Jank Mail: A dread Embrace

This week on Jank, Graham used The Lie-In to get in one more round of Mixtape discourse, which is now over and need never be spoken of again. The first Disco Elysium sequel came out and Nic reviewed it. Titanium Court came out already but Alice has reviewed it now, so it’s official. Both reviews are qualified endorsements, which are secretly the best kind of endorsement. 

On Total Playtime, we came up with the worst merch ideas we could think of and made the mistake of inviting suggestions on the topic, so now I have people emailing me about Disco Elysium Funko Pops. This week’s Character Select pitted Stardew Valley against The Flood, which paired nicely with our definitive judgement of the best grenade in videogames.

Outside these ruthlessly uncommercial walls, a new financial year has dawned so the publishers are all announcing what happened in the  last one. Take-Two did great because people love NBA and spending money in GTA Online, Ubisoft did badly because that’s just what it does these days and Embracer did badly because of everything it’s ever done since its inception. It’s going to solve this by spinning off another company, because that is also what it does these days. 

To mark this occasion the CEO of Embracer put out an open letter packed with remarkable “lessons” like “problems don’t solve themselves”, “borrowing lots of money can be risky” and “nobody ever understood what Embracer was trying to do”, all of which should have been thunderingly obvious to anybody who’d sat through a business studies class or even played a management game. There was also a spirited effort to request credit for all the people they didn’t lay off rather than being blamed for the thousands that they did, which received a suitably succinct response from Chris over on Game Developer, and a threat that Embracer will seek to acquire other businesses in future, which sounds like a campfire horror story to scare young developers with.

For the rest of us, there’s a chance that they’ll entrust licences like Deus Ex, Saints Row and Thief to external developers, upgrading the likelihood of sequels from “never” to “maybe”. There are vanishingly few independent studios who could create something of that sort of scale so it’s somewhat academic; all the new studio launches are loudly telegraphing their ambition to make something small and affordable because we all know what happens otherwise.  

On the subject of which! Destiny 2 is finished and reportedly so are most of its developers. Quantic Dream gave up on its live service game, which may surprise those unaware that Quantic Dream had made a live service game, and hey guess what. In brighter news the Kingdom Come Deliverance people are doing fine and making a Lord of the Rings RPG, but don’t worry, they’re making another Kingdom Come Deliverance as well. Steam killed RPG Maker as a tag but it can never kill what it means in our hearts.

You can play Star Citizen for free this weekend and you don’t have to spend the cost of a real-life car on a made-up spaceship to do so. Sony is officially giving up on bringing single-player games to PC, which denies us maybe four games but they’re pretty good ones so that’s a shame. Embark wishes you to know that Arc Raiders matchmaking is not a simple carebears/psychopaths binary but “a scale” between the two, so you can apparently murk somebody occasionally, as a treat.  

Metaverse guy is now Xbox strategy guy. Serial MMO guy says that the people yearn for MMOs. What are the chances. Take-Two guy says that making Borderlands look like that cost $50M and it wouldn’t have been a success without it, which is probably why he thinks the other indistinct shooter that 2K just forcibly redesigned is going to be a hit. He also says GTA 6 is definitely coming out in November, so please get ready for extremely over-produced trailers.

Let us close with some choice cuts from the comment section. Rackham has some big feelings about Disco Elysium in What You Could Play This Weekend.

I think about games being inspired by it in the way we had Doom clones, endless roguelikes and Soulslikes and it makes me nauseous. Having the same skill systems does not make you my love.

Will I try Esoteric Ebb anyways? I love the medium of video games. I don't know if I should cut myself off from games that are likely to be great, just because I feel in the pit of my stomach it's wrong to copy someone else's soul.

Maybe Esoteric Ebb won't be art. Maybe it'll just be a great game like Dark Souls 2. Maybe that's okay. Maybe it'll all be okay.

Meanwhile Nick Sitko is hanging with the bros.

I am playing Final Fantasy XV and it feels like a game made by somebody whose whole range of knowledge about the US comes from a drunken friend at a bar recapping top 25 US-set movies from IMDB (with funny voices). And then this person remembered that it's Final Fantasy and added a heavy dose of prophecies and huge swords and dumb haircuts and IMPORTANT CRYSTALS.

In other words, it's great and I'm loving every minute of it. At it's core (at least so far) it's a remarkably chill roadtrip with a quartet of lovable anime idiots, and it really really works.

Durkonkell revealed themselves to be our kind of sucker in the Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review.

Man, I’m a sucker for someone who just really loves words. Give me a neat turn of phrase or two and I’m yours. Great review!

RickyParaphernalia has some valuable tips on planning your wedding in the Titanium Court review.

It’s a constant source of disappointment that none of the Edinburgh Fringe performers I’ve invited to my weddings have ever shown up. Careful who you ask at the Montreux Jazz Festival, though. They’ll be there- with friends.

That's all for this week. Go play some PC games.