BlizzCon 2023, a massive celebration of Blizzard games like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and Diablo is back in-person for the first time in four years, and offering two very different paths to enjoy the ceremonies. For the first time ever, you can watch the livestream in its entirety for free, but if you want to go…
Source: Kotaku – BlizzCon 2023 Livestream Will Be Free, But IRL Tickets Are 0
A powerful world boss in Diablo IV has been slain in only a dozen or so seconds. And while that’s impressive enough on its own, it’s even more amazing that it was basically one very powerful Necromancer that wiped out this usually hard-to-kill baddie.
Source: Kotaku – Someone Killed An Ultra-Powerful Diablo IV Boss In Less Than 15 Seconds
OK, PC gamers, Steam’s annual Summer Sale is here. The event is active through July 13 at 1 p.m. ET and, as one of Steam’s biggest discount sessions, it covers a ton of best-selling indie and AAA games, like Dead Cells (now $12) and Sekiro’s GOTY edition (now $30).
Source: Kotaku – Here Are The Best 2023 Steam Summer Sale Deals
This past weekend I played a beta version of Mortal Kombat 1. I was part of an “online stress test” organized by NetherRealm Studios so the team could prepare the servers ahead of the game’s official launch. To quickly sum things up: So far, so good.
Source: Kotaku – Hell Yeah, Mortal Kombat 1 Makes It Easy To Do Fatalities
Developer Yager Development has announced that its free-to-play multiplayer shooter The Cycle: Frontier will go offline forever on September 27. The developer gave a few reasons for the shutdown, including an interesting one: Cheaters ruined the experience for everyone involved.
Source: Kotaku – Free-To-Play Shooter Shuts Down For Good Due To Cheaters
Back in May, it was announced Final Fantasy XVI would be banned in Saudi Arabia. Officially, it was because developer Square Enix refused to alter scenes in the game for the territory, which led to rumors and speculation that the 16th game in the long-running RPG series would have explicit gay sex scenes, which…
Source: Kotaku – Final Fantasy XVI’s Gay Romance Fails To Commit Where It Counts
No one likes a spoiled surprise. But if you’re Battlestate Games, developers of the indie extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov, then you really, really, really don’t like it. Recently, the dev has threatened to ban anyone who datamines or even shares datamined content from the game. The threatens haven’t gone over…
Source: Kotaku – Shooter Dev Threatens To Ban Anyone For Sharing Game Secrets
On Thursday, fans of the hit Nickelodeon cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender received an adrenaline shot in the arm by way of an announcement trailer for a new action-adventure game set in the universe that’s due out later this year. Unfortunately, its gameplay looks a bit bland, and the trailer doesn’t reveal enough…
Source: Kotaku – Avatar Is Getting A New Action-Adventure Game And It Looks A Bit Mid
Polish horror game developer Bloober Team told Engadget it’s leaving the psychological horror subset—a genre that defined all of its biggest titles, like Layers of Fear and the cyberpunk title Observer—far behind. The studio is currently responsible for the (impossible, diehard fans say) task to remake Silent Hill 2…
Source: Kotaku – Silent Hill 2 Remake Studio Says It’s Done With Psychological Horror—And That’s A Good Thing
Niantic is shuttering its Los Angeles studio and is moving away from in-house game development. As such, the Pokémon Go studio is laying off 230 employees, shuttering NBA All-World and cancelling its upcoming Marvel: World of Heroes.
Source: Kotaku – Pokémon Go Dev Lays Off 230 Employees, Cancels Upcoming Marvel Game
As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continues to drag Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard under a microscope, the company’s CEO wants you to know it’s actually Sony’s fault that console exclusives exist.
Source: Kotaku – It’s Sony’s Fault We Have Console Exclusives, Says Microsoft CEO
Baldur’s Gate III director Swen Vincke doesn’t think the sprawling fantasy role-playing game would exist if the team behind it, Larian Studios, had been gobbled up by another game company. “It would have been canned, guaranteed,” he told me during a recent interview. “There’s no way that a big publisher would have…
Source: Kotaku – Hyped RPG Baldur’s Gate III Took Six Years To Make Because It’s Scary-Big
Larian Studios is shifting its upcoming RPG Baldur’s Gate 3’s release around a bit, and that means good and bad news depending on if you were planning on playing the game on PC or PlayStation 5.
Source: Kotaku – Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Coming To PC Early To Avoid Games Like Starfield, Cyberpunk DLC
Valve seems to be blocking video games created with AI-generated assets from being published on its online storefront Steam. A Reddit post from earlier this month, first noticed by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, includes a message from Valve explaining that it “cannot ship games for which the developer does not…
Source: Kotaku – Steam Might Be Banning Games Made With AI Art
Certified PC gamers tend to think they are the best of the pack, but our superior hardware comes at a price. Sure, part of that is the hundreds of dollars of upfront cost which can sometimes make console gaming look simpler and more appealing , but mostly I’m talking about how the community treats PC gamers like…
Source: Kotaku – 10 Things You Should Never Say To A PC Gamer
Indie developer Neal Agarwal, better known as Neal.fun, makes video games that are very small but also very good. His latest, The Password Game, is the perfect example: it takes the hell of coming up with a password for an app or site’s account and somehow turns it into something as far from hell as possible.
Source: Kotaku – The Password Game Is A Perfect Recreation Of An Online Disaster
We’ve tried to scrub as much of the time period from our collective memories as possible, I know, but if you cast your mind back to the Presidency of Donald Trump, and 2017 specifically, you might remember one of the weirdest stories to emerge was one involving Disney, an animatronic robot and Hillary Clinton.
Source: Kotaku – Report: Disney Really Did Turn A Hillary Robot Into Donald Trump
As protests continue over on Reddit, the world’s largest community forum that is now inexplicably being turned into an engine for shareholder-driven greed, one of its biggest gaming subreddits has announced that it will be leaving the platform for good.
Source: Kotaku – Official Minecraft Subreddit Shuts Down, Says ‘We No Longer Feel Reddit Is An Appropriate Place’
Donald Duck is considered by many fans to be the most powerful mage in all of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. For a long time, his reign as the supreme magic user in the franchise was unchallenged. But that’s changed with the release of Final Fantasy XVI, because now there’s finally another mage who’s as powerful as…
Source: Kotaku – Another Final Fantasy Character Is Finally As Powerful As Donald Duck
We’re not even a whole week out from the release of Square Enix’s latest entry in the Final Fantasy series, and yet the voice actor for Final Fantasy XVI’s protagonist has already found (and read) gamers’ thirsty fan fiction.
Source: Kotaku – Final Fantasy XVI’s Clive Actor Has Read Your Thirsty Fan Fiction