Don’t be too sad. Tim is now raking it in on Patreon, and recently put out his most baroque video about Final Fantasy VII yet on Youtube, so there is some justice in the world. And the other writers have new perches elsewhere as well (and while we’re on the subject of writers once of this pasture, Evan Narcisse is…

There are more people working from home because of COVID-19, which likely means the security policies they would normally employ with builds have been loosened, whether that’s for QA, third party services, etc in order to meet the new shipping date.

That was my slightly mangled point — I think the thing AC took from TW3 was its broad RPG framework, well-written & cutscened side quests with actual choices (vs the increasingly dreadful fetch-quest while someone talks at you model of Unity) and an overall narrative that branched depending on choices you made (plus a…

I really hope they nail the settlement building. Even in something as small as the Witcher 3's arduous statue-building quest, there’s a deep reward in seeing the landscape permanently altered by your decisions. Mostly because (in the Witcher 3, at least) it reflects an overall design decision that your choices should…

It sounds like it’s going to be woven into the narrative and the choices, which can be really nice in an RPG, as it might create a more profound sense that your actions are shaping the world.

Lots more details in this Eurogamer piece:

I’m always slightly in awe of the journalists that manage to combine knowing their beat inside and out with the genuine perceptiveness that’s required to understand what isn’t being covered but should be, and how that fits into a larger picture. When I think back on the work you’ve done on crunch & working conditions a…

Indie-devs should learn from the Avengers and start thinking about those Switch hit crossovers:

Ooh! Thank you, what a nice surprise :) Though, if I’m honest, Jordak’s Beatles crosswalk (the shadow!) was the one I’d have gone for.

Increpare’s mini games are one of the very best things on the internet. If you didn’t check it out last year, Gestalt_OS is a wonderful thing:

I can exclusively reveal that Kraft Foods were forced to kill off Mr. Peanut after he struck an exclusive deal with Naughty Dog to star in their next franchise as a globe-trotting treasure hunter.

Single-player games are one & done financial transactions, where you pay your $50 bucks or whatever and get a game to play. Multiplayer games give rise to new & potentially repeated transactions, whether the slightly sleazy pay-to-win mechanics or things like season passes that keep the sleaze inside the skinner box…

This is an EXCELLENT DIGITAL VIDEO SERIES, Tim Rogers, formerly critic at Kotaku dot com, now fledgling shellwalla with the fingers of a bandy-legged foal. If you make more of these videos I will watch them all. Your failures will inspire me, as they should anyone who jumps with a metaphorical shell into the winds…

I got in on the alpha a ways back and have played countless hours of it since then. It’s hard to overstate how much there is to do in the game, and how replayable it is.

Tobacco companies have a long history of co-opting symbols of masculinity/coolness/etc and tying them to smoking, because it encourages people, particularly those under 18, to smoke.

Motion capture tends to work in concert with hand animation, which builds off it. The more the design changes, the more they’re going to have to redo all that detailed work. Not to mention that if the face design changes significantly, its expressive range will change as well, which requires much more involved work to…

I played a lot of Hitman 2016 during a fallow period in the PS4 release schedule and had no end of fun pushing levels to their breaking point. At one point, I got into an endless fist fight with a guard, which managed to summon almost the entire level’s security detail to watch:

I looked it up on my phone, Sherlock

It’s not really my thing, but I know anime is part of Kotaku’s coverage and that’s cool. However, when you feature stuff like this I wish you’d use different judgment about the article image that appears on the main site. It frequently crosses a line where I don’t think that I can reasonably open Kotaku at work. The…

Use your eagle to scout out and tag any sharks before diving into any shipwrecks (there’s usually 3-4) and then shoot them with arrows from the safety of your boat. It only takes 1 or 2.