It was eclectic week of gaming news, and we’ve got a diverse sampler platter for you with the week’s biggest stories, or at least, the biggest ones from before Summer Game Fest kicked off on Friday. For more on that, see our roundup of everything shown off at this year’s Keighley-fest, and our look at the games shown off in this year’s great Day of the Devs showcase. In these pages, you’ll find us breaking down the latest manufactured conspiracy in the ongoing video game culture war, this one involving “trans bullets” in Call of Duty. Also, Sony put a whole lot of emphasis on its new, Guardians of the Galaxy-esque hero shooter Concord at a State of Play this week but the reaction was less than enthusiastic. All that and much more awaits you in the pages ahead.
Diablo IV’s latest seasonal update substantially reworked a bunch of things to make the loot action-RPG more fun and rewarding. However, one change has engineered some especially cruel moments for the most devoted players. – Ethan Gach Read More
Concord, the upcoming hero shooter from Firewalk Studios, got a fair bit of spotlight at Sony’s May State of Play presentation. The showcase led with a lengthy cinematic trailer introducing the game’s wacky band of misfits, and the internet immediately clocked it as a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque romp. This was followed with a gameplay trailer that showed off an Overwatch-style competitive shooter, and given that it led the showcase and took up a sizable portion of the show, Sony was likely hoping it would garner fanfare from PlayStation’s community. However, the reaction has likely been less enthusiastic than Firewalk and Sony were expecting. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
An internal Google database containing six years’ worth of potential privacy breaches and security issues was recently obtained, and reveals—among many other things—that a Google employee used their access to watch a private YouTube video uploaded by Nintendo and leaked the details online. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Dragon Age II is a big centerpiece in conversations around video game romance. The 2011 BioWare RPG let players pursue whoever they wanted, regardless of what gender player character they chose. With Inquisition, BioWare opted to define your party’s identities, which meant not every love story was accessible to anyone. While both games’ approaches were met with a mix of praise and criticism, it seems BioWare is going back to Dragon Age 2’s approach with the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard (formerly Dragon Age: Dreadwolf). – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Anyone who played Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could probably guess that something went terribly wrong during development. Bloomberg now reports that the multiplayer bomb from a studio beloved for its single-player Batman: Arkham games was plagued by several issues leading up to its repeatedly delayed launch. – Ethan Gach Read More
A possible Call of Duty bug is causing a new Pride-themed cosmetic to paint the bullets in one version of one of the game’s guns the colors of the transgender flag. Now, right wing rage jockeys are seizing this to peddle transphobic conspiracy theories so idiotic they would be laughable, if not for the real world threats underlining the outrage. – Ethan Gach Read More
No matter how much a game might try to teach you its rules, some people will just never learn. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with a game not being for everybody! But what happens when the player just wants to be difficult? In the case of new indie dungeon crawler Cryptmaster, the game’s titular narrator and guide will get so fed up with you that he will ask you to refund the game. – Willa Rowe Read More
Pokémon has a rich history and spans across several mediums like video games, trading cards, merchandise, and more. So it would, in theory, be a perfect fit for fan conventions. The Pokémon Company hosts plenty of its own events like Go Fest for Pokémon Go fans and its World Championship tournaments for competitive players, but fans who live in places that don’t often get those official events are out of luck—unless they put on their own events. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Unless you’ve been living under a rock on Exegol for the last month, you’ve probably heard of YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s viral, four-hour-long video reviewing the Star Wars hotel, officially known as Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. Titled “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” it goes into excruciating detail about why the immersive (and expensive) experience went off like a Wookie fart in the Jedi Temple. Throughout the video, there are obvious parallels to recent, spectacularly bad video game launches centered around popular IP, like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Marvel’s Avengers. It’s almost as if no amount of lucrative lore can save something when it’s rushed or half-assed, am I right? – Alyssa Mercante Read More
The Epic Games Store is once again handing out a very good game for free. This time around it’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns, one of the best games of 2022 and one of my favorite superhero adventures out there. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
