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Firmly countering the full-throated endorsements of generative AI made by large companies like EA and Ubisoft, the CEO of markedly smaller publisher Hooded Horse, a strategy and simulation specialist known by many for city builder hit Manor Lords, says it’s begun explicitly banning gen AI art in contracts.Where many gaming executives are eager to preach the immense potential of AI tools and output, CEO Tim Bender, speaking with Kotaku, laments that, “honestly, all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult.””I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways…suddenly it…
A few years ago, it would have been pretty easy to imagine Helldivers 2 releasing as a free-to-play game. It is a live service game after all, most of those are free-to-play because studios want to reduce the barrier to entry. Instead, it launched as a paid-for, $40 game, a far cry from free, but not the $80-$100 releases we’re seeing more and more of. And it’s because Arrowhead made the decision to do so that Arc Raiders developer Embark did the exact same thing for their own shooter. This comes from Embark founder Patrick Söderlund who spoke…
After a 2025 that was largely quiet on the Manor Lords front until the very end of the year, developer Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse are intent that 2026 will see more regular updates for the breakout, million-selling medieval city-building game. As part of that new-look process, Hooded Horse is now handling its developer diaries, and CEO Tim Bender is back to give us a fresh look at what the team is currently hammering away at in the workshop. On the table for the next Manor Lords update are improvements to the progression for housing and workshops, and a…
The first trailer for Amazon Prime Video’s action comedy The Wrecking Crew is here, bringing together Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa as a pair of brothers trying to avenge their father’s death while outmaneuvering Yakuza assassins.It’s all set against the backdrop of Hawai’i, where co-star Momoa was born and whose history he explored in his Chief of War streaming series. The IMDb logline reads “Estranged half-brothers Jonny and James reunite after their father’s mysterious death. As they search for the truth, buried secrets reveal a conspiracy threatening to tear their family apart.”Here’s the trailer, which is just about as goofy…
Ubisoft are closing Ubisoft Halifax, the Canadian developers of mobile games Rainbow Six Mobile and Assassin’s Creed Rebellion. This is strictly speaking outside our mandate as a PC gaming site, of course – I fear smartphones like Hell itself, and only ever communicate over long distances using homing pigeons – but it’s all part of Ubisoft’s wider transformation into a heavily Tencent-backed publisher, and the nasty twist is that Ubisoft Halifax had only just voted to unionise.
All we want is a good new pirate game. Yes there’s always Sea of Thieves, and the rumors of an Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake grow more solid by the day, but who knows when it’ll actually appear. Sister title Skull and Bones failed to capture any of Black Flag’s magic, and while Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord’s War Sails update lets you wage terror on the high seas, at its heart it’s still very much a gritty, no-holes-barred strategy game. That’s where Sea of Remnants comes in. A sprawling, free-to-play open-world title published by NetEase and created by Joker…
Multiplatform does, indeed, seem to be the future for all of Xbox’s first-party studios, and the RPG powerhouse of Obsidian is no exception. Today, the devs confirmed that Avowed is coming to PS5, and revealed a few details about the impending anniversary update – including the fact that we’re finally going to be able to play as non-human characters.Avowed hits PS5 on February 17. That date – almost exactly one year after the game’s original launch – will also see the release of a big, free anniversary update including a host of new features across all platforms, including Xbox, PC,…
We’ve all been there. You’re at the end of a game, you’ve done all of the side quests, you’re strong as hell, finally read to take on the final boss, confident you can finish this quest you started 30-100 hours ago. Only to find that the fight is a piece of piss because, whoops! You overlevelled yourself by too much. This was seemingly the case for a number of people in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and now the game’s lead designer Michel Nohra has expressed some regret for those who had that experience. “The only thing I regret…
January 8, 2026 at 7:41am PT In a post on social media, Jason Schreier has clarified that he “wouldn’t be shocked if GTA 6 *does* come out this fall.” This article has been updated to reflect this. I don’t know if my delicate little soul could take another GTA 6 delay. First, it was meant to be arriving in 2025. Then it was pushed to May 2026. Now, the GTA 6 release date is destined for November 19 this year. Barring some major fumbles and oversights on Rockstar’s part, it will surely be one of the best open-world games ever made,…
The world of Elden Ring changed so significantly from the starting point established by Game of Thrones’ George R. R. Martin that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki thinks his collaborator would be surprised by the end result.Speaking with Game Informer, Miyazaki explained that while Martin helped lay the groundwork for the world-building and some character backstories, FromSoftware’s narrative team were the ones that brought them to life within the world of the game itself. In some instances, he suggests, those changes were so substantial that Miyazaki thinks Martin would be surprised by exactly what ended up in the game.The reason Miyazaki…