Latest news with #SeaofThieves
Engadget
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Yooka-Laylee developer Playtonic is laying off over a dozen staff
Playtonic, the creators of Yooka-Laylee , is laying off some of its staff, the developer and publisher announced on social media. The post doesn't mention how many members of Playtonic will be effected, but does credit the layoffs to the company's struggle with "a period of profound change in how games are created and funded." Based on a LinkedIn post shared by Playtonic brand manager Anni Valkama, the layoffs include staff members who worked in production, various art departments, game design, narrative design and UI/UX design. Playtonic only lists around 50 staff members on LinkedIn, but given the studios growth into a publisher and its upcoming release of Yooka-Replaylee , its possible the actual team is a bit larger. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. While Playtonic likely isn't safe from the problems of funding and selling games that other developers have, hiring up for a new project like Yooka-Replaylee and then laying those new hires off before the game is released is a fairly common practice. There's no way to know if that's the case here without more information, but it's worth stating. Yooka-Laylee was pitched as a spiritual sequel to Banjo-Kazooie and other character-focused action-platformers when it debuted on Kickstarter in 2015, perhaps unsurprising given that Playtonic was founded by former developers from Rare, the creators of Banjo-Kazooie and newer hits like Sea of Thieves . In fact, many of the games Playtonic has published under its "Playtonic Friends" publishing label fall in that Rare sweet spot, whether its the cute action-adventure game Lil Gator Game or the difficult platformer Demon Turf .
Digital Trends
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
I'm already having a blast with FBC: Firebreak's creative co-op action
As I fought a giant sticky note monster deep within the executive offices of the Federal Bureau of Control, I found quiet solace in the fact that Remedy Entertainment hadn't lost any of its quirky, wildly creative charm with its new cooperative first-person shooter FBC: Firebreak. Whenever a studio known for excellent single-player adventures branches out and tries something different, it always feels like a toss-up as to whether or not it'll succeed. Situations like Rare and Sea of Thieves stand as success stories, while disasters like Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League serve as cautionary tales. Fortunately, after going hands-on with the game for three hours, it feels like FBC: Firebreak is going to be the former, not the latter. Recommended Videos The studio's lack of experience with the genre can be seen in things like UI clarity, but for the most part, this is a cooperative shooter that thrives thanks to satisfying gun play and creative mission design that takes full advantage of Remedy's wacky connected universe. FBC: Firebreak is a game I already want to go back and play more of, which is a good sign after just a few hours of hands-on. In FBC: Firebreak, players control volunteers clearing out supernatural threats that have overtaken The Oldest House. Players complete different jobs in teams of three, completing special mission-specific objectives before returning to the elevator and leaving. It occupies the same space as games like Left 4 Dead and Deep Rock Galactic, which is a smart move for Remedy rather than trying to make a name for itself in the competitive extraction shooter or battle royale spaces. Each player can equip a different kit associated with a different element. I used the Jump Kit, which centers around electrocuting enemies. A good team composition would also include a kit that could get enemies wet, as that increased the area of effect for my electrical abilities. Different situations in each of FBC's levels impact the elements at play. A fiery grenade can set off a sprinkler, staying near a furnace for too long can cause heat damage, or holding radiated leech pearls for too long could poison me. A lot of the fun in FBC comes from the interplay of all these elements, and I was cheering when my squad could pull off a devastating enemy combo. The gunplay of FBC also feels tight so far, with the machine gun becoming a favorite of mine due to how the gun animated as I fired it. As someone who was disappointed by only being able to wield a pistol in Control, I appreciate that FBC lets me use some of the other weapons I've seen in that world. FBC is at its strongest when it leans into the Remedy of it all. Exploring the furnace from a new angle made me more intimately familiar with the area, while level conceits like sticky note monsters or growths on a wall that drop radioactive pearls are supernatural in a way that only quite works in Remedy's Connected Universe. I'm also grateful that this hands-on affirmed that FBC has strong mission design. The weakness of many co-op shooters, like Suicide Squad, is that missions often just boil down to killing a certain number of enemies and moving on. FBC is never quite that simple, having players move a shuttle along a track as they collect pearls or run around the furnace activating generators as hordes of enemies charge at players. The objectives change as players increase the difficulty, which should add some more replay value. FBC isn't like other cooperative shooters, and that's its greatest strength. It's also why I hope it'll allow me to overlook some of Remedy's growing pains as it enters the multiplayer space with a new interpretation on the world of Control. During my time with FBC, there were some UI and UX clarity issues. For instance, I had trouble understanding which enemies were damaging me. One objective, which had my team filling barrels with a substance before throwing them into a giant furnace, was confusing because it wasn't completely clear which barrels were filled or where we could fill them. In a debrief before my demo, Remedy said it was working on making features, systems, and UI clearer, so hopefully some of that will be resolved before launch. If it can clean all of that up, though, Remedy has what could be a gem of a multiplayer shooter on its hands. As someone subscribed to both of the services FBC is launching onto, I'm eager to give it another shot when it comes out. FBC: Firebreak launches for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on June 17 and will be available from day one as part of the PS Plus Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate catalogs.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sea of Thieves in space? Not quite, but Jump Ship replicates a lot of the things that make Rare's pirate sandbox so fun
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. My favorite co-op game of the past decade is Sea of Thieves: I love sailing a galleon into dangerous territory with friends, engaging in ship-to-ship and person-to-person (or skeleton) combat, then scampering off with loot. A game like Sea of Thieves, but in space? I'll definitely give it a try. Jump Ship is a mission-based co-op FPS from Keepsake Games where you and up to three other crew members pilot a spaceship, engage in ship-to-ship battles and first-person combat, and salvage gear and goodies you can use to upgrade your ship. I recently got to try a hands-on preview, joined by PC Gamer's answer to Han Solo: Morgan Park. (I'm not sure if that makes me Luke or Chewbacca. Whoever has the worst aim, I guess.) To be clear, Jump Ship isn't exactly Sea of Thieves in space. First off, it's a PvE-only game, so it doesn't have the unpredictability of other players showing up and trying to score your loot. And while Sea of Thieves is completely open world, Jump Ship is mission-based: you take a mission, then warp into a section of space to complete it. The missions do have a bit of an open world feel to them, in that when you enter a mission area you can choose how to accomplish your goals and in what order to face the threats, but it's not a seamless and unbroken open world like SoT. But there's still quite a lot in common with Rare's pirate sandbox. One player can pilot the ship while another operates the weapons, and when you take damage someone can run around patching the ship up or putting out fires. It's also tactile in a way I appreciate: a lot of lootable items, like scrap metal and ship modules, have to be carried in both hands, so while you're lugging something around you have to drop it if you want to use a weapon. It makes the loot you deal with feel like real objects that need to be physically moved around, carried, and stored on shelves, rather than things that just exist as icons in an inventory slot. It also makes the business of scavenging a shipwreck labor intensive, in a good way. One of our missions was to investigate and loot a wrecked ship drifting in space. After manually piloting our ship to the derelict vessel, we popped open our airlock and had to make several trips to collect everything, using our jet packs and grappling hooks to zip back and forth between the two hulls as fast as possible. If a threat appeared, like an enemy ship spotting us or a turret on a nearby asteroid activating, it was a scramble to get back aboard and to battle stations before our ship got completely destroyed. That led to some comedy, too: at one point Morgan jumped into the pilot's seat and flew off in our ship while I was still hovering clumsily outside trying to find a damn airlock while holding a pile of scrap metal. Did Han Solo ever do that to Chewie? On another segment of our mission, Morgan landed us on an asteroid and we ran through a darkened facility filled with enemy robots that chased us around while we collected batteries needed to power open a vault door. Again, the batteries were physical objects we needed to lift with both hands, so one person battled the bots while the other carried the battery. (At least we did that at first. Turned out the robots weren't that much of a threat and eventually we were just running and bunny-hopping as we each carried a battery.) Thing is, I think leaving the ship behind to do on-foot missions is the least fun part of Jump Ship, because the ship itself is the best part of the game. It feels like a mobile base you can upgrade and tinker with, and we had to work hard to keep it in shape. When we got blasted by an enemy spacecraft, we'd sometimes receive a fire warning, so I had to leave the turret controls, grab a fire extinguisher, and run around the ship frantically putting out fires while Morgan continued flying. Dealing with crises on the ship feels hectic and fun as you coordinate with your crewmates about who is going to do what. By the end of our mission we'd made our ship a pretty formidable one. We mounted a rail gun and some extra turrets onto the hull, we crafted a first-aid station from spare scrap we collected, and spent quite a bit of time trying to first figure and then optimize our ship's power supply. It's a little weird in that it's set up like a grid puzzle. Every element of the ship (guns, engines, shields) is a physical node with a different shape, and those nodes all need to fit onto the green sections of grid or they won't work. We eventually solved it by adding two new reactors to our ship, so the grid had so many green squares we could place all our nodes with room to spare. I'm definitely interested in playing more of Jump Ship when it launches later this year: it was fun with two people and I can only assume it'd be twice as fun with a full crew of four. It's not Sea of Thieves in space, quite, but when one player is barrel rolling the ship and blasting away at enemies while the other is scrambling around putting out fires, it definitely has some of those great Sea of Thieves vibes.
