LoginWhat are we all playing this weekend?
It's well and truly not summer now. I'm writing this with the lights on because the screen's backlight is suddenly too bright for these eyes grown weak and lazy by the abundance of natural illumination.
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"Publishers are afraid of certain parts of the world": Saber Interactive's message to North American studios is to get their head out of their own geography
Layoffs have been a constant drumbeat in gaming industry news since 2022. Even if the cadence of layoffs seems to have slowed in 2026, the severity of those cuts has not lessened. In July, Microsoft made 1600 staff redundant as part of its great reset, and promised investors they would let 1600 more staff go in the next 12 months.
Cuts like those and the ongoing economic pressures plaguing the industry – rising debt rates, a cost of living crisis, and a memory shortage that is making every aspect of making and playing video games pricier – should have the head of any large studio examining their plans for the future. Especially when games are taking longer to make, costing more to make, and up against a much greater volume of competition than even two years ago.
With all that in mind, when I wasn't talking to Saber Interactive's chief creative officer Tim Willits about generative AI, I wanted to know what he would do if he ran one of those 200-people big-budget game studios. Because say what you like about Saber (and there's a lot of things people like to say about Saber), but the developer is doing well at a time when a lot of other studios and publishers are struggling.
Three different 4X strategy games, three different solutions to "that inherent problem" of disappearing exploration
There is an issue in 4X games. In fact, it's so persistent, that Amplitude Studios' co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis describes it as an "inherent problem", one his team have been attempting to solve since the first Endless Legend released back in 2014.
"One of the X's, 'explore', disappears after a while," de Waubert de Genlis explains. You've discovered the map for one thing, so there is no more world to uncover. But 'explore' can also refer to something more abstract, your strategy becomes fixed. Because you can see the lands, and you can see the resources, and you can see the enemies you face, you must decide on a course of action and there will rarely be much reason to change it.
But spotting the problematic 'X' is far simpler than fixing it.
Guild Wars 3 dev wants you to be able to take a break for months at a time and know you're "not going to be left behind"
Colin Johanson doesn't think the MMO is dying. He would say that: he's the studio head of Arenanet, the team behind the Guild Wars series. He's also talking to me directly after showing off combat and movement in the team's next MMO, Guild Wars 3. That said, what is more unexpected is that he says the genre is "as big as it's ever been."
You just need to expand your definition of an MMO.
"15 years ago, people understood it was an unfinished game": As Endless Legend 2 hits 1.0, Amplitude reflect on how early access has changed
Amplitude have always used early access for their games, even before Steam Early Access was a thing. Ahead of Endless Space's release in July 2012, players who preordered the game got immediate access to an alpha build that was steadily patched and updated on the lead up to launch.
To this day, the studio still uses its Games2Gether program, where they discuss design issues with players and poll them for thoughts on how to proceed. Right now, there are a small group of players giving feedback on the recently announced Humankind 2.
However, as Amplitude prepare to launch Endless Legend 2 after a year in early access, co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis readily admits "The whole thing has changed over time."
Tim Willits doesn't think Rideshare's generative AI is damaging Saber's reputation
A few weeks ago, when I spoke with Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, makers of games like Space Marine 2, SnowRunner, and World War Z, the company was dealing with the shitstorm that ensued from their announcement of Rideshare Stimulator.
The game's basically an Uber simulator, with you driving a car around town picking up fares, but Saber drew all kinds of bad attention when a former writer on the game revealed the game featured generative AI (something left undisclosed on the game's Steam page until recently) and CEO Matt Karch responded by attacking the writer in statements to the press. Something he has since apologised for.
So, naturally, we talked about generative AI and the reputational damage – or lack of – when getting caught out using it.
Paradox's grand strategy game Afterworld hasn't got a fixed history, it changes with every playthrough
Each time you start a new campaign in Afterworld, Paradox's upcoming post-apocalyptic grand strategy game, a tiny virtual historian cracks their knuckles and gets to work writing a new 200-year history for what happened to North America in the dying days of the great war.
They will decide where the great powers fired their nuclear-tipped missiles, where they released their clouds of flesh-eating nanites, where they dropped their lung-bubbling chemical weapons, and they will decide who survived and who died. These procedural changes should mean that each time you start a new game of Afterworld, the map will be dramatically different from the last.
That flexibility to rewrite the surface of Afterworld is vital, game director Dan Lind tells me, "Otherwise it undermines a lot of the exploration".
"20 players is the sweet spot": Guild Wars 3's action game combat is a first for MMOs, but it doesn't work at traditional raid scale
Arenanet are keeping a lot of Guild Wars 3 hidden away. Throughout the short presentation of their new fantasy MMO, the refrain is 'We're not talking about that yet'. Mounts, professions, dynamic world events, even shops and the economy are all things the developers will talk about in the future.
Though, what they did show more than made up for it.
The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for luxuriating in the chill of the September air and hoping for more of the drenching rain that's ended the summer heat. Though, it's a luxuriating that's quickly pierced by the worry that we've seen the last warm weather of the year. Winter isn't far off and all the gaps around the windows in the living room are going to start making themselves known again.
What are we all playing this weekend?
This is the first Saturday in a month I've woken up without a blocked nose or a mucus-hurling cough. Trips to Spain, Sweden, and Germany in quick succession and loaded on top of a cross country bike ride may have been a touch to much for my ageing body.
Still, at last, I am well. In body, if not in spirit. So, better start playing some games then, right?
Lego Skylines' devs want your city's problems to be visible without digging into a stats screen, which means finding a "family friendly" version of showing homelessness
As pretty as Cities: Skylines is, getting a read on your city's problems can take some digging. While traffic jams are immediately visible, prompting you to start reorganising the layout of your streets and bypasses, other issues only make themselves known when you switch on overlays or bring up a stats screen. Changing that is one developer Iceflake Studios aims for colourful plastic brick-based spinoff Lego Skylines.
"If there's an issue, it should be visible in the world," game director Lasse Liljedahl tells me. "Everything that you need to worry about or manage is something you should see while zooming in and zooming out and not digging deep in statistics or information screens. That's the goal."
"I'm a massive fan of Aliens, but it is a very different beast": Why Creative Assembly are still ignoring every movie but the original in Alien Isolation 2, despite heading planetside
Creative Assembly have themselves a particular constraint when making Alien: Isolation 2. The sequel to their 2014 horror title would only reference their first game and the original 1979 Ridley Scott Alien film. It ignores all the other films that came after.
That includes James Cameron's Aliens, the immediate sequel to Scott's film, which, like Alien: Isolation 2, moves the action from a space station to an isolated planetside colony.
"I just want to go back inside": How Creative Assembly use weather to make you crave claustrophobic interiors in Alien Isolation 2
As I stand on the lee side of the wrecked haz lab, all I can hear is the rain pelt its metal roof and the feral wind howl about me. Planet LV-921 may have a breathable atmosphere, but it's not a safe planet. And that's before the xenomorph enters the scene and starts hunting the colonists living in Weyland-Yutani's Kurasaki mining station.
Alien: Isolation 2, the long-awaited sequel to Creative Assembly's 2014 horror game, moves the action out from the original's claustrophobic Sevastopol Station, but the developers have worked out ways to make the wide open spaces of LV-921 feel just as tense and trapping.
The adult game crackdown is "ridiculous for our art form", say Hellraiser devs, but they think they'll survive thanks to that Clive Barker association
Last year, Australian anti-porn group Collective Shout pressured payment processors, such as Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, and Paysafe Limited to withdraw their services from Steam and Itch.io if the stores didn't remove adult games from their shelves. The campaign was successful and many games were impacted. The campaign's had a chilling effect, leaving developers making games including any sexual content in a kind of limbo as to whether digital storefronts will host their work. Some are ushered through without issue, while others are banned with little recourse.
Just last week, we saw how Valve blocked Molleindustria's Future? No Thanks! due to its scenes of minor nudity. Then, only after public lobbying, did they manage to get Valve to reconsider and rescind their ban.
So, after playing a half hour demo of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, a demo set almost entirely inside a fetish club, and one featuring male nudity, female nudity, and some pretty sexually explicit content, I asked the developers if they were worried about a Steam ban or if it had led to any changes to the game.
When Crusader Kings 3: By God Alone comes out, I'm going to turn the Roman Catholic Church into a polyamorous love nest
Being a pope is a stressful job. That's true today, but imagine heading up the Roman Catholic Church in the 11th century. Back then, the leader of the Catholic Church didn't have access to a bubble car or a social media team. The good news is, when Crusader Kings 3's next expansion, By God Alone, launches at the end of September, I know how to help my pope relax after a long day: polyamory.
Road Kings is sometimes American Truck Simulator in a disaster movie, but delivering crates of ellipticals is fun too
When I sat down to play Road Kings in April, the event organisers were very clear: when you're done driving around in the sandbox, let us know and we will load up the disaster movie scene. After fifty minutes of my hour with Saber's spin on American Truck Simulator, I'd completely forgotten about the second mission. I was merrily absorbed in hauling truckloads of exercise bikes between the cities of South Georgia and Northern Florida.
Saber are definitely playing catch up with SCS Software. The latter's American Truck Simulator released over a decade ago and it now features nearly half of North America. Naturally, Road Kings will ship with a much smaller map and roster of vehicles. Though Saber hope to pull ahead by injecting a little drama.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy review – a competent action game spinoff that loses what made its predecessors unique
For a series about light and dark, it's appropriate that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a spinoff that's trying to escape the main entries' shadow. Developer Asobo Studio have dropped much that is familiar to explore exactly what a Plague Tale story can be.
Resonance doesn't feature series protagonists Amicia and Hugo. It is set 16 years before the events of the last game, long before the siblings flee across wartorn medieval France, hunted by the soldiers of the Inquisition. In Resonance, you play Sophia and see how she became the woman who saves Amicia in A Plague Tale: Requiem. You learn how, as a child, she was kidnapped by the Inquisition and injected with a poison that gave her visions of a strange island. How her father, the leader of a group of smugglers, found the island and died there searching for treasure and a cure to Sophia's dreams. And how Faro, her father's successor, continues visiting the island, seeking to unearth its secrets.
Resonance's early chapters see a now teenage Sophia growing frustrated with Faro. The smuggler leader never takes her with him to the island, despite – and because of – the mounting casualties in the expeditions. Guiltridden, Sophia stops sharing her visions. Those chapters also teach you Resonance's focus: combat.
I'm not a fan of Heroes of Might & Magic 3, but I can recognise that Ubisoft have done a faithful job of recreating the much-loved turn-based strategy RPG
Heroes of Might & Magic is having a moment. Not only are publishers Hooded Horse and Ubisoft backing the development of Unfrozen's Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, the first new game in the series in more than a decade, but Ubisoft have revealed they're completely remaking the series' best-regarded entry: Heroes of Might & Magic 3.
While there are many quality of life improvements in the remake, Ubisoft aims to keep its spirit as close to the original as possible. There is a new three-mission prelude to get you into the story and teach you the game's systems but, after that, you're into the thick of the original campaign and its two expansions – Armageddon's Blade and The Shadow of Death. This also means you'll have all nine factions to play with.
I've played the remake for a few hours already and I'll get into my thoughts on that in a moment. But, the most telling thing about the remake is that it supports all the custom maps and campaigns players have made for the past 25 years. Ubisoft showed how you can import any original map file into Might & Magic 3 Remake's map creator and it will build a modern-looking level from the old data. It's a wonderful way to support the Heroes of Might & Magic 3 players who are still playing decades on from its release.
Rainbow Six Tactics transforms the demolition-driven Siege into a turn-based game while keeping the destructible environments, operators, and reconnaissance drones
Ubisoft have done the sensible thing and turned Rainbow Six into a turn-based tactical game. Nabbing the special ability-laden operators of Rainbow Six Siege and dropping them into the XCOM: Chimera Squad framework. The Mario + Rabbids developer have found a spin off that looks to be a natural fit for the series.
