Midsummer Studios announced their existence in May 2024 with a promise to “revitalise the life sim genre”, but now, they’re closing down. Co-founder and former XCOM developer Jake Solomon confirmed the news on social media this week, saying goodbye with some brief pre-alpha footage of Burbank - a build-your-own-TV-series project with a lot of generative AI in it.

“We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both,” Solomon writes. “Before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios I'd like to share a glimpse of Burbank, the game we poured our hearts into.”

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The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's satisfying to hit an enemy with a shell from a howitzer, it's even more satisfying to target the space next to them and use the force of the blast to give them a sideways shove into a wall.

It's a mechanic that puts Fogpiercer into the same fine company as Into The Breach.

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Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.

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Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.

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"I mean, look, I think everybody knows why we announced it that way then." Stay calm, I've got to get my dinner first. "We know some things we're doing." Please stop trying to jump on the bench. "It's going to be a while yet." Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard has said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in his latest bout of interview chatter about the RPG. He's confirmed it's running on a new version of the Creation Engine, but will also be a return to Bethesda's "classic style".

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Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, has had its release pushed back a little further. The studio have taken on feedback from the demo they recently released on Steam - that's the one which kept surnaming me - and reckon a few more weeks of acting on it are in order to get the game ready to go.

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Avowed now has a bunch more possibilities when it comes to one of the most important fantasy RPG build archetypes, thanks to the deployment of its anniversary update. Three new character races are on offer alongside the established humans and elves, and you can arm them with a quarterstaff which caters to mages who think puny wands and books aren't quite showy enough.

As you might recall, some of the stuff included in this anniversary update was orignally supposed to arrive in Avowed late last year, but ended up being delayed by Obsidian.

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Rubbing shoulders with factions is a big part of the Fallout: New Vegas charm, even if it often devolves into you doing a bunch of favours if you don't want to risk ending up on the vilified naughty list for one too many accidental grenade pickpocktings. You do get some nice perks for keeping the likes of the NCR or Legion on side, but a new mod aims to take that to a new level, letting you send faction cronies out on handy odd jobs while you kick your feet up.

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Last June, Jagex - the developers of medieval MMO Runescape - found themselves at odds with players after deciding not to create any new content for Pride Month. Disputed internally at the studio before the discussion then leaked online, the decision appeared to be a retreat in the face of a world turning on minority groups.

Following up in September, Games Industry asked Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy if he stood by the call to simply re-run existing Pride-themed quests and events. "Ultimately, my job is governance and protection as much as anything else, and so sometimes those kinds of harsh decisions have to be made to protect the imminent future of the game," he told them. "If there are tough decisions to be made next year, we'll make them. If the world has changed a bit and the environment is different, we will react accordingly."

Five months on and with this year's Pride Month on the horizon, we've asked if the environment is different.

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The second series of Amazon’s Fallout adaptation has now fully emerged from the vault, its eight episodes having been plinked out gradually, rather than whipped out in one fell swoop. Naturally, one of us has taken in the show how its distributors intended, injecting a stimpak a week in calm and measured fashion. The other waited until all the episodes were out, and then injected them all at once like an unhinged adventurer blowing through half their chem stash in a mid-fight panic. I’ll let you try to work out which is which, here’s our verdict.

Major spoilers for season 2 of the Fallout TV Show lie ahead.

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Warren! Warren! Warren!

ARRGGHHH! WHAAAA! HUHHHH! Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, keeps shouting my last name at me. It might because the game's main character, a jacketed gap jumper and baddie shooter, is called Warren. It might also because I did plenty of falling and accidentally got shot by a robo-sniper in Replaced's demo, which is now live ahead of the full thing's release next month.

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In an industry pestered by calls to "think of the children", Tarsier’s games are useful reminders that children can be utterly depraved in ways no coddling adult would ever dream. Later in Reanimal, the developer’s latest, strictly 'co-optional' horror game, two kids rip an eyeball out of a massive, sunken horse skull and shove it into what I sincerely hope is the eyesocket of a slumbering whale. Somehow, this is necessary to advance.

It’s the kind of thing that would only occur to children, because children do not reason like 'we' do, those disgusting creeps. They sense that they exist in a world that isn’t for them: a world of baffling laws, high shelves, and everyday monstrosity; a world they’re required to 'grow into' by means of repeated shedding and sprouting and subjection - milk teeth and pubic hair and doing your goddamn chores. So they instinctively come up with ways to screw with the system, twist its horrible logic against itself. Why not push a horse’s eyeball into a whale?

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The developer behind voxel sandbox Allumeria claims Microsoft have withdrawn a DMCA takedown filed against the game over alleged copyright infringement. According to an email posted on Discord by Allumeria developer Unomelon on February 10th, the strike accused their work of using content from Minecraft without Microsoft's permission.

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More like space the final funtier am I right (cue canned laughter that goes on a touch too long)? Besiege, the physics building game about building all manner of medieval machinery to destroy your enemy, has taken you to all kinds of lands and with its 2024 expansion, The Splintered Sea, a few oceans too. But with its newly revealed follow-up expansion, there's nowhere to go but up (because it's set in space, hence my absolutely hilarious opening line).

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The single most offputting thing about a game like Arc Raiders, i.e. an extraction shooter, is that every single other person you meet in-game is Schrödinger's asshole. They could be a friend who you share a story or some loot with, or they could mercilessly gun you down at the drop of a hat. It's certainly not for everyone, but in the game's latest update, a new PvE event has arrived encouraging everyone to walk hand in hand together to defeat those big bad bots.

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Star Trek Online’s Chimerans prove to be more adaptive foes after this past week’s patch: “You will now see them gaining resistance to all damage types, once per damage type they receive.” Yeah, good luck with that you non-adapting space captains! And this is just the beginning of the rest of the news! Read on for a […]

Maybe a poetry recitation is a pretty dull affair if you stumble into one at a coffeehouse in real life, but in Project Gorgon, it’s the social event of the week that draws all the partiers — and giant glowing green bears — to slam down some lyrics and boost some skills. There once was […]

Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! We’ve got quite a bit to cover today, so let’s not waste too much time with a preamble and hop right into this list of headlines. Regime change at Microsoft Gaming and Xbox: According to reporting at IGN this afternoon, Microsoft Gaming CEO […]

While Massively OP’s MJ already celebrated on Star Trek Online’s 16th anniversary, the actual event had not started yet. Now that it is running, she obviously has to celebrate again! But this party won’t be all fun and games (despite Q’s meddling). Starting with the new episode Curse of Phrygia then moving on to The […]

March 9th is shaping up to be a significant boon for Elder Scrolls Online’s community, as ZeniMax is prepping Update 49 and an array of player-requested improvements. These include free build changes, account-wide outfit slot unlocks, an increase to the furnishing limit cap, cheaper bag and bank space expansion, and a whole ton of mounts […]