Month: October 2024

Star Wars Outlaws is almost here, and you know what that means: It’s nearly time to crouch-walk your way into saving the galaxy and—so says our own Morgan Park—actually have a pretty good time doing so.

But Star Wars Outlaws features a woman as its protagonist, which means it’s also time for the strangest corners of the internet to spin up some of the most baffling discourse they can. In this instance, a minority of very loud commentators have complained that devs have made Outlaws’ protagonist Kay Vess deliberately unattractive in order to further some kind of progressive political agenda. Somehow. Perhaps Ubisoft character designers are the engineers of the human soul.

It’s as bizarre a claim here as it was when certain segments of the internet were getting very heated about the appearance of Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West. More accurately, the appearance of Aloy in a screenshot taken at the most unflattering angle possible, which is then treated as representative of the character as a whole (which is also what’s being done to poor Kay Vess). Fortunately enough, Outlaws’ team has zero time for it. In a chat with The Washington Post, Star Wars Outlaws cr…

In 2009, Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were abruptly fired by the company’s owner Activision. West and Zampella had directed the original Call of Duty, and brought the series to superstardom through Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Their sacking just before the release of Modern Warfare 2 shocked the industry, and arguably changed the course of both Call of Duty and the FPS forever.

Now a developer who worked at Infinity Ward at the time has recalled the dramatic events of that day. Paul Sandler, who is currently Lead Designer at NetEase games, wrote am article on Linkedin detailing the day’s events. “Jason and Vince just got fired!” the article starts, in the words of a “lead artist” who broke the news to Sandler while riding a scooter around Infinity Ward’s office. “I just sat there in stunned silence with my eyes wide open,” Sandler recalls. “I stood up from my chair and sad: “What the fuck?…Why?”

Some of what Sandler recalls is familiar from articles written around the time. He writes that West and Zampella were fired for “insubordination” after a “series of executive-level meetings” and that following the firing Activision’s security guards …

Red Hook has been hooked. The Darkest Dungeon dev has been acquired by Behaviour Interactive, the company behind Dead By Daylight.

Which would, in an ideal world, be good news: A mutually beneficial arrangement that gets Red Hook the support it needs to make new games and that gives Behaviour a stake in them. That’s certainly how the statements from each company’s execs are selling it, anyway. Behaviour CEO Remi Racine says it’s part of a plan to “make Behaviour synonymous with horror.” Red Hook co-founder Chris Bourassa says the deal will let the studio “[open] the door to new possibilities.”

All of which sounds good to me, but the problem is the context. Not only has Behaviour made a chunk of layoffs this year (which, to be fair, makes it far from unique—it’s been a terrible time in general to work in game dev), but this announcement comes a mere week after Behaviour closed down Midwinter Entertainment, the team behind ill-fated Dead By Daylight PvE spin-off Project T. Behaviour had acquired Midwinter back in 2022, but killed off the studio—and Project T—after an internal playtest of the game “yielded unsatisfactory overall results.”

So as…