Apparently marketing for Shipbreakers is going through Gearbox, so my guess is that they will publicise the Remasters and then use their release later this year to hit us with Shipbreakers stuff. My guess is that Shipbreakers will launch in 2015. The game was actually in a playable beta state a year ago, so I'm…

'Early Autumn 2014'.

No. They've said the remasters will be available on Steam.

Apparently Gearbox want the the updated originals to work fine with mods and allow modding for the remasters. If it actually happens or not is anther quest. CA continue to insiste that Shogun 2 and Rome II are the most moddable Total War games ever when, very clearly, they are not. Big developers' ideas of 'moddable'…

Gearbox are internally handling the remakes, with advice and help from the guys at Blackbird (who are the guys who actually made HW1 and 2 whilst at Relic). So that's only a concern for the brand-new Homeworld game, Shipbreakers, when it launches (and even then the Blackbird guys have really good form to them). The…

It won't break Steam. If Steam can handle CoDs on release day and, well, almost every single major game on PC ever, with millions of people simultaneously downloading and playing, it can handle HL3.

ALPHA PROTOCOL was apparently not much more than an alpha build: Sega witheld the next stage of funding for polishing and beta, and Obsidian weren't willing to work for free, so left them to it. I don't think anyone's going to blame Obsidian for that. KotOR 2 was down to LucasArts messing around with the release dates…

I had one, though it was a biggie: the game wouldn't launch saved games from the front menu, I had to start a new game and then hit load from inside the game world. Luckily that only took 2 seconds, so it wasn't a major issue.

Self-publishing is what most Kickstarter games do by default (i.e. Obsidian will publish PILLARS OF ETERNITY, inXile will publish WASTELAND 2, Stoic publish THE BANNER SAGA etc). It just allows them to have the final say over the product. Usually with investing, the investors will agree to the initial design document…

They're self-publishing, so they don't have a traditional publisher. As their dev diary says, in some detail, they spent a year or so trawling around industry events and getting publisher reps in and got nowhere. As they say:

A third-person mode is a possibility, but only if there is a strong demand for it from backers.

Apparently it is purely first-person at the moment, but they have said they will look to add an optional third-person mode if enough people demand it.

If you look on their website, they have a terrific development diary in which they talk about trawling around various event shows taking meetings with publishers (which requires some rather expensive flying over to the States, sometimes for weeks at a time) and trying to explain what they are doing. Even when they get…

Apparently it's a very heavily modified and customised version of Source. Expecting ordinary Source mods to work on it would be like expecting Quake 1 mods to work on the original Half-Life without any adjustment, and they wouldn't. You could port them over once you knew how Titanfall had modified the engine, but…

Apparently every time a big website reported on a GTA4 mod, sales of GTA4 on PC would measurably jump. GTA4's PC sales remain buoyant many years after the console versions have basically flatlined for this reason (alongside the constant discounting of the game in Steam sales). So that's certainly one example of how…

Yeah, the rumour was that Rocksteady are working on a Silver Age DC game with a different tone to the Arkaham games, but there's been nothing about that since.

The leaked storylines are rather different: the hoax had you as the last survivor of a vault destroyed by unknown forces who then travels to Boston in response to SOS calls from a settlement there. This leak suggests you are a WWIII soldier put in suspended animation for 200 years who wakes up to find the world's…

I assume Kotaku have insider contacts in these companies with provenance, and would not make definitive statements unless the info came from someone with a good track record.

Bethesda's main development team probably only started work on FO4 once they had completed Dragonborn, which is a bit less than a year ago. Pre-production on it probably did begin a few months before that, but the game's still at a fairly early stage of development.

There is a cost benefit: making a full 3D RPG with an over-the-shoulder camera or even a top-down but fully-rotatable camera (like say DRAGON AGE) is enormously expensive, costing many tens of millions of dollars, maybe closer to $100 million. Creating those 3D assets to stand up in high resolution to people standing…