Eurogamer

Resident Evil producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi has established a new studio with NetEase.

GPTRACK50, as it's called, aims to create original IP that will "impress the whole world", not just games, but films and entertainment series.

Kobayashi, who will take the role of president, has been involved in the production of Resident Evil's live-action and CG animation series, as well as the Resident Evil games, Dino Crisis, Dragon's Dogma, Devil May Cry and more.

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If you like brash, explosive, Brosnan-era Bond action with outrageous, blockbuster set-pieces and peak Michael Bay spectacle, then boy do I have the game for you: it's available now on next-generation hardware, it's called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and it came out in 2009.

The original Modern Warfare 2 was huge, a cultural event after the breakout debut of the first Modern Warfare subtitle but also a remarkable reflection of that culture itself at the time. It was a bleak reflection of the west's shared headspace in the late noughties, playing up on jingoism and melodrama and a general post-9/11, mid-forever war, Pearl Harbour-esque fear of American vulnerability to surprise attack. There was an argument, too - not that many tend to agree with it - that a close reading might find something almost, nearly, verging on an anti-imperialist message, what with its tale of ultra-nationalists inciting invasions and warmongering commanders-in-chief using their window to take the world for a ride.

Microsoft loses up to $200 on each Xbox console it sells.

Speaking at the WSJ TechLive event on 26th October, Xbox head Phil Spencer admitted its Xbox Series X/S consoles are sold at a loss, with the expectation that revenue will be made up elsewhere on accessories and games.

"Consoles as a business model, in the overall scope of gaming, is fairly small relative to the places people play. Consoles evolved to a business model much different from phones where consoles are actually sold at a loss in the market," he said.

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With Halloween behind us, the spooky season is now winding down as we enter November.

To celebrate, developers and fans alike joined in the annual festivity of pumpkin carving.

Here's some of the delightfully devilish designs we've seen over the weekend!

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Fortnite is hosting a Star Wars week, and introducing skins for Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa and Han Solo alongside a range of classic trilogy-themed acessories.

Each of the three skins includes multiple designs based on costumes worn throughout the original trilogy - so, Luke in his white farmhand tunic but also his darker Return of the Jedi look, while Leia rocks her bounty hunter disguise as well as her iconic ear buns.

The game's ever-popular Lightsaber weapons are back, as is the return of Darth Vader and various Stormtroopers to defeat. In a nice touch, the Junk Rift item (which plummets an object onto a specific location, squashing anyone below it) can now drop Luke's landspeeder.

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The option to use Steam's family sharing function with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been disabled.

An update last night removed this feature for the game.

Steam's family sharing feature offers users exactly what you would expect. It allows players to share the games in their Steam library with their nearest and dearest. They can then go on to earn their own achievements and save any progress made in a shared game on the Steam Cloud.

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Sackboy: A Big Adventure hasn't had a big start on Steam.

Originally released on PlayStation consoles in November 2020 (launch window for PS5), the game arrived on PC via Steam last week on 27th October.

However, so far it's highest concurrent player peak is just 610 players, according to SteamDB.

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The number of people subscribed to PlayStation Plus has dropped by two million over the past year, despite Sony's big summer revamp of the service and the launch of several new pricing tiers.

PlayStation Plus had 45.4 million subscribers as of 30th September this year, down more than two million from the 47.2 million signed up at the same point in 2021.

Sony relaunched its PlayStation Plus subscription in June, when it split the service into three tiers and launched a Game Pass-style catalogue of games for those paying more.

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Square Enix's forthcoming farming sim Harvestella is the first of the publisher's games to offer a non-binary gender option in a character creator.

It's still something of a rarity for major game developers to specifically include non-binary representation in addition to male and female. But for the Harvestella team, its inclusion feels "completely normal", producer Daisuke Taka told Eurogamer.

"I think it's completely normal these days for non-binary to be included in gender selection," Taka said.

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UPDATE 2/11/22: The Last of Us' TV adaptation will indeed arrive in January, HBO and UK broadcast partner Sky have now officially confirmed.

As expected, the series' first episode will debut on 15th January in the US, which makes for a 16th January launch here in the UK.

These dates were previously glimpsed in promotional material and listings for the series visible to subscribers - more on all that below.

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Netflix's ongoing grasp for a chunk of the video game pie continues with the streaming service's announcement it has now snapped up Spry Fox, the studio behind the likes of Triple Town, Alphabear, and last year's Cozy Grove.

Netflix shared the news - which comes just shy of a year since the streaming service took its first tentative steps into gaming - on its website, saying Spry Fox's focus on "cosy, original" games would help it "accelerate our creative development in another beloved genre and add to the growing variety of Netflix's games catalogue that will have something for everyone."

It's unclear what today's news means for Spry Fox's previously announced publishing partnership with Epic Games, which was intended to result in a "multiplatform nonviolent persistent" MMO "designed to encourage friendship and reduce loneliness in the world".

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Playground Games' long-awaited Fable reboot continues to staff up with the news that Andrew Walsh, whose credits include senior writer on Horizon Forbidden West and associate narrative director on Horizon Call of the Mountain, has joined the team.

Walsh - whose writing career has spanned everything form The Division 2 and Prince of Persia to UK TV shows Emmerdale and Byker Grove - revealed his new role on Twitter, writing, "So, Albion has beckoned once again. I'm delighted to announce that I've had the chance to join the wonderful team [at Playground] working on the new Fable!".

As his tweet implies, this won't be Walsh's first dalliance with the Fable series; he was also lead writer on Fable Legends, the ill-fated free-to-play multiplayer-based spin-off, which was cancelled in 2016 when Microsoft made the decision to close developer Lionhead Studios.

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In an appropriately spooky bit of news for All Hallows' Eve, Ghostbusters VR has re-emerged following its announcement tease earlier this year with a brand new subtitle - Rise of the Ghost Lord - and 2023 release date on PSVR 2 and Meta Quest 2.

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, a collaboration between Sony Pictures Virtual Reality and developer nDreams, promises to unleash an "extensive and engrossing" spirit-bothering adventure playable either solo or co-operatively with up to three friends.

It also waves goodbye to the series' traditional home of New York City and makes the jump to San Franciso, taking players on a tour of some familiar sights - including the Golden Gate Bridge - as they attempt to thwart the titular Ghost Lord and his army of malevolent spirits.

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Portal 2's director Josh Weier has spoken more about the game's cut content and given background information on why features were cut or how they came to be.

The team that worked on Valve's first-person puzzle adventure masterpiece have openly talked about cut content in the past. At the Games Developer Conference in 2012, writers Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek talked about features that were cut such as Garfield references, multiple endings, and Wheatley's early demise. Later that year at PAX Prime, Wolpaw also revealed Valve had planned to have protagonist Chell marry a turret during the game.

10 years on, speaking to Did You Know Gaming, Josh Weier has weighed in with his own insight on why these bits were cut and where they stemmed from during development.

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The Uncharted series made the jump to PC earlier this month with Naughty Dog's Legacy of Thieves collection. And, where there are PC games, modders are never far behind, ready to put their skills into action.

One such modder is Raq (whose name you may recognise from our Tomb Raider Anniversary piece). They have created the Elena mod for Legacy of Thieves which, as I am sure you have guessed already, puts Elena into the spotlight by reskinning series hero Nathan Drake as his wife.

I am a big fan of the Uncharted series as a whole, and of Elena Fisher especially (you may be able to spot a poster of her on my wall during Newscasts). With this mod being a particularly notable one for me, I contacted Raq to find out more about why they siezed the chance to bring Elena to the fore.

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EA has signed a three-game deal with Marvel, beginning with its previously-announced Iron Man project.

That's according to Bloomberg, which reported today that the FIFA publisher had inked a deal for a further two titles featuring Marvel characters.

There's no word yet on which other Marvel faces might star in these games, which EA studio might be making them, or when they will see release.

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The new DF Direct Weekly arrives, with myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia diving straight into a packed week of news... though we kick off with our own God of War Ragnarök impressions a whole week after the preview embargo lifted. Unfortunately, media outlets were prohibited from showing their own captured footage which essentially precluded us from producing a video, but in the wake of the impressions pieces that did follow, we did feel compelled to share some initial thoughts - and the extent to which Ragnarök leverages the power of PlayStation 5.

As you'll hear in our discussions, this seems to be a very different proposition to Horizon Forbidden West, where there was a clear night and day difference between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions. I won't spoil John's hands-on thoughts too much, but I think it's perfectly valid to consider the PS5 version as similar to the idea of what a PC version would look like: the same core game, but ramped up significantly in terms of clarity, performance and other 'ultra settings' niceties. We'll be sharing our full tech review as soon as the main embargo lifts.

It's also fair to say that we're hugely excited about the reveal of the new RDNA 3 graphics hardware later this week - and it represents a golden opportunity to AMD in the wake of the highs and lows of the Nvidia RTX 40-series launch. RTX 4090 is a simply tremendous - but extremely expensive - piece of hardware, but questions marks around the RTX 4080 were enough to see the 12GB model 'unlaunched' while the 16GB edition has it all to prove. There's also the RTX 4090 power adaptor issue adding to the controversy (a story that took a new turn over the weekend after excellent GamersNexus coverage)

I must admit, there was an element of selfishness involved in this podcast. I'm currently doing a creative writing course in my spare time (rather than in my news stories, ho ho) and one of the things I'm struggling with, weird as it is to admit, is the idea that I can write anything. I don't have to be bound by the rules of this world, or any world, or any rules. I can conceive of something totally and utterly new. And that's... I still can't quite wrap my head around it.

But my guest on the podcast today, Cassandra Khaw, has long made their peace with this, producing works of - usually - pitch black horror that I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to imagine. The most famous of their pieces is probably the novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth, which was a USA Today bestseller when it came out roughly a year ago.

So I wanted to find out from Cassandra, who seems to imagine new stories at the speed other people think of things to eat for dinner, where their ideas came from and how to shape them from there. I also wanted to find out where their life-long love of horror came from - and I was treated to a wonderful real-life Malaysian horror story when I asked.

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Games industry Twitter stalwart Nibel, who built a following of 450,000 for regularly tweeting breaking news and memes under the handle @Nibellion, has today quit the social media platform.

"After some introspection, I've made the decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere and move on from Twitter," Nibel tweeted today, now from a locked account. "This marks the end of my video games coverage and my active participation in this platform. Thanks to everybody for the fun times!"

In recent days, Nibel had begun posting on Patreon and planned to launch a Discord channel for followers to join. Both of these have also been scrapped, however.

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Twitch Streamer GinoMachino has completed the world's first Elden Ring all bosses no hit run.

After two months of planning, the streamer finally finished the challenge on 25th October.

There are 165 bosses in the game, which GinoMachino defeated without a single hit.

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Today is the spookiest day of the year. Now, in honour of this occasion, Breath of the Wild modders have released a new fan-made DLC for the game known as "The Halloween Hunt".

Waikuteru (whose name you may recognise from the Breath of the Wild 'Second Wind' mod) worked with fellow modder Sockpoppet to create this haunting DLC. It includes new challenges, armour, weapons and NPCs. Oh, and there is also a new boss to defeat - The Phantom Rider.

"The time of the year has come and so came the mysterious creature too," proclaims a bodiless voice in the DLC. This voice then bids Link to make haste to Korok Forest, to help these spirits of Hyrule before it is "too late".

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God of War developer Sony Santa Monica Studio has said it is doing its best to block Ragnarök spoilers ahead of the game's launch next week - but that ultimately, it cannot completely stop the flood of leaks now spreading online.

Over the weekend, God of War creative director Cory Barlog said it was "completely fucking stupid" fans have to "dodge the spoilers" after retailers began selling Ragnarök copies well ahead of the game's official launch on Wednesday 9th November - still more than a week away.

Now, Sony Santa Monica has offered its own less-sweary official comment, asking fans to be considerate of others, and advising those who wish to remain unspoiled to "mute any keywords or hashtags associated with the game until release day" when browsing social media.

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There was a run of things that happened to me in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord that perfectly summed up my early-game experience with it.

It began with me finding a way to cheese the game. I'd discovered I could take down groups of enemies on my own, up to a dozen of them, simply by riding out of their reach on my horse and slowing down just enough to carefully aim my bow and headshot them. One by one, they'd fall. If it weren't for the arrow limit - around 27 depending on the quiver - I'd have taken on entire armies. And it was beginning to be very profitable for me. I was finally threatening to make the dent in the world I'd been struggling to make.

But then Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord - the latest in TaleWorlds' series of strategy action RPGs that's just left early access - suddenly decided not to let me do it any more. It decided I needed troops to command, because that's what the game is about: commanding armies in battle - think Maximus in opening scene Gladiator, where he's riding with the troops through the forest. You can, in a Total War-lite way, shout orders to your troops, using the F-keys and a time-slow mode to command them (it's fiddly). So, I bought troops.

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Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka has confirmed that Sonic Frontiers "isn't similar at all" to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Since the game's reveal, fans have made the comparison with Nintendo's adventure due to Sonic Frontiers' lush green open setting and that hero shot of the hedgehog looking out over a wide landscape.

But in an interview with Shacknews (spotted by TheGamer), Iizuka has clarified that Sonic Team's game is more linear and - for the millionth time - open zone, not open world.

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A NASCAR driver pulled off a wall ride stunt on the final lap of the Xfinity 500 race at Martinsville Speedway yesterday.

The inspiration for the move came from NASCAR 2005, according to driver Ross Chastain.

"I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the GameCube which I had growing up," Chastain explained in his post-race interview. "You could get away with it," he continued, referring to using the move in-game, "and I never knew if it would actually work [in real life]."

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Call of Duty fans were quick to praise Modern Warfare 2's Amsterdam level, with many complimenting how accurate Infinity Ward's in-game depiction of the city was to real life.

However, the hotel manager of Amsterdam's Conservatorium Hotel is less happy about the establishment - known within Modern Warfare 2 as Breenbergh - showing up in a game that "[encourages] the use of violence".

The hotel is now considering its next possible steps in response to this inclusion.

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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has made Microsoft's plainest promise yet around the future of Call of Duty on PlayStation platforms.

Speaking to the Same Brain Youtube channel, Spencer pledged to keep releasing Call of Duty games on Sony's consoles "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to".

The future of Call of Duty on PlayStation has become a contentious topic for regulators such as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is currently scrutinising Microsoft's planned $68n takeover of COD publisher Activision Blizzard.

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Immortality and Her Story developer Sam Barlow has said he was asked by Tesla to put his game in a car for the exposure.

Last week, Tesla owner Elon Musk bought Twitter and now, as The Verge reported, the social media platform plans to charge users $20 each month for verification.

In the wake of this, Barlow had his own story to tell about Tesla.

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What makes a great video game opening? With recency bias, you might say The Last of Us Part 1’s devastating introduction. But the best kind, I think, are able to successfully capture and distill the experience of the game as a whole.

It’s the feeling I got when I recently replayed Nier: Automata on Switch. Mostly, I was playing to test the port, and I didn’t have time to play more than the opening. But what an opening it is! Narratively, the stakes are high given 2B is the sole surviving android on a suicide mission against the enemy machines, but from this epic prologue, you get a taste of its combat that’s more like a feast, the way it changes between genres and perspectives, culminating in a multi-stage boss battle that could be the final boss in any other game.

Another game I recently replayed was Marvel’s Spider-Man, again just to test out the Steam Deck. I wouldn’t call it the better game but it arguably has a stronger game opening than Naughty Dog’s opus. That moment you first pull back the trigger and effortlessly take to the air as the web slinger himself is just electrifying, and as you go from swinging through Manhattan to taking down the Kingpin and his goons, it’s a fast-moving tutorial that breaks down the fundamentals of Spidey’s Arkham-inspired-but-playful combat. By the time Fisk is in cuffs, I’m happy to call it a day, just in time before the game’s open-world bloat materialises. But I’d take this over the literal cold opens of GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 that are practically divorced from their open-world USP.

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Ikea has issued a cease and desist demand to an indie horror developer insisting they change their unreleased horror game in a bid to stop press and players alike from comparing it to its global furniture chain.

The Store is Closed - which we told you about a couple of weeks ago - is a haunting mash-up of Endnight Games' The Forest (which incidentally saw its sequel, Sons of the Forest, recently delayed) and the humdrum of everyday life, and comes from indie developer Ziggy.

Whilst it doesn't use any of Ikea's products, names, or branding, Ikea believes the developer is infringing on its copyright and has sent in New York legal firm Fross Zelnick. Consequently, Ziggy - who's based in the UK - has ten days to make the changes or face legal action.

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UPDATE 7.40pm UK: After discovering the footage used in the mysterious video has been taken from an Unreal Engine 5 assets pack, it now appears that the video is a hoax.

Whilst it's unclear where the story originated - or why - for now, it's best to presume this isn't true until Konami, Virtuos, or TGA confirm otherwise. Original story follows.

ORIGINAL STORY 1pm UK: It looks like the long-rumoured Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake may be announced at the upcoming The Game Awards.

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Scorn is one of the most visually distinctive games released in recent times. Clearly inspired by the work of HR Giger, the game's environments marry mechanical intricacy with biology to create a highly unnerving experience. It's sci-fi, but not hi-tech, with analogue mechanics, skeletal metalwork, and the occasional glimpse of something truly alive.

On the surface, Scorn looks like a first-person shooter, but it has more in common with Myst or The Witness than Doom. This is a slow-paced, brooding title that requires puzzle-solving and careful exploration - but with a small team at the helm and a nearly 10-year development cycle, is this Unreal Engine 4-based game properly polished? And on Xbox Series X, just how good is AMD's FSR 2 image reconstruction?

Scorn's visual design is pitch-perfect from the moment you look at the title screen. The environments are highly ambiguous - vaguely mechanical, but ribbed with bone-like arches and inlaid with vascular tubing. Everything is dilapidated, worn and glistening with moisture. But some mechanisms still seem to work, and hint at some larger, unknown purpose. As you progress, the organic elements take over, with guts and veins splayed out all around. Humanoid creatures can be found, fused into bizarre arrangements or discarded like trash. Your character is no different - shortly into the game, you're attacked by a parasite, which slowly envelops you. The game's style is strange, uncomfortable, and wholly unique in gaming.

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Blizzard is seemingly polling Overwatch 2 players to get their views on the game's Battle Pass and in-game store.

That's according to u/FelineXJunkie, who posted on the game's subreddit community reporting that they'd received an email from Blizzard, inviting them to feedback on their experiences with the game so far, touching "heavily" on the shooter's in-game store and battle pass.

"I got an email from Blizzard requesting that I fill out a survey. It heavily touched on topics regarding the Battle Pass and the Overwatch Store," they wrote. "If you haven't already, be sure to fill it out. I really hope this is a first step towards change."

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A couple of weeks ago I listed off my top 13 confirmed PSVR2 games that I couldn't wait to play and, at the end of it, I wondered what people's dream PSVR 2 games would be. Some answered that question in the comments, so I took some of your suggestions, mixed them up with some of my own and created the following list of my top 11 most wanted PSVR 2 launch games! Which are listed in no particular order.

Please bear in mind that this is nothing more than my dream launch line-up for the PSVR 2. This is a wish list only so some of the games featured may not exist yet and maybe even never will at all. For this list I have also excluded PSVR 1 ports and instead gone for ports of big PC VR games that have previously been unplayable on Sony's original headset.

Blood and Truth was a cracker and easily one of my favourite games on the PSVR. It's a fast-paced James Bond simulator that allowed you to roleplay as a soldier in a warzone, a cockney gangster literally riding shotgun in a sports car and even some kind of parkour hitman, dodging machine gun fire from a helicopter as you leg it across the floors of a barely built block of flats before they explode behind you.

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Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward has disabled attachment tuning following reports of a crash that occurs when players have five attachments tuned.

In a tweet, IW said it was disabling the feature "until further notice" and advised anyone with a tuned attachment to unequip and reequip to continue playing the newly-launched shooter.

"We are disabling attachment tuning until further notice to investigate crashes for users with 5 attachments tuned," Infinite Ward announced on social media.

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Hideo Kojima has posted a tribute to Ryan Karazija, the lead singer and founder of Low Roar whose work many of us know from Kojima's atmospheric Death Stranding soundtrack.

Karazija died over the weekend at just 40 years old "after a short illness" due to complications from pneumonia.

"I heard the news. I can't believe it. I don't want to believe it," Kojima tweeted.

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Sony Santa Monica's Cory Barlog has apologised that fans have to "dodge the spoilers" after retailers broke the "street date" for its highly-anticipated sequel, God of War Ragnarök.

Sony's exclusive is out on 9th November, but it seems players have got their hands on it early and are sharing screenshots online, as well as spoilers about the game's key story beats.

"You know, right now, I can really understand the benefit of having just an installer on the physical disc. smh", Barlog tweeted overnight.

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The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a game that has stuck with me for a long time. I've never entirely known why. When I imagine playing Majora's Mask, I don't sense the buttons of the controller beneath my fingers or picture the light moving across the screen. I'm enveloped in an atmosphere - a feeling of some kind. As is the case with the game's predecessor, Ocarina of Time, I think this is partially due to the game's wonderful sound design.

Majora's Mask picks up the story of Link after the events of Ocarina of Time. Link is ambushed wandering through a forest, where a creature named Skull Kid and its two accomplices steal his horse and ocarina. After giving chase, Link is transformed into the body of a Deku. Crucially, while these events play out on the screen quite literally, they don't always feel literally true. Majora's Mask actually feels more like folklore: I can't really take the events of the game at its word, but rather watch as the game moves between the real world of the narrative and something else. Maybe it's a story, passed from generation to generation - each iteration meaning something different and personal to those who repeat it.

To put it another way, things don't quite make sense in Majora's Mask. After following the Skull Kid, Link falls down a huge ravine, filled with trippy visuals, before arriving in the landscape where the real adventure will take place. Some have interpreted this as the death of Link or the representation of his grief and trauma at Ganon's hands in his previous adventure, but I'm happy not to know. When it comes to folklore, after all, you never really know where the truth fully lies.

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Netflix has announced The Witcher Season 4 and Henry Cavill's exit from the show.

Season 3 has yet to air on the streaming service, but already we have confirmation that for Season 4, Cavill is set to be replaced as titular monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia by Liam Hemsworth, most famous for playing Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games movie series.

Cavill, who recently announced his return to the role of Superman for DC, issued a statement praising his replacement:

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Another day, another Steam concurrent user record broken. This time, it comes just days after Steam hit 30m concurrent players and sees Valve's PC gaming client clock up a giant 30,049,264 simultaneous players.

That said, whilst that figure comes from SteamDB, Steam itself states the all-time peak is a more modest 30,044,046. In either case, though, it's proof that PC gaming remains on the rise, even if the majority of those players were idling at the time (SteamDB estimates "just" 8.9 million were actively in-game at the time the record was set).

Steam numbers have been rising since the pandemic began in 2020, with a previous previous peak of just under 30 million set back in March this year.

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