Microsoft will terminate over 1900 contracts in its gaming division. The majority of them will be in Activision Blizzard, recently acquired for $69B.

There are several top-tier workers among people who will leave the company including Mike Ybarra, the president of Blizzard Ent.

It means that on January alone there were about 6000 jobs lost across the game industry, compared to 15-20K during the last year.

#Business #Finance #Microsoft #Xbox

Traversal in open-world games is very often a pain. Boredom is hidden behind "random events" and rule of 40 seconds but in general moving around is just not fun and more like a side effect.

There are exceptions: Dying Light 1 and 2 with parkour, High on Life with platforming, Death Stranding with its funky physical steps and cargo caring, etc.

Dragon's Dogma looks like there will be environmental puzzles to solve but I don't expect any interesting platforming or parkour. Sadly, they will also use random events, note that and feel free to tell me if I was wrong.

#GameDesign #OpenWorld

Game reviews #meme

Another Music Sunday #OffTopic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0XCoYrcTGo

Fully #procedural leather materials in #Blender 4 using Voronoi texture by Joakim Tornhill.

💡 Higher quality version is available in the chat!

#GameArt #Shaders #Nodes

Unfortunately, we have yet another unpleasant news: the upcoming Deus Ex game has been cancelled and 97 staff members have been laid off from Eidos Montreal.

Previously, Embracer Group acquired the studio from Square Enix and promised to make things right. They restarted the development of Deus Ex and now it's gone again.

#Business

Also a great moment to appreciate Andre (head of marketing) and Johnathan (Art Director and the face of Adam Jensen). We used to meet in Moscow in 2010 during the Deus Ex Human Revolution showcase. I was working with the publishing and had long hair.

Both of them left Eidos after Mankind Divided and haven't returned for the preproduction of the new game.

When you find a note on a computer in a sci-fi horror game #meme

Enshrouded #Survival #RPG, that looks like Valheim + Zelda, sold over 1 million copies in a few days, despite how many survival fans are busy with Palworld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSSIH5L2liI

After Embracer shut down Volition (Saints Row, Red Faction), studio veterans founded a new company and already co-developing a project for Xbox Games Studio. They are also hiring and their main focus is Unreal Engine 5 games for PC and consoles.

#Business #Xbox

Death Stranding is now available on recent iOS devices. The game was fairly playable on handhelds, it may be a nice experience on mobile platforms too.

The native macOS version is also available on App Store. Saves are synced via iCloud between all platforms.

⭐ Do you have a recent iPhone? Would you buy DS to play it on the go?

#LevelDesign vs #LevelArt of Jedi Survivor by Simon Isacsson Andersen

There have been questions on our recent #NPR posts about "how to achieve that" and there are many ways to do so, but here's the one for characters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM8ukvOFgKs
#Tutorials #Shaders #Anime

Oh, a #Blender character modeling tutorial that isn't 10 hours long, you're welcome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1CFWDWTamo
#Tutorials #3Dmodeling

Nice #GodotEngine tutorial!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vAkTHeoORk
#Tutorials #Godot4 #Programming

Spore #meme time (the first game I got as a deluxe edition with some artbook and stuff).

The #RPG that was in development for ages and switched several studios, is still kinda planned for this Autumn and the new trailer just arrived. Is this only me or it looks cheaper than before?

New models, animations, even color palette are all saying "hey, it's indie game"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja1rtSS4YlI

How LOD (Level of Details) works inside the GPU render pipeline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf27qsQPRLQ
#GPU #Hardware #Rendering

Black Goo cats, neck hands, flying ships... IDK WHAT IS GOING ON ANYMORE, but yeah, meet DS2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cs-A1rNvEE

Meanwhile #Valve #Modding