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John Smedley Steps Down As Daybreak President

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John Smedley, former CEO of Sony Online Entertainment

John Smedley is stepping down from his role as president of Daybreak Games, which was formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment. Daybreak is the studio responsible for games such as H1Z1, Everquest, and Planetside 2. John Smedley will apparently be transitioning into a different role that has yet to be determined. Daybreak’s COO, Russel Shanks, will be promoted to president as Smedley’s successor.

Daybreak confirmed the news on Venturebeat. “I can confirm that John Smedley will be taking some time off from the company for the near-term and transitioning to a different role to be determined,” said a spokesperson for Daybreak. “Upon finalization of his plans, further communication will be provided.”

While Smedley’s future plans are undetermined, he’s likely to take up another role at the company. He is stepping down following a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that took many of Daybreak’s servers offline.

John Smedley might be a familiar name to some of late. That’s because he was making headlines a couple of weeks ago for making threats against a Lizard Squad hacker via Twitter. A few weeks ago, Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki was convicted of more than 55,000 cyber crimes but avoided jail time. Smedley, who was on board an American Airlines flight that Lizard Squad diverted with a bomb threat, expressed outrage over the light sentence. He called Kivimaki a “sociopath,” a “piece of garbage,” a “little dirtbag,” and said “I’m coming for you.” (That last threat was with regards to civil litigation.)

Lizard Squad was responsible for the DDoS attacks that took down the Playstation Network and Xbox Live over Christmas last year. They are also responsible for an attack on Tor, the online anonymity service, and for attacks on various other services.

During his time as president of Daybreak, Smedley has been largely public-facing and open to fans. Despite that, he has also been the target of online harassment and even swatting. It’s unclear if this is the reason for his departure, but it’s good that he’s staying with the company.

Rhiannon likes video games and she likes writing, so she decided to combine them. As well as writing about video games, she also belts out the occasional science fiction or fantasy story, edits videos, and eats strawberry oreos. In that order.

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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