I've been stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever—at the time of writing, I'm around 15 hours /played (and will likely be 20+ hours by the time you're reading this) on my warrior. I chose the roleplay ruleset because, well, I'm a roleplayer. I've been writing and being cringe in videogames for over 15 years.

RP in WoW is, actually, what got me into writing in the first place. My clear and obvious mastery over the written word was hard-won by being a terribly annoying edgelord death knight, for which I apologise.

I was curious about the implementation of the roleplay ruleset back when it was properly announced—back then, I thought it was great that we're being given our own place, but being completely split off from "normal" ruleset (which I'll be calling PvE for simplicity) didn't seem necessary to me.

Having played in the roleplay ruleset for a little while, my opinion has only been vindicated. Splitting PvE and PvP rulesets does make sense. For instance, a resource node might be easier to gather on PvE, throwing the economic balance of the PvP server out of the window. But beyond technical limitations, a complete, strict divide between RP and PvE just has me scratching my head.

There are things I like about having our own little nook of the Forever servers to putz about on. For starters, the vibes are a lot chiller. I don't want to cast generalisations about players, but I do think roleplayers are just smarter, sexier, have bigger muscles, and will solve climate change.

In seriousness, I do think thinking about your character's place in the world and having a bent towards immersion does make you a chiller person in general. I've experienced vanishingly little toxicity or hostility. The absolute worst instance was a tank getting a little passive-aggressive about mining nodes in my Deadmines run. That's it.

But what I foresaw is bearing out: Nobody is really roleplaying in instanced or group content, and that's because we legitimately never have done so. Most RP takes place either spontaneously out in the open world, or in dedicated hot spots. Even in the most diehard MMO communities, people aren't talking in ye olde English while pushing Vancleef's face in.

There are some people who are always in-character, sure, but that portion of the playerbase is incredibly rare. We're talking a sliver of an already-small population of a videogame, here.

As for the strict rules on naming conventions—yeah, I'm seeing a lot more lore-accurate names, but I'm also seeing plenty of joke ones. And if I'm being perfectly honest, these gag names really haven't ever bothered me; people being disruptive or annoying when I'm roleplaying are a massive pain, but if Tsundere Cowbell the paladin wants to watch me write, my immersion isn't shattered.

Overall, I think keeping us on our own server architecture for the most part is the smarter plan, especially given layering would dilute roleplayers so much that RP would be hard to find. However, I don't think there's any real reason to disallow us from jumping to the Normal ruleset servers when we group up with someone from there—or giving us an option to travel between them of our own accord.

Just as we tend to swap between in-character for roleplay and out-of-character for, y'know, playing the videogame—I think most of us would be happy to have the choice as to whether we want to futz about on the roleplay layer or go hang out with our non-theatre kid friends on the PvE ruleset.

Especially given, as time goes on, population might become an issue. Believe it or not, roleplayers still do like to raid and gear up, and if they should be able to migrate on characters they've invested literal dozens of hours into, rather than having to start all over again.

MMOs are kinda costly to run, but as it turns out, nowhere near as costly as a datacenter. I was going to spend most of this article joking about how Sam Altman, who doesn't like that we have RAM, would be frothing at the mouth for that kind of compute power. After a bit of research I am leaving horrified at the sheer industrial heft the AI industry requires.

The numbers were revealed by the official WoW X account, which states that WoW Forever runs on about 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores. To give you an idea of how much server infrastructure that is, our best budget CPU goes for around $110 at the moment, and it has six cores.

Fudge the maths a bit and that's $1.2 million in cores alone. Which is pricey, don't get me wrong—though not perhaps for a company that has hundreds of thousands of players paying a sub each month.

Moreover, while it's funny to imagine Altman simply salivating at the amount of hardware that's going towards entertaining people, rather than whatever AI does, it turns out the RAM baron himself wouldn't so much as lift an eyebrow at the amount of tech it takes to run one of the biggest MMO events of the decade.

It's just actually not that much, at least, not compared to AI. We reported on a $60 million AI rack cluster just last month that had about 1.4 petabytes of memory in it—that's around 1.4 million GB—and around 4,200 CPUs (each of which likely have a lot of cores, so a lot more than 70,000 cores in general). And yeah, sure, $60 million is costly—but Microsoft spends multiple dozen billions of cash in AI investment each year.

In case you aren't aware of how much a billion is, $1 billion is enough to buy the aforementioned rack cluster, which let me remind you absolutely dwarfs the WoW: Forever server requirements, 16 and a half times.

In other words, the amount of hardware it takes to run a massive MMO is barely even a dent in the amount that's being swept into the ever-gluttonous belly of datacenters. I don't really have a way to end this article that isn't just putting my face in a pillow and screaming.

World of Warcraft: Forever's launch has been downright impressive—MMOs are notoriously difficult to run servers for, particularly when it comes to launch, where players will get bottlenecked into servers, throwing devs into a catch 22: Do they increase capacity and wind up wasting money in the long run while things die down, or do they ride out the wave? And yet, after the chaos of the beta, it's been buttery smooth.

Which is why I'm willing to forgive Blizzard for a weird quirk of its realmless layering technology—cities have been empty, empty as hell. Which is a shame, given I know that hundreds of thousands of players are technically on this thing—and yet, none of them are in my Stormwind.

Well, Forever's devs are working on a fix, per the official forums: "Just wanted to chime in," says Aggrend, "And say that we are aware of some issues with certain areas not feeling as populated as they should. We will be tweaking some numbers tomorrow to help things feel a bit more lively. Thanks for the feedback on this one!"

That's a relief to hear, especially given I'm on a roleplay server, and there have been problems with this sort of thing where phasing has interrupted the flow of narrative commerce in the past. Cities, especially, should feel lived-in, and it's hard to create a sense of community when people you could be writing with keep bamfing in and out of existence.

But even if you aren't a roleplayer like yours truly, I think you should be gladdened by this news—big cities are one of the places where crowding isn't a problem at all, but rather, the thing you want. They're social hubs, and rubbing shoulder to shoulder with the masses at the auction house is kind of the whole point.

At least anecdotally, my Stormwind's been looking a lot more populated, and I'm sure that as populations settle to sane levels and Blizzard keeps chipping away at this tech, the streets'll be bustling again.

Xbox has joined the 'faster launcher load times' arms race, announcing that its updated Xbox PC app, available now to Xbox Insiders, launches up to 60% faster, and has also been overhauled to offer "simpler navigation, updated filters, and new ways to organize your games."

Along with the faster launch time, Xbox said the home, store, and Game Pass pages in the updated app load up to 50% faster, while in-app windows open up to 65% faster—depending upon factors including device, internet connection, system configuration, and usage, of course. Library navigation has been simplified, search has been improved, and friends and social features are now part of the main navigational window.

Credit where it's due: That change to friends and social features is welcome. I don't use the Xbox App much—to be blunt, it's pretty much exclusively for Sea of Thieves. But after a long stretch away from it, I recently jumped back in for some high seas adventures with the crew, and I'll tell you this: Figuring out how to connect with my fellow online swashbucklers was kind of a headache compared to the super-simplicity of Steam. It worked fine, it just wasn't smooth and easy, so anything that helps with that, I'm happy to take.

I'm less excited about the faster loading times. Not that I'm going to complain about performance improvements, I'm just not sure it matters in the grand scheme of things. When the Epic Games Store promised that its "vibe coded" launcher was faster than Steam, a common reaction was mockery: Much of that was sparked by Epic's insistent banging of the 'AI is inevitable' drum, but there was also a lot of 'who cares?' in the reactions, too. I think the Xbox PC app may face the same: Faster is good, sure, but is it going to convince many PC gamers to use it instead of Steam when they don't have to? Of this, I have doubts.

(Steam also recently dropped a performance update that promises to improve loading times as well, blunting the impact of both the Epic and Xbox boosts even further.)

If you want to check out the updated app for yourself, you'll need to be in the Xbox Insiders program—for that, you'll need to install the Xbox Insider Hub. A "refreshed Xbox web experience" is also on the way, with an improved library tab, more efficient use of screen space, and light, dark, and high-contrast visual modes.

World of Warcraft: Forever has proven extremely popular—and while I was preparing for the launch last night, I was bracing for the same experience I had in the beta. Namely: Long queue times, connection errors, and disconnects. At least I wouldn't have to use a VPN this time, I thought, that is some small saving grace.

Turns out I needn't have worried. There was a brief panic, mind, when I finished a breezy five minute queue and landed on a ruleset selection screen that was completely greyed-out. But one eight minute queue later, and I was in—and proceeded to quest until 4 am with nary a disconnection or lagspike to be seen.

Granted, I am playing on both the EU realms and the roleplay ruleset, both of which are bound to be less populous. But having hopped online, it doesn't seem like I'm alone: "I fully expected to not be able to play today, but I logged in with no queue and no lag," writes one equally-astonished player on the game's subreddit.

"Outside of having to spawn camp some wolves at the start, this has been the best wow launch I've seen so far. I haven't really had to compete for mobs, or herbs or quest drops, and I only had a brief moment of lag," writes another.

On that point, I do feel like the phasing is maybe working a little too well. I had an eerie experience jogging around Stormwind (admittedly, this was at 3 am on a Wednesday. Anyone with a normal job was likely sanely and soundly asleep) and having the Alliance's capital city all to myself.

But it is early days, with Blizzard clearly having braced hard to deal with its server capacity. And compared to the opposite of having to bare-knuckle wrestle people for quest tags—or group up and cooperate like some kind of loser, I guess—it's way more preferable. So kudos for Blizzard, managing a downright smooth MMO launch. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some kobolds to rob of their candles.

France's Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) union has accused Microsoft of sabotaging work on Marvel's Blade and then using the inevitable results to justify Arkane's closure.

The union said development of Blade "is going fine," and that the game is on par with Arkane's previous body of work, which includes the Dishonored series, Prey, Deathloop, and the sadly overlooked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Despite that, "workers have to face the harsh reality: our studio might get closed because, and only because, Microsoft decided to, even if that means sabotaging the game it funded."

"Microsoft chose to justify the closure on economic reasons," the union wrote. "But Microsoft is actually why those economic reasons even exist. Because after freezing hiring for 19 months, which artificially caused delays and additional cost, Microsoft now uses those same delays and additional costs as a reason to close down the studio."

Closing Arkane would defy "financial logic," the union claimed, as it would likely cost more money than just allowing it to finish Blade—and furthermore, it added, Arkane is profitable—"just not profitable enough for Microsoft."

"Microsoft is responsible for the situation Arkane is in today. Microsoft is responsible for the situation the workers are in today," the union said. "So Microsoft has to take full responsibility here and act accordingly."

While its "dearest wish" is to see Arkane "live on," STJV said the studio's future has to go beyond just completing Blade. And if that's not feasible and Arkane must close, it falls to Microsoft—"the company who decided that Arkane has to shut down"—to take care of the hundreds of lives it has thrown into turmoil. Given Microsoft's essentially limitless resources, the union believes the company has a moral obligation to go beyond the bare minimum required by law: "We will not allow the lives of Arkane Studios' workers to be destroyed without the company paying a fair price."

The union is not aiming low with its demands. First, "to give employees control over the decisions that shape their future" while acquisition negotiations are underway:

• Go beyond the mandatory Work Council consultation, and actually give employees representative & unions a say in the discussion to choose a potential buyer.
• Setup a protection fund for employees on the level of the PSE compensation in case workers get fired for economic reasons by the buyer in 24 following months.

Should Arkane ultimately be closed, it demands Microsoft "funds commensurate with Microsoft’s status as a corporation" to ensure employees are properly compensated:

• A redundancy payment of 200K€ ($225,000).
• Two years’ redeployment support funded by Microsoft.
• The introduction of shared resources for training and studio creation, with a residual bonus to enable all employees to look to the future with confidence.
• Compensation up to the redundancy payment for independant workers’ contract breach.

Those are big asks, but the union isn't wrong about the resources Microsoft has at its disposal: Microsoft's net income for the first quarter of FY27 was $36.6 billion. Xbox is a small contributor to that total, but it is a part of Microsoft, and that makes it Microsoft's issue to deal with.

For now, the fate of Arkane remains unresolved: The studio fell victim to the most recent round of cuts at Xbox, but a recent report indicated that it might yet find a home with a new owner. I've reached out to Xbox for comment on the STJV union's demands and will update if I receive a reply.

World of Warcraft's big crossover with Dungeons & Dragons is finally here—and despite being a huge flagship collaboration, one of the biggest MMOs meeting with one of the biggest TTRPGs, I'm sad to say I'm feeling just a touch whelmed. This sourcebook is inconsistent—filled with very cool character options in some places, and just pointing at the already-existing player's handbook in others.

That inconsistency doesn't let the whole project down, mind. There are still some rules tucked away in here that I think are great additions to any campaign, not just a World of Warcraft-themed one.

Let's start with the big one: Classes. WoW and D&D do have a lot of overlap in terms of class fantasy—there's not much in the way of appreciable differences between a Fighter and a Warrior, other than a few iconic abilities being missing from the pack. As a result, this rulebook essentially uses the pre-existing classes as a template to throw some WoW flavour on.

Some of these changes are meaningful—take, for example, the Death Knight. This uses the Paladin's chassis, but throws in a ton of impactful changes, replacing Lay on Hands with Death Coil, for example. It also throws a whole new raft of Death Knight-adjacent spells, adjusts your Find Steed with a cool undead ghost that can phase through objects, and more.

A lot of the classes are solved by custom spells like this—the Paladin, for instance, has just the one new subclass to cover for Holy and a bunch of iconic Paladin spells. But the balance of these is a touch skewiff in places. Take Divine Shield, for instance. This thing is straight busted.

It's a 4th level spell, which does admittedly mean you'll only get it at levels 13 plus, but it makes you immune to not only the damage of a triggering attack, but also all damage until the start of your next turn. AND you can't be moved or have your speed reduced. While absolutely correct for the flavour of WoW's iconic bubble, this is crazy overpowered.

And while some of these classes do have a lot new on offer, others are so thin on content it's a wonder why they're there at all. The rogue gets a particularly short end of the stick, for instance. Outlaw rogues are just given a reskinned version of 5e's Swashbuckler subclass (which does, in fairness, have some new Cunning Strike options to bring it up to parity). Otherwise, the book just points you in the direction of pre-existing subclasses.

Others are a complete miss, too. Shamans are all awkwardly stuffed into the chassis of the Barbarian, which only really works for Enhancement shamans—Elemental and Restoration shamans are pretty much just your standard D&D barbarian with some flavour-adjacent rage options, rather than the full spellcasters they are in the videogame.

This inconsistency in quality applies to character origins, too. Some of them have fully bespoke traits—Dracthyr get their visage forms, Void Elves get this cool void form that triggers when you hit identical numbers on an Advantage/Disadvantage roll, and so on. And then there are Orcs and Dwarves, some of WoW's most iconic races, where the book goes: Just use the stuff that's already in the PHB.

And yet, there's a lot to this supplement I actually like. When it's actually adding new options to the classes, I think they're cool—the Frost Mage flavoured feat, Fingers of Frost, gives you extra cold damage against restrained creatures, for example. But the real thing I would encourage you to just crib for your non-Azerothian games are its gathering and crafting systems.

Crafty rules

In 5e (and the 2024 rules), crafting's always been sort of a joke. There are tool proficiencies, but they might come up every once in a blue moon. The actual Player's Handbook just says to half the cost of an item, then smacks you around the head with a massive downtime cost for anything particularly expensive—a suit of plate armor takes a whopping 150 days to craft (though you can split this with extra help). At which point you might as well just eat the GP cost and buy the damn thing.

This book, however, has some really neat rules for gathering and crafting professions. Having the right tool proficiency gives you access to a profession, which you can level up when your proficiency bonus increases to new tiers (which also increases the rarity of the items you can make).

Instead of making players shell out the gold cost, these gathering professions have a neat little table for getting enough golds' worth in raw materials to make the thing, with extra bonuses for beating the involved DC by five or more. When you get to higher levels, certain recipes might require items from specific regions—and you might only know how to make those items via recipes obtained from certain factions.

It's still all pretty lightweight (although each profession does have a useful list of suggested recipes it should know) but that's honestly a boon to this system, rather than a bane, because you could very easily just slot this whole mechanic into your homebrew campaign with very little trouble.

And, more to the point, you could very easily make entire adventure hooks out of going to get specific materials for a recipe here—which helps solve D&D crafting's main issue: It's not relevant unless you have literal months of in-game downtime to kill. While the book doesn't make changes to the time-to-craft issue, it's still a major step up.

Renown's another mechanic I like. You get renown with certain factions based on your origins, but you can increase this renown through play to get certain perks. For instance, improved renown with Darnassus gives you the option to learn certain proficiencies, gain a blessing from its leaders, or gather extra materials with herbalism. My favorite of these is the gnomeregan Shield Guardian perk, which specifically states that if you dip below 50 renown again, the guardian turns on you. Sorry buddy, my creator says you dropped off.

Aside from these rules additions, there are also some solid dungeon adventures with their own bespoke stat blocks, extra magic items, and a respectable bestiary full of critters to toss into your campaign.

The fact that there's plenty to like in this book makes it all the more frustrating that it's so inconsistent—some areas have novel, if a little wonky, additions to the system. Others shrug like the book's designers simply ran out of time and budget, pointing towards resources that you already own.

However, if you are looking to run a WoW-specific campaign, or just want crafting rules that don't suck, it very well might be worth checking out on the strength of its secondary mechanics alone. Just don't go in there expecting a 1:1 replication of the MMORPG. This is still Dungeons & Dragons—and in some places, I mean that literally.

Longtime Microsoft executive Helen Chiang was made Xbox's first-ever chief operating officer as part of the 'reset' in July, a role that gave her "end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Then, just three months later and with virtually no fanfare, she was gone, amidst an anonymous claim that she was "terminated for policy violations."

Saying it was important "to set the record straight," Chiang has now formally denied that claim in a lengthy LinkedIn post, saying she did not:

• "Leak confidential company information to the press"
• "Leave Xbox to join a competitor"
• "Engage in discrimination, bullying, harassment, insider trading, embezzlement, or other fraudulent activity"
• "Leave because I was passed over for a bigger role"

The record-straightening did not get into why Chiang did leave Xbox, although she seemed to imply that it was not an amicable departure: "I believe in fairness, accountability, and holding ourselves to the standards we expect of others. Those standards only mean something when they're applied consistently. I have serious concerns about how they were applied in my case, and I believe those concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

The sudden split seemed doubly strange because prior to taking the COO job at Xbox, Chiang spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, nearly all of it with the Xbox division—rising from Xbox platform business manager in 2007 to corporate vice president of the Minecraft franchise in 2020, a position she held for more than six years. The memo announcing Chiang's departure was also notably restrained: "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote. "I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well."

"I share this because I don't want my departure reduced to an inaccurate story about incompetence, ambition for the next big job, or a Nelson-level scandal. My story is about staying true to your core values, especially when it is hard. That's the legacy I hope to leave behind," Chiang wrote in her message.

"This is not how I ever imagined my story here would end. And it is not the whole story."

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on Chiang's message and will update if I receive a reply.

Earlier this week, Kris Zierhut, principal game designer on World of Warcraft: Forever, said that the game would have a release schedule that's a "little more laid back". Rather than the blisteringly fast eight to 10 week schedule of Season of Discovery, Forever'll aim to release major updates once every four months or so.

This is honestly music to my ears—I've been impressed by retail WoW's blistering pace and its seasonal structure, even if there have been some rocky, bug-filled patches in the past; and it's certainly something I've praised before, especially in contrast to other certain MMOs that have been coming to a standstill.

But I've been playing WoW… well, for a long time, but I've had a consistent sub since Dragonflight, and I've been able to see the arc of Blizzard whipping up its schedule into a proper roadmap. Which did pull the game back from the brink, true, but three expansions in and I'm just sort of exhausted.

There's always some new bar to fill, some new doohickey to collect, some new reputation track to chew on, and it all moves so fast that if I, say, have an off-week to go play another game, I feel pretty lost. While Midnight does major patches at roughly the same release tempo (12.0.0 came out in January, 12.1.0 came out in August) it also has a ton of interim stuff to flood out your schedule every three months, rather than four.

Launch was already crammed with stuff—a raid tier, delves, the new prey system, housing, and so on. Just under three months passed since launch, and wham, suddenly we've got Void Assaults! Ritual Sites! The Omnium Folio! Whatever Abyss Anglers is, I never checked, which is kinda the problem! Just over a month later, and there's a new raid and a new system plugged into Void Assaults (which I'm literally just now finding out about, I completely missed it). Two months later, and it's 12.1.0, which I hadn't even sat down to properly play before Labyrinths became a thing.

The idea of smaller, chiller patches in an overall slower-paced game (here's fellow PCG writer Lincoln Carpenter's treatise on the virtues of hitting a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds) sounds like a nice, soothing bath after an overstimulating day at the circus.

I do feel that prickling sense of overstimulation fear return when Zierhut talks about the interim stuff, however:

"And then one nuance on that is: We do plan on making content that unlocks in between … you want to stagger out some content across those four months. It's not just patch day comes [around], here's a content fire hose, and now we're silent for four months. A lot of that is, hey, there's a time event calendar that gradually unlocks things and opens them up over those four months to give things a little bit more life instead of that all at once effect."

Still, given Forever's meant to be a horizontally-progressing game that doesn't have expansions (we'll need to see how that pans out), I might find these little tasks a lot more soothing than the looming feeling I have with WoW, where at any point it might suddenly become too late to get stuck into a season.

Ideally, these mid-patch trickles will be optional tasks I can get around to basically whenever, rather than something I feel pressured to get done just so I can stay up-to-date for whatever flashy system's trundling down the pipeline next. Hit me with that lo-fi update cadence, I'm ready for it.

Id Software has tightened its relationship with fellow shooter specialists MachineGames according to studio co-director Marty Stratton, after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer's employees earlier this year.

Stratton was asked how the studio was doing following Xbox's massive job cuts at a recent press event for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC (via IGN) and he was keen to assure everyone that things are hunky dory at the legendary FPS developer.

"We're doing great," Stratton explained. "Not to handwave the [layoffs] away … everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and [the] technology department."

As part of its response to those layoffs, id Software has apparently deepened its ties with MachineGames, developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and, more recently, the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

"We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever," Stratton said. "We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at the point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs]. We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that. We're both really, really bullish on what we have ahead.

Stratton's comments have led to speculation that the two developers may be cooperating on Wolfenstein 3, which MachineGames is rumoured to be working on. Id Software has just concluded active development of Doom: The Dark Ages following the expansions' release, so this is possible. What's interesting to me, however, is how Stratton repeatedly references technology.

The id Software layoffs heavily impact the developer's Frankfurt arm, including numerous designers of the formidable id-tech engine. This led to fears that id-tech was being shelved. Microsoft contradicted this, though further reports left the question open. But Stratton's comments lead me to believe we might be seeing a tech alignment between the two developers as a result of those Frankfurt layoffs.

While id Software built Doom: The Dark Ages on id-tech 8, MachineGames used a modified version of id-tech 7, called Motor, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The fact that Stratton references both teams' "incredibly talented engineers" suggests to me that id Software is folding MachineGames' engine programmers directly into id-tech's ongoing development, with both teams working on the engine concurrently going forward. Assuming that id tech hasn't been canned outright, this approach would make sense given the expertise id Software lost from its Frankfurt arm.

Sadly, the layoffs that affected id Software were far from the last at Xbox. After cutting 1600 jobs in the summer, Xbox initiated a second wave of layoffs in September that also saw Obsidian and Bethesda merge and put Activision in charge of Halo. Further Xbox layoffs are planned leading up to January 2027, while Microsoft more broadly has offered a "voluntary exit offer" to over a quarter of its workforce.

In a new interview with VGC, FPS legend John Romero revealed how things were going at Romero Games, the studio he leads alongside his wife, veteran designer Brenda Romero. After its unannounced shooter project was canceled by Xbox last year, Romero Games managed to secure a new publisher, but there's a catch: The team is now only a tenth the size it was while funded by Xbox. Romero says they've rescoped to use the material they already had on a smaller, more focused game.

World of Warcraft: Forever is "realmless", which has a couple of advantages for oceanic (OCE) players—who so often get the short end of the stick when it comes to MMORPGs. Blizzard has servers in Australia, so OCE players can enjoy not having terrible ping, but due to the smaller playerbase they share a lot of overlap with the North American server architecture.

Which produces a unique problem: As it stands, OCE players are stuck in perpetual night. See, Forever has a 24 hour day/night cycle, so if you play during the evening and your timezone's matched to the server, the sun will set in Azeroth roughly at the time it would outside your window. But since OCE players are very much not local to North America… the curse of endless night persists.

As explained here on the WoW forums: "Because our servers share North American clock cycles, playing after work means the game is locked in pitch black. Log on at 7 pm? Midnight. Saturday afternoon? Dark. Unless you ruin your sleep schedule to play at 4 am, you practically never see the sun in Kalimdor."

A solution, however, was offered by the game's developers in an official podcast on the WoW channel—since Australia does actually have local server architecture, lead software engineer Ana Resendez says that "we could have an Australia timezone in those, but what happens if you're playing and suddenly you get an invite from [a North American player], then all of a sudden you go from night to day within like a couple of seconds? It's something we talked about."

Which is a little immersion-breaking, for sure, but likely preferable to being stuck in eternal night—especially given how gosh-darn pretty Forever's lighting changes are. There are a ton of lovely sunsets that'd be a shame to miss. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield, however, straight-up asks if Australian players would be happy for the chance to get some virtual vitamin D every once in a while:

"How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you'd be okay with? Would you be okay with your day/night suddenly changing abruptly? … Getting feedback on that honestly would be helpful."

It's a teeny-tiny sample size, but at least on the r/wowforever subreddit, OCE players are all in favour: "In Retail," writes the author of one thread, "to make ourselves day time we are constantly having potions or toys to shift the sky for us anyway, it's something a lot of us are accustomed to … the shift would only happen when joining a dungeon.

"The gameplay in WoW Forever is a lot slower, you are not joining and leaving groups, getting kicked for your score or your gear level, you spend a significant time in that group so you're not going to be always changing the day and night."

However, as some players note, maybe the problems with the day/night cycle being 24 hours to begin with. Some suggest it exists on a 20-hour cycle, instead—which would gradually shift the time of sunset around so that players with more rigid schedules could experience Forever's different lighting states for themselves.

Which, personally, sounds like the best bet. While I do think it's neat if a game world matches my real-world state—it's always fun to get cosy—I'd rather have variety than consistency, especially when Forever's lighting is such an upgrade.

The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn't a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate.

Such was the case with Blizzard where, as revealed by principal game designer Kris Zierhut in a recent Polygon interview, there was a little cheeky in-fighting over the power of crafted gear. Zierhut, who joined the company in 2005, was reflecting on the corrections the team wasn't allowed to make during the "no changes" era of Classic in 2019. Corrections that are now possible with World of Warcraft: Forever:

"The only design direction that really existed was: Don't change anything … I was there when we made some of these decisions. I had those discussions with Tom and Jeff and Scott. And I knew some places where we made mistakes."

One such mistake, as the article gets into, is the role that crafted gear had in vanilla WoW—this isn't to say that crafted items were never on the list of best in slot recommendations, but professions were actually meant to give you good gear from the word 'go', with a series of clear outlines for how powerful gear could be.

The problem? Some designers bumped up their gear's power on the sly. "Eric Dodds, the crafting designer, was always very responsible and followed the rules, and other people cheated a little bit."

This is, with over 20 years of hindsight and distance, really funny. The concept of a team of developers quietly bumping up their stats like they're in some gear equivalent of The Big Short—yeah man, just give those boots a few more points of stamina. Dodds isn't gonna know a thing, the sweet fool. But we know the future of WoW is dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, baby!

Anyway, having played the beta, I can confirm that this is indeed addressed. There are a lot of really good blue items that're soulbound which you can craft for yourself if you're, say, a blacksmith or a leatherworker—items that absolutely compete with questing and dungeon items. Crafting is absolutely worth it for your levelling journey.

Microsoft has announced a new "voluntary exit offer" aimed at making drastic cuts to its headcount. A CNN report says roughly 60,000 of the company's employees are eligible for the buyout offer, a number that represents roughly 27% of its total full-time workforce, which the company's 2026 annual report says stands at approximately 223,000 people.

"This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs," Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman said in a memo sent to employees.

"The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter. This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program."

The CNN report says Microsoft's buyout offer is part of its effort to balance its spending on AI services, and was preceded by its first-ever voluntary buyout program for employees in the US in April, and then layoffs of roughly 4,800 people in July.

The buyout offer is limited to employees in the US, UK, India, and Canada, and not all employees are eligible: Coleman said participation in the program "varies based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs." Employees who want to take advantage of the buyout will leave the company on December 31, according to the CNN report.

Whether Xbox is one of the participating businesses was not specified—I've reached out to Xbox to ask and will update if I receive a reply.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta is now closed, meaning I can no longer appreciate the pretty god rays in Ashenvale. To soothe this yawning ache in my soul, however, Blizzard has released a fun little stats tracker to tide me over with the knowledge that I apparently jump in MMOs way more than I thought I did.

If you played the beta and sign in, you'll be given a full list of fun little stats including your hours played, where you spent the most time, what killed you the most and, crucially, how often you jumped.

I jumped 7,738 times. And considering I played the beta for 57 hours (putting me in the 69th percentile—nice), that means I averaged around 135 jumps an hour, which is… honestly a lot more than I thought I'd jumped. Now of course, jumping is a time-honoured tradition. Even in a game with a /wave emote, simply jumping around someone to acknowledge that you see them is a far more efficient means of communication.

It also makes you go faster when you're running somewhere. This is absolutely correct and not at all unsubstantiated, don't look it up.

The enemy that killed me the most was the Silithid Swarmer in the southern barrens, which I'm going to chalk down to those bastards being a touch overtuned rather than any skill failing on my part (I do not know why the minions it summons have so much health). I'm also heartbroken to find out that I spent the lion's share of my time in The Barrens, presumably killing lions. If you know anything about the absurdity (and sometimes obscenity) that takes place in Barrens Chat, you'll know why this news upsets me.

Anyway, I'll be able to jump a lot more when Forever goes live come November 4, where I'll be able to relive the experience of fighting 900 other players for a cactus apple on launch day once more. Though if my uncertainties about how its endgame's gonna shake out are true, I'll be thankful for the slower pace.

As reported by The Verge, Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang is leaving the company after three months in the role⁠—though Chiang had previously been a Microsoft employee for 21 years. Xbox had not previously operated with a COO in its hierarchy, and the role was created as part of CEO Asha Sharma's controversial brand "reset."

Sharma announced the personnel change in an October 23 internal memo, and did not offer an explanation for Chiang's departure. "Her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders for now," Sharma wrote. "We'll share more on COO leadership as plans are finalized."

Microsoft shared a boilerplate statement on the departure to Eurogamer: "We don't discuss individual personnel matters. We're grateful for Helen's years of service and wish her well." However, an anonymous source within Microsoft also told Eurogamer that Chiang was "terminated for policy violations."

According to Sharma's original reset announcement, the COO was tasked "with end-to-end P&L [profit and loss] responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services." Given Xbox's current focus on cost-cutting and maximizing revenue, that sounds like a fairly key role in Sharma's project.

It's hard to imagine Chiang's departure having any significant impact on Xbox's strategy or its execution, but it hardly inspires confidence to see such a quick turnaround in an executive-level position, particularly given the overall instability and uncertainty at Xbox.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has just ended, and I'm basically sold, for now. I've had such a good time, in fact, that I dipped at around level 26 on my warrior (and 16 on a Shaman) because I didn't want to spoil or burn myself out before the full thing releases in November and I am consumed in a quest-drunk fugue.

But there is one thing that's rattling around in the back of my mind: This version of WoW is designed to be played perpetually (so in MMO terms, for about 10-20 years, give or take) at the level cap. There won't be any expansions, and the game will continue to expand horizontally.

Which leaves a major question hanging over its endgame. Now, collecting a few interviews together, we've seen a smidge of what that'll look like. In an interview with SkillUp, associate production director Clay Stone contrasts overtly horizontal progression systems (such as the Legacy tree) and gear, which he notes "our intention very much is to try to limit the amount of power progression as we release each raid tier."

Speaking to IGN Nordic, lead game designer Tim Jones says that "we're not going to make a Tier 2 raid without making the loot better … Tier 2 and Tier 3 raids will therefore have better gear, but we're going to be responsible about it. We still want gear from previous raids to remain useful, such as the Onslaught Girdle."

In other words, Forever'll still absolutely have a vertical progression, but your best-in-slot might include gear from all sorts of raids, which… oh, boy.

I'm not going to put a wooden plaque on my chest and say the end is nigh. If Forever's raid tiers only increase your overall item level by a couple of digits, then it really is not that much of a problem. It's essentially playing out that power creep in slow-motion, and if it takes a decade for there to be a numerical difference between, say, tier 1 and a hypothetical set of tier 10 gear that matters for more people than just hardcore min-maxers? It's all gravy, baby.

But as someone with a vested interest in these sorts of systems, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard is just making broad, sweeping assumptions about the way it has to do things at endgame. Forever is going to be purpose-built to keep folks in this rehashed version of classic Azeroth for a very long time. Is it not poison to the entire exercise, then, to purposefully introduce vertical progression at all?

Going up, up, up

I can see a few issues—or let's call them challenges—with this approach. Firstly, three tiers is manageable. But if Forever continues to add raid tiers, then those small incremental increases in gear power slowly stop becoming incremental at all.

Unless a character can set foot in a tier 3 raid comfortably without getting gear from the first two tiers, what you've done is essentially created an attunement questline. That questline being, 'do several tiers of raiding to get up to snuff'.

In a game that resets every expansion, or season, this is a non-issue. But Forever'll have the task of bridging that gap the wider it gets—either with catch-up gear, which kills the older raids dead, or by issuing stat squishes, which never feels good on the other end of things.

The other problem is that, even if you do solve those problems, you've only got so many players. The wider the raiding scene is spread apart over the course of these raid tiers, the harder it becomes to find a group or a guild to do the specific raid that you need.

This can be solved, as these interviews mention, by giving each class useful best-in-slot gear from lower tiers so that they have an incentive to go back and do them. But there's another problem there, too: Characters only have so many equipment slots, and what's considered a BiS getup is dependent on a ton of other difficult-to-tune factors.

My point being: Blizzard really cannot rely on gearing to keep Forever's raiding scene alive in the long run, and yet (at least to start off with) it'll be mimicking old patterns. Just smaller, more controlled, and slower-paced. It's a little like trying to avoid an iceberg by designing the world's slowest boat. Sure, you're avoiding it for longer, but if you don't put a steering wheel on the damn thing you're gonna crash.

This is by far Forever's biggest risk. Playing the game casually is going to rock. Questing is going to rock. Levelling alts is going to rock. Forever has already convinced me of all of these things—but the delicate, finickity balance of a pseudo-horizontal endgame is far harder.

You have to wonder if a developer who has been designing linear progression systems for over two decades is simply finding it hard to break from that ingrained patterning. Jones' words: "We're not going to make a tier 2 raid without making the loot better." They're sticking in my craw, because… well, why not? Why are there tiered raids to begin with?

You could do as Guild Wars 2 does—new classes or skill trees to unlock that require endgame feats, character power for specific zones that'll stay relevant in perpetuity, an equivalent of "masteries". Basically, expanding the definition of what endgame is, and then having raids be a part of that ecosystem, rather than trying to slow-death power creep.

Blizzard's going to have to learn some very hard lessons to get there, though. I think this attitude towards tiers will work absolutely fine for a while, but there will come a point where the developer has to wonder if it wants to keep kicking the can down the road or really, genuinely reinvent what an endgame is in World of Warcraft. And that'll be either very exciting or very, very messy. Perhaps both.

Arkane Lyon may soon be facing closure, according to a new report by French site Le Monde, which says a deadline to find a buyer for the studio will land on November 13, at which point Microsoft could close the studio outright. Microsoft has since extended that deadline by a month, however, so it can continue to pursue alternative options.

Arkane Lyon was caught up in this year's vortex of Xbox layoffs, announced in July, which will see roughly 3,200 people put out of work. Xbox also dumped four studios: Double Fine, Compulsion Games, and Undead Labs all went independent (and almost immediately laid off large numbers of employees) while Hellblade developer Ninja Theory appears to be closing outright. Because Arkane is based in France, Xbox couldn't just drop the hammer on it. Instead, it began a legally-required consultation process "to review potential strategic options."

The Le Monde report says that on July 16, 10 days after the Xbox layoffs were announced, Arkane management informed employees that Xbox intended to close the studio. France's "Florange Law," however, requires companies with more than 1,000 employees who want to close a facility to undertake a search for a buyer first.

The deadline for that requirement in Arkane's case is November 13, after which Xbox will presumably be free to close the studio. That option is definitely on the table: The Le Monde report says documents signed in July and published on a French government website on August 10 specifically reference "the plan for the complete and permanent cessation of the company's activities" and "the subsequent plan for the dismissal of all employees for economic reasons."

The report also says the Printemps Écologique and the Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) unions were seeking to have the November consultation deadline extended to allow for redundancy negotiations and the buyer search to continue, and that has now happened.

"We have extended the consultation period by one additional month as we explore options, including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead," a Microsoft representative told PC Gamer, referring to the Marvel's Blade game currently in development at Arkane. "This is a defined extension, and we remain committed to keeping the Works Council informed throughout the process."

Regarding the documents referencing the planned closure of Arkane should a buyer not be found, the rep said that they "are part of the required consultation process and do not represent a final decision."

The Le Monde report says 217 people are employed by Arkane. Sources close to the studio say that despite being announced three years ago, at the 2023 Game Awards, Marvel's Blade still has years to go before development will be complete.

In the era of speedy solid state drives, I barely remember the last time I saw a loading screen. I say 'barely' because it was, in fact, last night as I waited for Star Wars Zero Company to compile its shaders for a second time following a crash I encountered during the tutorial mission. Some of us are just blessed (read: cursed) like that. Thankfully, more and more games are moving towards pre-compiling shaders.

Case in point, Nvidia just released a fresh GeForce Game Ready Driver that adds support for Advanced Shader Delivery in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day. I've not had a chance to test the Nvidia GeForce 621.01 WHQL driver yet, but journalist Sebastian Castellanos notes "considerably lower system RAM usage" with it installed.

He wrote on X, "In Gears of War: E-Day, [RAM usage is] about 7-8 GB lower in my case. CPU usage is still relatively high though."

To briefly recap, Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft tech that compiles a game's shaders before you ever hit 'play', distributing them during the download process and banishing that pesky in-game load screen. This update brings support to all RTX GPUs, from the 20-series to the 50-series, but the tech is only available for certain games.

Back in May, Microsoft worked with AMD to get Advanced Shader Delivery support in a number of games—but only if you download them via the Xbox app. It's the same story here, with Nvidia writing, "When you download or update a supported title, the exact Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB) tailored to your rig is bundled with your download via the Xbox PC app, meaning ASD-supported games purchased from the Microsoft Store will offer a seamless experience."

Nvidia also breaks down why one cannot simply add Advanced Shader Delivery to every game, and why waiting around for a game to compile shaders is even a thing to begin with. "Modern games rely on tens of thousands of complex shaders," Nvidia explains, "However, generic shader files must be compiled locally into instructions specific to your GPU and driver version, which is a CPU-heavy process that forces players to wait up to 30 minutes every time a game launches or updates.

"Pre-compiling every possible combination on the developer’s side would mean users download terabytes of data with each new game and update, leaving local compilation as the long-standing norm." Nvidia goes on, "Microsoft’s new Advanced Shader Delivery solves this by offloading the heavy lifting to the cloud."

Xbox senior business strategy manager Brandon Stirrup is tired of pussyfooting around about AI: In a thread on X his week, he said that he wants the world to know that Xbox uses it, that he thinks everyone should be using it, and that he believes so strongly in the cause that he's willing to "take the hit" for saying so.

He has since deleted his X account. A source at Xbox tells PC Gamer that Stirrup opted to deactivate the account because of the volume of replies he was receiving.

Stirrup kicked off his thread on October 18 with a simple message saying he'd "vibe coded a bad but improvable game" over two days, although he only "actively" worked on it for about three hours. "I’m telling you I tried it and it’s true…anyone can build a game."

After saying that developers and studios who aren't incorporating AI into their strategies are "planning for a fake future," Stirrup went all in.

"Look if I'm fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. You can make a game with a simple prompt and yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse," he wrote.

"I'm happy to take the hit if it means hundreds at Xbox can stop pretending that they're not using AI. It's time to accept and move forward."

After calling out the game industry and gamers alike for their reluctance to accept "reality," Stirrup stated explicitly that Xbox is "using AI" and then added, "My goal is to get this over with so we can move on as a company, despite the fact that some will persecute me for this: we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026."

There's a growing push for people to simply accept the "reality" of AI: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, for instance, recently said the studio was "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," after which the Epic Games Store ignited a firestorm by saying it "vibe coded" its new launcher. Xbox, now under the leadership of a former AI executive, recently launched a new Xbox Labs program to pursue emerging technologies, which naturally includes AI; even Linux recently dropped its rule requiring AI usage disclosures.

Stirrup himself is an enthusiastic AI evangelist: Last month, he also counselled laid-off employees to use Copilot to catalog their skills and accomplishments at the company.

Ah, zone chats in MMOs—trade and general chats, /shouts and /yells. Intended as a way to render the social glue that binds these videogames together, they are often instead a tableau for (and I say this somewhat affectionately) absolute lunacy, pock-marked with some of the most vile verbiage you'll see online.

Take, for instance, the time-honoured tradition of "Barrens Chat" in World of Warcraft. Combine a big zone that spans around 10-15 levels along with proximity to a major city, and you get a certain kind of verbal hooliganry that, in my journeys through WoW: Forever, I was actually pretty nostalgic for.

I mean, sure, the Chuck Norris jokes have gotten a smidge old. But while collecting Zhevra Hoofs, I would find myself possessed to ask Barrens Chat philosophical questions, and while I never received much in the way of wisdom, responses were always entertaining.

I'm not so fond of trade chat, though, which—at least on the horde side of things—has mostly been dominated by a bot by the name of Margrave Tyrael. Who, I kid you not, was literally sitting there for days spitting out the same automated messages, questioning why Blizzard was deleting beta characters.

I fell for it, at first. Then I started trying to warn people not to fall for it. It didn't work.

Things are no less cursed in my other MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14. I shan't repeat some of the obscenity I've seen in Ul'dah here, but it does always stagger me that the same kind of infectious absurdity can persist, particularly in a videogame whose moderators are altogether far more heavy-handed with banning folks for ill behaviour.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader: Zone chats. Are they a force for good, or ill?

Personally, I'm weirdly fond of them. I don't think these chats are particularly healthy to engage with, and they're certainly not worth arguing with some rando over. But the belligerent nonsense of the masses feels somehow pure. Unsullied by the algorithmic mechanisms that drive us, purposefully, towards enragement and bickering. Instead, we piss people off all by ourselves. And that's kind of beautiful.

Big Walk is the most fun I've had in a co-op game all year, perhaps for a few years; it's certainly at the top of my list for greatest games to play with friends. I'm not the only one who thinks that, just ask about anyone on the PC Gamer team or the other million players who picked the game up in its first week. But not everyone's had the chance to check it out as developer House House confirms that Big Walk still won't be coming to Xbox anytime soon.

"It has always been our intention for Big Walk to be played by groups of friends, and we know that keeping the game off Xbox runs counter to those intentions," House House says. "This decision means that some people will miss out on playing Big Walk with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we're causing. We are disappointed too. We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets."

It's a tough decision but one that ultimately has its merits. Just last year it was revealed in a report that the Israeli military was using customised and specialised subset of Azure, provided by Microsoft, to store data from intercepted telecommunications in Gaza and The West Bank. This led to employee protests and Xbox being added to the BDS boycott targets.

"We've made this decision with the belief that meaningful change can be made in the world," House House adds. "That coordinated collective action can confront even the most powerful interests, and that one day. Palestine will be free.

House House told players curious about its motives to check the BDS campaign's own explainer as to why it is targeting Xbox and Microsoft. It also recommended reviewing "the successes this kind of pressure has already had on Microsoft, and especially, watching this great introductory piece by People Makes Games."

Thousands of layoffs, a couple of booted studios, and a re-organisation of Obsidian away from its newer projects and onto Fallout later, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has reportedly taken to an internal town hall and talked about the importance of new IP.

The transcript, as shared by Windows Central, goes as follows: "We're backing our strongest franchises. I want our great games to become great global billion-dollar franchises. I would also like to see us continue to create enduring new IP. We will not survive if we only revive [sic] on the past. We have to find new ways, and courage, to have invention on new IP, that reaches new sets of audiences."

This is, to put it gently, very confusing. As part of Xbox's "Reset", the studio has done the following:

• Cancelled multiple projects from Obsidian and told it to go make a Fallout game.
• Made Double Fine go independent.
• Did the same to South of Midnight studio Compulsion Games.
• Put its sights on Arkane Lyon.
• Is, at present, in consultation talks regarding Ninja Theory after attempted sales failed.

That doesn't smack to me of the kind of courage and new IP invention that Sharma is talking about—most of these studios had either just made interesting new IPs (South of Midnight) or are in the business of doing cool, inventive new stuff (Double Fine).

From a numbers-driven point of view, were they making bank? Likely not, but the phrase "trying to have your cake and eat it too" exists for a reason. The mouth isn't talking about what the hand is doing—waxing lyrical about courage and new IP while making some of the most cutthroat industry cuts we've seen in an already-dire decade.

The one counterpoint to this is that Xbox has picked up Hideo Kojima's Physint. Which is technically a new IP. Not an IP that Xbox personally funded the most of, and it's being created by a beloved auteur, but hey. There is that.

All of this isn't to say what seems to be Xbox's actual strategy—"backing our strongest franchises", as Sharma puts it—isn't understandable from that same ruthless abacus point of view. But given how sore its existing developers understandably feel from the sword dangling over their heads? I'd leave that town hall very confused.

World of Warcraft: Forever seems, at first blush, like an antidote to the idea of a modern MMO. I see it in the (naturally, traditionally) insufferable trade chat as I potter about on my fury warrior—people turning up their noses at the idea of retail players. Cushioned as they are in their soft little bubbles, ptooie!

But as someone with a 9-5 job and other MMOs I play, I wouldn't particularly describe myself as a "hardcore" WoW player. Competent, sure. I've cleared high-end content in other games (like a Savage tier in FF14). I know how to push buttons and avoid mechanics—and I also like hard games in general. But I'm definitely not on that grindset, particularly not in a beta.

And while I do admire the folks trying to get best-in-slot gear for a month—there's something beautiful and ephemeral about the effort—I do have to wonder: Are we playing the same game? Because WoW: Forever's actually super casual friendly. And if you played it with the right attitude, honestly, Classic was pretty casual friendly, too.

Seasonal grindset

WoW's gone through what I'm going to frame as a water cycle of difficulty—its starting point, back in vanilla, is what we're going to call an "oldschool" mindset. A big, open world that required a lot of patience and cooperation to get around, littered with quests, where getting to level 60 was part of the journey itself. The water in this laborious metaphor.

Then we start moving towards Cataclysm, a halfway state—steam rising up into the clouds. Things are more straightforward, you've got people griping about "welfare epics", the dungeon finder has well and truly obliterated the social contract, people are finding new and inventive ways to insult your mom, and so on. However, you still need a challenge, a carrot on a stick.

Enter borrowed power grinds: Your artifact weapons, your Azerite armors, your Covenants. In a world where everything but the hardest of content comes easy and levelling is a brisk inconvenience, these systems are needed to keep players logging in every day. Eventually these systems go from beloved for their sense of progression to reviled for their meaningless tedium.

And, crucially, for the fact that a missed day, week, or month sets you permanently behind folks who're putting in the hours every single day. The clouds get heavy, resentment brews, and suddenly—bam! Max exodus, pandaemonium! And to fix it, we move into the downpour cycle: A seasonal structure.

Seasons are an antidote to borrowed power. You're no longer permanently left in the dust for an entire expansion, and their short lifecycle allows them to be filled mostly with secondary rewards—there's the gear treadmill, sure, but you can pepper 'em with less impactful things like cosmetics. But they have a catch.

At the end of a season, a lot of your meaningful progress is reset. Seasons are meant to be played very intensely, but there's a large, awkward gap in the middle where joining halfway kind of feels like a waste of time. Not to mention, the same kind of demotivation you had in earlier expansions where all your hard-earned loot was made meaningless by quest greens? That happens three times over, here, between each major patch.

Seasons are designed to appeal to a "casual" player, but they just as often push them away—especially, as retail has experienced in recent months, because they're sometimes flush with so many things to do that it can become deeply overwhelming.

Which is why, I think, WoW: Forever has struck such a chord—because when you put the expectations of that loud, noisy seasonal structure against that oldschool design… which is asking more of you?

Retail, which bombards you with a dozen quests every time you log in—where you might complete five delves, three dungeons, and 10 world quests in an average evening of play? Or Forever, in which you jog around a forest for a bit, collect some pelts, and maybe run Ragefire Chasm if you've got the time?

Sure, when we get to level 60, the time investment for those big raids might start becoming a problem. But the actual experience of levelling in Forever—and, indeed, in Classic—is kind of chill. It was designed to provide you with little snack-sized adventures you could wrap up in 40 minutes, and if you came back a month later? Nothing changed.

What, like it's hard?

It might be easy to be fooled into thinking that, because you might die if you pull more than one monster in WoW: Forever, that it is somehow a more difficult game. I am here to tell you that Forever is not hard. As a matter of fact, Classic isn't hard, either.

I'm not the first person to make this observation, mind, but I'll reiterate it here: The difficulty of this old school design is more a question of patience and knowledge than it is mechanical skill. It's not particularly hard to use a bow to pull a mob away from its friends. It's not very challenging to have to hoof it from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff to learn how to swing a two-handed club.

Even in dungeons, where we might accidentally overpull and wipe a couple of times… c'mon man, let's not kid ourselves. You're spamming frostbolt. I hit Heroic Strike once every couple of business days. For the most part, I'm watching my orc slap a Worgen about, getting a brief and fleeting hit of dopamine whenever I see that dodge button fire up and can fire off an Overpower.

Everything takes a while, sure, and if you mess up, you're punished with a little tedium—and that's one of the big sticking points between a "casual" and a "hardcore" MMO, right? Time investment. But that only really matters if you care about the destination more than the journey.

For the hardcore people who want to hit level 60 in a week, navigating around the patience WoW requires (efficiency, routing, and so on) is a fun puzzle—and hey, more power to 'em! I'm something of a min-maxer myself, when the mood takes me.

But if you really don't give a crap about all of that, then the fact that the game requires a bit of time from you isn't actually an obstacle for a casual player. It's whether or not you get something enjoyable out of a short time investment, and because WoW's designers knew what they were doing 20 years ago? You absolutely still get that. You can turn in a couple quests and get a gear upgrade in an hour or two.

And, as Clay Stone, associate production director, pointed out to me earlier this week: Someone with a ton of responsibilities and obligations outside of a game might actually prefer the slower oldschool pace, anyway. He put it pretty well:

"It could be something with the times that we live in. It could be something with the amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are glaring at me all day, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace."

Which means that, yes—WoW: Forever is casual friendly. Very casual friendly, in fact, in the same way that something like Webfishing or Animal Crossing is casual friendly. If you aren't trying to minmax, what you have is a relaxing (dare I say cosy) videogame where you run around a fantasy world and hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds. Not a bad place to be if you've only got an hour to spare and need to decompress.

World of Warcraft: Forever has me in a chokehold, and it's partially because—well, it's relaxing. As my colleague at PC Gamer so succinctly put it: "Sometimes it's fun to hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds." Despite aping an era seen as more 'hardcore' to some players, Forever's lack of blaring and annoying seasonal grist is honestly refreshing.

Speaking with associate production director Clay Stone about why I'm certainly not the only one feeling that way (given the success of Classic, Season of Discovery, and now Forever's beta), he says it's a question Blizzard's been considering "for a little while.

"We saw, certainly with the success of Classic and the response to that, it was more than just a nostalgic experience for some people. The fact that they didn't leave, you know? They didn't just play for a month. They fell in love with it all over again. Then we saw it again a lot with Hardcore in 2023. All of a sudden, now you had a whole bunch of people who'd never played the game before, but were coming in because of that slower pace, and the fact that Hardcore reinforced that slower pace for them."

But it's more than just about the pace of levelling—it's also about the wider structure, too. Retail WoW is a seasonal game, which certainly has both benefits and drawbacks. One such drawback being that if you miss the start of a season, you're kind of put off the whole exercise:

"We had so many players who didn't even play Season of Discovery simply because it was a Season, even though they had friends who were saying 'this is the best version of World of Warcraft that they've ever made!' But because it was a season, it felt ephemeral, and therefore [people thought] 'I'm not going to jump in'."

Forever, in many ways, feels like an extrapolation of Season of Discovery—the Classic+ of it all—in a package that's not going anywhere. Personally, I fear for my free time, because even knowing my beta character's going to be deleted, I just can't seem to pull myself away. And it is, again, because of that zenlike state—the modern world is busy, which makes hitting satyrs chill by comparison.

"It could be something with the times that we live in," says Stone. "The amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are blaring at me everyday, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace.

"And I think something that we've seen over these past few weeks, which I'm really happy to see, is that players who are coming into WoW Forever, whether they played World of Warcraft before or not, are trying themselves not to rush it. There seems to be a deliberate pushback on this 'go go go' nature."

That's not to say Stone's anti-go go go entirely, though. Even in the beta, I've seen plenty of folks min-maxxing or trying to reach for bis, which has its own charm: "We love them too. We think that they're great, and the endgame is going to be spectacular.

"But we're deliberately trying to build something with WoW Forever that answers that question of… 'Is it too late to start?' With an emphatic 'no' as much as possible." Horizontal progression, baby—it worked out for Guild Wars 2, and I'm excited to see Blizzard take a crack at it as well.

Questing through the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, I've been impressed by just how much has been layered on top of the game's Classic world—new quests and new dungeons, designed to slot in seamlessly to the more oldschool playstyle without causing too much friction. It's an impressive magic trick, and one I'm really excited to get stuck into properly come November.

Talking to associate production director Clay Stone, Forever initially had far more humble beginnings: "It's been an evolution, and I think that's probably pretty clear from all the classic titles we've done so far in the level of experimentation and breaking away from #NoChanges at the beginning."

While Mists of Pandaria Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic added small changes and adjustments, Stone says the ball really got rolling with Hardcore and Season of Discovery:

"Obviously, with that, it was a wonderful testing ground for us to be able to see what the limits were and what what players would accept as [something that] does or does not fit into the space, how classes could function, and certainly for us as a team, wonderful opportunities for us to be able to learn how to develop things or new content in that vanilla era space."

Season of Discovery was tremendously successful: "The response to it blew us away … Shipping that in November of 2023, and then seeing that immediate response to it was incredible. And that's really when the discussions began about, 'Hey, what what does a version of this look like that is not pitched as a season to players?'"

Said version apparently snowballed the more excited the developers became, says Stone: "There is a version of WoW Forever that really is that version of Vanilla with just a couple slight class changes. We give paladins a taunt, and presto change-o, you got Classic Plus or WoW forever … Our original pitch internally was: We'll do four new dungeons, and the next thing we know, we're doing six, and the next thing we know, we're doing nine.

"That appetite amongst the team, and much broader in Blizzard, to be able to deliver something much more substantial than perhaps even what our players were expecting, that that built and that that grew … The actual scope of what we're ultimately delivering with launch was something that built up over time."

Which was satisfying for the developers when the floodgates opened for the beta last month: "There were players that perhaps expected us to announce something much smaller, but I believe, at least based on the response that we've seen, we've exceeded a lot of players' expectations in terms of the overall scope of what it is that we're delivering, which has been really exciting for us."

Minecraft has a new boss: Maria Angelidou-Smith, who is joining Microsoft from Reddit, where she spent not quite a year as the platform's chief product officer.

"We wanted someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical, and who understands how creators, product, technology, and monetization come together," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said. "Maria brings a rare combination of those experiences. She spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups used by more than 1.8 billion people each month, as well as Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization.

"She later led product and technology at Personio and served as Chief Product Officer at Reddit, another of the world’s largest community platforms. She has built products used by billions of people and led product and engineering organizations through significant growth and change."

Angelidou-Smith also has "a respect for what makes Minecraft special," Sharma said. "Her first priority will be learning from the teams and communities who know Minecraft best."

More big news out of Xbox today: A new division called Xbox XP will take the lead on "film and television, consumer products, strategic partnerships, and live experiences."

As detailed on today's announcement, here's what that breaks down to:

• XBOX PICTURES: Bringing our worlds and characters to new audiences through film, television, and other forms of linear storytelling.
• XBOX PRODUCTS: Creating products that are authentic to the fandom that allow fans to celebrate and express the franchises they love.
• XBOX PLACES: Bringing communities together through live events, immersive experiences, attractions, broadcasts, and destinations.
• XBOX PARTNERSHIPS: Working with creators, brands, and communities to develop new experiences, sponsorships, and brand partnerships.

Xbox XP will be headed by Kayleen Walters, who previously spent a couple years as president of Minecraft studio Mojang and before that spent close to a decade in different brand and "franchise development" roles at Microsoft. Prior to that she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm, finishing her time there as vice president of franchise marketing and integrated planning.

"XP is a play on 'experience points'," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma explained in a separate message, "and formalizes four investment areas for us: Xbox Pictures for film and television adaptations; Xbox Products for licensing and merchandise; Xbox Partnerships for sponsors and brand partners; and Xbox Places for our marquee broadcast and in-person events, theme parks, and other location-based experiences.

"Our franchises can mean more to people than the time they spend playing them, and Kayleen knows how to build those experiences with the industry without losing what made people care about the franchise in the first place."

A Minecraft Movie was a massive hit and I have no doubt the sequel will be too, and it's understandable that Microsoft would want a bigger piece of that action—and to leverage it across other brands too, although how many of them have that same potential is a big question.

But coming while Xbox is in the midst of laying off thousands of people who make the actual games that serve as the foundation of these franchises? The business behind Xbox XP may be solid, but it's not a great look.

If you want to make money in World of Warcraft, well… I cannot rightly say that we at PC Gamer are any good at it, based on the evidence given to us—but we are at least inventing new ways of money-making. And isn't invention the mother of necessity? Or was it the other way around? Who cares, we've got pockets to line.

I wrangled two of my erstwhile co-workers, Fraser Brown and Joshua Wolens, to see which of us was the best at making money in World of Warcraft: Forever's beta. Which felt like a fair testing ground, given both how populated it is and how un-inflated its new, fledgling economy would be. Here were the rules:

• We started as level 1 horde characters.
• We each had a nest-egg of 20 silver to get us started.
• Starting from our spawning points into Azeroth, we had to make as much gold as we could in two hours.
• There were some additional rules about auction house postings that didn't become relevant.
• No really. I spent a lot of time thinking about them and their implications for the challenge. None of us bothered.
• I'm definitely not mad about it.

Each of us entered with a different strategy. Well, two of us did (more on that later) to try and make the most bank. I, the Orc of Wisdom, would weaponise my 15+ years of roleplay experience to trade knowledge with the masses. Josh, the Majestic Celebrity, would try to wield his status as a games journalist and very famous person to his benefit—hamstrung only by the fact he had never actually played much World of Warcraft.

There was also Fraser, as Boeuf Beef, who did a secret third thing. I'll let him enlighten you about his masterful machinations myself.

This is a story of wisdom, courage, and bull-headed bravery—and, more importantly, it's a story of how those virtues could be mercilessly weaponised to siphon as much money from the economy as possible.

I've been roleplaying in MMOs for about 16 years—it is, in fact, what got me into writing—so rather than simply beg the masses for hand-outs, I would use it. I am, first and foremost, an entertainer.

I assembled a document full of snippets of wisdom—some reworded adages and sayings, others my original work—and decided to leverage them around WoW: Forever's new campfire feature. For those not in the know, anyone with a cooking skill can set down a campfire, around which may be set various fixtures. Sit around the fire for a minute, and you'll get buffs.

This made for a pretty cheap initial investment of seven silver and 66 copper: Enough to train my cooking skill as well as some simple wood and tinder. All of which was available on the jog up to Razor Hill, which was very pretty. An auspicious sign, I thought, for my journey.

With the ability to make campfires in hand, I parked myself somewhere people would be forced to interact with me by game mechanics alone: The top of a zeppelin tower. Being the only convenient route to the Undercity, home to the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon everyone was keen to try, passengers would be forced to stand around while I gave them my spiel.

Originally, I was going to set a static price for my wisdom—but at the last minute, I decided to change my tact to simply requesting whatever people could spare. I am, after all, a humble old orc simply looking for a hot meal and a place to stay. Durotar nights get so very cold.

And, listen—I'm guilty of my fair share of cynicism of the MMO populace, but the two hours I spent up here were nothing short of delightful as the WoW community played ball. Here's a short-list of the characters I encountered:

• A druid, who could not give me money, but did give me meat.
• An absolute mensch who gave me one entire gold piece.
• An elf who was very mean to me, but hit my ramblings about the vigors of youth with "And the daftness of age is clear upon your face", which is unfortunately a solid dunk.
• An undead named Glenda, perhaps my one true love, who replenished the fire for me when it ran out.
• A tauren who gave me 5 silver, then whispered to me that he didn't want wisdom, he just wanted to tip me for my good roleplay.
• An orc rogue who straight-up mugged me (note: threateningly opened a trade window). She got so into the RP that she panicked when the zeppelin was leaving and managed to fall off the tower instead.
• A cat burning themselves on my fire. TheOrc OfWisdom said this was concerning, to which someone else quipped: "Don't worry. They've got nine lives."
• An undead who told me I couldn't park here, and that it was "time to move". Then then proceeded to bust it down. TheOrc OfWisdom took a break to bust it down with them.

I had a lovely old time—and one that was very profitable. My final score—minus my initial silver stipend—can be found at the bottom of this article.

I don't know what WoW is. I don't know what my abilities are. I don't know where this zeppelin is taking me and I don't know what the buttons in my hotbar do. I don't know what any of this shit is and I'm fucking scared.

What I do know: I'm incredibly important. My name is on something like 68 million articles on PC Gamer dot com, making me a rough hybrid of Scarlett Johansson and George Herbert Walker Bush in fame and significance. Play to your strengths, they always told me, so off I went to ignore circa 99% of WoW's actual mechanics in favour of simply impressing my incredible renown on other players and asking them for money.

My other strength is slander, so at the same time as I harangued people about my own importance, I also let them know that my two opponents were dreadful. Just utter bastards.

This worked alarmingly well. Did you know you can just ask people for money and get it? I might try this out in real life. Just a few minutes in, my very first beg netted me some silver pieces and well-wishes.

The issue was not the effectiveness of my tactics but my complete unfamiliarity with the videogame 'World of Warcraft'. I quickly realised that I had genuinely no idea what the relative value of these coins were. Is a silver piece nothing? Is it a billion dollars? Am I the richest man in MMO history already?

Likewise, simple mechanics hamstrung me. Did you know to actually get into The Undercity there's a whole elevator system? I didn't! So instead I just sort of roamed around the top part for a while, unsure what kind of zone I was even in. This was, on reflection, not a lucrative use of my time.

The highlights of my adventure? I'll be honest, I mostly just had a pleasant time ambling from town to town and asking people to give money to the world's most important man (me). This did backfire once, though.

In dialogue with one player, Zippie Skadoo, I referred to him as a "good man" (or maybe "good friend," I forget). It turns out this was not acceptable. Zippie Skadoo quickly educated me that he was, in fact, bad to the bone, on the verge of going berserk, and might be inclined to assault me.

So that could have gone better.

Elsewise? I reckon I could have won this thing had I not wasted time in A) The Undercity and B) taking a boat or something to another continent and getting repeatedly killed by panthers for a bit.

Lessons for next time, I suppose, when Majestic Celebrity once again graces… Azeroth(?) with his presence.

I've been playing WoW off and on since 2004. So you'd think I'd find this challenge a doddle. Nope! This was, and I am not prone to exaggeration, the worst two hours of… if not my entire life, at least this month.

OK, so, I didn't have a plan. Or rather, my plan was to tell everyone I had an amazing plan, in the hope that an amazing plan would just pop into my brain. It did not. What actually happened was I rushed headfirst into insanity. It's a good thing the video accompanying this is short, because I really don't want the world to see the extent of my madness.

At one point, I just started making animal noises.

After failing to prepare a plan, I decided to simply skin a bunch of critters and make money that way. Perhaps selling them to generous players. Easy, right? Obviously not, or I'd still have my sanity. I have listened back to my full recording and plucked out some choice quotes.

• "I'm flagging and it's only been half an hour."
• "What am I doing with my life?"
• "I feel time just slipping away."
• "My screams of anguish have woken both my dogs."
• "I am so angry."
• "I am filled with rage."
• "I am filled with rage. I am filled with rage."
• "This is my supervillain origin story."
• "This is Hell. This is Hell."
• "I have lost my mind."

So, yeah, I had a great fucking time. And then I had to listen to my two-hour descent into madness. Which, let me tell you, was not fun! I got to relive the experience of wasting time and money when I should have been making money.

At one point, I spent about 20 minutes trying to complete a single quest, which I should add only promised a reward of two silver. I never really dipped into WoW Classic, so I forgot how unforgiving OG WoW was. I'm not used to being a weak baby who will die as soon as a large bird or boisterous pig-man so much as looks at me. And I was already tired and annoyed by this point. I could have moved on. But I was determined to complete this stupid bloody quest. And I did it! I got my two silver.

Why was I even taking quests on!? I should have just stuck to murdering and skinning critters.

Anyway! I had a horrible time, made less than 10 silver, and because I'm not a very nice man, the knowledge that Josh and Harvey had a lovely time only makes me feel worse.

The final scores...

At the end of our two-hour stint, we'd made a combined two gold, 49 silver, and 20 copper, after subtracting our 20 silver stipends. Which isn't exactly that much for a combined six hours of work, but given we were all starting at level one? I'm not that upset.

It's somewhat telling that Josh managed to produce roughly the same result by simply telling folks that he was trying to beat "two bastards" in a competition. Still, I chalk this up to WoW's community being refreshingly funny and willing to play ball: I had a lot of folks whispering to me during my wise vigil with kind words, which honestly brightened up my time as TheOrc OfWisdom considerably.

What did we learn? I think, unfortunately, that begging in an MMO is surprisingly effective, provided you're insightful or "famous" enough. Maybe stick to selling copper bars, or something.

We still don't have a PC launch date for Grand Theft Auto 6, or even official confirmation that it's ever going to come our way, even though we all know it is. But for one brief shining moment, fans on PC had hope that maybe they'd be able to backdoor their way into the cool kids club—that despite the absence of a PC version, they might be able to play it on November 19 anyway, without having to shell out for a new game console.

Alas, the word has come down from on high, and that word is: "No."

The ball got rolling when The Verge reported on October 6 that Xbox had secured the exclusive right to deliver GTA 6 via streaming platforms—that is, Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that would presumably make the game playable on PC, as Xbox Cloud Gaming is accessible through any PC rocking Windows 10 version 20H2 or later.

You'd almost certainly have to sign up for Game Pass Ultimate to access it, and you'd need a better internet connection than mine to make it work, but even so: Grand Theft Auto 6, on PC, on launch day. Holy guacamole!

Alas, it is now time to lock eyes with the metaphorical skull in your hand and ponder that dream, that faraway hope, and all that has brought them low—which in this case is Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball, who delivered the bad news on X.

"While the excitement for GTA 6 and Xbox is great to see, it has also led to some misreporting," Ball wrote. "We are looking forward to launching GTA 6 on Xbox November 19, though the game will not be streaming exclusively or to PC."

That's some real infinite jest, alright! Which I think is applicable to the whole situation: I actually buy the argument that it's better to develop a game of this scale within the constraints of consoles and then expand to the greater (and more unpredictable) power of PC later, and I have no doubt that Rockstar and Take-Two also enjoy the tighter constraints on the user end of things too: You're not going to find shenanigans like Joshua Wolens' effort to mod GTA 5 into GTA 6 in the worst way possible on a PlayStation 5, after all.

But I also think PCG's Ted Litchfield hit the nail on the head with his analysis: "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." There really is no dip like the double dip.

Anyway, some of the responses to Ball's message complain that the message is vague or ambiguous, although I'm not sure how: There are questions, sure, most obviously how Xbox will stream GTA 6 without making it accessible to PCs that can normally access streamed Xbox games. It's a fair point, and I suppose if one has an inflated sense of optimism and squints at the statement just right, a faint glimmer of that hope might remain. But to me, 'will not be streaming to PC' seems pretty cut-and-dried: Our long, wintry wait will continue.

What's the most stunning revelation in this Gears of War prequel? Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover. So E-Day contains at least one literal leap forward for the franchise. Shame it's trapped in a slog of a campaign that's otherwise anything but.

But before I moan about that, plenty of good news first. Gears has never felt better to play. These third-person cover shooters have always been a blast when they're working, and a miserable swearing fit when you dodge roll into certain death instead of snapping into cover like you wanted to. Again.

That nonsense has finally been excised, mostly, thanks to slightly more acrobatic characters and some wise button remapping. It's amazing what a difference sticking run on L3 and giving climb its own designated button makes.

Gears of War's biggest haters are liable to characterise its cover-shooting as a dull game of whack-a-mole. Perhaps on Normal difficulty, but Hardcore is where the experience sings. Here, staying in the same spot of cover is rightfully punished. You've got to keep gaining better ground, constantly weighing up the risks of lining up a sniper shot, a chainsaw insta-kill, or making a desperate dash for cover. It's a turn-based tactics shooter with a missing pause button. There's a reason that it translated so smoothly to a tactics spin-off.

E-Day introduces new weaponry that makes cowering in cover harder than ever. It loves a blast of acid, this game, either delivered from a massive evil frog or a new gun that shotguns it at you. Devastating, but a loving kiss on the cheek compared to the Goreshot, a grappling hook only interested in grappling your torso from your body. So gloriously over-the-top, it almost makes up for the insta-kill tedium from the elite enemy who wields it.

That stuff's good, but it's the renovations to the old guard that stand out. The spike trap now opens with a hugely satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk as its horrible insides prepare themselves for a good gouging. The explosive arrow-firing torque bow gets a great glow up—the sound design as it finds its target is wonderful, practically a doomsday drum roll, so good I still enjoy it even when a locust is aiming it at me. And if I'm ever called upon to assassinate God, this game's sublime sniper rifle is what I'm reaching for.

So if the gunplay's a treat and the core combat never better, what's the problem? Well, almost everything else, unfortunately.

Dis-may

E-Day is a prequel, referring to the fateful day when the locust got bored of living underground and burst free from the surface to say a very messy hello. This is covered in the opening cutscene of the original Gears of War. And if you're wondering what insights E-Day has that weren't covered in said cutscene, same here.

The game opens with Marcus Fenix and Dom 'boy isn't it great that my wife and kids are alive' Santiago. Instead of the cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran of the original Gears, here Marcus is… a cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran. Oh.

Discovering Marcus was once a flamboyant drag queen who was changed forever by E-Day into the man we know today was probably too much to hope for. But the fact he's essentially exactly the frikkin' same is the first alarm bell that this prequel is struggling to justify its own existence.

Once the locust arrive, E-Day tries cosplaying as Resident Evil for a bit, complete with a trip through the panicking city to the police station. Some of these horror moments work. The drone gets an excellent introduction, though not so much for the poor sap stuck in the interrogation room with it. Other attempts at horror atmosphere are hilariously clumsy. I find the blood-soaked helmet of a transit worker, and the game immediately shatters any sense of foreboding with text popping up saying 'Bloody Transit Worker's Helmet Found!' Er, hooray?

The game then has some dumb fun giving little origin stories to its iconography—chainsaws being attached to machine guns! Grenades being tossed in emergence holes! Problem is, by the start of Act 2, you have the weaponry, armor, and the squad. At which point E-Day just becomes standard Gears of War again. You explore the ruined city (not open-world, more wide-ish linear) with goals never more complicated than 'shoot those locusts' or 'survive this wave of locusts' or 'why haven't you shot those locusts yet?'

Gears 5 understood the value of variety. It had sections where you had to stealth around a mad scientist's factory to stealth kill infected robots. Or ride a skiff down an icy mountain. Or fight an enemy on the stage of a Hamilton-inspired musical which starts rotating at the worst moment possible (play Gears 5—it's one of the best 7/10s ever).

True, not all of Gears 5's ideas worked. But I wanted a sequel that improved upon them, not a regression that believes the only thing you should ever be doing in one of these games is endlessly pulling the trigger. It's just slightly remixed combat encounters all the way down. Battle a giant frog and several snipers! OK, now two frogs, one sniper, and several shotgunners! OK, OK, now three giant spiders that fire insta-kill rockets, and loads of grunts, and the last checkpoint was seven minutes back! …Hey, why are you suddenly aiming at me?

Is the shooting strong enough to sustain this? Yeah, just, though it does get exhausting. It's an action movie with everything ripped out that isn't bullets going into bastards. The 20+ hour campaign is also waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is (well, aside from two crap shooting-from-a-turret-inside-a-helicopter bits, but I was planning on being nice and not bringing those up).

Moderate improvements

New for E-Day are mod slots for your weapons and armour. Mods include less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, etc. Not as useless and incremental as the crap you get in [insert whichever live service shooter you currently have the most beef with here], but it's borderline and hard to get excited about. Far better is the gizmo that can send out rippling shockwaves that stun enemies, perfect for a chainsawin'. I found a mod for it that also sets enemies on fire. Lovely.

You get these mods for completing sidequests or finding them in cases. But E-Day is so terrified of you missing anything that tiresome all-caps text saying HARD CASE NEARBY blazes across the screen. And the location of the case is immediately added to your map. Oh and if you activate whatever this game's version of Eagle Vision is called, we'll show you exactly where the case is. Ugh.

Gears 5—which I promise to stop swooning over soon—did all this so much more elegantly. You had a robot companion with abilities that were upgraded with currency you found through exploring. No map markers, screaming text, or other BS that belongs in the Ubisoft dark ages. You were actually incentivised to explore properly, with any world-building or character moments you encountered along the way a nice bonus.

E-Day's a less interesting place to explore regardless. A city in ruin is one of gaming's most overdone settings, so you really have to pull out the stops to make it interesting, like in The Last of Us 2, or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil Requiem. Otherwise, seen one ruined city block, seen 'em all, like in the second half of Resident Evil Requiem (at least E-Day is less grey and brown, shockingly).

Other frustrations just feel like they shouldn't be happening in the seventh game of a series. There's a special place in hell for games that put checkpoints before long dialogue exchanges that you can't skip through. Normal difficulty still isn't challenging enough. Opt for hardcore and you get the compelling challenge, but also have to swallow the occasional ocean of stale piss, with boss health bars so overlong I'm amazed they fit on the screen.

And how can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies? There's no satisfaction in emptying clip after clip into a monster, not feeling like you're having any impact whatsoever until it finally falls over. Do I actually love E-Day's sniper rifle, or is it the only gunshot against the more bullet-spongy cretins that feels like it has any kick?

A new enemy at least has the decency to have a nice big eye that it doesn't like being shot in, which means I actually feel the impact of my gunfire. This thing is called… actually, to try and describe it myself when I can let the game do that in the following screenshot would be like snatching the pen from Shakespeare. My apologies. Take it away, E-Day:

Thank you, Lucas. God this game is infuriating. Great shooting trapped in a horribly overstretched campaign, telling a story that clearly didn't long to be told. It feels more like Microsoft taking a page out of the Jack Donaghy playbook and tapping a sign saying 'make it 2007 again'. Marcus is gonna have to open Gears 6 with one Hell of a drag show to make up for this.

Multiplayer saves the E-Day

Multiplayer is a less qualified success. The 4-v-4 modes are great if you just want to jump right in and quickly discover that you should have been practicing with the shotgun a lot more during the campaign. Conquest is all about taking and holding a certain section of the map, Demolition is all about triggering and protecting a bomb somewhere the opposing team would rather you didn't, and so on.

Nothing revolutionary, but all executed well, and even fun when you get matched against bots. I like how the new jump button means leaping over insta-death chasms is now an option. Which The Coalition have celebrated by sneaking in a bunch of insta-death chasms that are easy to miss, the cads.

Horde Siege is more ambitious as it takes advantage of the city's massive scope. Classic horde saw you setting up defenses like spike traps and turrets before waves of enemies came to tear them down. That's still true here, except now that Horde is basically open-world, there's a lot of commuting between the actual wave-battling bits. But where that padded out an irritatingly wheel-spinny campaign, it works here because the city feels much more alive and spontaneous.

Optional objectives with tasty rewards constantly pop-up, tempting you and your team to hunt down a massive enemy, or carry a core across the city that essentially leaves one of you unarmed. Even if you ignore these because you've unfortunately matched with the dullest squad alive, locusts can still suddenly appear in big numbers at any moment. Not so often that it becomes as exhausting as the campaign, but enough to give even a long encounter-free trudge across the city constant tension.

You're on a squad of four, and there are two other squads out there, too. Occasionally you might cross paths and can join them for a bit of shooting, or maybe they'll save you. There's not much incentive to do so—besides, y'know, compassion or whatever—but it's still a fun touch.

Horde Siege is a fun, smart evolution of what came before, and an experience that tries to expand what Gears can be. It'll still be worth playing whether The Coalition decides to build on it or not. I just wish it didn't feel like it was living in such a separate silo to a flawed solo adventure that's disappointingly conservative in comparison.

A new map-viewing tool of the WoW: Forever client has just dropped, and this thing is so gosh darn nifty. It's not perfect, and it can take a while for textures to stream in, but as long as you have the files on your computer, this map viewer lets you zip around Azeroth with your mouse wheel like an omniscient god. Please enjoy me marvelling at this fact.

"Xbox is not for sale," CEO Asha Sharma said in a new interview with the New York Times. "We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that."

Sharma's statement would seem to refute prior reports that a sale of Xbox is being considered, but it does leave open the possibility of other movement in that direction, including spinning it off or entering into a joint venture with other partners. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also recently implied that some kind of major structural rework could be in store, saying that after "streamlining" Xbox—a euphemism for laying off thousands of people and closing, dumping, or merging numerous studios—"we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people." What that model will look like will presumably become clearer once the cuts are finished: Announcing the most recent cuts, Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the "reset" (another euphemism) that began in July is now about three-quarters complete.

WoW: Forever's been a great time so far, partially because the old-school design of it has forced me to actually group up with strangers. But there's just one problem: My working memory is shot from being a very tired millennial, and I can't possibly remember all these names.

Enter Grayvves' "I Remember" AddOn, which has now been ported over to WoW Forever. This lets you assign a quick note and a smiley, neutral, or frowny face to anyone you meet. Not as commitall as a friend request, but robust enough to make you seem like an attentive person with a good memory.

What do you mean, "it looks like a social credit system." I don't know what you're talking about.

I've been very much enjoying the World of Warcraft: Forever beta—and I will be the first to cop to the fact I think it's recapturing a lot of the essence of an oldschool MMO that we lost. Tongue in my cheek, I'll even join in with the "reject modernity" crowd. But, crucially, I'll be doing so as a joke.

I've noticed, skimming my hand across the surface of the discourse, a propensity for folks to be getting up in arms about which version of their favorite MMO was better and to do so loudly, passionately, and obnoxiously. These factions stand divided:

My heart lies with the Coalition, sure. I think Forever is one of the most exciting things to happen in the MMO space in years. I have a fondness for the old tab-targeting techniques of older MMOs and a resentment for the dodge roll, and I much prefer the slow-paced explorative nature of Forever to something like Retail, which has, I admit, temporarily lost me with its seasonal structure.

But I am also a lover of variety. My favourite games range from hopecore science fiction RPGs like Citizen Sleeper to basically every Soulslike I can get my hands on. I adore silly "friendslop" games and the hope-crushing simulator that is a MOBA, which Deadlock has pulled me kicking and screaming back into. Point being: I think there's a space for everyone.

Rose-tinted Warpaint

I don't think the design of retail World of Warcraft is inherently bad, it's just different. I think Midnight has got a lot of things right—player housing is an absolute win, the game's increasing alt friendliness suits what it has become, the lack of mandatory borrowed power chores is nice, and I like being able to rinse through my Delves and Preys and zip around on my flying mount. It's frictionless, easy, keyboard-smashing fun.

Sometimes I'm in the mood to mindlessly do a bunch of low-stakes content. That mood hasn't taken me lately, but I'm not naive enough to believe it'll never take me at all.

Similarly, I also enjoy how Forever shrugs off those systems in favour of their design opposites: No overstimulating heaps of new patch-specific systems to partake in, no chore lists full of faction grinds, no dungeon finder. You log in, and you plod along with your playlist of choice in a world filled with players, and you do some quests. Maybe you find a group to clean out RFC with. You meet an undead paladin called Glinda Smlinda around a campfire. That's it, that's the game.

The issue I have is when this preference is put forward as a matter of moral imperative—the idea that modern WoW is somehow this corrupt, anti-gamer monolith that must be wrangled back to the way things were. I will say it plain: This shit sucks, it's annoying and it's subtractive and it's exhausting.

From a personal perspective, it's pretty unhealthy to make an actual identity and personhood out of a videogame you play, and it's certainly not subversive or impactful to make yourself a staunch defender of the old ways online. Because the truth is, Blizzard couldn't give a toss if we like modern WoW or not—it's all umbrella'd under the same price point, we're all pulling from the same buffet.

The community taglines the company incorporates ("putting the 'war' back in 'Warcraft', for example")? That's kayfabe, to get you to spend money. It's not part of a culture shift, Blizzard's just doing what it's proven profitable to do after years of safe success with Classic and Season of Discovery. And it'll keep running Retail WoW because guess what, that's also been very profitable too! Folks still play it.

From a pettier perspective, and this is just my personal exhaustion: It's console wars. We're doing console war stuff. Except, rather than doing them with blocks of hardware that can at least be attributed to different experiences on the whole, we're arguing about different versions of the same video game. Why?

More to the point, Forever itself is kind of a counterargument to the idea that these versions of WoW have nothing to learn from each other. What's made it interesting is how it's reinterpreting oldschool MMO design with just a few sprinkles of convenience. I do not blame people for being in love with the past, but we can't be trapped in it forever, but saber-rattling and name-calling over it? We shouldn't do that to ourselves, or each other. We should (and I know this is a vain hope) be normal on the internet.

Speaking on the FRVR Podcast last week, former Bethesda writer and designer Kurt Kuhlmann was asked about the concept of "Dragon Breaks"—time getting all weird on account of magic and stuff⁠—in Elder Scrolls lore. The biggest Dragon Break as far as Elder Scrolls fans are concerned: "The Warp in the West," the series' post-facto determination that every ending of The Elder Scrolls Chapter 2: Daggerfall happened at the same time. On account of magic and stuff, you see.

I love this story: Simple serendipity, a workplace oopsie, accidentally setting in motion the continuity and story beats of a billion-dollar franchise. Kirkbride is memetically famous among Elder Scrolls fans as a boundary-pushing loremaster who added a lot of weird flavor to Morrowind, so his affinity for the timey-wimey, fucky-wucky potential of the Dragon Break absolutely scans.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like the series timeline Kuhlmann mentioned was ever publicly available⁠—this must have been an internal lore bible sort of thing. While TES Arena and Daggerfall designer Ted Peterson would write the in-game book, "The Warp in the West," for Oblivion, Kirkbride and Kuhlmann appear to have introduced the concept in Morrowind with the books "Where Were You When the Dragon Broke" and "Dragon Break Re-Examined" respectively.

Kuhlmann noted in the podcast that he attempted to introduce more grounded, historiographic ambiguity with his treatment: What if the confusion was a matter of bias, transcription, and record-keeping, rather than metaphysical forces? Of course, Dragon Break Re-Examined also deliberately references events in Morrowind's future as the past, implying the skeptical book itself is yet another example of timey-wimey shenanigans⁠. An all-timer bit, for my money.

Elder Scrolls aside, the problem of preserving and representing RPG choice across multiple games in a series is something no studio has managed to fully "solve," if such a thing is even possible. I've always appreciated Bethesda's "fuck it, we ball" approach to the continuity with stuff like The Warp in the West. See also how Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2 almost completely contradicts the story of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (sans Original Sin) from eight years prior. I love RPGs so much, man.

The facts:

• Hideo Kojima's return to stealth-action, Physint, is no longer a PlayStation joint, and Microsoft picked up the ball.
• It still has big Hollywood talent, with Bill Skarsgård in the lead role.
• That's literally it.

What people are saying:

Alright, so what does that mean?

• Both Corden and Schreier's sources suggest Kojima Productions is working on a tighter budget with Microsoft than it was with Sony
• It's unclear how much had already been spent on Physint, and how much of the work on it is transferable—Kojima Productions presumably no longer has access to Sony's proprietary Decima Engine, for example.
• GamesRadar quoted a rumored budget for Death Stranding 2 "somewhere between $150-200 million."
• Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, with a leaked budget of $300 million, is widely agreed to have been an expensive gamble for PlayStation.
• Scooping Kojima was a PR victory for Xbox amid its unpopular, studio-killing "Reset," but its continued financial woes would give them incentive for doing it on the cheap.
• Whether Sony pulling out was a surprise as Kojima says, or preceded by months of negotiations, as alleged by Bloomberg, Kojima would not have been negotiating from a place of strength with Microsoft—his studio's health and employees' livelihoods were on the line.
• None of this strikes me as conducive to making a good videogame under healthy, happy working conditions.
• I really stuck on Schreier's phrasing, "certain A-list actors attached," regarding Physint. The game's first public image of its protagonist looks way more like Robert Pattinson than Bill Skarsgård. Maybe my hopes for Pattinson playing John Physint weren't just projection on my part...

Gears of War: E-Day is almost here, but that doesn't mean its developers have been spared in Microsoft's latest wave of layoffs as part of the Xbox "reset." While The Coalition, the studio currently working on the Gears of War series, was not mentioned by name in Matt Booty's "Continuing Our Reset" blog post, story director Juan Vaca announced on LinkedIn that he is now looking for work.

"I am part of this round of Microsoft layoffs and am open to new opportunities in games/film/tv," he wrote. "If your team needs a director/storyteller please reach out." It is perhaps especially galling given that Gears of War: E-Day went gold just days before the layoffs were announced, with a full release planned for Oct. 6.

It has felt increasingly like there is simply no amount of success, sales, acclaim, or back-breaking work you can demonstrate in the games industry to avoid some pencil pusher's job cut scythe. It's not just Microsoft's massive rounds of layoffs—take a studio like Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor, which furloughed most of its staff despite glowing reviews and over a million copies sold. This situation with Vaca echoes when, last year, a writer on Apex Legends was laid off just one day after a character she spent a year writing was unveiled.

For a primer on all the most reliable ways you can get laid off in the games industry, check out our guide on that very phenomenon. It is a sobering time to wish you could cheer on the medium's every step forward, given that the reward for doing the work seems to be a kick out the door.

The latest stage of Xbox's delicately named "reset" arrived last Tuesday—but its impact on World's Edge Studio, the developer now behind the Age of Empires series, was only briefly mentioned in Xbox CCO Matt Booty's announcement. On sites like resetera and LinkedIn, former employees of the RTS developer have shared that it was hit especially hard.

"What a morning," said former World's Edge creative director Adam Isgreen on resetera, posting under the verified account name Tempus Chaoti. "FYI World's Edge was not spared completely—just under half the studio was let go—myself included. Been fun, y'all!" This is in addition to the studio now answering to Activision alongside Sea of Thieves developer Rare.

Andrew Martz, former senior software engineer at World's Edge, posted on LinkedIn adding that "as part of that reorg, our next project was canceled and a large chunk of our studio was laid off. I was part of that layoff."

Isgreen also had more to say on LinkedIn, reflecting on his time working on the RTS series: "I didn't think I'd be working on RTS games again years after their first 'heyday,' but am I ever proud of what our studio team and partners were able to do with the series and juice the genre's return. I think the fans would agree (mostly!) that we delivered the goods for all of 'em."

While layoffs are always devastating to the affected workers, this latest round of calls from Xbox is especially baffling, and Microsoft's track record of destruction goes far beyond the games industry, it's still alarming how little regard for this medium's history has been shown in this "reset." This situation with World's Edge Studio echoes the company's treatment of id Software and countless other teams earlier this year.

The Elder Scrolls Online's developers have had a rough couple of years, starting with the scrapping of Project Blackbird in July 2025, which also led to 62 employees being laid off. Then, in July of this year, Xbox's reset tore into the studio's numbers, with a whopping 213 employees laid off from Zenimax Online. Overall, Zenimax Online's dev team dropped by roughly 60% in one year.

Which is a terrible blow, given I spoke to its development team back in January and was told it had rallied—and things were, for a while, really looking up. Refreshes to animations, a new seasonal structure, and a heaping help of experimental gameplay. Which made the aforementioned 2026 bloodbath both confusing and deeply disheartening.

I spoke with a few developers from the game to check in on how they were doing: "It is challenging," says game director Nick Giacomini, "something like this, it affects us. It affects all of us and the developers at a personal level. So we can't just pretend like it didn't happen and that it hasn't impacted us. We're human.

"At the same time, we still love this game. We love our players, and we love contributing to this and continuing to make it exciting, giving players something to look forward to. We're committed to doing so."

Giacomini himself dropped a letter to the community back in July, which echoed a lot of that same resolution—while also making the difficult choice to postpone a lot of the game's updates to 2027. "With what happened," Giacomini tells me, "That required us to take a look at schedules, see what's possible, and things needed to shift. And one of the underlying principles with that was that we didn't want to rush to just hit a date, right?

"We want [the] player experience to be as rewarding as possible to continue to surprise players and get them excited. And had we rushed it, would have put that at risk. So we wanted to give the team the space to be able to do it right, which necessarily meant pushing dates out for some things."

Giacomini says that, despite everything, the studio's not just in damage control mode: "I was just in a meeting earlier today about our plans for the end of 2027 and early 2028. So we're not just trying to figure out what to do now. We very much have an eye toward the future and how to continue to grow and excite players in this game."

Loremaster Michael Zenke views it as a means of honoring his colleagues who put in a ton of hard work already to getting ESO back on its feet: "Because ESO is here to stay, because it's not going anywhere, I personally feel like indebted to the people that we worked with, and want to make sure that the vision that they had goes out in the world and lands really successfully with the people that we love and appreciate on the community, and that's that's our long term thing that we're looking at right now."

Fortunately, Giacomini says the team has been buoyed by the community's support—and while some have been disappointed by the delays, no real ire's been directed at Zenimax Online itself: "I think our community is certainly one of the best—perhaps I'm a little bit biased—but it's one of the reasons that I love this game … We've had people reach out, we've had people post.

"We had a book that was made by our community, and it's now sitting in the office on a desk open right in the middle where everybody can see it … They wrote about what makes Elder Scrolls Online special to them, things that have stood out, and it is extraordinarily heartwarming. And it's just really it's been really incredible how they've supported us through this."

Looking forward

Mercifully, it's not like ESO's going to be completely dry before these delays—come September 28, the game'll be getting three new bits of content: The Nowhere Vault, an experimental set of puzzles, mazes, and jumping challenges put in a randomised order, The High Seas of Tamriel, an event that'll see you battling on ships and underwater, and perhaps the most interesting one: rumours.

A rumour is a special type of quest that's essentially a scavenger hunt—no quest markers, just hints. Associate game director Jason Barnes says it's designed to pull players out of a streamlined questing experience and into something a touch more immersive:

"We all have grown and up in MMOs, and I know probably [for] everyone here, our our time has changed dramatically over the years, but there was this sense of discovery and exploration [back then], and coming across something interesting where you don't really know the answer, no one's pointing to a direction and saying you have to go here or anything like that."

That's what rumours aim to do, as Barnes puts it: "You're not playing the UI; you're playing the actual game itself. Early testing and feedback has been very positive. Matter of fact, we've gotten feedback saying 'you need to make them harder, you need to make them more obscure'. So we're like, OK, cool, acknowledged."

A lot of these are hold-overs that were in the works before the layoffs of July this year, but still—it's nice to see ESO properly trying to experiment, something Giacomini is pretty key to the game's future. And those experiments have, in his mind, been successful:

"Night market is a great example … at first, players didn't quite know what to make of it. They came in and just got steamrolled right away. It was hard content, and so there were a lot of calls for like, 'Oh my god, this is so overtuned. What have you done!' But as time went by they started grouping up and they started enjoying it more … It's one of the few examples that I can think of where we didn't have to go to the drawing board."

Despite everything, there's some genuine excitement to be found still among Zenimax's developers: "I'm just really excited," says Zenke, "in general, that we are trying things. We've been making the game now for a very long time, and the way that we made the game and the best practices we developed are all really good … [But] I'm very excited about taking a hard look at like, 'Why do we do this this way? Why is this set up this way?'"

I'm not going to sit here and tell you, in this harsh and chaotic industry, that The Elder Scrolls Online is immune to future hardship—almost nothing surprises me anymore. But while it's clear that the one-two suckerpunch of layoffs and restructurings have hobbled Zenimax Online, it's still trying to keep ESO going. And in a genre that's on the ropes, I certainly hope this game can get back on solid ground without further earthquakes.

Earlier this week, Xbox laid off 268 people on top of the 1,600 jobs it cut earlier this year. It has shoved Obsidian into Bethesda, handed Halo to Activision, said Sayonara to Double Fine and Compulsion Games, and State of Decay developer Undead Labs, and is primed to close Hellblade developer Ninja Theory.

All of this is part of Xbox's "reset", under its new(ish) CEO Asha Sharma. Sharma has been the public face of the company's deeply controversial restructuring, defending it with statements like "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger" which, incidentally, is why aeroplanes always perform better when you rip one of the wings off.

But both Sharma and Xbox are ultimately part of a much larger organisation. So what does Microsoft's head honcho Satya Nadella think of all these cuts, closures, and cancellations? Well, he thinks that Xbox's "streamlining" is "great to see".

Speaking on the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath (via Kotaku), Nadella briefly touched upon the subject of the Xbox layoffs as part of a much wider-ranging interview, starting by gassing up all the intellectual property that Xbox has under its belt. "I feel fantastic about the IP we have right now," Nadella stated. "If I look at the studios, the IP portfolio we have, and our ability to then take that and produce great games going forward, I feel fantastic."

As for the radical studio reorgs and the cuts which have left thousands of people jobless, Nadella described the process as if Xbox was designing a new Formula 1 car. "There's some amount of streamlining the team is doing, and Asha is doing, which is great to see," he said.

Nadella then quickly turned to Microsoft's future plans for Xbox: "Then we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people. That has always been the goal, which is, we want to be a great publisher and a great platform provider to games across both PC and Xboxes." he told Heath. "And so that is sort of our goal. And I think Asha and the team have said that Xbox is going to get growth in the next fiscal year."

If I understand Nadella correctly here, the plan is to embark upon the most dramatic reorganisation of Microsoft's gaming division ever and then come up with the business model that it's going to pursue. Which, to extend my aeroplane metaphor, is a bit like ripping one of the wings off before saying "Right, how do we circumnavigate this 'globe' thing?"

But that doesn't mean Xbox is going to stop. Oh no. When the most recent layoffs were announced, Xbox's Chief Creator Officer Matt Booty said the company was "roughly three-quarters of the way through previously announced restructuring". Which means there's more yet to come.

Tom's Hardware and Respawn First recently reported on a fun new patent from those wiz kids at Microsoft, one that would dynamically pause your game to show you advertisements. Here are the big wham lines from the abstract of US 202610260258 A1, "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access:"

• "A content management system may suspend a user's interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event." (Emphasis mine)
• "A content management system may present the promoted audiovisual content to the user."
• "A content management system may establish a credit … the credit delays suspension of the user's interaction."

That's the sort of whimsical creativity that made me fall in love with games in the first place. In plain English: This is a system for showing advertisements during gameplay, one that pauses your game (suspends your interaction). Similar to ad-supported mobile games, Microsoft proposes a credit system where these tokens can be exchanged for more ad-free game time.

Microsoft explains that videogames do not lend themselves to regular commercial breaks in the same way as TV shows, necessitating a partially user-controlled, credit-based system for managing advertisement delivery. The other half of the equation: Having it monitor gameplay and avoid deploying ads during climactic or lean-forward moments. How thoughtful.

This sounds, quite frankly, god-awful. One of the worst case scenario arguments against always-online consoles and subscription-based gaming outlined in a patent. I'm not sure there is a game good enough, or an ad-supported Game Pass package cheap enough, that would make me subject myself to this. Forget the inconvenience⁠—the indignity of it all is enough to drive you to the brink.

The silver lining, if you're still rooting for Xbox⁠—it still holds some of my favorite studios hostage⁠—is that patents are not always put into practice. Seventeen years ago, Sony signaled intent to have us all stand up and shout "McDonalds" to make a vision of a burger go away, and that never happened.

The popular outrage against the patent may already be giving the planners at Microsoft pause. On the other hand: Xbox's CSO Matthew Ball is still a big believer in in-game ads. Meanwhile, The ailing titan EA has already rolled out EA Advertising, a new platform for "in-game integrations, creative partnerships, and scalable advertising capabilities." I love scalable advertising capabilities.

Listen, you can say what you want about Avowed—I wouldn't even blame you if you didn't like it, or much of what has come out of Obsidian's recent catalogue. There's even a tiny, selfish scrap of my gamer heart that's secretly very glad that Obsidian is working on a new Fallout game, again.

But this is pretty rich, given the grinder that Obsidian's been put through in the past few months. As a reminder, in July, 25% of Obsidian's staff was laid off during Xbox's ongoing, brutal "reset", totalling around 52 employees. When this happened, a sequel to Avowed was cancelled, along with multiple unannounced games. More recently, Obsidian's being folded into Bethesda.

Now, in fairness to Braff, it's entirely possible that this particular merging did not ruin Obsidian's ability to express itself. It's entirely possible that the post-bloodletting Obsidian we were left with in July and the one currently under Bethesda now are pretty much interchangeable.

However, the idea that Obsidian's creative identity has been respected by these moves overall is laughable—cancelling multiple projects is the opposite of that, actually. Making it work on a franchise it hasn't really touched in 16 years is the opposite of that, actually. And pushing it into a get-along t-shirt with Bethesda? I have a suspicion that time'll prove this move the opposite, too.

Not that things are great for anybody at the moment, but I'm not entirely sure how anyone in the videogame industry keeps their head together—Josh Daniels, one of the latest victims in Xbox's brutal series of resets, has been promoted and then laid off in the same week.

For some context, this forms part of the previously-announced 1,600 layoffs that'll be happening as Xbox's fiscal year whirls around. This is, of course, after a 1,600-person bloodbath that preceded it, leaving a sword dangling precariously over Microsoft's remaining videogame studios.

Daniels' absurd circumstances remind me of a report, which surfaced in July, that described a situation in which an anonymous source told Game Developer their layoffs "left colleagues scrambling to make sense of the situation using unofficial channels—many of which are overseen by union members and organizers."

Also in July, Bethesda developers were also reportedly told they had jobs until September right before the axe swung. What's clear is this: Nothing, absolutely nothing, signals safety in the videogame industry anymore. Even if you're promoted, you can get punted from a studio in the same week.