Games

We now have 2 schisms from ex Arkane devs:

• WolfEye Studios (Julien Roby & Raphael Colantonio), which already published Weird West
• Black Pony Immersive (Harvey Smith, Ricardo Bare, & Ben Horne), just announced in this post link

Hey all, I’m on the hunt for games that really suck you into their world, the kind where you look up and suddenly three hours have gone by.

Games I’ve loved and couldn't put down:

• Plague Tale
• Horizon
• Subnautica
• Mass Effect
• Expedition 33
• Homeworld

Doesn’t matter the gente, as long as it’s got that vibe where you just exist in the atmosphere and forget about everything else.

What are your go-to games when you want to disappear into another world? Bonus appreciation if it’s something underrated or off the beaten path.

Edit: Thank you all. I will definitely keep this thread bookmarked. You all dwarved what I found on Reddit ir any other platform! Well done!

[DevLog] New Age Cartel — Solo Dev Project & Public Beta Soon!

Hey all! 👋

For the past couple of months, I’ve been hard at work solo-developing New Age Cartel—a modern PBBG / text-MMO designed with a slick, responsive UI, deep player-driven economy systems, and custom artwork.

Core features are coming together, and Public Beta testing will be opening soon! 🎉

Feature Highlights:

Central Dashboard: Real-time character stats, profile tracking, syndicate status, and daily login rewards.

Tiered Operations & Missions: Scale up from petty street jobs to high-tier syndicate operations with custom atmospheric art.

PvP & Rivalries: Target lists, stat-driven combat calculations, player contracts, and live rival battles.

Underworld Training: Upgrade facilities from underground rings to private compounds to boost Strength, Guard, Agility, and Precision.

In-Game Stock Market: Dynamic market charts, corporate ticker tracking, and interactive investment portfolios.

What to Expect in the Beta

Looking for active feedback to polish things before the full release:

Balance & Economy: Testing progression pacing, combat formulas, and market balancing.

Multiplayer Systems: Testing group mechanics, territory battles, and community features under load.

QoL & Player Feedback: Ironing out UI flow, catching edge-case bugs, and taking feature requests.

If you enjoy modern browser games and text-based RPGs, keep an eye out for the testing link dropping soon. Would love to hear your initial thoughts or questions below!

From the Saber Interactive CEO:

“Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.

“Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.

“We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower priced title, as a plus for consumers,” he said.

“As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest.”

This started when I had the idea to build a text file on my disk for keeping my thoughts on recent video games fresh, which then grew into a spreadsheet, and after many years, into this. There's probably a ton of games missing, especially indie titles / adventure game studio entries.

I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.

It’s not just you; the Xbox network–or parts of it, depending on when you read this–is down. After users across the globe began reporting issues with the Xbox Network, Xbox identified several issues affecting its online services today. At the time of writing, the following functions are still experiencing “major issues” on the Xbox network:

Account and profile
Store and subscriptions
Games and gaming
Apps and mobile

These problems are widespread, and include an inability to sign into network services, disconnections, and missing games from the storefront. Xbox says that the problems have been identified, and it is working on a solution, but there’s no ETA for when these fixes will be applied. “We are aware that some users are encountering errors when attempting to sign in, see your game library, or launch games,” Xbox’s official support account posted online. “Our engineers are actively working to mitigate the issue.”

Console gamers also had to contend with an outage on the PlayStation Network last week, which saw account management, gaming and social, PlayStation Video, the PlayStation Store, and PlayStation Direct go down for several hours–bad timing for anyone looking to jump into the Marvel Tokon open beta, and more fuel for the fire that PlayStation’s social media has become as users demand that Sony reverse its decision to kill discs in 2028.

Outages like these have also brought into question the decision for companies to embrace a digital-only future, as they effectively prevent users from accessing their game libraries.