Gaming
Darkwood: A Survival Horror Game Its Own Developers Want You to Pirate
Ever heard of Darkwood? It’s an indie horror game that was released a week ago on Steam. It’s also available for free on The Pirate Bay, thanks to the game’s developer, Acid Wizard Studio, of all people.
Earlier today, Acid Wizard Studio posted a sort of tell-all story on Imgur explaining why the company decided to post its game on The Pirate Bay. The story explains how this three man (and one dog) Polish development studio worked for four years on Darkwood, the survival horror game that doesn’t rely on jump scares, because the developers were too scared to play survival horror games. The story goes into detail how the developers quit their day jobs, ran an Indiegogo campaign that almost didn’t succeed, and missed numerous scheduled game release deadlines. But, then the story takes an interesting turn and describes the studio’s mounting frustration with scam emails that asked for free Steam keys that the scammers planned to sell on gray market key-reseller sites like G2A.com. The article also mentions how sorry the guys at Acid Wizard Studio felt when they read why gamers asked for refunds of Darkwood, especially one kid who “didn’t want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month.” According to the story, this kid was one of the galvanizing forces behind the Acid Wizard Studio’s decision to post Darkwood on the infamous pirating site The Pirate Bay: because they felt bad for people who didn’t have $15 to spare on a video game. This, my friends, is what a bleeding heart looks like, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
“So we decided to something about it,” explains the original article. “If you don’t have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free. There’s no catch, no added pirate hats for characters or anything like that. We have just one request: if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG, or Humble Store. But please, please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site. By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”
Interesting words from an interesting developer. Most studios would scream to the heavens that The Pirate Bay is the true cancer leeching off the gaming industry, but I’ve never, ever, seen a game developer actively support gamers pirating its game, let alone post the game on a well-known pirating website. However, many prominent Internet game critics and reviewers actively support Acid Wizard Studio’s decision, including TotalBiscuit.
Gamers who want to take Acid Wizard Studio up on its pirating offer can find the link to the officially pirated version (never thought those words would come out of my mouth) in the original article, but those of who want to support the studio can buy Darkwood on Steam here. Given the game’s quality, I look forward to what Acid Wizard Studio does next.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
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.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
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.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
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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