Daily Briefing: Wednesday 6th October

Blizzard axe more World of Warcraft content

World of Warcraft patch 9.1.5 is on the horizon and, in the run up to it, Blizzard are continuing to remove some of the game's more suggestive or inappropriate content. Blizzard outlined the pledge to clean up the game world in the wake of the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment lawsuit, promising in August to introduce “updates to improve the game environment for our community, including additional changes to some content to better reflect our shared values.”

• Since then, the World of Warcraft team have been removing everything from pieces of artwork to certain jokes and emotes. They've also been renaming characters, bosses, areas, and making big groups of NPCs a bit more diverse. One of the areas renamed was Mac'Aree - a Legion endgame zone. Mac'Aree is named after disgraced Blizzard designer Jesse McCree, who also lent his name to Overwatch's roguish cowboy. The Overwatch team are currently working on renaming that character, as well, though it appears that the bulk of the cleanup efforts really are over in Azeroth.

Umm...somebody just leaked all of Twitch

This is a really weird one. An anonymous hacker has apparently leaked the entirety of Twitch - y'know, the massive streaming platform - and posted everything from source code to streaming personality revenue information in a 125GB torrent link on 4chan. According to the hacker themselves, the breach was intended to "foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space." They also noted that Twitch's community is "a disgusting toxic cesspool."

• There were initially some doubts surrounding the legitimacy of the leak, but gaming media outlet VGC published an updated version of the story which included confirmation from "an anonymous company source" that the leak is real. There's a lot of information to go through, but so far it looks like the leak includes all of Twitch's source code and comment history going back to the early days of the platform. It also contains creator payout reports from 2019 and information on proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch, as well as details on "every other property that Twitch owns" - this includes IGDB. There are also details of something called Vapor - an apparent Steam competitor. Yikes.

Oh hey, more Elden Ring details

Elden Ring is out in January so a little bit of a detail drought would be easy enough to deal with, especially seeing as we went literal years without hearing anything before the game was officially unveiled back in June. It's surprising, then, that we actually got a little bit of news at Tokyo Game Show courtesy of Elden Ring producer Yasuhiro Kitao. Speaking in an interview with Famitsu, Kitao confirmed that the game is currently in "the final stages of development" and is "moving forward quietly" towards its early 2022 release date.

• We also learned that Elden Ring apparently has a "very unusual map structure" that gives the player the freedom to explore wherever and whenever they want, but "also tells you when you're in trouble." FromSoftware's Souls series is no stranger to intricate and even obtuse world design, but it looks like Elden Ring being designed to give "an enormous sense of scale and this broadness and openness" is set to push things even further. Players can discover physical map fragments across the world (surely a first for the series) and set their own waypoints to help with navigation a bit. Roll on January.