In 2020 workers at Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted and Last Of Us series, came forward with reports of brutal, 12-hour work days and sustained periods of what's known as crunch:

Many who have worked at Naughty Dog over the years describe it as a duality—as a place that can be simultaneously the best and the worst workplace in the world. Working at Naughty Dog means designing beloved, critically acclaimed games alongside artists and engineers who are considered some of the greatest in their fields. But for many of those same people, it also means working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives at the altar of the game.

In 2021, in response to those reports, Naughty Dog bosses Evan Wells and Neil Druckmann said they were 'assessing ways the studio can improve', with Druckmann insisting there wasn't one single solution to the problem:

...in the past where we’ve said, “Okay, no working past this hour,” or, “It’s mandatory that no one can work on Sunday,” and they’re always a lot of corner cases of someone saying, “Well, I couldn’t work on Friday because I had to be with my kids. It’s actually more convenient for me to come in on Sunday.” When you try to have a silver bullet, like one solution, you’re always leaving someone behind. That’s why we feel like we need multiple solutions. We have to approach this from multiple angles.

In 2024, in a documentary detailing the production of The Last Of Us 2, Druckmann said, "We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch", before quality assurance lead Patrick Goss added, "When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don’t want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore".

In December 2025 (as in, today), Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has reported:

For the past seven weeks, the Santa Monica-based studio behind The Last of Us has been pushing its staff to work long hours to get ready for an upcoming review of the [Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet] demo by its parent company, according to people familiar with the situation. Starting in late October, staff were asked to begin working a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging their overtime in an internal spreadsheet, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. This overtime period was an attempt to get the production back on track after several missed deadlines.

Workers were also told to get back into the office five days a week (they had only been required for three). What's notable here is that this cycle of crunch--which lasted for just under two months--wasn't even to finish the game, which isn't due until 2027, but just to finish a demo.

Also of note, from the end of Jason's story:

Earlier this year, members of the production team were each given customized metal coins that seemed to capture, purposefully or not, the current state of the studio’s workplace attitude. On one side was the company’s paw-print logo. On the other, a quote from the trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet: “The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end.”

Cool, cool, cool.

A survival city-builder in broadly the same vein as stuff like Frostpunk and Ixion, Flotsam is a game set at the end of the world that, thanks to its vibrant art style and optimistic outlooks, actually feels more like the start of the world instead.

You play as a tug boat that poots around a flooded world, ala Waterworld, and as you go--on a kind of strategic overworld map--you need to scrounge for resources and pick up survivors. Zoom in, though, and the game becomes a city-builder, where you can attach buildings to your boat and use those resources to craft stuff, build more buildings and keep everyone happy by giving them nicer houses and places to hang out.

The cheery, hand-crafted visuals are a joy to be around. For an apocalyptic game, Flotsam's glass is very much half-full, its flooded wastes featuring crystal-blue oceans, storybook islands and fantastic character art, while the survivor's chatter is mostly interested in everyone working together to build something new and communal from the wreckage. To give you an idea of just how cheery things are, here's the game's website:

The world of Flotsam is a colorful and cheerful place. It’s about going on adventures, seeing the world and cleaning it up as you go. The sun is shining, the sky is clear and the ocean is calm… mostly at least.

Does this change the way the game plays? Not really. Does it dictate the way I feel while playing it? Absolutely. As I've explained in my impressions of Town To City, I like these games because they let me build stuff, and I hate the stresses so many of them bring along for the ride. Flotsam has those stresses--you need to keep everyone fed and supplied with fresh water--but meeting those needs is so straightforward, and everyone looks and works so happily while they're in danger, that it never feels like a crisis.

I should note that this isn't really a city-builder in the traditional sense. While you are definitely building a settlement around your boat, and it needs walkways and power and all that stuff, the overworld navigation is a place you spend a lot of time exploring, finding resources and picking up survivors. What's cool is that the two are linked; you cruise around a map screen where everything is abstract, but when you find something to explore, the view zooms into the boat-scaled view, and the objects that appeared as points on the map are now islands represented off the stern of your town, on which you can see your survivors clambering over and harvesting supplies.

Flotsam has a more involved supply chain and production management slant than many of its peers, which I really enjoyed; the loop of harvesting raw resources from the overworld, then using your city to refine them and turn them first into processed resources, then things, is always satisfying. There are a ton of different materials and items, some you can only get by scrounging, others that can be grown and others that you have to craft, and it's an interesting challenge having to prioritise your survivors and various buildings to churn out exactly the things you need at any given time.

I said earlier in the year that I'm tired of apocalyptic futures where humanity is resigned to living off scraps, where the overriding themes are those of defeat and despair. Flotsam's optimism and resolve to build something new from the ashes are exactly what I was talking about; the fact it's a game where you're directly responsible for the building only makes it better.

Give Me A Future Worth Fighting For - Aftermath

I want to build a better world, not live in the ruins

AftermathLuke Plunkett

I don't want to be the Game Announcement Police here, ACAB, but over the last month there have been two big, new video games revealed that were notable not for what they showed off, but for what they didn't.

First up was Total War: Medieval III, which was announced via a live-action trailer (below) and blog post:

Amazing news! There hasn't been a proper historical Total War release since Three Kingdoms (I'm not counting Pharaoh's mea culpa), and Medieval is a long-time fan favourite, so this should have got people excited. Only problem is that there wasn't any gameplay shown. There weren't any screenshots. There wasn't even much art for the game, aside from a single piece shown at the top of a follow-up blog.

Only days later, Creative Assembly announced a second upcoming Total War game coming out much sooner, this time set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and its debut trailer was packed with gameplay footage, right down to giving us a look at the menus and interface.

I'm not drawing a very long bow here to speculate that the Medieval announcement was made a few days prior in an attempt to head off any uproar over the 40K announcement. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, there's a kind of uneasy divide among some in the community, with Total War's longest-serving fans (going back to 1999's Shogun) preferring the series' historical focus over the wilder, more fictional stuff that has featured in the Warhammer (and now 40K) entries. They look at how much money and effort has been poured into the Creative Assembly collab, then look at the relative neglect shown to the historical games (from ending Three Kingdoms support early to whatever the hell happened with Pharaoh), and get pretty mad.

While getting Medieval III out in front like that probably made diplomatic sense to publishers Sega and developers Creative Assembly, I dunno, I think I'd rather a game be announced on its own merits and with something genuine to show off and talk about, rather than shoot a clip and write a blog just so you make some of your own fans less angry. Medieval III is clearly years away (they didn't even hint at a broad window for it to come out), and you went and announced a whole other game a few days later– you didn't have to Elder Scolls VI-ify your next big game!

The Elder Scrolls 6 Announcement Is Now as Old as Skyrim Was When The Elder Scrolls 6 Was Announced - IGN

The Elder Scrolls 6 announcement is now as old as predecessor Skyrim was when The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, and developer Bethesda hasn’t shared another snippet since.

IGNryan_dinsdale

The second game I wanted to talk about is even funnier. Earlier today Netflix announced that Delphi, a company you've likely never heard of (they're relatively new, and their only public credit is as support on IO's upcoming 007 game) will be both developing and publishing a new FIFA game. You might remember that back in 2022 EA Sports (developers of the long-running series) and FIFA (the world governing body for football) split, and ever since EA's series has been called EA Sports FC, or EAFC for short.

Netflix's announcement contains zero images or video of the game. And there's probably a good reason for that: the press release says stuff like "All you need is Netflix and your phone", and "We want to bring football back to its roots with something everyone can play with just the touch of a button", suggesting that whatever Delphi is cooking up, it'll be a lot closer to a casual mobile experience than the blockbuster simulation football fans have long come to expect from series like FIFA (now EAFC) and Pro Evo (now called eFootball).

That obfuscation has paid off handsomely, though, with a ton of mainstream coverage of the announcement hitting today with headlines like:

Fifa video game to return after four years in Netflix exclusive

The game will be made by Delphi Interactive and released in time for the 2026 World Cup.

BBC News

There's a small mention of what I've just said above at the bottom of that BBC article, but as a mainstream article intended for a mainstream audience, I guarantee Delphi and FIFA will be thrilled at the number of water cooler and group chat conversations this week that will revolve around the talking point "Boys, did you hear FIFA is coming back?"

I should point out that this isn't the first FIFA game to "return" since the body split with EA; there's already a game called FIFA Rivals, which is basically an antique NFT scam with a playerbase best summed up by the fact the game's official site has a Telegram account.

Earlier today Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published an interview with Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, the company behind the internet's favourite video game and demonic relationship simulator Baldur's Gate 3. It could not have gone worse for the guy.

Among all the expected pre-release interview talk about how their next game, Divinity, will be making all kinds of improvements over their last game, there was this:

Under Vincke, Larian has been pushing hard on generative AI, although the CEO says the technology hasn’t led to big gains in efficiency. He says there won’t be any AI-generated content in Divinity — “everything is human actors; we’re writing everything ourselves” — but the creators often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.

The use of generative AI has led to some pushback at Larian, “but I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” Vincke said.

The quote made an audible record scratch on social media before leading to a ton of blowback from artists and beyond, so much so that Vincke took to Twitter to try to explain himself:

Holy fuck guys we’re not "pushing hard" for or replacing concept artists with AI.

We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more. The art they create is original and I’m very proud of what they do.

I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn’t say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world class artists.

We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.

I talked about how we use ML here if you would like to know more.

We've hired creatives for their talent, not for their ability to do what a machine suggests, but they can experiment with these tools to make their lives easier.

Which only made things worse! Because instead of explaining himself, all his follow-up showed is that Vincke does not appear to understand what it is that his art teams actually do, or indeed how their art is made.

That's OK, Swen, let me explain it for you! Firstly, any use of AI fucking sucks. It's a creative, economic and societal disaster, so really, there's no excusing its use in any circumstances. That's why people got so upset about the initial quote. But to get more specific, let's take a look at your justification.

Saying you only use AI for "reference" is wild. Artists use image searches and books as inspiration because they are drawing on art (but also everything else from colour palettes to photos to the weather). There's experience there, things they can relate to, be inspired by. There is no inspiration in slop! Everything AI is presenting to you is simply stolen and amalgamated. It's like asking your phone's autocorrect for relationship advice.

There's an unsurprising tendency across leaders in the tech world (games included) to see art as merely part of something's production line, a box that needs to be ticked before copies can be sold. It's why AI is often justified as something that saves time, or saves money. But with art, that process is the point. The themes and ideas artists draw on, the way they iterate through those ideas with sketches, the work itself is what creates art. There are no shortcuts.

When Helldivers 2 first launched on PC, its installation size was a whopping 154GG. It is now, thanks to the magic of Going Back And Taking A Look At Things, a measly 23GB. Please, God, let this be the one good trend in video games for 2026.

Developer Arrowhead first announced plans to shrink the PC version's size down last month, saying that 154GB figure was "roughly three times larger than the same game installed on consoles!" The reason given for this was that the team wanted to support older mechanical hard drives found on older PCs (all modern consoles have solid state drives), and so in order to give players with those HDDs a playable experience, they "duplicated" a bunch of assets like textures and sound effects, so that a mechanical hard drive didn't need to go reaching all over its surface area just to respond to what was happening at speed on the screen.

Which sounds wonderful in theory, but months of analytics post-release have revealed that not only are a small number of Helldivers 2 players actually using a mechanical HDD--around 11%--but that the pre-release industry standard figures Arrowhead used to make the decision to accommodate them in the first place were off.

They've found that it's the generation of levels causing the biggest slowdown, not the constant loading of assets, and that their projections for how slow HDD users were going to find things were also "very conservative". So a new "slim" version of the game is now being tested in a public beta (which you can join here), clocking in at just 23GB, and this version--optimised for everyone--will only "result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most".

I'm fascinated by this. We live in an age where video game studios and publishers obsess over metrics, yet these numbers were so wrong! And in fixing them, a major video game is going to free up so much precious space–something that could get very expensive soon--that I can install at least 13 indie city-builders where those 131GB used to be!

A few weeks back I got a copy of Anno 117, and was really looking forward to playing it. I've been on a city-building and management streak lately, and was excited at the prospect of spending some time with a Roman one that also featured the Anno series' quaint obsession with city-building narrative campaigns.

So I started it up, dabbled in the sandbox mode for a bit, found out I was probably better off playing the campaign instead (it’s got a gentler, longer tutorial) and settled in for what I thought was going to be a month or two of good times. The game looked great on my new PC, and in terms of city-building it seemed like one of the better ones I've played recently. Its production queues require some tricky planning to get right, and the 4X/RTS stuff layered over the top--like controlling army units, exploring uncharted islands and having diplomatic relations with neighbouring islands--was all pretty interesting.

Over the weekend, I hit a loading screen (pictured above) I hadn't noticed before and something immediately felt off. The game's other loading screens had also been weird, but I'd assumed that was because they appeared simply unfinished, raw sketches of an idea for an eventual, more-polished loading screen, in much the way many of Civ VII's were at launch. But this one in particular wasn't that; it was clearly AI-generated. People's arms were gone, hands were strange, outfits warped in unnatural ways, the entire composition was wacky. I'm not the only one to have picked up on this, either; after jumping online to see if anyone else had noticed, I found that so many had noticed and posted about it that Ubisoft had issued a public statement defending it:

This image was a placeholder asset that unintentionally slipped through our review process...With Anno 117: Pax Romana being our most ambitious Anno yet, we’ve assembled the largest team of artists ever for the franchise and to help meet the project's unique scope, they use AI tools for iterations, prototyping, and exploration. Every element players will experience in the final game reflects the team’s craft, artistry, and creative vision.

After reading this I immediately stopped playing, and won't be back. This is 2D art, for a series dating back to the 90s and which has made it through seven previous games using 100% human-made art just fine, and you're telling us that somehow AI is needed now? Are we honestly supposed to take Ubisoft at its word that this dogshit image was the only one? And that it just magically slipped through multiple layers of supervision before appearing in a shipped product?

In addition to the above statement Ubisoft have shown an updated version of the art, which will be added to Anno 117's next update, but the public-facing damage has already been done. As I've said with The Alters previously, once players can see one instance of AI being used, how do we know it hasn't been used throughout?

I’m Getting Real Tired Of Not Being Able To Trust That A Video Game Doesn’t Have AI Crap In It - Aftermath

It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue

AftermathLuke Plunkett

And just like I said with The Alters, I'll say again here: the presence of this stuff inside a game (and in such an obvious case) sends a very clear message to your fans and customers that you do not give a shit. You don't care that this technology is threatening art jobs (and beyond), that it's dehumanising the medium, that it's creating slop that makes your own product look like garbage to the degree that it's causing people playing what had seemed an otherwise good video game to jump online and re-enact the Jose Mourinho headphones meme.

All of that for a piece of loading screen art! Something that older games in the series, like 2019's Anno 1800, were especially noted for. Gah!