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Starbreeze is giving Payday 3 a regime change ahead of its one-year anniversary. The studio recently announced game director Miodrag Kovačević will no longer lead its live-service crime game.According to Starbreeze, Kovačević will "step away from his role…and refocus his efforts as a designer elsewhere in the project."While the studio looks for someone to take on long-term director duties, Payday 3's "creative force" will be temporarily steered by lead producer Andreas Penninger and global brand director Almir Listo.As Listo noted, he and Penninger have been at Starbreeze for 12 years and worked on Payday 2. Discussing the future, Listo said he was "thrilled about the upcoming content we are preparing for you all!"

The tumultuous, ongoing Payday 3 saga

Payday 3 debuted in September last year but has struggled to make headway. The multiplayer shooter faced server issues at launch but still opened to 1.3 million overall players.Months later, Starbreeze said the game had massively underperformed. The situation result…

VR studio nDreams is conducting a round of layoffs that could impact 17.5 percent of employees.The company said a "challenging VR games market" requires a "renewed strategic focus" that will result in job cuts.The UK firm operates four studios and is known for working on titles like Far Cry VR, Fracked, Phantom: Covert Ops, and Synapse. According to the nDreams website, it currently employs over 250 people across a variety of hybrid and fully-remote roles.The downsizing comes less than a year after nDreams was purchased by Swedish conglomerate Aonic for $110 million in what was described as a "landmark" deal.In a statement sent to Game Developer, nDreams CEO Patrick O'Luanaigh said the layoffs are being made with "deep regret" and noted roles could be trimmed at all levels "including senior leadership.""We are working tirelessly to support our team with the respect and care they deserve throughout this challenging process, including all our efforts to comprehensively assist those whose positions may be impacted to move into new roles within nDreams or elsewhere," he added."Having been fully-focused on VR developm…

Palworld developer Pocketpair said the game will not transition to free-to-play.Last week, translated comments surfaced from CEO Takuro Mizobe, wherein he talked about the game's future. At the time, he claimed the studio was debating whether or not to change to a live-service, free-to-play model.Plenty of games have launched as a paid title, then converted into a free game years later. It can revitalize a game's community and open up more revenue opportunities.

Palworld just wasn't designed with the free-to-play model in mind

During the interview, Mizobe noted a switch would help "extend [Palworld's] lifespan and make it more stable in terms of profitability." At the same time, he acknowledged how it wasn't built with free-to-play in mind, and switching models could be a challenge unto itself.Pocketpair has now clarified the interview was conducted "months ago," and it's firmly settled on not going free-to-play."Palworld was never designed with that model in mind, and it would require too much work to adapt at this…

Reuters reports tech company IBM won its lawsuit against mobile developer Zynga, which it sued over patent infringement in 2022.Two years ago, IBM claimed the Farmville creator was misusing its "foundational" web technology, including data capture and analytics. The two companies had reportedly been negotiating a license since 2014, but those talks repeatedly fell through.

IBM's other suits

At the time, Zynga was one of many internet companies IBM took legal action against. Earlier this year, a suit against e-commerce site Rakuten was settled, while another against pet goods seller Chewy was dropped entirely.Documents show the federal court found multiple Zynga games fell within the bounds of patent violation. Specific titles listed include the Farmville sequels, Crosswords with Friends, and Wizard of Oz Slots.With the court in its favor, IBM has been awarded $44.9 million in damages. However, Zynga spokesperson Alan Lewis argued those patents were invalid, and said the developer (and its owner Take-Two) plan on appealing the verdict.…

Remedy Entertainment just unveiled FBC: Firebreak at the Xbox October Partner Preview. The studio may be known for creating some of the best single-player games around – Alan Wake 2 and Control being its most recent efforts – but now the team is turning its attention to multiplayer for the first time in its 29-year history. FBC: Firebreak is a three-player co-op shooter set inside The Oldest House from Control. In it, you take on the roles of a fearless first responder from the Federal Bureau of Control, diving into the darkest recesses of The Oldest House to fend off para-natural threats with your friends. It’s a strictly PvE affair, with communications director Thomas Puha promising that Remedy isn’t pitching FBC: Firebreak as an all-consuming live service – but rather something you can dive into at your leisure. “FBC: Firebreak should be easy to get into and quickly understandable, not feel like a second job or that you have to spend an hour setting up your loadouts etc. before you get into a session. This is not that game,” Puha tells Xbox Wire. “It’s a pick-up-and-play experience [about] having fun with your friends when you have the time. That’s no…

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii – Naval Combat Reveal | Xbox Partner Preview October 2024 – YouTube

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Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii has a new gameplay trailer with a release date that’s a week ahead of the previous one.Premiering during the Xbox Partner Showcase for October 2024, the new trailer offers up the first look at actual naval combat gameplay, which I presume is at the heart of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. We’ve known from the cinematics in the reveal trailer, as well as just the premise of the game, that there would be ship combat, but this is our first proper glimpse of it in action.And, well, it looks like Yakuza’s take on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. The trailer shows fan-favorite Yakuza antihero Goro Majima take the helm of a wooden battleship whose hull, sails, figurehead, and trimming can be customized, and cut through waves with his signature crazed determination for violence. An enemy ship approaches and Majima crashes into it and orders his crew to fire, with plenty of boat drifting to go around. The combat looks a lot faster than, say, Sea of Thieves, and indeed much more in line with Black Flag. The key difference he…

Today’s Xbox Partner Showcase gave us a look at Subnautica 2 – which is, of course, the third game in the Subnautica series. The new, direct sequel is set to launch into early access in 2025, and it’s finally answering fans’ prayers by adding multiplayer.The brief trailer for Subnautica 2 appears to be all cinematics, but it sets the tone for the new game with a brief look at a colorful, inviting coral reef dive followed up by the most terrifying deep sea encounter you can imagine. The big tease here is that we see multiple characters working together, a clear example of the long-awaited addition of cooperative multiplayer for up to four players.Subnautica now officially hits early access in 2025, and it’ll be available day one on Game Pass for Xbox Series X|S and PC. The devs have confirmed that it’ll also be available on PC via Steam and Epic, but there’s no word of a PS5 version just yet.In a new Xbox Wire blog we see a handful of screenshots alongside confirmation that we’ll “traverse beyond Planet 4546B.” Some of this info has already been teased out by publisher Krafton in recent years, though developer Unknown Worlds has had to do some damage control on certain pieces of tha…

Bloober Team is chasing its successful Silent Hill 2 remake launch with an announcement of a new IP and third-person survival horror game — Cronos: The New Dawn. “Our commitment to redefining the horror genre continues with this survival horror title, which represents a natural progression of our creative vision and our studio’s strategy,” CEO Piotr Babieno says in a press release. The nasty time travel adventure is the first original survival horror game from Bloober, whose breakout titles Layers of Fear and  The Medium largely operate in the land of slow, sometimes lumbering, psychological creepiness. But a new cinematic trailer suggests that Cronos: The New Dawn will be more aggressively nauseating than that, with skinny H.R. Giger beasts and a desolate zero-gravity environment. 

Cronos: The New Dawn – Official Cinematic Reveal Trailer – YouTube

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“Cronos: The New Dawn is a twisted time travel story set in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic future in 1980s Poland,” the press release continues. “Players will take on the role of a Traveler, an agent of the enigmatic Collective with a mission to extract selected people who didn’…

WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers – Official Trailer | Xbox Partner Preview October 2024 – YouTube

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Where the developers for games like Black Myth: Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero have come out and said they aren’t making a Soulslike, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a loud-and-proud “Soulslike action RPG” set in a horror fiction take on the late Ming Dynasty. I got this vibe from its reveal earlier this year, and the new trailer fresh from today’s Xbox partner showcase seals the deal with phrenetic bosses and plentiful parries that are ringing my Sekiro alarms. There’s thankfully a lot more gameplay this time. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a third-person action game promising a distinctly darker take on the Chinese history and mythology that’s (rather excitingly) becoming more prominent nowadays. Our hero, the female pirate Wuchang, is a one-woman army sporting dual swords, glaives, straight swords, magic clubs, magic flames, a spear gun, a flamethrower, a Sephiroth-esque blood wing, and a shotgun lightning bow. Let’s not forget the feathered arm, either – evidently a sign of Wuchang’s mixed bloodline. The sheer variety of weapons and attacks reminds me a bit of Nioh, a…

Five years after its formation, the 2K studio 31st Union has revealed its debut project: a free-to-play, third-person roguelike hero shooter tentatively titled Project Ethos.31st Union has had an interesting history since its formation in 2019. It was founded by Sledgehammer Games co-founder and former studio head Michael Condrey as 2K Silicon Valley in 2019 and officially named 31st Union in 2020. That’s not all that interesting, but it is pretty weird that the new studio said it would be focused on “a single new IP at the time” and then waited almost five years to reveal it. To be fair, a little something called COVID-19 happened between then and now, but that’s a long time between announcement and reveal regardless.Project Ethos is described in a new press release as “a new free-to-play, 3rd-person roguelike hero shooter and an exciting evolution on the genre.” The roguelike element sounds like an interesting twist on a well-established genre, and it sounds like it’ll revolve around something called Evolutions, which 31st describes as “powerful, semi-randomized, upgrades unique to each hero. Evolve a sniper into a close-range skirmisher, or a support role into a powerful lone wo…