreFew topics divide the games industry as sharply as artificial intelligence. The technology promises to speed up production and cut costs, while raising hard questions about creative work, originality and the people whose jobs sit in its path. Epic Games has found itself in the middle of that argument. The company is facing criticism again this week over its position on the subject. It appears to be shifting toward what is described as “AI-enhanced development,” a phrase that signals AI moving from an experiment into the ordinary workflow. Running alongside the criticism is the response of chief executive Tim Sweeney, who has been trying to convey that neither he nor his firm is troubled by it in the slightest. The posture is one of indifference to the backlash. That posture is a choice, and choices like this are often read as messages in themselves. Whether a company engages with criticism or brushes it aside...
Read MoreGrand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated releases in gaming, and its marketing has unfolded almost entirely through trailers. Each one has become an event, picked apart frame by frame within hours and used to fuel years of speculation. A new collection brings the campaign together in one place. It gathers the first trailer, the second, and the release trailer for the game, which is set to arrive on November 19, 2026. For anyone who wants to watch the sequence in order, it is a convenient way to see how the messaging has evolved. The video is structured with simple timestamps. An introduction opens at the start, the first trailer begins within the opening seconds, the second follows at roughly one minute and twenty-eight seconds, and the release trailer sits around four minutes and ten seconds in. Watching them back to back reveals how a trailer campaign tells a story of...
Read MoreAsk a room full of players to name the scariest game they have ever played and a handful of titles come up again and again. Silent Hill is usually there, along with Resident Evil. Alien Isolation makes the list. One of the Fatal Frame games gets a mention, and the better-informed might add something like Siren. It is a crowded field, which makes Outlast’s success all the more remarkable. According to the current teaser, the game was turned down by publishers before it ever saw release, yet it has since reached sixty million players. A horror juggernaut that no one wanted has, by any measure, done just fine. The rejection is not hard to understand in hindsight. Outlast is brutally intense, built on helplessness rather than empowerment. Players cannot fight back in any meaningful way; they run, hide and survive, relying on a camcorder and its night vision to see through the dark. That...
Read More
