Jank Mail: Bye-bye, Bioware

This week on Jank, the reviews kept coming, as our pitiless judgement was applied to still more new PC games. Sin was left largely cold by the whale-based space exploration of Beyond These Stars:

The planets' lack of significance is compounded by the fiddly micromanagement needed to transfer resources from whale to planet, and although it's cool that you can run these planetary towns independently at any time (even before unlocking fast travel gates between them), they suffer from the same problem as the post-apocalypse city builders of recent years: they split your focus so much that the only workable approach is to either make them tiny and perfectly stable, or milk them dry as rapidly as possible. 

Marsh had a surprisingly good time with Hellraiser: Revival, which turned out to be more sophisticated than its teenage schlock suggested:

That Revival even gestures towards this sort of deep discussion surprised me, given that the game initially appears to be liberally doused in the Axe Body Spray stank of puerile lockerroom fantasy. Its lurid depictions of sex clubs or even private sex have an edgy absurdity to them, even before you account for the cultists and transdimensional leather-daddies. But though Revival deals in the kind of smutty imaginings you might attribute to undersocialised and overwanked boys (who absolutely, definitely have hot girlfriends that go to another school), it is not doing so thoughtlessly. 

Sin advocated for creeping reconnaissance in Adaca’s Zone Patrol mode:

You look for artifacts. These exchange for starting weapons, practical and boring and soon running dry (leaving the gravity arm, for launching junk, accidentally braining yourself, and petulantly yoinking a soldier's gun before firing it into the stratosphere). You're supposed to pick up bizarre weapons, to find secret things, to notice, experiment, familiarise. To come close to revealing something, then guess there's a missing piece and make the recon decision: time to head home and come back with a plan. Excellently, see, you must return to the beachhead, whenever you want but however far you went. 

I was charmed by the Archives of Trevosa, a nice little deduction game you can play for free on Itch while they’re working on the dolled-up Steam release.

Like Roottrees, the goal is to fill out a multigenerational family tree, although in this case the tree itself is already present and you have to assign the name and title to each. These may be ascertained by picking through sundry historical records like speeches, notes, and courtly proclamations, and searching the names or Trevosan phrases found within. It’s a medieval version of Roottrees' 90s internet, basically, with the chief deviation being the aforementioned phrases that require a stretch of dogged determination to translate.

We debuted our first and possibly last cryptic crossword because that’s the sort of desperately uncommercial thing we can do thanks to the backing of our subscribers. For exactly the same reason, Nate could compel us to eat the McDonald’s Xbox menu for this week’s episode of Total Playtime, while his wife hunted down Halo-branded McNuggets. 

Beyond Jank, it’s layoffs again but unusually emotional as EA has shut down Bioware entirely. This is not surprising given that sweeping cost cuts were the only way it was going to pay off the vast debt it accrued to go private, and even if that wasn’t the case the prospect of betting nine figures on a studio with a spotty recent track record was always going to be a tough sell. It is nevertheless very sad: the Mass Effect game they were making looked great and sounds great, and the creators who’ve just been laid off are once again not the ones who caused the problems. All that remains is the Amazon TV show and an N7 day that will presumably be dedicated to mourning and developer GoFundMes, because EA is memory-holing everything else.

The loss of Bioware was the headline amid job cuts at a bunch of other EA studios and a general commitment to Guns, Sport and Recurring Revenues: they’re putting Respawn and DICE together to make Battlefront 3 and separately developing an “open-world American Football game” which sounds like both a terrible idea and very hard to sell internationally, like the gaming equivalent of those gigantic pickup trucks that can’t be sold anywhere outside of North America. We also learned of one deceased Sims project and one that survived with ominous title of "Project Evergreen", which suggests the arrival of subscription pricing.

Xbox wasn’t about to give up the bad-vibes spotlight without a fight, though. The latest fawning profile of Asha Sharma pegged the cost of the next console at $1,800 (although note that's "cost" not "price") and said that more job cuts are coming in October. November and January. Separately, “sources confirmed” that Gears of War E-Day cost $500 million and didn’t sell, which suggests it’s going to be a bad time for The Coalition. It remains a bad time for Arkane but it’s probably not going to be shut down. The Xbox COO quit after 21 years at the company and three months in the job, which is not a good sign. 

In brighter news, apparently CoD is good again. Half-Life 3 might exist. Beyond Good And Evil 2 does exist, but in a state of perpetual uncertainty because apparently Ubisoft can still afford that level of dicking around. Pantaloon will give you a bunch of weird games for £4 a month.

The developers of Despatch accidentally made ”three feature-length movies and a video game on top of each other” and they do not recommend it. Most game studios are using AI although not particularly deeply, confirming Tim Sweeney as AI Spiders Georg. Epic remains extremely enthusiastic about it and set up a vibecoding game jam although it later confirmed that you don’t have to use AI. 

Lucasfilm wants to make smaller Star Wars games. The developers of Samson filed for bankruptcy, which is also sad but not entirely surprising. Through a simple process of extrapolation, I have concluded that Helldivers 3 will be a visual novel. 

This year’s Football Manager is going to be free for a bit to make up for how bad last year’s was, which is nice but it’s also Football Manager so there’s an element of “drug dealer giving out free samples” here. Modding CDPR games is a good way to get hired by CDPR. The games media is still on fire, please support Jank so that we may survive.

Meanwhile in the comment section, Agingdanform took the bait:

"What if Half-Life 2 was good" - Nobody chooses violence quite like Sin.

Anders (SeekerX) speaks our language:

I both love and hate that I immediately understand the seemingly oxymoronic "superb 6/10". 

Durkonell appreciates alluring alliteration: 

I would probably play at least the demo for a game called Were-War: World Wolf 

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