Daily Briefing: Friday 5th March

Valve end development on Artifact 2.0

An official statement published to Artifact's Steam page reads that, while the team were "reasonably satisfied" with the extent to which they had achieved their game-side goals, Artifact just wasn't able to draw in enough active players to justify investing further development resources.

• Players can now download Artifact Classic or the Artifact 2.0 Beta, now renamed Artifact Foundry, completely for free - no further updates will be made on either title. Artifact initially launched back in November when its genuine potential was marred by its baffling in-game economy. Reboot efforts began in March 2020 but they just weren't to be. After Anthem, this is bad few weeks for reboot projects.

Marvel's Avengers' levelling grind is about to get even grindier

Square Enix's Avengers title will finally hit Xbox Series X|S and PS5 on March 18th and to celebrate (?) the game will be getting a significant change - the XP requirement for maxing out a character will increase. So that means one of the grindiest games ever made is about to get even grindier.

• In an update on the game's official website, the developers explained that they felt things like quick level-ups and rapid XP gain could be confusing to new players and led to "pacing issues". This new slower levelling will kick in at level 25 (so surely new players will still get confused?) and seeks to take one of the beleaguered game's biggest issues and make it even worse.

Outriders demo hit two million players, patches incoming

The newest game from Polish developer People Can Fly has been putting on quite a performance during its demo, reaching two million players in just one week, and now the devs are seeking to capitalise on and maintain the momentum by dropping a major patch.

• A lot of the patch addresses the sorts of stability improvements you would expect, like crash fixes and bumps to matchmaking time, but there are also some balance and loot changes on the way. Outriders is intended to be a Destiny-killer of sorts, and so People Can Fly will need to pay close attention to these aspects. The fact that they're doing so even in the demo can only be a good sign.

Senior Sucker Punch devs made permanent ambassadors of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima game director Nate Fox and creative director Jason Connell will become permanent ambassadors of the real-life city of Tsushima in Nagasaki, Japan. To celebrate the occasion, the city have pledged to collaborate with Sony to set up a new tourism campaign based on the game.

• Tsushima mayor Hiroki Hitakatsu explained that the duo are receiving the honour for spreading "the name and history of Tsushima to the whole world in such a wonderful way”. This is the first time such an award has been granted to someone of the of "their works", which is pretty neat.