It took nearly a decade of work, but Daggerfall Unity—the best version of Bethesda’s biggest RPG—finally crossed the finish line into a full 1.0 release in January. With that Herculean task complete, creator Gavin Clayton is moving on to a new project: Making a Daggerfall-style game of his own.

“I’ve already started working on a new game, but it’s going to be something of mine this time,” Clayton said in an interview with DualShockers. “I do genuinely love that old style of game. The thing I’m building is in the same vein. You’re talking big world, complex systems, mod support, that’s all of the stuff I want to explore, and I want to take that experience of Daggerfall Unity and put it in the new game.”

Clayton said he’s wanted to make games since he was very young, but the opportunities were very limited back in the 1980s and ’90s, and so he went into IT instead because it was “sensible and down to Earth,” and something he could make a proper living from.

…

The neverending development of Star Citizen continues, and just before the weekend Cloud Imperium Games pushed out an extremely meaty update that promised to nudge the game towards the level of persistence it’s been promising since the Kickstarter days. 

“Alongside adding immersive careers, stunning locations, and thrilling gameplay, the latest patch holds the key to true in-game persistence—one of the biggest hurdles in the pursuit of a living universe that evolves alongside its inhabitants,” CIG said before the update’s arrival. 

With Persistent Entity Streaming, the update promised to let players leave their mark on the universe, resulting in things like items remaining after death, cargo being represented by actual physical crates that can be moved around, and the introduction of the salvaging profession and its accompanying systems. 

All welcome additions, at least for those players who could actually experience them. With so many people w…

The original DayZ mod was released in 2012 to near-instant popularity and, come December, it’ll be ten years since the standalone game entered early access on Steam. Originally launched in a pretty barebones state, the idea was always to build-out DayZ over the years to come and Bohemia Interactive has done just that: with a sizeable patch last week leading to the game’s largest number of concurrent players ever: 69,449, per Steamdb.

To briefly dig into the numbers, DayZ was hitting up to 45,000 concurrents back when it was first released, though from 2015 until late 2018 its player numbers seem to be in a managed decline (with a few odd spikes). But from 2019 onwards the game’s ongoing popularity with big streamers like Shroud, along with judicious use of free weekends and a couple of Humble Bundle appearances, has seen player counts rise and keep on rising: I believe the previous peak before this was on January 19, 2023, at around 63,000 players.

It’s har…

The White House today rolled out a plan outlining a road to universal high-speed internet access in the United States by 2030. The plan will draw on some $42 billion in funding from the $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure laws that Biden championed.

“It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever. Because for today’s economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity, or water, or other basic services,” said President Joe Biden at the White House on Monday.

The plan will be based on a Federal Communications Commission map, recently released, that highlights major gaps in access. Presumably it will also be based on the new broadband standard in the US of 100Mbps downstream, 20Mbps up.

News agency Reuters reports that the plan will most funding will hit larger states like Texas and California, as well as those with large underserved rural populations, like Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. It also includes money for US territories,…

The seemingly endless litany of layoffs that’s plagued the game industry through 2023 and into 2024 continued today as two more studios have confirmed cuts to their workforces: Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive has let 40 employees go, while Lord of the Fallen publisher CI Games has reduced its workforce by 10%.

The CI Games layoffs reportedly came largely at the expense of the company’s marketing team, although a GamesIndustry report says its Hexworks and Underdog internal studios were also affected. CI Games CEO Marek Tymiński later confirmed the report, saying: “To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company.”

“We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us,” Tymiński said. “Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation’s …

Google’s recently-introduced Web search option feels like a cheat code: it just gives you a list of websites related to your search query, sorted by relevance, with no cruft, sponsored links, or other nonsense⁠—it’ll even skip over the search giant’s new AI Answer box that insists on inserting itself at the top of your results. 

What’s more, as outlined by Tom’s Hardware, you can set desktop Chrome’s address bar to default to Web search, removing the hassle of manually setting it each time. The process is blessedly simple:

1. Go to your Chrome settings: click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the browser and it will be the second-to-last option.

2. Click on the Search Engine tab on the left side of the screen, then Manage search engines and site search.

3. Scroll down to Site search, and click Add to create a new entry:

• Name: Google (W…
  

Watch On

The first-ever gameplay trailer for the upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow appeared at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live showcase tonight, giving us our first proper look at the upcoming VR take on the adventures of the most therapy-averse billionaire in history.

The new trailer focuses on exploration, dialogue, and of course plenty of fisticuffs, as the world’s greatest detective whomps the living hell out of dozens of flunkies and underlings on his way to ensuring that nothing ever really gets better in the bleak, crumbling metropolis of Gotham City. 

“A corrupt system has failed you,” the villainous Rat King (at least, I assume that’s the Rat King) says at one point. “Are you not angry? Fight back!” The man has a point, right? If your life is an endless swamp of futility and hopelessness, and the best the people in power can offer is a sock in the chops from a guy dressed up like a flying rat, well, I think I’d be a little angry about things too.

Anyway, b…

The folk behind the GameDiscoverCo newsletter have gone on a deep dive into Steam, ranking 212 words based on the median gross lifetime revenue of games that have them in the title. The results they pull out of their data may not all be super surprising, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting.

Number one with a bullet is the word HD, with a median gross Steam revenue of $63,082. It’s not the only word commonly associated with rereleases near the top of the list, with Remastered at number three ($32,243) and Gold at number six ($11,239). Collection, Deluxe, and Ultimate all place solidly as well. Nothing shocking there, of course. We live in an age of remakes, which is fine as long as we can still get the originals.

Slightly more unexpected is how well management sims are represented. The word Manager clocks in at second place ($33,341), with Tycoon at number four ($18,903). Though there are other words associated with specific genres in the list, they’re ranked mu…