There are quite a few Cardcaptor Sakura character Nendoroids, with even a Nendoroid doll in the works, and that also means reruns of ones like the Sakura Kinomoto Tomoeda Junior High Uniform figure. As expected, it’s as adorable as it was during its 2018 run for its 2023 one. 

This is a rather basic Nendoroid of Sakura in her school uniform from the Clear Card follow-up series, so the character does look slightly older. However, because of the diminutive nature of Nendoroids, she still looks incredibly childlike and cute. She’s a charming chibi, with face plates that mimic CLAMP’s trademark eye design. The uniform itself is also an accurate representation, which is great. But all this also means that if you had past Nendoroids of Cardcaptor Sakura characters, you could mix and match easily. Tomoyo could wear this new uniform, for example.

Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure game that follows scoundrel Kay Vess between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, previously had no release date beyond a very broad “2024” window. Today, however, a Disney Parks blog post quietly announced that it would launch in “late 2024.” This…

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There may not be thousands of Uruk-hai ready to knock down the walls, but a resourceful Lego Fortnite player has constructed a virtual Helm's Deep inside the game. The location serves as the setting for one of the most famous battle scenes in cinema history in the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Dexerto posted a clip from Lego Fortnite on X (formerly known as Twitter) showcasing the refuge for the people of Rohan in the The Lord of the Rings universe. The person behind the digital recreation is Reddit user Crownedpepper, who's also built the Eye of Sauron inside the game. Crownedpepper stated that Helm's Deep was "made with mostly the castle building parts from the desert area village upgrade."

It can be difficult keeping track of the various comings and goings in the games industry, which is why we compile them in semi-regular round-ups.

If you have new appointments or transitions in your company that belong here, please send the names of the appointees, new role and company, and prior role and company to newhires@gamesindustry.biz.

Natalya Tatarchuk has announced that she is Activision's newest chief technology officer.

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It can be difficult keeping track of the various comings and goings in the games industry, which is why we compile them in semi-regular round-ups.

If you have new appointments or transitions in your company that belong here, please send the names of the appointees, new role and company, and prior role and company to newhires@gamesindustry.biz.

Emily Gera has been appointed to the role of senior writer at Baldur's Gate 3 maker, Larain Studios.

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More than six years after its release, the Nintendo Switch is still dutifully chugging along, and still without the long-rumored Switch Pro. Compared to its supercomputer competitors, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5, it’s by no means the most powerful place to play games today. But it’s still the…

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The January 2024 PlayStation Plus games are now available. There are three titles to choose from this month, with Evil West (PS4, PS5), Nobody Saves the World (PS4, PS5), and A Plague Tale: Requiem (PS5) appearing.

Evil West first launched in November 2022. It is a third-person shooter set in the wild west, with players following Jesse Rentier as he attempts to deal with vampires and other supernatural creatures in the name of the Rentier Institute with the help of a new prototype Gauntlet. It normally costs $59.99. 

Nobody Saves the World is also a 2022 release, though it debuted in January 2022. It is an action-RPG that can be played alone or with others, with players following a nobody with a wand that lets them transform so they can use their new forms’ skills to save a procedurally generated world. It usually is $24.99. 

Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the…

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The age-old question of what Pokemon would look like in the world of Halo has finally been answered in a video where Pokemon Snap meets Halo.

Thanks to YouTuber Hat-Loving Gamer (via GamesRadar), we now know how many guns a Machamp can hold and what a Togepi's weapon of choice is. The video shows the photographer talking to Professor Oak before being transported to Coagulation, a multiplayer map featured in Halo 2. Once the photographer loads into the map from the safety of their pod, they're greeted by a Dodrio losing one of its heads as soon as the battle starts.

As the video goes on, we're shown various things, such as how the original three starter Pokemon would look like in a Warthog, a Psyduck falling from a Banshee after being shot down, and perhaps most importantly, how a Cubone and Clefairy look as Master Chief and Cortana.

This video captures the chaotic charm of what made Big Team Battle in Halo so much fun, with multiple characters meeting untimely deaths and vehicles blowing up every other second. But simultaneously, it captures that childhood innocence that Pokemon has always had.

According to France’s Autorité de la concurrence, a government body responsible for regulating competition, Sony hasn’t been playing nice with third-party controllers on PS4. The regulatory body has fined Sony 13.5 million euros (roughly 14.8 million USD) for deploying “technical countermeasures [...] which affected…

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In Famitsu's New Year Greetings column for 2024, Silent Hill series Lead Producer Motoi Okamoto offered an update on the series. Okamoto’s keyword for 2024 is “delivery,” and the producer confirmed that 2024 will mark the beginning of new Silent Hill game releases. [Thanks, Famitsu!]

The producer’s aspirations for 2024 consist of continuing to build up the Silent Hill series with both games and other types of media. Motoi Okamoto mentioned the release of the interactive streaming Silent Hill Ascension in November 2023 as one of such types of non-game media for the franchise.

Beginning in 1989, the Prince of Persia series enjoyed consistent attention, with its longest break between releases being six years between Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and the better-left forgotten Prince of Persia 3D. 2003’s Sands of Time and its two sequels marked a new era for Prince and, in many ways, laid the foundation for Ubisoft’s most successful franchise, Assassin’s Creed. The 2008 Prince of Persia reboot didn’t reignite the series as Ubisoft had hoped, and 2010’s Forgotten Sands felt closer to a movie tie-in than a new, proper entry.

That game’s subtitle would end up being a portend of the future as the series seemed inexplicably lost to time. Though not completely ignored, thanks to the occasional cameo in other Ubisoft games and underplayed mobile releases, we will have gone 13 years without a new Prince of Persia game by the time The Lost Crown is released early next year. We’re well overdue for another chance to explore a Persian location with our impressive parkour skills. We may not have expected the series to go back to its 2D roots for its triumphant return, but based on our discussions with developer Ubisoft Montpellier and playing the game’s first three and a half hours, it may be precisely what we need.

Now that 2024 has begun, Naoki Yoshida, the producer and director for Final Fantasy XIV, shared details about the game's future in a New Year’s message. In his greeting, he explained how the current plans for future updates and preparations for the Tokyo 2024 Fan Festival on January 7, 2024 are faring.

Yoshida admitted that the Final Fantasy XIV development team in Japan has been hard at work preparing for the upcoming Fan Festival 2024 in Tokyo, as well as the 7.0 update and Dawntrail expansion. The team hopes to ensure the conclusion to the world tour is a success. Yoshida also noted that even though the event would take place in the large Tokyo Dome, the same Fan Festival shenanigans would ensue.

Yoshida teased that a note was "delivered" to his office. It reads as follows:

Guild Wars publisher NCSoft's long-rumoured Horizon: Zero Dawn spin-off is a full-blown MMORPG codenamed Project Skyline, will run on Unreal Engine 5, and is coming to PC and mobile with a PS5 release still TBC, according to a brace of job listings and CVs fished from the post-apocalyptic robo-wilds of yonder internet. Also according to the said listings, it won’t be out for a while.

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Guild Wars publisher NCSoft's long-rumoured Horizon: Zero Dawn spin-off is a full-blown MMORPG codenamed Project Skyline, will run on Unreal Engine 5, and is coming to PC and mobile with a PS5 release still TBC, according to a brace of job listings and CVs fished from the post-apocalyptic robo-wilds of yonder internet. Also according to the said listings, it won’t be out for a while.

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Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden will be leaving Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription service within the next two weeks. The official site noted that they are among the four games leaving on January 15, 2024.

Here is a full list of the video games leaving Xbox Game Pass within the next two weeks. All four of them are playable on both consoles and PCs with subscriptions.

• Garden Story
• MotoGP 22
• Persona 3 Portable
• Persona 4 Golden

In addition, Grand Theft Auto V apparently was removed from the service on December 31, 2023.

Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden each long campaigns, with the former being around 60 hours and the latter being about 80. Atlus announced both titles, along with Persona 5 Royal, would join the Xbox Game Pass service in 2022.

Steam is by far the most peculiar of online storefronts. Built on top of itself for the last twenty years, Valve’s behemothic PC game distributor is a clusterfuck of overlapping design choices, where algorithms rule over coherence, with 2023 seeing over 14,500 games released into the mayhem. Which is too many games.

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UPDATE 4/1/24: Disney Parks has updated its original promotional post, and now lists Star Wars Outlaws as arriving in 2024. It no longer gives a more specific timeframe.

As we reported yesterday, this post initially said Ubisoft's upcoming open world Star Wars game would arrive "late this year".

The original story continues below.

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UPDATE 4/1/24: Disney Parks has updated its original promotional post, and now lists Star Wars Outlaws as arriving in 2024. It no longer gives a more specific timeframe.

As we reported yesterday, this post initially said Ubisoft's upcoming open world Star Wars game would arrive "late this year".

The original story continues below.

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Tim Cain wrote what is perhaps gaming’s most famous and influential monologue: the introduction to Fallout. “War never changes,” he says. “People loved it. I’m like, ‘I must be a writer.’” Yet much more recently, when Cain sat down to write his memoirs, nobody really liked what came out on the page. “I was really, really bad at it,” he says. “I had half a dozen people read it, and they all pretty much said that the stories were good, but my writing wasn’t.”

Cain’s writing strengths, as fellow Fallout originator Leonard Boyarsky has suggested, lie in shortform. Which was bad news for anyone who wanted to read the definitive account of his four decades at the heart of Interplay, Troika and Obsidian, three of the most important RPG studios of all time. Thankfully, though, it turns out Cain is a natural raconteur. The same anecdotes that appeared flat and toneless in his memoirs go down a storm on YouTube. There, for the past seven months, Cain has been delivering his stories straight to camera, as if at a dinner party with 73,500 other people. “When I started the channel, I would effectively just look at something in the book and be like, ‘I’ll tell that story today,’” he says. “Now I spend as much time answering questions and doing videos based on things people ask about.”

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The Version 1.6 Update for Honkai: Star Rail is full of exciting new additions, including Ruan Mei, Pure Fiction, and you can even play as Peppy the Dog at some point! But with all these additions, one stood out to me more than any other: the changes to Daily Training.

It’s a small thing to get excited about, but I have my reasons. I finished the story of Honkai: Star Rail up to the end of Version 1.0 before putting the game down. This allowed me to play other things until more updates were added. Except I didn’t come back when the updates were added. I consistently got distracted by other games until, eventually I finally came back to the game partway through Version 1.5’s updates.

Final Fantasy XI Producer and Director Yoji Fujito discussed the state of the game, including its server replacements, Windows 11 support, and the ongoing existence of the We Are Vana’diel site as a repository of information. The 2024 New Year’s letter also went over plans in and out of the MMORPG for the next year.

First, Fujito brought up the Final Fantasy XI server replacement and Windows 11 support as part of efforts to ensure stability and compatibility. He noted that in the case of both, there is “steady progress.” There was no update on when either project will be finished. 

After that, he noted that We Are Vana’diel will not only remain online, but it will get more updates about the development of Final Fantasy XI. Specifically, more interviews were confirmed. However, he also noted it will also offer “oral histories” for the game.

Tim Cain wrote what is perhaps gaming’s most famous and influential monologue: the introduction to Fallout. “War never changes,” he says. “People loved it. I’m like, ‘I must be a writer.’” Yet much more recently, when Cain sat down to write his memoirs, nobody really liked what came out on the page. “I was really, really bad at it,” he says. “I had half a dozen people read it, and they all pretty much said that the stories were good, but my writing wasn’t.”

Cain’s writing strengths, as fellow Fallout originator Leonard Boyarsky has suggested, lie in shortform. Which was bad news for anyone who wanted to read the definitive account of his four decades at the heart of Interplay, Troika and Obsidian, three of the most important RPG studios of all time. Thankfully, though, it turns out Cain is a natural raconteur. The same anecdotes that appeared flat and toneless in his memoirs go down a storm on YouTube. There, for the past seven months, Cain has been delivering his stories straight to camera, as if at a dinner party with 73,500 other people. “When I started the channel, I would effectively just look at something in the book and be like, ‘I’ll tell that story today,’” he says. “Now I spend as much time answering questions and doing videos based on things people ask about.”

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2024 is starting off strong: The controversial Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision Blizzard King, is no longer heading up the Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch 2 publisher. We knew this was going to happen—shortly after Microsoft completed its massive $68 billion purchase of ActiBlizz, the company…

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Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's upcoming open world Star Wars game, is set to release "late this year", according to Disney. Announced via a Disney Parks blog post of all things, Star Wars Outlaws ranks as the No.22 most "Ooooh-Worthy Thing" out of the 2024 Disney Experiences line-up - which, considering the list only stretches to 24 entries is a bit of an unfair burn on the game, if you ask me, especially when No.21 is... *checks notes* new Disney Eats and Stitch clothes collections.

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Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's upcoming open world Star Wars game, is set to release "late this year", according to Disney. Announced via a Disney Parks blog post of all things, Star Wars Outlaws ranks as the No.22 most "Ooooh-Worthy Thing" out of the 2024 Disney Experiences line-up - which, considering the list only stretches to 24 entries is a bit of an unfair burn on the game, if you ask me, especially when No.21 is... *checks notes* new Disney Eats and Stitch clothes collections.

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Leave it to modders to push the boundaries of what was once (and arguably still is) one of the most impressive visual showcases of modern gaming: Cyberpunk 2077. A skyrocketing post on Reddit shows off some pretty remarkable graphical feats that one enterprising player has achieved. Featuring a handful of mods that…

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Resident Evil 4 was one of the most accomplished remakes of 2023, a modernised, bold reinterpretation of Capcom's 2005 action-horror classic. It looked great too across current-gen platforms as well as PS4, with great lighting detail and excellent art design. As the year closed out, Capcom delivered RE4's first mobile port. As a part of Apple's recent triple-A gaming push, Resident Evil 4 is now available on iPhone 15 Pro and M1 and M2 based iPads, representing the fastest of Apple's mobile hardware. So is the game hung up on performance and configuration issues like Resident Evil Village? Or is RE4 a capable conversion of the console code?

Resident Evil 4 was for the most part a current-gen console and PC experience, but Capcom also shipped the game on PS4 console systems. The visuals were mostly preserved on Sony's eighth-gen machines, but there were some notable cutbacks. Most notably, texture resolution took a big hit, and texture streaming could be pretty slow. There were a range of lighting cutbacks as well, including a reduction in the number of shadow-casting light sources, and absent screen-space reflections.

Those cutbacks need to be kept in mind, because the PS4 code proves the closest match of all the console versions for the results seen on iPhone. Unlike Resident Evil Village, RE4 doesn't have a PC-style settings menu, so we're effectively getting one basic visual experience on the platform, with some options to adjust lens distortion, depth of field and motion blur, like we saw on all console versions of the game.

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Resident Evil 4 was one of the most accomplished remakes of 2023, a modernised, bold reinterpretation of Capcom's 2005 action-horror classic. It looked great too across current-gen platforms as well as PS4, with great lighting detail and excellent art design. As the year closed out, Capcom delivered RE4's first mobile port. As a part of Apple's recent triple-A gaming push, Resident Evil 4 is now available on iPhone 15 Pro and M1 and M2 based iPads, representing the fastest of Apple's mobile hardware. So is the game hung up on performance and configuration issues like Resident Evil Village? Or is RE4 a capable conversion of the console code?

Resident Evil 4 was for the most part a current-gen console and PC experience, but Capcom also shipped the game on PS4 console systems. The visuals were mostly preserved on Sony's eighth-gen machines, but there were some notable cutbacks. Most notably, texture resolution took a big hit, and texture streaming could be pretty slow. There were a range of lighting cutbacks as well, including a reduction in the number of shadow-casting light sources, and absent screen-space reflections.

Those cutbacks need to be kept in mind, because the PS4 code proves the closest match of all the console versions for the results seen on iPhone. Unlike Resident Evil Village, RE4 doesn't have a PC-style settings menu, so we're effectively getting one basic visual experience on the platform, with some options to adjust lens distortion, depth of field and motion blur, like we saw on all console versions of the game.

Read more

It’s just two days into 2024 and a major video game company is already talking about its big AI plans. If you thought we were leaving AI discourse behind in 2023, I’m sorry to tell you that you were very, very wrong. A New Year’s letter from the current Square Enix president details the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth…

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Nijisanji Vtuber Selen Tatsuki offered an update on her condition following her hospitalization. She is now home for the hospital, but still on break.

On December 27, 2023, Selen announced she needed to be hospitalized following an accident. This followed two days of silence and her not appearing during scheduled streams following her cover of the song “Last Cup of Coffee” being removed by Anycolor. At the time, she encouraged her followers to reupload the track, noting how much of her own money and effort from all sides went into its creation. She mentioned she was “under supervision” for a brief period.

On December 31, 2023, Selen posted to social media that she is home and with her parents. She also thanked her followers. 

The New Year brought the excellent news that Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse has finally entered the public domain, after decades of Disney, er, convincing Congress to keep extending its copyrights. With that, derivative works that don’t directly contravene Disney’s trademarks are now allowed by law, and with that,…

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Before we read and wrote, we moved. Stories of people moving – migrating – have been told since time immemorial. The Mexica journey to central Mexico; Moses leading the Jewish people across the desert; the founding of Rome – as told by Virgil – by those that fled the fall of Troy. Unsurprisingly, then, video games also tell stories of migration. On August 8, 2013, game designer Lucas Pope, the man behind the studio 3909, released Papers, Please, a game about managing migration.

Papers, Please, subtitled “A Dystopian Document Thriller,” was for some the first time they played a game whose core design ethos challenged their worldviews and understanding. Other games have placed the topic of migration front and center. Path Out (Causa Creations, 2014), an adventure game that retells the journey of Abdullah Karam, a young Syrian artist who escapes the country’s decade-long civil war in 2014; and Escape from Woomera (2003), a game about a refugee, Mustafa, stuck in the infamous Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in South Australia, are two stand-outs. Papers, Please tackles the subject from a different perspective. You play an inspector examining documents, determining whether a person can enter the fictional country of Arstotzka.

Timi Studio and The Pokemon Company International kicked off 2024 by revealing Magikarp and Gyarados will appear in Pokemon Unite on January 25, 2024. The announcement also confirmed that Magikarp’s “Splash” attack will be tied to its evolution method.

First, here’s the first screenshot of Magikarp in Pokemon Unite, which shows a new gauge below the health bar that is apparently tied to the attack Splash (はねる). The UI in the bottom right also notes the move Flail (じたばた) is present.

First the price went up, and now, following the release of a newer headset from Meta, the very popular Meta Quest 2 has dropped to a new low of $250, making it a much easier buy for the VR-curious.

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Sony has been fined €13.5 million by French antitrust regulator Autorité de la Concurrence, which has accused the company of "abusing its dominant position in the market" by restricting third-party PlayStation 4 controllers.

Filed by the regulator last month following a referral from French controller manufacturer Subsonic, its investigation found that Sony put counterfeiting measures in place in November 2015 that caused third-party controllers to regularly disconnect from the console during system updates.

The competition regulator also found that third-party manufacturers faced difficulty in joining its licensing program, which it alleged that Sony "refused to communicate" terms and criteria to manufacturers who'd requested it.

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