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Developer Rachel Byrk Commits Suicide After Months of Cyber Bullying

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Transgender game developer Rachel Byrk was told by cyber bullies to jump off a bridge, in the end that’s what she decided to do

It’s a sad time for the gaming industry as it loses a creative young game developer to suicide. Rachel Byrk, 23, was a prominent transgender developer who was best known for her work on Gamecube and Wii emulators. Years before she dived into development work and joined all the communities involved in it, however, she had suffered from low self esteem and chronic pain. Those problems only grew worse after joining the only game development community where she was subject to constant harassment.

As many people know being gay or transgender in the gaming community can make you a major target for trolls and cyber bullies. Rachel Byrk was no exception, for months now cyber bullies told the young developer that she should jump from a bridge. On April 23, after months of this severe bullying Byrk jumped from the Washington Bridge in New York. Only weeks after posting on a 4chan VG that she would be leaving a number of online communities because of their treatment.

That post was also met with a wall of hateful message telling Byrk that she should commit suicide. Now as news of her death spreads scores of other game communities, like the one centered around the Dolphin emulator, mourn her loss. Memorials have appeared all across the internet to remember Byrk and the contributions she made to the emulators she loved.That outpouring of sadness at her loss has sparked a new discussion in the gaming world about homophobia and transphobia.

The strongest voices in that new conversation are the people she worked with on the Dolphin emulator. Rachel Byrk was an important name to anyone who closely follows Dolphin and her presence is already being sorely missed there:

“She was a very kind and helpful person, one of many to help guide me through the project when I first started to contribute to the program. Her contributions to both the TAS and Dolphin Emulator community were vast, adding multiple helpful and sorely needed tools to make Dolphin easier to TAS. Although I did not know her as long as the others, I know she will surely be missed by all of those who knew her.”

Source: Dolphin Emulator Blog

Just like most other people are here, Ryan is very passionate about gaming and technology. When he's not writing about video games, you'll likely find him talking about the latest gadgets.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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