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Star Citizen Developer Threatens Legal Action Against The Escapist

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Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has threatened legal action over an article published by The Escapist. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) claims the article, published October 1, was defamatory and damaging to their reputation. The article, written by Lizzy Finnegan, claims multiple CIG sources commented on alleged troubles the developer is facing. The sources also claim that CIG has a “toxic culture” and has a pattern of discriminatory hiring practices. After the article was published, CIG boss and Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts sent The Escapist a strongly worded letter, threatening legal action if the article wasn’t retracted.

But that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The drama really started on September 25, when Finnegan published a separate article asking if Star Citizen was going to “crash and burn.” The article examined a series of blog posts by a backer of Star Citizen called Derek Smart. Smart has obviously come to regret his decision to back the game, and spends his time posting about CIG’s apparent misuse of Kickstarter funds and the woes of Star Citizen’s development.

The reason there’s so much drama around CIG is that Star Citizen is a crowd-funding superstar. The game garnered a massive $90 million in funds, which means any drama that goes on surrounding CIG also pulls that $90 million into question. Finnegan’s September 25 article spoke about the misuse of those funds, as well as long delays and changes to the Terms Of Service that the backers agreed to.

The October 1 article was, allegedly, published after multiple sources from CIG came forward to give more information about the developer’s woes. These sources added a string of new serious allegations. Most notable were allegations that Sandi Gardener, CIG’s vice president of marketing and Roberts’ wife, refused to hire people over 40 and, on one occasion, refused to hire somebody based on race, saying, “We aren’t hiring a black girl.”

The second article also claimed that Roberts was using Kickstarter funds to purchase a mansion and that CIG has already used up $82 million of its funds. Finnegan’s claims apparently come from 9 different current or former CIG employees.

CIG has since responded to the article in a strongly-worded letter. They’ve refuted some of the claims directly and cast some doubt on others. The Escapist claims it vetted its sources with documentation that proved they were employees of CIG, saying they saw “pay stubs and a Cloud Imperium Games ID.” Roberts says no CIG employees are given employee ID cards. It’s also emerged that many of the quotes in The Escapist’s article are word-for-word matches with quotes from Glassdoor Australia, an anonymous employment review site. While it’s possible the employees also posted on Glassdoor, it does cast doubt on The Escapist’s sources.

CIG’s letter concludes with three demands. First, they want The Escapist to apologise to Sandi Gardener. Second, they want that apology published, as well as to have the article retracted. And third, they want The Escapist to have an independent party investigate the events that led to the article’s publication. They effectively gave The Escapist until October 5 to meet these demands, or else they would take legal action in both the US and UK (which has tougher anti-defamation laws).

What this all means for Star Citizen and its backers remains yet to be seen.

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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