Eurogamer

Rockstar Games had plans to release a remaster of both Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4, a new report has claimed.

However, in light of the pretty poor reception following its GTA trilogy release last year (yes, I am being generous here), the company has now apparently put these ideas to one side.

Sources with knowledge of Rockstar's inner workings have now confirmed to Kotaku that recent rumours to this effect were indeed true, and we were meant to be getting a shiny new upgrade for both games. Last year's release of the GTA trilogy came as a real blow to Rockstar, however, and now the company is hoping to put all of that bad press behind it.

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After a three-year hiatus due to Covid, Pokémon Go's in-person Go Fests have properly returned. The first of three music festival-sized city gatherings took place this weekend in Berlin and went off smoothly, with the usual mix of rare creatures, boosted Shiny chances and early access to new species.

As ever, it was the feeling of playing Pokémon Go among thousands of others that made the event something special. Along the many pretty paths circling Berlin's beautiful Britzer Garden, thousands of Pokémon players plodded along in groups, with friends or in couples, celebrating rare catches or looking on in envy.

I wasn't certain about Berlin as a choice for Go Fest, after the smaller German city of Dortmund hosted the game's main European events in previous years so successfully. Not only did Dortmund have a great city park to play in, but its main centre was small enough that when Pokémon Go players turned up, they absolutely took over - fans flooding its small squares and filling restaurant terraces. It created a carnival atmosphere, and seeing the expressions of bemused locals as dozens of people passed by in Pikachu onesies never got old.

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The next big Ubisoft Forward reveal livestream will be broadcast on Saturday, 10th September at 8pm UK time, the company has announced.

The event will detail multiple games from Ubisoft teams around the world, and follow a dedicated Skull and Bones showcase - also just announced, and coming later this week.

Keep a weather eye on the horizon and you'll get an in-depth look at Ubisoft's much-delayed multiplayer pirate game this Thursday, 7th July at 7pm UK time, with a first (official) look at gameplay in quite some time.

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A speedrunner from the recent Summer Games Done Quick 2022 event has admitted he faked part of his run.

Russian speedrunner Mekarazium completed a live run of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance as one of a handful of online (rather than in-person) runs.

However, an extra run of the game's Blade Wolf DLC was offered as a charity donation goal incentive, but Mekarazium has since admitted this run was faked using pre-recorded footage, as PCGamesN reported.

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We will no longer be getting any Xbox 360 games included with Games with Gold as of this October.

This is due to the fact that Microsoft has now "reached the limit of [its] ability" for adding new Xbox 360 games to the service, Microsoft stated in an email to customers seen by Eurogamer.

All is not lost though, as we will still be getting the usual monthly offering of Xbox One games.

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Formula One returns once again, with Codemasters' Ego engine remaining as the power plant at the heart of the experience. Due to the essential nature of the game, a superficial comparison of the new F1 22 up against last year's offering shows a lot of similarities: just like last year, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are offering up native 4K resolutions with Series S at the back of the pack with a 1080p resolution, all systems using dynamic resolution scaling to maintain performance. There's also ray tracing support, 120Hz features - basically everything you'd want from the experience - but thankfully, no porpoising, meaning that the game of the sport steers well clear of this year's controversy.

For console users at least, F1 22 changes where it needs to. Obviously, the new cars, liveries and drivers are in place, while the circuits are tweaked in line with their real-life counterparts, along with a small boost to detail. Similar to last year's offering, ray traced reflections are also part of the mix. However once again ray tracing features only engage in out-of-race sections on console, such as replays, which are accompanied by a drop to 30 frames per second. Interestingly, Xbox Series consoles (even Series S) appear to benefit from some in-cockpit RT reflections not found on PS5 or even PC - likely a bug or omission. The good news for PC users is that RT can be enabled throughout the gameplay itself, albeit at a huge performance penalty.

Microsoft has announced the next batch of games making their way onto Xbox Game Pass this month, and they include the return of several Yakuza titles and a certain Miss Peppa Pig.

From today, subscribers will be able to get their hands on Last Call BBS (PC), as well as Yakuzas 0, Kiwami and Kiwami 2 (all cloud, console, and PC).

The next wave of releases will come to us on 7th July, when DJMax Respect 5 (cloud, console, and PC), Matchpoint: Tennis Championships (cloud, console, and PC) and Road 96 (cloud, console, and PC) join the service.

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A year or two ago I'd taken a fairly lengthy break from League of Legends. There was a period, as so many MOBA players, or MMO players, or other game-that's-big-on-Twitch players will know too well, where I was all in. I knew the moves of every champion of the 140-odd that were out at the time, I knew the name and purpose and general viability of every item, I knew the optimal jungling route, the amount of seconds between respawning dragons, the situational builds for my mains and the match-ups with every one of their counters. Then came the welcome break, at which point you think you must be too far gone to ever come back. There's too much going on, too much that's changed, no room on this rocket for old-timers like you.

The secret to LoL of course is that this is, in fact, the game. The learning, and re-learning, and re-re-learning. You can play it without all that, under a veil of ignorance, and it will remain excellent: the cycle of earning gold and experience from killing enemies and popping minions like bubble-wrap, to use to buy more items and gain more levels, to more effectively kill enemies and on and on. This will never not be immensely satisfying and narcotically moreish, even with the LoL player's true addiction - to competition - put aside. But if you stick just to that you will be missing something, a little special sauce reserved for those who tip over into min-maxing obsession.

Let's step back a bit, though. The state of League of Legends, midway through 2022, is that it is utterly gigantic. You've probably heard that many times before - but it's also gigantic in a way that feels unusually stable. For one, this is because LoL has achieved what seems to be the ultimate goal for many video games: to expand into things that are not video games.

Hello! We have a new series for you. It's called State of the Game and the goal is, basically, to tell you exactly that. Over the next couple of months we'll be running a series of features that dig into the biggest, most interesting and most influential live service games that are running at the moment.

Naturally, the words "live service" give some people the ick, and that's fair enough - but it's also the type of game where vast numbers of players want to spend their time, and the type of game that, in bottling the magic of fun-with-friends, can often capture the very best of the medium.

It's also an area that's been quite tricky to adequately cover here on Eurogamer. To borrow a phrase, these are 'hobby-grade' games - games that often demand extraordinary amounts of time or attention - and so keeping up with them all in sufficient detail quickly becomes impossible. The focus, naturally, falls on the biggest controversies or the most sweeping changes, when a lot of the really special stuff is found in the detail. It's also hard to know what on earth people are talking about when they do write about them, if you're not already immersed in the games yourself.

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The release of Splatoon 3 is marching ever closer, and as such we are starting to get some little drip feeds of what we can expect on the game's launch. The latest of these shows off an upcoming multiplayer stage for us all to run amok in called Mincemeat Metalworks.

"Squid Research Lab here with a meaty discovery - this is rare imagery of a new multiplayer stage," the Splatoon team tweeted.

"The facility was made FROM scrap metal in order to make MORE scrap metal. Also, there was a sea here that evaporated. Surely unrelated to heavy industry [ahem]!"

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A new study has forecast how the video games industry will perform over the course of 2022, and suggests a year-on-year decline following a strong period of growth.

The sale of games, consoles and subscription services contributed to a enormous $191bn global total in 2021, which will fall slightly to $188bn this year, according to Ampere Analysis.

This follows extraordinary growth through the early stages of the pandemic, with a leap in spending especially noticable from 2020 onwards.

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A new listing suggests PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of What Remains of Edith Finch could be heading our way soon.

Spotted by TwistedVoxel, the ever-leaky Taiwanese Game Rating website now has both a native PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release of the game listed in its catalogue.

While there have been no official announcements made as yet, publisher Annapurna Interactive does have its 2022 showcase scheduled for later this month.

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Bungie's under-wraps work with Chinese publisher NetEase involves a mobile shooter set in the Destiny universe, a new report has claimed.

Job adverts for a Destiny project were previously spotted last year by The Game Post. Required skills included a "willingness to travel to China" on a regular basis, and host Chinese partner teams.

NetEase invested $100m in Bungie back in 2018, though the companies have never officially confirmed what the two are working on.

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Ubisoft recently announced it would pull the plug on a number of its older games, stopping online and multiplayer support. Titles affected by this move include Anno 2070, Far Cry 3, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, and Assassin's Creed 2.

However, the powers that be at Ubisoft Mainz, developer of Anno 2070 are not going to let this hinder their game. Oh no sir.

The team behind the city-building and economic simulation game will now "dedicate some of [its] development resources to work on upgrading Anno 2070's aged online services infrastructure to a new system".

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A remake of Suda51's cult zombie game Lollipop Chainsaw has been confirmed for release next year.

Release platforms are yet to be announced, though the original game arrived for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2012.

As teased last month, this return is being overseen by Yoshimi Yasuda, the original game's executive producer, as part of his new company Dragami Games.

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Capcom has revealed Monster Hunter Rise's expansion Sunbreak - which adds new quest ranks, locales, monsters and never-before-experienced hunting actions to the game - has shipped over 2m units across the globe. Considering how recently this launched, that is some pretty good going!

In addition to this, the company also revealed that Monster Hunter Rise itself has also passed 10m units sold since its release.

Capcom equates these figures to "a variety of measures including ongoing free updates and the launch of a PC version, as well as with the release of a set that includes Sunbreak."

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Do you remember when, earlier this year, Horizon: Forbidden West came out and Sony said it would plant trees in the real world for everyone who earned the Daunt trophy in the game? Actually, did anyone earn that trophy? Well done if you did. Anyway, that was made especially by Sony for something called the Green Game Jam.

You've probably never heard of it. That's because it's a fairly new thing run by the fairly new Playing for the Planet Alliance, which was formed in 2019 by people from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to get the games industry working together to tackle the climate emergency. Part of this involves companies committing to improving their business operations, environmentally speaking; and part of it comes from using the many games they make, which reach many millions of people, to enact real, positive change. This is where the Green Game Jam comes in.

Again, the whole thing is fairly new and still establishing itself so we're not talking about entire games designed around climate change, though Tencent is making one called Carbon Island - an island-based city-building game. Mostly, what we're talking about is "green activations" in games: a term used to describe bespoke elements placed in games either temporarily, or permanently, and focused around an environmental theme.

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It's Monday, it's DF Direct Weekly - which as the name heavily implies - is Digital Foundry's weekly show, where team members take a break from their current projects to discuss the latest gaming and technology news. What's excited us the most this week is the 'shadow drop' of Valve's Portal and Portal 2 for Nintendo Switch. These games are timeless: brilliant examples of excellent design that don't actually require immense hardware to look and play wonderfully. Nevertheless, it's great to see 720p60 and 1080p60 gameplay from the Switch in mobile and docked permutations respectively - and we'll be covering the package in more depth in more extended form this week.

For the purposes of the Direct discussion though, John shares his first-hand knowledge of port before the team move onto the emergence within 24 hours of a modded version of the game that injects Half-Life 2 assets to remarkable effect. It turns out that Portal was written around the Source Engine and Half-Life 2 specifically, meaning that a semi-working 'port' of the classic title could be realised very quickly. It's a great story, but more than that, the possibility of an actual official Switch port of the game and its subsequent episodes is mouthwatering. Fingers crossed that Valve takes heed.

A fan made video focusing on 2013's The Last of Us highlights some of the most impressive details hidden within the game that many may have missed.

Ahead of The Last of Us Part 1's release for the PS5 (and eventually PC), content creator Speclizer has revisited the first game in Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic world.

They have since shared a compilation of the incredible inclusions from Naughty Dog, many of which can be easily missed on your average playthrough. I am talking about things like Joel's buttons being embossed with the words "Naughty Button" or being able to spot Tess' bite before she reveals her infection.

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Uncharted 4: A Thief's End's Madagascan jeep chase almost featured a stunt made famous during Sean Connery's sixth outing as James Bond (I mean, why not, Drake does look pretty sharp in a dinner jacket after all).

The stunt in question comes from the 1971 film Diamonds are Forever, where Sean Connery's Bond tips his vehicle onto two wheels to get through a tight gap (something those in pursuit are, of course, unable to pull off).

"We actually prototyped doing that [during A Thief's End's jeep chase]," Uncharted 4's co-lead designer Kurt Margenau reflected during a recent chat with Couch Soup. However, as those who have played the game will know, this idea did not ultimately make the final cut.

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This weekend's major Call of Duty leak points to a Gulf War-era setting for the next Black Ops, fans have said.

The huge cache of leaked information - apparently gleaned from the files of a Warzone Mobile alpha build - detailed elements from several upcoming games, including the next release from Black Ops studio Treyarch, due in 2024.

Details were posted to Twitter by user RealiityUK, whose account has now been suspended, though a description of what was posted remains on reddit.

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itch.io has launched a new charity bundle to raise money for abortion funds.

The bundle is in direct response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, key US legislation that grants individuals the right to an abortion.

The bundle contains over 750 games from over 600 creators available for a minimum donation of $10. Estimated value is over $3k.

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The modders behind Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition have finally fixed a 20-year-old bug that's plagued the PC version of the game.

Previously, an infamous bug when playing on a PC with a multicore processor (as most modern PCs have) would cause the audio to skip and the game to crash, making it all but unplayable.

Now, the creators of the Enhanced Edition have fixed the issue by implementing a custom streaming audio engine.

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A new co-op mod for the eternal The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim known as Together Reborn will release this Friday.

"Hey everyone, after a long development process, we are excited to announce that Skyrim Together Reborn is almost ready for release. It will release this Friday, 8th July at 16:00 GMT. The mod will be published on Nexus," the mod's developer revealed.

And that is not all. Along with the release date announcement, the developers also revealed this will not be a beta as previously intended.

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Minecraft maker Mojang has paid tribute to YouTuber Technoblade, whose death from cancer was announced last week.

Technoblade, real name Alex, had amassed 13 million followers over years of creating Minecraft content. He was just 23.

His passing prompted an outpouring of messages from fellow streamers and esports players, as well as acknowledgement from Mojang itself. Now, the developer has gone further and updated Minecraft Java Edition's launch screen with a nod to Technoblade's YouTube icon - a crowned Minecraft pig.

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FaZe Clan member Cented has been booted out for using discriminatory language.

A clip of Cented using the N word has surfaced online, leading to the ban.

"FaZe is constantly evolving and we expect our members to do the same," reads a statement on Twitter from the group.

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Political parties in the Netherlands have broadly backed a new attempt to block the sale of video game loot boxes in the country.

Six parties say they will support the motion, which would bring Dutch law largely in line with Belgium - where loot boxes were outlawed back in 2018 (thanks, Neowin).

The motion describes loot boxes as "a form of gambling" and states "children in video games are manipulated to purchase" such items via in-game microtransactions.

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Monster Hunter Rise numbers are soaring on Steam following the release of the Sunbreak expansion.

At the time of release on PC in January this year, the game had a concurrent player count of 134,262; now that's close to doubling at 231,360 - and it continues to rise.

Sunbreak is a huge new expansion to the game, adding master rank hunts, a plethora of new items, and returning monsters to defeat.

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Netflix has shared the opening credit sequence for its upcoming anime series, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

First debuted at the Anime Expo 2022 in Los Angeles, these opening credits are accompanied by Franz Ferdinand's 'This Fffire' from 2004. (A small spot of trivia for your next pub quiz, this is not the only piece of game-inspired media to feature this song. The earlier released and self-produced 'This Fire' can also be found on the soundtrack from Burnout 3: Takedown.)

Anyway, I digress. Back to Edgerunners, and its new credit sequence which you can check out for yourself below.

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It took what felt like several eternities for Yu Suzuki to release his last dream project, the teases and trials that led up to the eventual release of Shenmue 3 spanning over a decade. It's wild, then, that his next dream project - a return to his 80s arcades roots, and an explicitly styled spiritual successor to none other than Space Harrier - was revealed and released within the space of a month; wilder still, Air Twister's every bit as much a Suzuki joint as the epic Shenmue 3, and it's a small shame its arrival has met with a muted response because this is clearly the work of a master.

Actually, scratch that, it's the work of the master - forgive the breathless enthusiasm, but how else to meet a rare new game from the pioneer behind Out Run, After Burner and Virtua Fighter - and it's thrilling to see Suzuki to the kind of basic yet bombastic action that made his name in the arcades. It's an '80s revival that to my arcade-obsessed mind is every bit as exciting as Top Gun Maverick, though this is clearly a much more modest project.

Air Twister is an on-rails shooter that shares the simplicity of Space Harrier, while at the same time folding in some of the features introduced by the many games inspired by Suzuki's 1985 original. This is a tap shooter, quintessentially, with a lock-on you can paint by touch that feels akin to Panzer Dragoon, while elsewhere the pace of movement has been slowed from the whip-quick Space Harrier to something a bit more sedate to give space to the new control scheme.

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Surprise, Sony fans! Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally coming to PS4 in the West… a full decade after it first release in Japan on PC.

The ARPG will debut on PS4 on 31st August, six years after it arrived on PS4 in Japan and over a year later than it arrived in the West on Xbox and PC.

Like the versions on other consoles, it will be cross-platform compatible and free-to-play, and carry the "New Genesis" sub-title with fully localised text and character voices in English (thanks, Polygon).

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Bandai Namco has dropped a new gameplay trailer for its upcoming tactical battler, Digimon Survive, which finally releases on 29th July, 2022.

Digimon Survive - which "blends visual novel storytelling with tactical battle elements" - has been a long time coming, having been formally delayed three times to "allocate more time to development" and "enhance the quality of the game".

Featuring over 100 Digimon, this latest game in the Digimon series features a world map that is divided into areas and locations which you will need to scan in order to find "glitches" for clues and items.

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Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) is over for another year, netting a staggering $3,018,320.49 with donations still coming in - that's almost £2.5 million.

In all, the event showcased 134 different speedruns with games such as Left 4 Dead 2, Super Mario World, Portal 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, to name but a few - and racked up over 42,000 individual donations.

Summer Games Done Quick returned this summer with more charity speedruning attempts and an in-person event to complement its online component for the first time in two years in Bloomington, Minnesota.

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505 Games' parent company, Digital Bros., has acquired mobile publisher D3 Go! from D3 Publisher and Bandai Namco.

D3 Go! - which publishes the Puzzle Quest games, including Marvel Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns - will now join the 505 Games US office in Calabasas, California.

The acquisition now gives 505 Games "exclusive ownership of the entire Puzzle Quest franchise", following the 2021 purchase of Infinity Plus Two, the Australian game development studio and original creators of the Puzzle Quest series.

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Concept art of the upcoming 2024 Call of Duty game and Modern Warfare 2 have allegedly leaked online.

As spotted by ResetEra, Twitter user RealiityUK - although they've had other accounts taken offline by DMCA strikes - shared the images over the weekend, posting a full thread of what seem to be loading screens from the shooter which they say were discovered in Warzone Mobile test files. [UPDATE: This account has, predictably, also now been shut down.]

If true, they show that the multiplayer upcoming maps from Modern Warfare 2 will include a Grand Prix, an oil field, and a museum, as well as others called Codename: SABA, and Hydro.

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Numskull's next Destiny statue is of a character whose voice most Guardians know well; Lord Shaxx, he of "they can't kill you if they're dead, Guardian!" fame and master of the Crucible.

An official Destiny product, this Shaxx statue has been designed in conjunction with Bungie and features "hand-painted features for extra detail". He stands 11.7” (29.7cm) tall and is the sixth Destiny statue in the series after The Stranger, The Drifter, Eris Morn, Cayde-6, and Savathûn, the Witch Queen.

"Charismatic Crucible Handler and former Warlord, Lord Shaxx commands an audience with ease," explains creator Numskull. "With his booming presence, unwavering conviction, and reputation as a ferocious warrior, it's no wonder he's beloved among Destiny fans. We're proud to pay tribute to his brazen character with this epic statue!

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HoYoverse has finally revealed what's coming in Genshin Impact's 2.8 update when it releases on 13th July, 2022.

Entitled Summer Fantasia, 2.8 brings a new look to the Golden Apple Archipelago, as well as new events, a new character, and a sneaky peek at new location, Sumeru.

You can check out the stunning new look right here:

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If you ask me, Portal's signature moment involves putting a portal in the ceiling and another portal in the floor just below it. Thump, thump. These portals, for the uninitiated, are basically two sides of the same magical hole; walk through the orange portal and you emerge through the blue portal. In the game's deliriously arch fiction you are testing a device that projects these holes, allowing you to do unusual things with space as a result.

How unusual? With the floor and ceiling set-up, you have created an extremely short tunnel, the height of the room you're in. And yet it's also a tunnel you can fall through forever, that single room zipping by again and again like the repeated domestic background in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Here is the thing, though. Over a decade after Portal's release, just thinking about Portal can be a bit like falling through that simultaneously brief and endless tunnel. Oh, to make a Slinky of your thoughts! Blue becomes orange, distance becomes time, ceiling becomes floor becomes ceiling again. Absolutes clash against conflicting absolutes.

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UPDATE 5/7/22: Deus Ex writer Mary DeMarle will work on the next Mass Effect game, it's been confirmed.

Mass Effect director Michael Gamble confirmed the news via Twitter last night, shortly after it emerged DeMarle was joining BioWare.

DeMarle most recently worked on Eidos Montreal's Guardians of the Galaxy. At BioWare, she will serve as the Mass Effect project's senior narrative director.

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Sega has pledged to match donations to "accredited non-profile organisations supporting reproductive rights" following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade in the US.

It is the latest in a long line of gaming industry companies speaking out against the decision and pledging support of reproductive rights.

"At Sega, we stand for equality and believe in the ability to make choices about one's body is a human right," the brief statement, posted yesterday on Twitter.

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