Every game developer in the world has to stop using it. What are you deleting?

• Escort missions?
• Durability?
• Crafting?
• Stamina bars?
• Unskippable cutscenes?
• Inventory weight?
• Forced stealth sections?
• Quick-time events?

Pick ONE. And don't just name it - convince everyone else that you're right!

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By the way, the physics of the "eyes" wobbling are spot on.

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I really liked many games despite being unfairly called horrible games.

Take Watch Dogs 1 for example. I don't care what anyone says. I loved it.

Still I understand that players have a right to get angry and disappointed especially when they get lied to by businesses. And this is why I think producers ought not to falsely advertise.

Nevertheless I embraced Kratos' lesson.

Keep your expectations low. And you will never get disappointed.

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⚠️IMPORTANT! SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE MAIN TWIST⚠️

So!

Arthur Morgan has tuberculosis. He found out in Chapter 5. He has known he was dying since before you did.

The game's final act is about what a dying man chooses to do with the time he has left. And Rockstar made a decision so specific and so cold that it took the gaming press months to articulate it fully after release.

The players who tried to be good - who accumulated high honor, who helped strangers, who returned stolen horses and paid off debts and chose the merciful option in every encounter - received a better ending. Arthur watched a sunrise. The music was gentle. The weight of what he'd done with his last days was present but resolved.

The players who played low honor - who robbed and murdered and took the violent option consistently - received a darker ending. More brutal. Less transcendent.

This sounds like a conventional morality system. It isn't.

To accumulate high honor in Red Dead Redemption 2, you have to participate fully in Arthur's life. You help the camp. You interact with the Dutch's schemes. You go on the missions. You do the things that the gang asks of you.

Many of those things are terrible. Robbery. Intimidation. Violence against people who don't deserve it. The honor system rewards helping strangers and punishes cruelty - but the main story requires you to do cruel things as part of Arthur's existence in Dutch's gang.

High honor doesn't mean innocent. It means that despite the violence you were complicit in, you also chose mercy when the choice was yours to make.

The honor system exists to measure investment, not morality.

A player who genuinely tries to be good in RDR2 has to pay attention. Has to engage with the camp, the strangers, the world. Has to care about Arthur's choices. Has to feel the weight of the violence they're complicit in because they were trying not to add to it unnecessarily.

By the time Arthur's diagnosis arrives, a high-honor player has been living inside his decisions for forty hours. They have tried to make him better than his circumstances. They have partially succeeded and partially failed. They know what he was trying to be.

The ending lands differently for these players because they have invested in the aspiration - not just the outcome.

Low honor players experience a technically complete story. High-honor players experience something closer to grief.

Rockstar knew that players who cared most about Arthur, who tried hardest to give him dignity - would feel his death most completely. The reward for moral engagement is not a happy ending. It's an ending proportional to your investment.

The honor system doesn't tell you who Arthur is. It tells you how much you cared about who he was trying to become.

And then it uses that caring against you.

What was your honor level at the end of RDR2 and did the ending land differently than you expected based on how you'd played?

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The harsh realities of the live-service market. Yep!
Developers often underestimate the sheer velocity at which dedicated gamers consume content. Whether it’s endless battle passes, "go fetch" side quests, or in the case of ARC Raiders, intense expeditions, players are wired to mainline that dopamine hit and blaze through available activities at record speeds.

Embark Studios learned this lesson the hard way. While they likely anticipated a successful launch, they probably didn't foresee just how quickly their player base would outpace the game, devouring every available task and subsequently moving on when the well ran dry.

In a candid interview with GamesBeat, Executive Producer Aleksander Grøndal opened up about the studio's miscalculation.

(Quote from Aleksander Grøndal)

"We didn't expect this many players to show up and play ARC Raiders. That surprised us. We were a bit unprepared. It was one of the hard lessons we had to learn when January rolled around and the first issues with the game began."

January 2026 was the moment the armor cracked. The initial honeymoon phase wore off, and players began to realize just how shallow the content pool actually was. This was compounded by severe issues with cheaters and stream-snipers, problems that, despite the team's best efforts, have continued to plague the experience.

(Quote from Aleksander Grøndal)

"We have very dedicated players. We struggled with how much content is in the game, how much progression there is. We had some stuff, but players wanted more."

The original strategy relied on rapid-fire updates and a slow drip-feed of new activities. However, the development team simply couldn't keep pace with the voracious appetite of their audience.

"The problem was that the team couldn't keep up with the players. Players were getting frustrated because some of the things we were releasing might not have been as good or as meaningful as they had hoped."

This served as another massive eye-opener for the team.

Embark Studios has been open about the fact that they are a relatively small studio, especially when compared to the behemoths operating other successful live-service titles. They physically cannot compete with the content output of giants like Call of Duty, Overwatch, or Valorant, all of which have massive teams dedicated solely to churning out new stuff.

In today's market, every live-service game is fighting a brutal war for the industry's most precious resource: player attention. Grøndal acknowledged that "this is the main difficulty in supporting a live-service game" and that Embark "cannot beat anyone on quantity."

Instead, their philosophy has been to offer less "filler" and focus on higher-quality, curated content that bears the studio's signature polish.

The inherent flaw in the "quality over quantity" approach is that, in the live-service space, players actually love quantity. Gamers might say they value high end aesthetics, but what keeps them logging in daily is the feeling that there is always something - anything, to do. ARC Raiders promised a ten-year support plan, but right now, that promise is struggling to become reality.

So, what is the solution? Better anti-cheat measures would be a solid first step, but to truly survive, ARC Raiders needs to find its footing and establish a sustainable, engaging content cadence if they hope to win back the players who left.

It seems Embark Studios is preparing for a comeback this October with the major update, Frozen Trail.

According to Grøndal, this update will include:

• A reworked ranking system
• New ARC (robot) enemy types
• Updates to the stash/inventory system
• A brand new map

The developer noted that these changes are designed to answer "many of the questions we have been asked from a mechanics and content perspective."

Until that update drops in October, all we can do is wait and hope that this course correction is enough to put ARC Raiders back on track.

That's the news for now, gamers. Let us know in the comments did you burn out on ARC Raiders too quickly, and will this update bring you back?

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Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and we are all out of gum. We all remember the classic Duke Nukem 3D. It was a revolutionary title for its time, pushing the limits of Ken Silverman’s Build Engine. But what if we told you that the technology from the game has officially become reality?

Recently, a video of "gameplay" from Duke Nukem 3D went absolutely viral on social media, showcasing something truly unprecedented. The footage was published by Voxel Photonics, a company currently developing actual volumetric 3D displays. Unlike your flat monitors, these displays project physical, tangible 3D light images that occupy real space.

To show off the raw power of their hardware, they chose the legendary FPS as their canvas.

"Here is Duke Nukem 3D running in a physical 3D space on a Voxel Photonics display."

The result is nothing short of mesmerizing. Viewers were stunned to see the retro sprites and environments existing not on a flat plane, but floating as a physical object in the air.

Commenters immediately drew the ultimate comparison, noting that the real-world technology has finally brought the "Holoduke" to life. As fans of the original game remember, the Holoduke was an in-game gadget that projected a 3D hologram of Duke to confuse and trick enemies. Now, we can do it in our living rooms.

This incredible footage offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future of display technology, proving that classic games can still teach us new tricks.

What about you, folks? Are you ready to play Doom or Quake floating in the middle of your kitchen?

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In the beginning was the Word... But what if words are just a set of strange squiggles, and you are standing in the middle of an unfamiliar metropolis without a map, hints, or Google Translate? The beginning promises to be complicated, to say the least.

Hello, everyone! Today, we’re talking about an game that turns you into a bona fide linguistic detective. Chants of Sennar casts you in the role of a "mute" stranger in a world that speaks the language of ancient symbols.

There are no familiar quests or map markers here. Your main and only task is to survive in this Tower of Babel, where each floor represents a new people, a new culture, and, naturally, a new, completely alien language.

How does it work?

• Trial, error, and observation. At first, you simply wander the city and watch how the locals behave. They point at frescoes and repeat the same word. You take note, make comparisons, and form hypotheses. You start to understand that this symbol represents a noun, and that one is a verb.
• Revelation and joy. An hour in, you suddenly realize that the "crooked sticks" above the entrance to a building mean "tavern," and that complex pictogram is the "temple." At that moment, your mind is truly blown, and you feel like a deciphering genius.
• Changing scenery. But the game doesn't let you get bored. Just as you think you’ve figured out the essence of this world, you are sent to the floor above. There, the society is different, the hierarchy is different, and their language consists of completely different structures and meanings. The logic of the previous level collapses, and you have to start all over again.

Chants of Sennar - It is a philosophical and linguistic journey that promises, by the end, not only to unlock the secret of the tower itself but also to provide answers to the questions: what unites these peoples, and what caused them to become divided?

In short, if you want to feel like a Champollion of the video game world, you cannot skip this project. Learn languages, ladies and gentlemen!

"Amazing" for lovers of smart games, but it might cause a headache for those who just want to shoot things.

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David Brevik had a vision for Diablo.

It was a dungeon crawler. Procedurally generated levels. Permadeath. A gothic atmosphere of unrelenting darkness. Players descending beneath the town of Tristram toward the demon Diablo level by level, making strategic decisions at every step.

The key word: strategic. Brevik's original design was turn-based. Every action - movement across the grid, attacks against enemies, spell casting, item use, would play out in discrete turns, like a board game or a classic CRPG.

This was not an unusual design choice for 1994. The genre precedents - Nethack, Rogue, the early Ultima games, were predominantly turn-based. The conventions of the dungeon crawler were built on strategic thinking rather than reactive speed.

The twenty-minute experiment!

At some point during early development, one of Blizzard's engineers implemented real-time movement as a prototype test. Not a design decision. Not a proposal. A technical experiment to see what the underlying systems could support.

The team played it.

For twenty minutes.

And then they scrapped the turn-based design entirely.

What they discovered?

The shift from turn based to real time transformed the emotional register of the game completely. Turn based Diablo was a tactical puzzle - thoughtful, considered, strategic. Real-time Diablo was visceral. The sound of weapons hitting enemies, the spray of blood, the constant movement through darkness, these elements became the core of the experience rather than the backdrop to decision making.

The gothic atmosphere that Brevik had designed for a contemplative tactical game turned out to work even better as the context for frantic combat. The darkness became threatening rather than atmospheric. The enemies became responsive threats rather than strategic obstacles.

So! What the experiment created?

Real time Diablo shipped in 1996 and sold 2.5 million copies. It established the action RPG genre as a commercial force and produced conventions - isometric perspective, loot drops, skill trees, procedural dungeon generation - that shaped every action RPG released in the following three decades.

Path of Exile. Torchlight. Grim Dawn. Hades. Every game in this lineage traces its mechanical trace to a design decision made in twenty minutes by a team playing a prototype that was never meant to ship.

The turn based version of Diablo would have been interesting. The game it became changed the industry.

Brevik's original vision was coherent and thought-through. The engineer's prototype was impulsive and informal. The twenty minute playtest that changed everything was conducted without agenda or expectation.

Some of the most significant design decisions in gaming history were made by people who were playing rather than planning. The experiment produced what the design document couldn't anticipate.

Which game do you think would have been completely different and possibly better or worse, if one early design decision had gone the other way?

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1. Konami's development offices in Japan.

Kazuhisa Hashimoto is working on the NES port of Gradius - a horizontal scrolling shooter that was significantly more difficult on home hardware than in arcades. Testing the game in its intended difficulty state meant dying repeatedly through the opening stages before reaching the content that actually needed evaluation.

Hashimoto's solution was practical and immediate. He programmed a button sequence into the game - Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A - that when entered on the title screen would grant the player thirty lives. Enough buffer to reach any section of the game quickly for testing purposes.

Then he forgot to remove it before the game shipped.

The Gradius port shipped in 1986. Players discovered the code quickly - the gaming press of the era was heavily focused on tips and secrets, and an input sequence granting thirty lives was exactly the kind of discovery that spread through word of mouth rapidly.

But the code's true cultural moment came in 1988, when it appeared in Contra.

Contra without the code was brutal. Contra with the code - thirty lives instead of three, applied to a game designed to be completed in a single arcade session, was conquerable. For an entire generation of players who couldn't finish the game on normal terms, the Konami Code was the difference between experiencing Contra's ending and never seeing it.

Following Contra, Konami began including the code deliberately in subsequent titles - sometimes granting lives, sometimes unlocking content, sometimes producing joke responses. The sequence appeared in over 100 Konami games over the following decades.

Then other studios began including it as an easter egg or tribute - a cultural shorthand for "gaming" in the same way that certain musical phrases function as shorthand for "suspense" or "romance." It appeared in non-Konami games, non-game software, websites and eventually advertising campaigns targeting gaming audiences.

The code appeared in the animated film Wreck-It Ralph. In the television series Chuck. In dozens of websites where entering it would trigger hidden features or easter eggs. Amazon once activated a special mode on their website using it.

The Konami Code functions as the closest thing gaming has to a universal vocabulary item - a sequence recognizable to people who stopped playing games decades ago, who played only casually, or who absorbed gaming culture without direct participation.

It is gaming's equivalent of humming a few bars of Beethoven's Fifth. You don't need to know classical music to recognize it. You don't need to know gaming to recognize the code.

Kazuhisa Hashimoto died in February 2020. His obituaries in the gaming press were extensive - unusual for a figure who was not a creative director or studio founder but a programmer who shipped one unintentional mistake that became permanent cultural property.

He gave several interviews in the years before his death about the code's history. His consistent description of the original decision was matter of fact: he needed to test the game without dying constantly. The sequence was memorable enough to type reliably without looking up. He forgot to remove it.

The most recognized sequence in gaming history was created in approximately five minutes as a practical workaround and preserved by an oversight.

Some accidents are more valuable than any intention.

What's the most significant thing in gaming history - mechanic, feature, cultural artifact that you later discovered was the result of an accident or oversight rather than deliberate design?

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It’s time to dust off your shotguns and put on your survival instincts, because some very exciting news has roared out of Capcom. For years, fans of certain classic series have been screaming into the void, hoping for a return to form. Well, the void just winked back.

Earlier this month, Capcom successfully brought back one of its most beloved old-school IPs with the launch of Onimusha: Way of the Sword on PC and modern consoles. The game was a critical and commercial success, proving that there is still a massive appetite for these retro experiences when they are given the proper modern treatment.

Hot on the heels of this victory, Capcom has issued a new corporate strategy statement that is giving us all hope. In a press release outlining their future plans, the company explicitly stated:

"In addition to regularly releasing major new games every year, Capcom is paying special attention to the revival of intellectual property franchises for which no new games have been released recently."

Furthermore, the statement confirms that the company aims to "further increase corporate value by utilizing its extensive catalog of content."

Naturally, this has set the fan community ablaze with speculation, particularly the die-hard Dino Crisis loyalists. For decades, these fans have been begging Capcom to treat Regina’s saga with the same legendary "Resident Evil Remake" level of love and polish, or even to create a brand new mainline sequel.

However, the road to this hope has been long and paved with disappointments. Many fans have been burned so many times that they are greeting this latest statement with cautious optimism, or even outright skepticism. User CarLeeForever7 spoke for a cynical portion of the fanbase when they commented: "I'll believe it only when I see it."

This is a fair point. While the original Dino Crisis trilogy is currently available on Steam and modern consoles, we are still waiting for that official, groundbreaking announcement.

Do you think Dino Crisis is next in line, or do you have your fingers crossed for another franchise like Viewtiful Joe or Darkstalkers? Let us know in the comments!

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Square Enix has just unveiled some merchandise that perfectly targets our nostalgia centers. They have successfully re-invented the classic music box, dragging it kicking and screaming into the millennial era.

Introducing the Mini Melody TV collection. These aren't just simple wind-up boxes; they are detailed electronic dioramas that perfectly simulate playing a classic Final Fantasy title on a chunky, old-school television set.

Here’s how the magic works: each unit features a screen displaying a static, pixel-art scene from the game. When you press a button on the front, the screen lights up, bringing the scene to life, and the electronic speaker plays the iconic main theme from that specific entry.

The collection covers the first six mainline games in the series. You will be able to purchase them as a complete collector’s set or individually in "blind boxes," because Square Enix loves a good gacha mechanic.

Sales are scheduled to begin on January 29, 2027. It’s a bit of a wait, but it gives you time to save up.

It’s a brilliant piece of desk candy that combines visual and audio nostalgia in one neat package. Honestly, it makes you wonder what other soundtracks deserve to be "trapped" in this format.

Speaking of, what games would you want to see get the Mini Melody TV treatment? Personally, I’m holding out for Chrono Trigger. Let us know your picks in the comments below!

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Robert Kurvitz had been building the world of Elysium since 2006.

Not as a game. As a tabletop RPG setting - a world he ran campaigns in, wrote fiction for, developed with collaborators over years of private creative work. The city of Revachol. The failed communist revolution. The political factions competing over the ruins of an ideology. The detective Harry Du Bois, whose backstory Kurvitz had been writing for a decade before anyone outside his circle knew he existed.

When Kurvitz and his colleagues at ZA/UM decided to make Disco Elysium a video game, they weren't adapting source material. They were translating fifteen years of private mythology into an interactive form.

The decision that makes Disco Elysium structurally unlike any other RPG is also the decision that most directly reflects its literary origins.

In most RPGs, skills are numbers. Higher Persuasion means more dialogue options unlock. Higher Strength means more combat options. The skills are mechanical multipliers, not presences.

In Disco Elysium, every skill is a voice.

Your Electrochemistry skill doesn't just determine whether you can analyze chemical compounds. It has opinions about drugs and alcohol that it shares unprompted. It craves. It advocates. It is a distinct perspective on existence that exists in permanent conversation with the other 23 skills competing for Harry's attention.

Your Inland Empire doesn't just affect intuition checks. It experiences visions. It makes Harry see things that may or may not be real and doesn't apologize for the ambiguity.

Your Shivers - the skill that connects Harry to the city of Revachol describe the city and it communes with it. Activating Shivers produces passages of prose that read less like game text and more like poetry, describing the city as a living entity with its own grief, its own memory, its own relationship to its history of violence and failure.

This design is only possible because Kurvitz spent fifteen years writing a world before he built a game in it. The skills speak in distinctive voices because Kurvitz had been writing in those voices - for characters, for locations, for the accumulated texture of a place, long before he needed to assign them to game mechanics.

Harry Du Bois is a fully realized character because he existed as a concept, as a figure in stories, as the subject of Kurvitz's thinking about failure and identity and the specific exhaustion of a man who used to believe in things, for years before he became a protagonist.

The result is a game where the writing doesn't support the mechanics. The mechanics support the writing. Every skill check, every dialogue option, every failed roll is an opportunity for the world's voice to speak - in the specific register of whichever aspect of Harry's fractured self is most active in that moment.

Disco Elysium won four BAFTAs in 2020. It is studied in university game design programs as a masterwork of interactive narrative. It has sold millions of copies to an audience that includes many people who rarely play RPGs but responded to its writing.

The studio that made it no longer exists in its original form. The people who built Elysium don't own it anymore.

The world Kurvitz spent fifteen years building is owned by a company he no longer works for.

That irony belongs in the game.

Which skill in Disco Elysium felt most like a genuinely distinct personality and which one surprised you most with what it had to say?

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Arkham Asylum in Batman: Arkham Asylum has always created a sense of dread with its sinister and disturbing atmosphere. Its eerie aesthetic was largely built around its twisted Gothic architecture - abandoned, decaying, and gradually falling apart throughout the game. Buildings and interiors that were once beautiful and imposing had been heavily altered and destroyed by the extremely rough treatment of the only people responsible for maintaining the asylum.

The facility housed Gotham City's most dangerous and disturbed criminals, and the psychiatric hospital was supposed to break them and drive them insane. But time itself had taken an even greater toll on the architects' original vision.

But did you know that the original concept for Arkham Asylum looked very different from the nightmare we saw in the game?

Originally, the asylum was envisioned as a massive castle. The structure featured its own inner gardens, and the castle's original beauty had not yet been lost. The Gothic influence was much stronger, with even more statues throughout the interior, many of which had retained their original appearance.

The main entrance was supposed to be protected by gigantic gates, with two grand staircases leading up to them. This grotesque design gave the asylum the appearance of a terrifying, impenetrable fortress - a place few people would ever dare to enter.

We never got to see this vision in Arkham Asylum.

The gigantic gates and staircases were replaced with ordinary gates hidden in the forest. We see them at the beginning of the game, when Batman and the Joker arrive at the asylum. Later, we're shown the interior in a cutscene.

By then, almost nothing remained of the castle's original, refined design.

All of the artwork was taken from the book The Art of Rocksteady's Batman.

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In the gaming industry, it's generally accepted that if a shooter puts a gun in your hands, the goal is to shoot everything that moves. But sometimes developers pull a fast one, and 4A Games' Metro 2033 is a prime example. This is a game carefully monitors your behavior and presents you with the bill at the very end.

The plot sends us to a grim future following a nuclear war. The survivors huddle in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro, fighting over every bullet. On the surface, mutants have taken over, chief among them the mysterious creatures known as "The Dark Ones."

Unlike humans, who are slowly degrading underground, The Dark Ones have perfectly adapted to radiation. But the main thing is that they are not mindless beasts at all. They sincerely want peace and are trying to make contact with humanity.

The problem is that their only means of communication is powerful telepathy. The fragile psyche of an average Metro dweller simply cannot withstand such mental pressure; people go insane or die from sheer terror. Naturally, in response to these attempts to "talk," the Metro declares total war on them, considering their only goal to be annihilation.

Our protagonist, Artyom, is a unique guy. Possessing a special psychic makeup, he is the only one capable of withstanding the telepathic contact and understanding the true motives of The Dark Ones. This is his mission, his gift, and his curse.

But this is where the brilliant mechanic of "hidden karma" comes into play. The game does not show you a good/evil morality meter. Instead, it keeps a tally of your actions. Do you ruthlessly finish off wounded enemies? Do you walk past beggars asking for help? Do you refuse to give a child a single bullet? Accumulate enough selfishness and Artyom will simply fail to understand the telepathic message of The Dark Ones. To him, they will remain enemies.

The finale becomes the logical conclusion of your journey. If you played as a ruthless raider, you will personally press the launch button. The missiles will fly toward the lair of The Dark Ones, erasing them from the face of the earth forever.

And that is when that exact moment hits - the credits, the screen fades to white, the realization sets in. You have made a terrible mistake. You destroyed an absolutely innocent race that was reaching out a hand of friendship to you, having succumbed to the herd mentality of the Metro. Metro 2033 brutally punishes you not with a "Game Over" screen in combat, but with the burden of a guilty conscience and the realization that the bad ending was your own, conscious (even if made in ignorance) choice.

Perhaps this is one of the most powerful moments in the history of shooters. Play good games, friends, and think about the consequences.

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