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Did You Try Turning It MarathOn and Off Again?

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  Good afternoon and Happy New Year, Get the eye rolling over with. Yes, this is yet another Marathon blogpost, I have nothing else I want to talk about. I’m very excited about this game and I have word vomit to expel regarding it in lieu of its newly announced release date in 6 weeks, March 5th 2026. This one is a followup to a post I wrote out a few months ago regarding what I thought, at the time, Bungie needed to accomplish leading up to the title’s release. I want to go over what changes Bungie has made with respect to what I suggested, what I didn’t suggest, and what new advice I have for them for Day 0 and post-launch content. We’re going to split this into sections: Changes I wanted to see months ago, changes I did not consider but have been made by Bungie, and things that Bungie should consider for post-launch support. Disclaimer: I have been involved in a number of NDA protected playtests and therefore will avoid topics that could infringe on that confidentiality in their...
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Divnity, meet Divine Retribution.

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     Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hannukah, Happy Holidays to any and all who celebrate anything during the jolly and festive month of December. This will be my last blog post of 2025, and of course, it’s about Generative AI. So, without further ado… Larian, what the fuck were you thinking? After hyping up their next big game with a mysterious statue in California and finally revealing it at Geoff Keighley’s video game Superbowl, Swen Vincke, head of Larian Studios, decided the smartest move was to open his mouth and admit that the game’s concept art was influenced, to some vague degree, by Generative AI (and that they're letting AI throw together PowerPoints, which is even more frivolous and indefensible in my opinion as a Professional Complainer). His excuse? That their actual artists, who are clearly talented, sometimes “need help visualizing their ideas,” and that AI was used like an art book. (Siri, did  Zdzisław Beksiński need to use Generative AI, o...
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How Many Years Does It Take To Develop A AAA Game?

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If you said “6-7”, you’d be right, and also just completely fucking cooked.  Good morning everyone. A rare occasion is upon us: I’ve somehow been inspired to write two posts in the same month. Whether that means next month’s entry is doomed remains to be seen, but given that it’s the holiday season, I may be a little occupied anyway. On Sunday night, I ended up in a lengthy conversation about the current state of AAA games and the time it takes to make them. It all started with a post from someone annoyed that Naughty Dog’s upcoming Intergalactic is only the studio’s second release this generation, and that this is, apparently, some kind of scandal. We’re in an unusual moment for gaming. We’ve never had such steady access to great new releases, but we’ve also never had to wait this long for them. This year alone we’ve had Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , Hollow Knight: Silksong , Hades II , Death Stranding 2 , and plenty of others proving the post-COVID drought is finally behind us. ...
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Sony: New Frontiers

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  I imagine it’s got to be a hell of a week to be Sony Interactive Entertainment. To be honest, it’s more like it’s been a hell of a decade. While there’s easily 5-10 years of rather unprecedented shifts in the gaming landscape that has concerned Playstation directly, I want to zoom in and focus on what’s happened specifically in the last week. It’s been unusually loud at SIE; even when factoring in that they’re quite vocal this time of year, this week alone we’ve had a new (and unique) State of Play from and largely concerning Japan, we’ve had a new competitor rise valiantly from the ashes of Xbox hardware in Valve’s Steam Machine, and, perhaps most controversially, the announcement of not one, but two mobile games made out of Sony IPs that will not be releasing on their main hardware in Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble and Horizon: Steel Frontiers . I don’t want this to be an SIE newsletter, I’m much more interested in looking at the larger implications for SIE moving forwar...
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