Jank Mail: Eternal fetch quests

The week is over and it's definitely autumn now, which I don't care for, but there are some good games and good words to comfort us as the evenings draw in. For the latter, we did some important financial journalism to find out who could make the most without spending any money in Wardogs, and I won't say who won on money but Brendy definitely won on depravity:

I crawl forward to a screaming teammate, lying in the grass ahead of me, and take his machine gun, helmet, and armour. I turn to crawl away, and then think better of it. I turn to revive him. Because it will earn me money. Unfortunately, two other people have had the same idea. We all crowd around our fallen comrade, rubbing our hands together like three fuckbois warming their hands over a Tinder profile.

Sin reviewed Ostranaughts, which is entirely our sort of game (derogatory):

You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.

We passed 900 wonderful, attractive, charismatic subscribers which means we get to break out Nic Ruben's new column asking games about their book collection. First up: Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård, who delivered both book recommendations and personal lore:

I remember reading Neuromancer in high school on an illegally hosted website with a cool and headache-inducing black-and-green color scheme. That shit, along with a certain teaser trailer in 2013, got me so hyped for the entire cyberpunk genre that I spent like three years of my youth trying to make the greatest HACKERMAN game ever made. Three times. First was a Hotline Miami clone that crashed if you touched a wall. Second was an isometric pixel art RPG with recolored Mega Man X sprites. Third was an insane copy of the classic 2002 web game, Lego Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident. After that, I was done with cyberpunk. When 2077 eventually released, I felt nothing.

In this week's Total Playtime, I joined Nate and Brendy to pick over the sinister threat of World of Warcraft Forever, the Matt-Berry-voiced IKEA shelf in Skyrim, and for some reason Post Malone's enthusiasm for Magic: The Gathering. And of course Graham picked out some of the internet's finest words for The Lie-In, including a long-read about payday loans and an interview the folks trying to build a new Club Penguin.

In wider PC gaming news, Blizzard waited until I’d sent last week’s newsletter before revealing their Blizzcon news, the cowards.  This included the announcements of Diablo 5, which will be Diablo again (and on PC); a new Starcraft which will be a story based-FPS; which sounds like a joke but isn’t; and World of Warcraft Forever, which also sounds like a joke but is actually more of a curse. The latter has a massively oversubscribed beta you can’t get into so they’re really nailing those formative OG WoW experiences. I never really got into Starcraft to the same degree as the real heads, or Korea as they're more popularly known, but the FPS pivot seems like a bold decision based on the last time they tried this.

The other big news was that the Steam Frame came out and it’s good but expensive and now it’s very difficult to buy anyway. There is no dedicated new game for it because Valve got too stuck into making Half-Life Alyx work, which is fine but nevertheless disappointing.

Bungie is changing how it does Marathon updates to introduce “permanent PvE progression” which apparently means shooting giant bugs, and an “experimental” team deathmatch mode, which sounds a lot like admitting that the game is indeed too intimidating for normies to stick with it. The EU has a new child safety law that might make a lot of work for people making multiplayer games. Kojima’s new thing has a creepy Skarsgaard. 

There’s a new PC gaming site from the fine people at Hookshot, to which we are tribally opposed but spiritually supportive because games media is otherwise going downhill and Microsoft straight up admitted that AI scraping will destroy journalism as an industry, please support Jank so that we may first survive and second hire Brendy full-time.

The Twitch CEO says that GTA 6 multiplayer will launch next year and also that GTA 6 will make lots of people return to Twitch, and while both of those statements come from a place of naked self-interest I find them both highly plausible. Nighthawks was briefly too sexy to release but they got better, or worse depending on your level of depravity. This week’s layoffs: nearly all of Heart Machine, probably all of Build A Rocket Boy and definitely all of Polyarc. 

The most recent Call of Duty developer is “ready to make something new” which is a shame because it’s definitely just going to make more Call of Duty except with, idk, more user-generated content. Wardogs sold a lot but the CEO said a lot so the week has been at best a mixed bag for him. The pre-GTA games release crush now contains a Total War Shogun 2 remake. Somehow, Kinect has returned.  

Let's see what the commenters came up with. JimJamMajesty is a person of science.

I appreciate the inclusion of "stabbing cops" as a metric for game reviews.

Sin Vega (her again) does not care to do it Wardoggy style:

It's really sad seeing a HUD that reminds me quite strikingly of Planetside 2, and then having that interest rapidly drained by screen after screen of grey, dilapidated generi-manshoot wraparound sunglasses backwards baseball cap skull on your mask snorefodder

Nathan Redland has a grim portent of future mod-based marketing:

Can’t wait to see David Mitchell playing a Greggs steak bake-flavoured food cube in a Starfield mod this time next year.

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