There's now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa's casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.

Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn't specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa's casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having "tried to think of someone who makes you go, 'This guy's a creep'".

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"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose."

Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. "YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY," it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of the voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.

Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.

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The next big update to Destiny 2, Shadow and Order, has been delayed as it undergoes a substantial round of tweakage and expansion. Such a substantial round of tweakage and expansion, in fact, that it'll no longer be called Shadow and Order when it returns.

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Remember Hyper Scape? I acknowledge that this might come across as a tad mean, but in this ridiculously fast-paced world we find in, it can genuinely be hard to remember one failed live service game from the next. For a refresher, this was Ubisoft's attempt at a battle royale game back in 2020, though it didn't pan out as it was shut down only a couple of years later. Well, anyway, it's back! Sort of, not quite, but it might soon, or actually probably eventually, will be thanks to the efforts of a group of people hoping to revive it.

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“Get me somebody who’s played The Chinese Room's Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 STAT,” I yelled, barging through the double doors of our seedy news saloon. “I need 300 or more tasty words on these leaked videos of the older, unreleased Hardsuit Labs version.” A grim silence fell across the chamber. Mark furtively donned a pod-racing helmet. James hid himself behind his latest tower of graphics cards, with an apologetic murmur that while he had played a few hours of Bloodlines 2, he was very busy right now building towers of graphics cards.

“If you want something done, do it yourself, STAT,” I bellowed, swivelling on my heel while looking up the origins of the term “stat” on my phone. It turns out it’s something medical doctors say to convey urgency, and comes from the Latin “statim”, meaning “immediately”. “What a perfect way to introduce this video showing a hospital level from the aforesaid leaked Hardsuit Labs version of Bloodlines 2,” I roared to myself. “Why, I’ve accidentally written 177 words of the news post already.”

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Sharpen your fangs and chuck out all of the garlic bread in your house, Castlevania's back with a new game co-developed by the folks who made roguelike-Metroidvania Dead Cells. Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is the name of this fresh bout of vampire whippage set in medieval Paris, which publishers Konami have teased is just the first of many Castlevania things they have coming as the series turns 40.

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WARNING: Major story spoliers for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, as well as the original Yakuza 3, lie ahead.

It’s natural to spend a lot of time thinking about what games could have been, had different decisions been made. Whether the change is preferable to the reality often doesn’t come into it, the fantasy of another possible world is the draw.

Despite that, few studios choose to make major shifts - at least as far as the main stories of those games go - when they remake their previous games. This won't necessarily be a philosophical decision: the remaster or remake has to sell. Games which get revisited are ones players deeply love, and the suits will inevitably see tweaks to their fundamentals as an unnecessary risk. Old Oblivion is loved, so Bethesda adopted a rubber glove approach to the Oblivion remaster. They limited changes to modernising visuals and snipping away some annoying features. It's akin to polishing up a holy relic, rather than replacing the gemstones or changing the engravings.

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I hope you like warlocks. Well, if you're someone who regularly delves into Diablo, I hope you at the very least don't detest warlocks with all of your hellish heart. Because yesterday evening's Diablo 30th anniversary shindig was rather heavy on warlocks, with the class coming to not just Diablo 4's next expansion, but also Diablo 2 and Diablo Immortal. Meanwhile, Diablo 2: Resurrected has moseyed on over to Steam.

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Look at all the mess lying around. You can't move for discarded detritus on the planets of No Man's Sky. Good news, then, that the space sandbox's latest update delivers a gravity gun and interstellar rubbish collection lorries that'll help clean those worlds up a bit.

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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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Planet of Lana II, Wishfully’s followup to their tremendous puzzle-platformer original, punched our news mouths with a double hit of announcements last week. First, it’s got a release date of March 5th 2026, a mere three weeks from now, and second, there’s a Steam demo coming even sooner, on February 11th. An embargo lift means I’m now at liberty to share my thoughts on said demo, and can report that it’s exactly the same as the demo given to press last year, and as such, you can already read what I said about it here and here. Still, eh? Release date, eh?

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Once every year, Final Fantasy XIV celebrates Little Ladies’ Day, which in practical terms absolutely means people getting glowsticks to cheer for idols putting on a concert. Yes, it is a bit of a walk to get from “a holiday for young women” to that endpoint, but it happened. The latest outing is planned for Thursday, […]

Time to kick up your feet and listen to a classic MMO tune! This week’s pick is We All Lift Together, a popular shanty from, oddly enough, Warframe and written by Keith Power. Give it a listen and see if you’re not whistling it for the rest of the day! And if you have any […]

Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken was published in August of 1915, and it has endured an immense popularity since then. Many people can quote the last couplet of the poem (“I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”), and for years the title alone conjures images of […]

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 […]

This week’s Massively Overthinking is inspired by a tweet I saw from SMITE, of all games, where the Hi-Rez devs asked players to propose one god to delete from the game. Obviously, this is not a serious proposition, but in the aggregate, the answers can kinda show a trend in what people are tired of, […]

If your first thought when hearing about Marathon’s March 5th release date was how that would immediately clash with Destiny 2’s plans for a major update for Renegades on March 3rd, well good news! It’s not going to get in the way anymore because Bungie is delaying that update for nearly four months. Wait, no, that’s the opposite of […]

Resident Evil Requiem for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC, and Tales of …

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Total worldwide shipments and digital sales for NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139 have exceeded two million units, …

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Total worldwide shipments and digital sales for NieR: Automata have exceeded 10 million units, Square …

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