Former Doom: The Dark Ages producer Andrew Willis has shared tuppence on the state of the blockbuster videogame trade, arguing that the biggest companies and most popular series are going through a familiar "cycle" whereby the moneyfolk finally displace the creatives, and start messing games up in the name of short-term returns. He reckons that the likes of Halo are well on their way to becoming "a dried husk of a product that everyone just now associates with like, slop".

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Well, that report earlier this year was bang on the banana. A new StarCraft shooter, creatively dubbed StarCraft, has been announced for a 2030 release at this year's BlizzCon. Joining it among the headliners were Diablo 5 - which is due out in 2029 - and a new World of Warcraft branch dubbed WOW: Forever. Brave of them to name a Warcraft fork after the inevitable response which follows a WOW player revealing how long they've been playing the MMO.

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What came first, the chicken or the egg? I know, it's a tough one. I'll put it another way. What came first, Todd Howard's lone desire to make a space RPG or what the devs working under him had initially anticipated they'd be working on once Fallout 4 shipped? Well, according to a fresh account given by long-time Bethesda developer and Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann, those among the latter who'd mentally prepped to be making The Elder Scrolls 6 right away were rather whisked along on an interstellar journey Todd seemingly charted a course for without much of a heads up.

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Unionised Bethesda Games Studios staff embroiled in Microsoft's latest round of mass layoffs have expressed further doubts about the company's ability to create games at the "quality level" of the very bestest Elder Scrolls and Fallout projects, as they continue to haggle with Microsoft over severance terms.

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Since I’m apparently now RPS’ Radioactive Eastern Europe correspondent, I recently spent a couple of hours in Metro 2039, the gloom ‘n’ grit FPS sequel that Ukrainian developers 4A Games have explicitly styled as a return to the series’ roots. From what I’ve played, it is in fact as much of a hybrid as the mutated shrimp-insects that lurk in its Moscow sewers, reviving the claustrophobic tunnel dwelling of Metros 2033 and Last Light while keeping a few favoured twists from the more freely-roamable Metro Exodus.

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I've already humiliated myself attempting to describe the sensory enormity that is Cicadamata", the new movement shooter from flowergarden with the tricksy title punctuation, so instead of writing additional sentences such as "this game is like drinking the aurora borealis" (OK, one more) or "this game is like surfing the Niagara Falls during a freak shower of potassium pellets" (enough!), I'm just going to transcribe the latest trailer.

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I don’t begrudge anyone who’s waited to try STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl until it got its technical defects fixed. They’re still wrong, obviously - an absorbing and eerily atmospheric survival FPS is still an absorbing and eerily atmospheric survival FPS when it has the structural integrity of baked beans. But it was spectacularly broken at launch, and although nearly two years of patches have swatted countless bugs and beefed up the series’ signature A-Life NPC simulation, it’s remained a heavyweight GPU-puncher on general performance.

Thank the Zone, then, for the 2.0 update, which rolls out tomorrow in tandem with the also-good Cost of Hope expansion. It ambitiously migrates STALKER 2 to a newer, sleeker version of Unreal Engine 5, and makes sweeping (though handcrafted) changes to lighting and environmental deets. Based on what I’ve played, the result is both a better-looking game and a better-performing one. So get in here, stalker - there’s never been a better time to have your skeleton melted out by an anomalous soap bubble.

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Like the technical fix-uppery of the 2.0 update it’s launching alongside, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s Cost of Hope expansion arrives with a determinedly furrowed brow; that kind of enthusiastic, if just slightly contrite, look of someone hellbent on righting their own past wrongs.

Of course, most of the open-world shooter’s past crimes are long absolved, if not forgiven immediately on the grounds that they were committed amid an actual war. But Cost of Hope does serve as a second chance for this bleak, beautiful, tense, thrilling, imperfectly brilliant game to address certain omissions it made back in 2024 – even if some of these restorations gleam brighter than others.

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Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's big 2.0 update is right around the corner, and developer GSC Game World have shared a plethora of details of what you can expect from it. For starters, the shooter is getting a visual upgrade, with a particular emphasis on lighting adjustments. Indoor lighting should look more realistic, the general landscape and foliage should look more natural, and hundreds of items that were previously inadvertently floating have been fixed too.

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Update: Game Developer cite a source familiar as having told them that Halo Studios staff have "departed as a result of external contractor shifts" and that no full-time staff have been laid off.

Original story below:

Halo studios appear to have cut an unspecified number of staff following the release of Halo: Campaign Evolved last week. A number of contract workers at the studio have posted about their departures on LinkedIn within the past day or so. Halo Studios' parent company Microsoft, lest we forget, laid off around 1600 workers in early July, while parting ways with several of the studios that had been under their umbrella.

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Update: Exactly two minutes after publishing, I noticed that Halo - Chipmunk Edition's creator has AI-generated music videos on their YouTube channel. Laugh rescinded pending further evidence. Beware that searching for Halo: Campaign Evolved mods is very much a game of avoid/try to spot the AI use at the moment for those averse to the tech.

Original story follows:

Halo: Campaign Evolved's now it's out in full, so naturally the mods are flowing. In taking a look through the early ones, which include the usual sorts of performance a graphical tweaks which crop up for every new release, I've stumbled across a few works I'd class as pulling off interesting or noteworthy stuff thus far. There's a mod which purports to activate split-screen co-op the devs have left sitting behind the scenes and another which swaps Cortana's lines for ones from the original Combat Evolved. Both of those have been made using AI - Claude in one case, OpenAI Codex in the other.

So, I tried digging a bit deeper into the early combat mods which don't have any AI shoutouts in their descriptions. That's led me to Halo - Chipmunk Edition.

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Grab your Geiger counter and your copy of The Arbinger Institute’s seminal conflict resolution handbook The Anatomy of Peace, because STALKER 2’s faction war-y story expansion Cost of Hope has a release date. It’s out on August 20th, developers GSC Game World have announced, and will launch in tandem with the long-awaited Update 2.0 – which, among other tweaks, will move the base game over to a newer, less technically perilous version of Unreal Engine 5.

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