The other day, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey hit me with a real slobberknocker: It told me that a family I’d decided to save from impending slaughter earlier in the game was carrying a disease that ended up spreading to a whole island. My character, Kassandra, was immediately distraught. “We can go back anytime you want,” another…
If you’ve ever found yourself tired of Overwatch esports spectators’ camera angle choices and thought you could do a better job, your big day is just around the corner. Blizzard’s shooter is getting an in-game spectator mode, though it’s gonna have to go through some testing first. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan—who, in a stunning turn…
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is, to hear people (including Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo) tell it, pretty good, despite some questionable narrative decisions. Last week, however, it committed a crime that some Steam users decided couldn’t be forgiven: a 34 percent off sale. Cue the review bombs. Shadow of the Tomb Raider came out on September…
Track: Electric Fires | Artist: Black Peaks | Album: All That Divides Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.
Jakub Cislo is a game developer who wears his influences on his sleeve. His just-released game, Project Warlock, is a chunky shooter stew made from the gory giblets of classics like Wolfenstein and Doom. It’s a pretty typical palette of influences—until you consider that Cislo is 19, and all those games came out before he…
Accounting+, a VR collaboration between makers of Rick and Morty and The Stanley Parable, is out. I got to play it last weekend at Indiecade in LA, and it’s the funniest VR game I’ve tried. If you want to get a feel for its sense of humor, watch this trailer, and make sure to stick…
Tired: Getting a team kill with your own ultimate in Overwatch. Wired: Dying a painful death as Genji, only to posthumously realize that you deflected the other team’s ult right back at them, resulting in a team kill so inevitable that their Bastion didn’t even try to get out of harm’s way. That’s exactly what…
Last week, controversial Twitch streamer Ali “Gross Gore” Larsen landed himself in hot water after attendees of official Runescape convention RuneFest alleged that he’d harassed women and gotten into a physical altercation with another streamer. Now he says he’s been suspended from Twitch and forbidden from attending TwitchCon, but, he claims, this happened because of…
I’m just gonna cut to the chase: The Hex is this year’s Frog Fractions, Undertale, or—perhaps most aptly, given that it’s from the same creator—Pony Island. It’s a game that makes confetti of genre conventions and reassembles the scraps into a surprising story about how we interact with games. To delve too far into the…
On Twitch, if a streamer’s concurrent view count consistently stays above 20,000, it means they’ve probably hit the big time. It’s the culmination of years of hard work, of amassing followers and community building. Even big names like Myth and Summit1g average below 20,000 some months. Yesterday, I watched a casino stream with zero followers…
Triple-A blockbuster season is heating up, which means everybody is now knee-deep in gargantuan games like Black Ops 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. These franchises have long, complicated histories—one more so than all the rest. I speak, of course, of the Odyssey series. Currently on its tenth main series entry, Assassin’s…
In the bleak, distant future, only one video game will remain: Mario 64, the devourer of all other games. Super Mario 64 mad scientist Kaze Emanuar has already created a procession of once-thought-impossible lab experiments in the 1996 Nintendo 64 game, everything from online modes and nauseating first-person viewpoints to recent internet celebrity Bowsette. He…
Back in 2016, an ambitious group of fans began work on an Unreal Engine 4 “reboot” of role-playing, light-sabering classic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic called Apeiron. The project has made impressive progress since then, but it emitted a tragic Wilhelm scream this week when Lucasfilm lawyers zapped it out of existence. As…
Does an overtly low-budget game in which a controversial politician smacks down black and gay people count as “straight up trolling” by Valve’s new anything-goes standards? Is it an effort to “incite and sow discord”—which Valve also recently said can be disqualifying? These are the questions surrounding Bolsomito 2K18, a game that’s now being investigated…
Among Elite Dangerous’ many player groups, there may be none better known than the unerringly altruistic Fuel Rats. The leaderless collective has one mission and one mission only: to rescue pilots stranded in the ever-ravenous vacuum of space. Recently, one of them completely screwed that up. Because of a cat. Yesterday, the Fuel Rats released…
RuneFest, a convention run by the creators of RuneScape, is supposed to be an annual celebration of the fantasy MMO that came out in 2001 and has stayed improbably relevant in 2018 due to updates, iterations, and an active streaming community. This year, some attendees raised concerns about one streamer in particular, Ali “Gross Gore”…
A little more than a week ago, Steam developer HyperReuts was at rock bottom. The studio had given out 10,000 free keys for its multiplayer arena space game Evolvation, only for scammers to snap up a chunk of them. In response, HyperReuts tried to delete the offending keys, but in the process, it accidentally zapped…
Streamer and speedrunner Trihex has explained the actions that led to his recent Twitch ban to Kotaku. The face of the notorious “Trihard” emote said that he is very aware of how much harm homophobic slurs like the one he dropped over the weekend can cause, but he overdid it during a Super Mario Party…
Even if you haven’t heard of Twitch streamer and speedrunner Trihex, you’ve almost certainly seen him. He’s the face of the near-ubiquitous “Trihard” emote, a chat icon people use both in good fun and, unfortunately, to mock people of color. As of now, while the emote remains on Twitch, Trihex himself has been temporarily banned.…
Claudio Sanchez is a rock star. His band, Coheed and Cambria, has millions of fans across the world. His cascading mane of heavy metal hair is the envy of other musicians and prides of lions alike. The secret to Sanchez’s success: being a giant nerd. Some bands tell stories with their music. Then there’s Coheed…
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