Bellular

Daily Briefing: Monday 14th March

Square Enix Seek Feedback On Babylon’s Fall

Square Enix have launched a survey to gather feedback on making a “better game experience” for Babylon’s Fall, specifically asking about the visual aspects of the game.

• This seems completely tone-deaf. Your live service action game launches to a PS5 Metacritic score of 42 and you ask about its graphical style after already revamping it entirely before launch? What about the fact it’s a full price game jammed full of cos...
  2022-03-14 19:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 9th March

Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary Site LIVE... And A Stranger Of Paradise Demo Soon

Ahead of tonight’s State of Play, Square Enix have launched a site celebrating FF’s 35th anniversary. Right now, the two projects on the page are Stranger of Paradise and Chocobo GP, but under “New Titles” it says “And More...”. That’s a heavy hint towards State of Play announcements of Final Fantasy titles tonight, perhaps 7’s Part 2, or maybe the Geforce-leaked remake of FF9 or Tactics. ...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 8th March

A Japanese Publisher-Focused State Of Play Tomorrow!

Sony have announced a State of Play, lasting about 20 minutes, will be on Wednesday, March 9th, at 2pm PT/5pm ET/10pm GMT. It’ll focus on “highlighting great games” from Playstation’s partner Japanese publishers, but will feature some updates from “other developers located around the world”.

• Bandai Namco, Square Enix & Capcom are the most likely to drop major updates, especially with Square Enix’s leaks...
  2022-03-08 19:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Daily Briefing: Monday 7th March

A State Of Play Due This Month

With the release of PlayStation’s first two major titles of the year, Horizon and Gran Turismo 7, a State of Play is allegedly coming as soon as this week to highlight the near-future of the platform. However, it’s claimed it may be delayed until the end of the month due to the industry’s reaction to the invasion of Ukraine. Ghostwire: Tokyo, God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are their next major exclusives, and they may be gearing up to ann...

Daily Briefing: Friday 4th March

Gran Turismo 7’s Microtransactions Are Heavy: Cars Costing $30+

Gran Turismo 7’s microtransaction costs were unavailable during early previews, but now that they’ve gone live, the ‘credit bundles’ are raising eyebrows. Credits are currency earned in-game that can be topped up for real money in the store, and cars can range from tens of thousands all the way up to 3 million. The credit bundles come in between $2.49 for 100,000 and $19.99 for  2 million. For a 3 million c...

Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd March

PlatinumGames’ Babylon’s Fall Has Released To Crickets

Square Enix’s next attempt at a live service following the disastrous Marvel’s Avengers has released today.... to zero fanfare. Impressions across players of the demo are profoundly negative: “EXACTLY What I Feared”, “Depressingly Bad”, “It WASN’T Very Good...”. and more. At time of writing, despite being available on PS5, it has only 2 critic reviews, one unscored and the other rating it 5 out of 10. Over on...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 2nd March

GMG Union On Strike

Union workers at Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and The Root are striking. The GMG Union has made proposals to G/O Media’s counsel five times, but rather than counterproposals, they have been sidestepped and delayed each time. They’re striking on 6 specific things: Refusing to codify healthcare improvements, paying too little to retain talent, not providing family leave, insisting on a return to the office despite WFH success, delaying conversat...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 1st March

Steam Deck owners are reporting stick drift

In a video shared to Reddit, one user showed the test controller input screen to prove that their right stick was already drifting - they clearly let go and reset the stick to neutral, but the screen is showing input values, the same issue that has been affecting most modern controllers and most notably on the Switch’s joycons. This is despite Valve’s claims last year that they did everything in their power to avoid stick drift issues. 2022-03-01 19:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Daily Briefing: Monday 28th February

GabeN Spotted Hand-Delivering Steam Decks (And Giving Some Away!)

Valve boss Gabe Newell has been spotted doing what seems like Steam promotion in Seattle, hand-delivering signed Steam Decks to customers in the area while followed by a camera crew. Multiple reddit accounts have shared stories of this, including one who claimed that they spotted him, shouted “Hi Gabe!” as he was delivering to his neighbour’s house, only for Gabe to bring over a few over for him and his housemates...

Daily Briefing: Friday 25th February

Elden Ring’s Launch On PC Is A Disaster, But... Still Incredible?

Elden Ring’s launch on PC has hit a peak player count of 764,835 - six times higher than the previous series’ peak with Dark Souls 3. However, it’s currently sitting with 40% of reviews as negative, primarily down to performance issues on PC - frame rate problems, an egregious stuttering issue that Digital Foundry claims is down to FromSoft’s poor use of DirectX 12, and even issues with EasyAntiCheat stopping ...

Daily Briefing: Thursday 24th February

Christian Dailey Leaves BioWare - Another Leader Down

In an update posted by BioWare General Manager Gary McKay, Dragon Age 4 is currently in “Production”, with a full pre-production blueprint that the team understand and are focused on turning into a game. They’re sad to see Dailey go, but understand that the industry is changing and sometimes, people want something new - Twitter sentiment among devs is that he’s moving on happily and left his mark on the project, leaving it ...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 22nd February

Bethesda Are Sunsetting Their PC Launcher - Moving To Steam!

In a surprise move, Bethesda have announced they’re winding down their own launcher and moving their library to Steam - including transferring licenses for existing Bethesda.net customers. Starting in early April, players will be able to migrate games and Wallet to their Steam account. Bethesda.net acco...

Daily Briefing: Thursday 17th February

EA Internally Blame Halo Infinite For Some Of BF2042’s Performance

In a town hall post-mortem of Battlefield 2042 reported by Tom Henderson, EA’s Chief Studios Officer Laura Miele admitted that Battlefield failed to meet the expectations of both the players and EA. They generally believe that the issues were brought on by the massive development time on Frostbite updates and moving BF2042 to a new version of it, the impact from the pandemic, and that Halo Infinite’s release was ...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 16th February

Apologies for a lack of Daily Briefing yesterday, patrons! This one is a bit larger to make up for anything you may have missed.

The Witcher 3’s Director Has A New Studio

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz left CDPR last year after being accused of bullying, accusations that he denied - and after a months-long investigation, he was determined not guilty. Still, he resigned, and now he helms his own studio in Warsaw. Rebel Wolves consists of ex-CDPR staff including The Witcher 3’s art dire...

Daily Briefing: Monday 14th February

Horizon: Forbidden West Reviews Are In

Reviews are in, and it’s sitting pretty at 89 across OpenCritic and Metacritic. A throughline across reviews is that it’s an incredible improvement on the original in almost every way. Eurogamer, among others, were a little less impressed by story and characters, some criticism focuses on it feeling unfocused and more varied than makes sense, and some suggests that the RPG elements aren’t particularly unique - but the majority of opinion re...

LOOT! February 2022

Yes, we've all got the hots for Dandelion ;)

We're about to launch with out new fulfilment partner, which is going to make shipping etc significantly faster! December 2021 is shipping to them now, and January 2022 will ship to them next week. February 2022 will ship March 4th - 6th, with that timing holding for all future months.

We've Got A NEW Studio!

The work begins!

Daily Briefing: Thursday 10th February

Microsoft are keeping an eye on Activision Blizzard’s executive leadership

That’s according to Microsoft president Brad Smith who, speaking in a new interview with CNBC, confirmed that the company want to greatly improve the work culture at Activision Blizzard. To do this, Smith says, the right people need to be in charge: “I think if there’s one thing that we’ve learned about addressing issues like sexual harassment or almost any issue of culture for people, it really requi...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 9th February

FromSoftware are fixing that Dark Souls PC exploit

A wee while ago we reported on a dangerous Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit currently plaguing the PC version of Dark Souls III. The potential security vulnerability could be exploited by abusers and used to gain access to other players’ PCs, at which point they could do anything from install malware to steal personal data. We learned from various community commentary that exploits of this kind have existed across the entire Dark...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 8th February

There’s a Nintendo Direct tomorrow

Ah, this is always an oddly fun little piece of new to give. Nintendo will hold a new Nintendo Direct presentation tomorrow, Wednesday 9th February, at 5pm EST/2pm PST. The presentation, the first since September 2021, will cover any number of things across its 40-minute runtime. Nintendo’s upcoming Switch-centric lineup (RIP the 3DS) includes games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, but we don’t have a huge ...

Daily Briefing: Monday 7th February

Loads of Dying Light 2 fixes are coming this week

Zombie survival sandbox Dying Light 2: Stay Human may be one of the biggest games of the year but that doesn’t mean its launch last week was entirely without incident. While the game is by all accounts a solid blockbuster action sequel, it’s still a AAA game releasing in the year 2022 and so it has its fair share of bugs, glitches, and crashes. That’s not ideal by any means, but developers Techland are showing themselves to be ve...

Legion’s Doomsayer Mystery Has Blown My Mind

Remember the doomsayers? Two expansions later, they've been SOLVED! We know what they're talking about - and they've been setting up the next step for Warcraft the whole time.

Daily Briefing: Friday 4th February

There’s a mobile Warcraft game coming this year

Speaking in their most recent earnings report published this week (there was no actual earnings call due to the proposed Microsoft acquisition), the company stated that at least one F2P mobile Warcraft titles is set to release before the end of this year. This follows on from Activision Blizzard’s confirmation last year that “multiple” F2P Warcraft experiences were deep in development. As far as specific details go, the earnings ...

Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd February

Skate 4 is reportedly “launching soon”

That’s straight from the mouth of EA CEO Andrew Wilson who, speaking  earlier this week in EA’s most recent earnings call, let slip a few key details. When discussing User-Generated Content, Wilson outlines that it’s been at the very centre of modes like Ultimate Team (Madden, FIFA, etc.) and that it will also be at the centre of Skate 4, which is “launching soon.” Well, it turns out that the new Skate game is actually just cal...

Dragons Are More Important Than We Thought

10.0 is (almost definitely) going to be about dragons. Why? The Age of Dragons ended in Cataclysm, right? Nope. New knowledge, and a second look at history, proves they’ve always been more important than even they know.

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 2nd February

PlayStation will launch 10 liveservice games in the next few years

That’s according to Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki who, speaking in the company’s most recent earnings call, outlined that “through close collaboration with Bungie and the PlayStation Studios, we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 31 2026.” As we know, liveservice games are fairly commonplace these days, and Totoki credits a recent jump in revenue from these kinds of games as ...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 1st February

Sony are buying Bungie

Not to be outdone by Microsoft’s seemingly bottomless wallet, Sony this week announced that they will be acquiring Bungie - the original Halo developers and creators of Destiny - in a deal worth around $3.6bn. In a new writeup announcing the acquisition, Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan that Bungie will be “an independent subsidiary” of SIE when the deal closes, and that they will remain a multiplatform studio with the option to �...

Daily Briefing: Friday 28th January

Hitman 3 Steam owners get free upgrades following messy launch

The Hitman trilogy (the new one, not the old one) is a bit of an odd duck. The games have released to fairly universal commercial and critical acclaim despite the fact that developers IO Interactive have seemingly been making every misstep known to man. They caused a bit of a stink last year when Hitman managed to launch with DRM on GOG.com, a historically and philosophically DRM-free marketplace. Then Hitman 3 finally com...

The Heart of Azeroth Is Their Key

N'zoth's whispers told us more than we knew at the time. When we make our way to Zereth Mortis, we're going to smuggle the Void in too.

Daily Briefing: Thursday 27th January

Ubisoft Singapore investigation concludes

According to new findings shared by Ubisoft, an external watchdog investigation into reports of misconduct at Ubisoft’s Singapore studio has confirmed that all allegations were handled appropriately. Last summer the TAFEP, which is Singapore’s watchdog for fair employment practices, launched an investigation into the widespread and incredibly well-documented allegations of workplace harassment at the studio.

• The TAFEP has repor...
  2022-01-27 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post