Daily Briefing: Monday 11th April

Konami Apologise For eFootball & Detail 1.0.0 Update

In a large blogpost, Konami have confirmed that eFootball’s huge “v1.0.0” update will be released on April 14th. Interestingly, it comes with some of the most candid communication we’ve seen from a large publisher. Here are some highlights: “However, we were too focused on getting the game out on time that we lost sight of the most important thing — quality. Naturally, we were met with critical reviews from rightfully disappointed fans.” ”All these changes were only possible because of your valuable opinions garnered from user feedback that we gathered from in-game surveys and social media posts — your "real voices".”

“Among those voices, many of them were encouraging us to create the best game possible. We were inspired by the warmth of the feedback and were able to pull together as a team, even amid the global health crisis. For this, we would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

• Obviously, eFootball released in a state so bad there are hardly words to describe it - it made most bad AAA releases look reasonable by comparison. However, Konami seem to genuinely understand how badly they’ve screwed the pooch and are trying to salvage it.

PlayStation Network Facing Issues: Old Games Unplayable

With Chrono Cross’s remaster release, some players have been going back to their old PSOne Classic copies on the PSN... only to find they no longer work. The ‘expiration date’ on a number of game downloads is set to December 31st, 1969, meaning they’re unplayable - this happens across random games for random users, implying something is going very wrong on the PSN backend. Like with earlier issues, it’s assumed this is related to ongoing system changes for the upcoming PS Plus refresh - although because it affected Chrono Cross, some took this as a cynical attempt for Sony to push sales of the new version.

• Dec 31st 1969 is a peculiar date - but 00:00 UTC on Jan 1 1970 is the default timestamp on Linux systems for when there is no valid date (or the input is “0”), so in a timezone behind UTC would show as Dec 31st 1969. It’s clear there’s a bug with getting the right data from PSN. As to why this is happening on a live environment? PSN must be built like Blighttown.

Dark Souls Loses Multiplayer Tags: Bandai Namco Removing Features?

Months after servers were taken offline to avoid a critical vulnerability for users, Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 have lost the ‘Multiplayer’ tag on Steam. Not the ‘tag’ provided by users, but the developer-provided ‘tag’ that shows the features the game supports. This could be temporary considering the games literally don’t support multiplayer to avoid misleading new buyers, and it may even have been intervention from Steam, but it also feels like a warning that the servers won’t be returning for a long, long time.

• This is awkward, right - Elden Ring is and should be their priority, both at Bandai Namco and at FromSoft. But to have this happen without an update to users when the game feature they paid for would return? That’s genuinely unacceptable, especially when Elden Ring fans are going to be coming back to play old games now. I’ve been playing some DaS recently, and without player messages and summons, the world feels a lot more lonely. So much for ‘Jolly co-operation’.

Kingdom Hearts 4 Announcement Proves GeForce Now Leak Once Again

On Sunday, Square Enix announced development of Kingdom Hearts 4 was underway, and on Unreal Engine 5. Great news for fans of the series, and the trailer looks interesting, but importantly - that was one of the games on GeForce Now’s leaked database. Since the leak, we’ve seen a lot of games appear: God of War PC, GTA Remasters, Crysis 4 announced, FF7R on PC, Street Fighter 6 and now Kingdom Hearts 4. Of course, games on the list can be cancelled or delayed, and projects might have been started after the leak, but there you go: it really was a massive list of planned games that’s looking more and more accurate every day.

• I bet Nvidia got some serious, serious flak for that list leaking. But honestly, I think it’s cool to see what industry plans look like under the hood. Also, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was on that list, as was more PS games on PC, so... hell yeah!