Culture

Report: Later This Week, EA Is Going To Decide If Anthem Lives Or Dies

EA still isn’t sure if it’s going to invest in massively overhauling its failed loot shooter Anthem, according to a new report by Bloomberg. Instead, executives from the publisher are set to meet this week to decide whether it will abandon the BioWare game or not. The studio announced last year that approximately 30 people…

I Want IO’s Upcoming 007 Game To Be Just Like Hitman‘s Train Level

The final level of Hitman 3 is an exciting and aggressive fight that moves across the length of a long cargo train filled with bad guys and guns. It’s also a bad Hitman level, but it might be our first sign of what an IO Interactive 007 game might look and play like. And that…

Disco Elysium Update Includes ‘Political Vision Quests’ That Permanently Change The UI

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, a “director’s cut” of the original game from 2019, will introduce the “political vision quest,” giving players a chance to further cement the protagonist’s ideological leanings. The Final Cut will come to PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, and Stadia next month, completing developer ZA/UM’s vision for the dialogue-heavy role-playing game.…

Epic Says Even More Epic Store Exclusives Are Coming In The Future

Epic pissed off a lot of people when it first revealed that big games like Metro Exodus and Borderlands 3 would be Epic Games Store timed-exclusives on PC. Now it says that even more exclusivity deals are on the way. “We have more exclusives coming in the next two years than we have published to…

Report: E3 2021 Being Planned As An All-Digital Event

Last year the Entertainment Software Association cancelled E3, the biggest trade show in gaming, due to covid-19 concerns. According to pitch documents obtained by Video Games Chronicle, this year’s E3 might be as a strictly online affair, with three-days of streaming content running from June 15 to 17. When E3 2020 was cancelled, game publishers,…

Forza Horizon 4 Is Coming To Steam In March

Microsoft’s gorgeous British countryside racer Forza Horizon 4 is coming to Steam on March 9, the company announced today. It marks the latest in a long line of first-party Microsoft games coming to rival platforms, and the first time a Forza game has ever appeared on Valve’s storefront. The Steam version of Forza Horizon 4…

The First Character You Meet In Half-Life Is Gus The Forklift Driver

You probably know Gordon Freeman is, the silent protagonist of the Half-Life games. And I’m guessing you know other Half-Life characters, like Alyx Vance, Dr. Kliner, the mysterious G-Man, and Barney. But a recent YouTube video pays homage to the very first character you encounter in Half-Life: Gus the forklift driver. YouTuber MarphitimusBlackimus makes videos…

My Madden 21 Says The Chiefs Won The Super Bowl, And I Accept That Reality

This morning Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs were awarded the Vince Lombardi trophy after defeating Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 36 to 20 in my Madden 21 simulation of Super Bowl XV. Sounds right to me. In my simulated game, which played out on my Xbox Series X console at 11…

Terraria Dev Cancels Stadia Port Over Being Shut Out Of Google Accounts

The sprawling 2D world-crafting game Terraria has been ported almost everywhere. One place it won’t be going? Stadia. At least according to one of its creators who recently took to Twitter to cancel the streaming version of the game after—he says—Google locked him out of all of his accounts. “I absolutely have not done anything…

343 Industries teased a “a new place and way to play” Halo: The Master Chief Collection in its latest development update. It could mean just about anything, like maybe MCC is getting VR support, or maybe it’s just coming to a new storefront.

Final Fantasy XIV Patch 5.5 Sets The Stage For Endwalker On April 13

There’s a new Final Fantasy XIV expansion coming later this year, but first we’ve got some loose ends to tie up. The third and final installment of the Nier-themed raid series and the first of a two-part story update leading to this fall’s Endwalker expansion arrives on April 13, alongside the open beta of the…

iam8bit’s Persona 5 Royal Vinyl Soundtrack Looks Pretty Sweet

Pre-orders for iam8bit’s three-LP vinyl soundtrack to Persona 5 Royal opened back in December, with fans dropping $75 on it without knowing what the album art or actual records look like. We’ve got an exclusive first look at the package, and, luckily for them, it’s a thing of beauty. The perfect companion to the unfortunately…

The Week In Games: Prepare For Bowser’s Fury

People like Mario games, I’ve heard. So it’s good to see Nintendo releasing another one! Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury releases later this week for Switch. I’m very excited about this port. I never owned a WiiU, so I missed out on this Mario game. It always looked like a lot of fun…

The Remade Demon’s Souls’ Soundtrack Is (Mostly) Good Enough For Me

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today we take a trip into the Nexus to compare a classic’s iconic score with the newfangled revamp that attempts to build on it. For my money, the single brightest spot of the PlayStation 5’s aggressively…

Track: Discreet Music (Remastered 2004) | Artist: Brian Eno | Album: Discreet Music

The Jedi In The Woods

Adam Fisher is an artist we featured so long ago on Fine Art that the series didn’t even have a name yet Ten years later it does, and Adam has some done some incredible work in the meantime (on everything from Prey to Total Warhammer to Call of Duty), so I figured it was time…

Now This Is A Very Nice Xbox

The Xbox Series S looks very nice in white, but I think it looks even nicer in this bright, bold and decidedly floral paint scheme by 14 year-old Dutch artist Pepijn van der Flier Done with spray paint and Posca pens over multiple layers, then finished with a matte varnish, it’s exactly the kind of…

Genshin Impact City Recreated As An Enormous Model That Took 1000 Hours To Build

Here’s a piece of fan art of Genshin Impact’s Liyue Harbour, where my use of the term “fan art” seems about as woefully short of capturing the enormousness of the project as is humanly possible. This is more of a fan endeavour, requiring an astounding amount of preparation, design work, printing, painting and assembly (around…

Track: We Like Sportz | Artist: The Lonely Island | Album: Incredibad 

Cactus Props At Super Nintendo World Appear To Be Based On A Fan Game

It appears someone working on the cacti props at the Super Nintendo World theme park in Universal Studios Japan might have inadvertently built them to look just like some cacti that appear in a New Super Mario Bros Wii fan mod. Whoops! As spotted by Twitter user Meatball132, the cacti in question can be clearly…