Apex Legends lead legend designer Devan McGuire explains that live-service games need massive gameplay changes over time to survive.
Mark Rubin, the lead designer of Ubisoft’s now-dead free-to-play shooter XDefiant, has left the games industry following his project’s death.
So much wrong with Xdefiant. At one point they started using the worst ideas for their game and FPS fans saw it in the previews.
"We had other issues though as well that we tried to be transparent about. For one we had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn’t designed for what we were doing...Another issue we had was having the right resources to make content for the game."
Ubi set them up for failure out of the gate. And he says they had stuff in the pipes that should have been at launch means Ubi rushed it out and the devs didn't.
Localthunk: "The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots & pans."
While it may not have been The Witcher 4 gameplay, the Unreal Fest 2025 tech demo for CD Projekt Red's latest gave us a good idea of how the finished game might look. We talked to the developers, as well as Epic Games' Unreal Engine team, to find out exactly how the upcoming open-world RPG looks so incredible.
