I hope I’ll be able to play this. I foolishly started a New Game+ at the end because I wanted to punch that horse jerk into the ground, but once I did that I realized I was stuck back at the start of the game. I don’t have it in me to grind to some of the later areas again. 

They’re all like that, but the game does a pretty good job about giving you boosts when you get beaten down that makes it level out in the long run. It’s a campaign designed for you to lose a considerable chunk of the matches. SPOILERS - In the end, aside from the narrative wrap up, the legacy itself only contributes…

I believe that’s about 3mm then. Perhaps they meant half a centimeter. 

Holy cow, the tether is only half a millimeter thick? That’s like a single strand of unjacketed fiber optic cable. 

It says in the article that it only took around five minutes per day. For 200 days, that’s a little under 17 hours. Not a huge time investment. 

Huh. Glad there’s stuff you like, but I find it to personally be a bit of a lackluster month. I got Cities off Gold some time back, and I played Madden for about eight hours on the GP free trial through EA Play. Atomic Heart is a standout though, very excited to check it out. 

Is Side Order supposed to be creepy? I thought it was just going to be something like “We lost all our color so now you need to paint the world!” It seemed like some really cool artwork was flashing in between there, so I assumed it was a just referencing more complex painting tools coming to the game. 

I agree with most of your points, except that this deal creates “little value for actual users”. If MS stays on the path they’re on, and puts these games on GamePass when they launch, that would be $70 per ABK game that a user would have otherwise bought that is included in their subscription. For users in that…

They have PC GamePass, but I think it’d actually be a great test case for a streaming-only console game. You’d get a lot of people who would be more forgiving of the experience because they’re getting a $15 a month sub for free. 

So it does use MMR, but it uses an aggregate across the whole team. And since the match range is pretty broad (I think you can be two whole ranks apart in a match, so a bronze player can be in an aggregate “gold match” with a platinum player on the other team) you get some huge swings. I’m in between high gold and low…

Looks great, planning to play this after the kid is asleep tonight. I have a feeling based on the track list from the trailer that this will be a tight three to four hour experience (which makes a ton of sense when launching on GamePass). Excited!

Depends on how it breaks down, but 343i is ~450, BGS, ~420, and the Coalition ~200. So at about 1100 people, it’s the vast majority of those workers. I think it’s much more likely that the layoffs were from Zenimax proper rather than BGS (2200 employees), in which case it’s about one third of the employees across all…

The buttons on the Xbox controller are colored to look like the Windows icon. 

I watched any of your web content that popped up in my feed (usually with someone like Rob Zacny showing up), but it was few and far between. I hope that you find something soon, and that we hear about it on Kotaku! 

This issue for me isn’t so much that they went from five new skins in the event to one (but that sucks) or that they no longer have three free skins to earn (but that sucks too) or that there aren’t any new game modes for the event (but that’s also a letdown), it’s that the modes that are there are now available all…

It says in the article, “at least 878” across 343, the Coalition, and Bethesda. I do wonder if some of those are redundant positions. They didn’t really do any layoffs when they acquired Bethesda and most companies would have let go of duplicated roles in finance and marketing, for example. Sucks that anyone has to…

Two things of note here. 1) The core gameplay is still really good. It’s fast paced, fun, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else quite like it out there at the same quality. The community is relatively tight knit, especially those that kept playing through the two years with no content updates. People are invested…

Seems like a weird choice to hold off on Starfield. They’ve shown enough of it, and it looks similar enough to their other products, that I think many people have set ideas about what this game will be. I doubt that another marketing beat will change many minds, and since it’s on GamePass all they need to do is…

Yes it was in early access, but it still had the 1.0 release this year. The company considers it a release for fiscal purposes, the media considers it a release for awards purposes, the game came out this year. 

This is just the same concurrent effect we see for every game near release. The time when most people are playing it is shortly after its release and this game just happens to be the most popular one. Even if MS had some released something huge, let’s say Starfield, in June, it would likely still be drowned out by…