Payday 3 devs say its disastrous launch issues have been fixed as the co-op heist shooter passes 3m players

When Skull Island: Rise of Kong was released earlier this week, we reported on the visceral social media reactions to its rudimentary gameplay, PS2-esque graphics, and left-fielded bugs with many calling it "the worst game of 2023." The reason it's received that dubious title, however, is apparently because the developers only had a year to work on King Kong's latest video game outing.

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Microsoft made several headlines when they unveiled their interest in bringing on another acquisition. After Zenimax Media, Microsoft went after a massive name with Activision Blizzard. The purchase brought in over $68 billion, and it was an uphill battle for Microsoft. They had to go through a series of regulators to ensure that this deal wouldn’t hurt competition. Of course, the significant component that hit the headlines was the fact that Microsoft would own Call of Duty. That made many players worried about a scenario in which Call of Duty would no longer be available on the PlayStation line of consoles. The folks over at Xbox continued to ensure this wouldn’t be the case. 

Ever since its initial announcement, Super Mario Bros. Wonder has captured the attention of long-time fans and newcomers for its rich and highly animated visual style. While it is a return to classic 2D Mario, it also looks to be a more exciting and visually distinctive take on that classic set-up - and according to the devs at Nintendo, making a large departure from the previous games was the intention. In a recent Ask the Developer post on Nintendo's official site, the creative team at Nintendo EPD spoke about the unorthodox development process for Super Mario Bros.

Just a week before the release of Cities: Skylines 2, developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive have issued a warning to fans about the city builder's performance.

The universe that takes place in presents opportunities for players to immerse themselves in space travel and exploration, but DLC has the chance to rectify some of the game's more tedious aspects. There are engaging features such as random encounters with other spaceships, quests both for the main storyline or optional side missions that provide lore in addition to rewards, and plenty of NPC relationships to form. All of these blend together to create an exciting and immersive game, set against the massive backdrop of space with planets to explore and ships to customize.

Last year, all 16 of the QA devs at Keywords Studios Edmonton held a unanimous and historic vote to become the first games industry union in Canada. Unfortunately, just over one year later, they were laid off.

Payday 3 has had, shall we say, a rough launch, and one of the main sources of player protest has been its progression system. Heisters just aren't thrilled that your infamy points—the things you accrue to unlock new weapons, cosmetics, and what have you—are tied exclusively to the game's challenges. It can mean that players whose goal is to unlock new gear are better off completely ignoring their heist in order to focus on blasting as many cops as possible to tick off 'kill 20 enemies with this gun' challenges. A little backwards, for a Payday game.

Peter Molyneux and other key figures behind the Fable series discuss how game development has changed since the 2000s, with some feeling that the industry has become too "risk averse". Molyneux in particular says that he fears Fable 2's changes from the first game wouldn't have been possible today, feeling that there's now more pressure to stick with formulas that have been proven to work.

Payday 3 has had a somewhat rough recent launch, but Starbreeze Entertainment is hard at work behind the scenes on updates and new content to improve the player experience overall. The developer addressed the game’s online matchmaking issues, but the team isn’t done updating Payday 3 just yet. While Starbreeze revealed that new heists were coming in an official roadmap, a recent livestream saw the developer announce that even more heists were currently underway.

Reviewers and influencers have begun to note on social media that they've received their early copies of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and developer Insomniac is taking a moment to warn players that spoilers might start hitting the internet soon, well before the game's actual release date.

Honkai Star Rail, the turn-based JRPG from Genshin Impact studio Hoyoverse, announced a new Twitch "incentive plan" on September 13 as a way to get people to stream and watch the game. This turned out to be quite the hornet's nest to kick, because within just weeks the Star Rail community had milked Twitch so hard that Hoyoverse has had to disable almost all of the rewards even though the event is still scheduled to run through October 15.