Gaming
Gazillion Entertainment Fires All of its Employees
Halfway through this month, Disney and Marvel terminated their relationship with Gazillion Entertainment. This ended up in the closure of Marvel Heroes, an MMORPG that allowed you to play as the iconic superheroes. However, it seems like the bad fortunes for the team don’t end there as reportedly there’s been lay-offs from Gazillion.
PCGamesN has confirmed through a source that there has been “a company-wide reduction in force.” Not only that, but also “The bank has decided not to pursue any course of action that sees Gazillion meaningfully continue into the New Year and this requires that the company terminate its workforce.”
Reports today suggest that Gazillion have fired all of their employees, and plan to shut down Marvel Heroes on November 24, over a month ahead of the planned end on December 31. Some of the affected people took to Twitter to talk about their misfortune.
I know a lot of people are upset and wanting refunds for their purchases in @MarvelHeroes, but please keep in mind the developers were not paid out PTO, severance, and our medical insurance is ending in 8 days.
— Andrew Hair (@andrewhair) November 22, 2017
Officially unemployed on the day before thanksgiving.
Nice.
— Brian Waggoner (@HeyItsBWags) November 22, 2017
Tied to the staff termination, the email also states “We also intend to shut down Marvel Heroes Omega per the bank and Marvel’s wishes on Friday, November 24, 2017. At Marvel’s request we have prepped succinct messaging and are preparing to shut everything down.”
The email also confirms that staff will not be paid the PTO (paid time off) that they are owed, saying “If at some point in the future these obligations will be met, you will be contacted.”
Allen’s sources also say that Gazillion employees were informed that the company had lost their license with Disney to the Marvel properties on the 23rd of October. Development continued, but they were not allowed to publicly discuss the loss of the contract or the reason for a lack of announcements.
They stayed on until November 10th, at which point they were informed that they were all furloughed as of the 11th. This explains the company’s silence over the last month.
It’s a pretty sad note for a lot of people, especially considering we’re nearing a holiday that a lot of people enjoy. Gazillion Entertainment seems to be a dying company after this fiasco, so it seems we won’t be seeing anything from them in the future.
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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