As promised, Blizzard brought a few of its games to Gamescom 2024 to celebrate the show, and bring us new nuggets to munch on. Now that the studio is part of the larger Microsoft family, Blizzard’s games occupy this awkward spot where they can clearly stand on their own, but also need to bolster Xbox’s line-up.Game industry politics aside, what the studio brought today was certainly worth tuning in for, especially when it came to Diablo 4.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings The focus, of course, was on Vessel of Hatred, the first Diablo 4 expansion. Vessel of Hatred was properly unveiled in June at Summer Game Fest. We got treated to its opening cinematic, and learned of its October 8 release date. Since then, Blizzard has been revealing m…

Visions of Mana only released yesterday, August 29, but according to a new report, plans to cut back at and eventually close the JRPG’s developer – Ouka Studios – have been in the works for a good while, with the current situation being that NetEase has cut “all but a handful of jobs”.This comes from Bloomberg, which has been looking into NetEase and Tencent, and the scaling back of Japanese investments both big Chinese companies have been doing.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Ouka opened in 2020 and went on to hire veteran developers from the likes of Capcom and Bandai Namco. Visions of Mana, published by Square Enix was revealed at last year’s edition of The Game Awards, and locked in a summer release via a gameplay reveal at the Xb…

After arriving back in all of our lives by showing off his latest project, god game Masters of Albion, at Gamescom Opening Night Live, veteran developer Peter Molyneux has now been asked what kinds of changes and evolutions he thinks the next few decades of gaming might see. His answer? More Hollywood adaptations and, well, AI.The controversial dev, who was once a key figure in Fable, and has since done some other stuff that’s often proven polarising or bizarre, was asked – along with a bunch of other industry figures – by Eurogamer where he thinks the world of video games be in 25 years time.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings “AI is going to be a real game changer,” Molyneux said as part of his answer, “There will come a time where AI will be used t…

The Grand Tour’s final special, One for the Road, is a poignant farewell to one of television’s most successful, and endearing, male friendships. And it’s not hard to understand why it might be time to say goodbye to the format that presenter Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman invented all those years ago: they’re old now. As you get older, things get harder to do. Even at the relatively spritely age of 40 I can attest to that.But there are more tangible concerns than the imperceptible march of biological decline, and more than a few of them were listed on Tuesday night’s Q&A, An Evening with The Grand Tour, a special event that was part press junket, part celebration of three lives well lived: as well as us journalists, most of the crowd were family…

Netflix dropped a new clip from the upcoming animated film The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep, though it does unfortunately come with a delay.With it being Netflix Geeked Week, the streamer has plenty of updates on a lot of your favourite series and films, and yesterday was no different as an official clip from The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep was released. We’ll get to the clip in just a second, but off the bat there’s some good news and bad news. The good news is that the animated film adaptation of the classic book series finally has a release date! The bad news is that it’s February 11, 2025 – the movie was originally expected to be released some time in 2024, but this latest bit of footage unfortunately confirms that it’s been pushed back a touch. We’re getting quite close to the end of 2…

If you’ve gotten all excited about Linkin Park making a return, and are still powering through 2AM ranked games in League of Legends, you may be excited to hear that these two interests are coliding tomorrow. This is thanks to this year’s Worlds anthem which has been created by the band.Announced via various Riot Games platforms including Twitter, a teaser for the song and music video is out in the wild right now. Like prior music videos that Riot has made, it’ll be totally animated and themed around Runeterra and the wider League cannon. There may even be a big trophy – who knows!To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings For those more alligned with the League fanbase than the music side, Linkin Park is an astoundingly popular band that recently made a com…

Remember The Day Before? Remember the seemingly never-ending scanadals the game, and its developer, continued to create? You probably do; it wasn’t that long ago. Fntastic, the studio responsible for that mess, has returned with a new project.This time around, the developer is asking for player support before releasing anything or hyping up the game. Fntastic is taking the crowdfunding route with Escape Factory, its next project.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Escape Factory, whose Kickstarter campaign just went live, is pitched as a physics-based multiplayer game where four-to-eight players attempt to escape the mayhem of a dangerous factory. It sounds decent, and the one-minute trailer on the page certainly looks competent and achievable.U…

Better Man is an upcoming biopic about Robbie Williams, where he’s being portrayed by a, uh, CGI… monkey?It’s very rare that I find a creative decision to be completely and utterly baffling. Even if something’s a bit odd I’ll usually go ‘well, I get why they did that.’ This isn’t a difficult thing to do, creative decisions can be rationalised, even when bad. But, dear reader, from the very depths of my soul, I cannot even begin to understand what the hell is going on with Better Man. Here’s the basics: it’s a biopic about pop singer Robbie Williams. OK, that part I can deal with, I’m sure as someone who was in a band as big as Take That has some stories to tell. He’s in it too, seemingly as a narrator, which is maybe ethically sketchy, but whatever. Except, the fictionalised version…

Everyone pretty much already knew that Payday 3 had a really terrible launch, and in a recent interview developer Starbreeze has admitted as such, even as it makes some hopeful promises.Right out the gate, Payday 3 was a struggle to run – matchmaking issues were constant, and only a month after it launched, its predecessor Payday 2 had 10x more players on Steam, not exactly what you want from a sequel as a developer. And now, in a recent interview with PCGamesN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo spoke about the games launch, and the studio’s hopes for the game going forward. Listo explained that Payday 3 “suffered from major technical issues, so the game was more or less unplayable for several weeks.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cook…

Blizzard has released the full set of patch notes for Diablo 4 update 2.0.3, which is set to arrive tomorrow, October 17 on all platforms. This is, more or less, the first meaty patch for the game since the release of Vessel of Hatred and the start of Season 6.As a result, many of the changes fix a lot of the issues players have been having with it, bring back some missing features, and drop the first post-expansion nerf hammer to address those pesky evade spam Spiritborn builds.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Patch 2.0.3 follows a series of smaller patches that released in the wake of Vessel of Hatred. While the majority of those were single-issue updates, this one has much wider reach that spans balance, bug fixes, and even a few UI tweaks to ma…