Latest news with #gameDevelopment
Fast Company
2 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
From flop to franchise: Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a sequel
A video game once synonymous with one of the most disastrous launches in history has not only redeemed itself, but will be getting a proper second act. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red announced in an earnings call Wednesday that the company is at work on a follow-up to the futuristic role-playing title, which was released in late 2020 and universally criticized for being unfinished, glitchy and at times unplayable. CD Projekt Red said that the conceptual phase is complete and pre-production has begun on the 'next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe,' which it is calling Cyberpunk 2 for now. The company expects the game's development to take four to five years, but that number could shift as the project gets underway. The redemption story is a striking change of fate for Cyberpunk 2077, which not longer ago was doomed to languish in video game lore as one of the greatest failures of all-time. Cyberpunk's skyscraper-high launch expectations For a time, Cyberpunk 2077 appeared destined to become gamer shorthand for a much-hyped game that over-promises and under-delivers to the extreme. The backlash over Cyberpunk 2077' s likely premature launch was so severe that many platforms hosting the game's download began issuing refunds to appease unhappy players, with Sony even going as far as taking the game out of the PlayStation store. At the time of its initial release, hype for Cyberpunk 2077 was sky high. Developer CD Projekt Red was widely lauded for its hit The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a sprawling open world RPG famous for rich narrative storytelling. It didn't help that Cyberpunk 2077's development budget topped $300 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made. A very expensive makeover Instead of calling Cyberpunk 2077 a flop and moving on, CD Projekt Red kept chipping away at the game, issuing improvements to stabilize its performance, deepen combat and paint richer stories in its glowing Tokyo-esque fictional metropolis, Night City. Cyberpunk 2077 joins only a handful of games including Final Fantasy XIV and No Man's Sky that have completely re-written their own histories after failing spectacularly. For Cyberpunk 2077 and those games alike, the modern model of live-service games – games that evolve and get updates over time, sometimes through paid content – made the comeback stories possible. After their initial missteps, the teams behind all of these games spent years winning back players and rebuilding their communities, earning a lot of respect in the process. Cyberpunk 2077's turnaround wasn't cheap. The company poured north of $100 million in additional resources into the game after its launch, putting out a major 'large-scale' expansion called Phantom Liberty, starring actor Idris Elba, who joined Keanu Reeves on the game's A-list voice acting cast. In its earnings call, CD Projekt Red announced that the expansion has now sold more than 10 million copies. Fast forward four years and the team behind the former failure clawed their reputation back so successfully that Steam's user reviews now rate Cyberpunk 2077 as ' overwhelmingly positive ' – an outcome that would have been impossible to imagine back in the game's dark days.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
DeepSeek's R1 Update Boosts Coding Capabilities
SAN ANSELMO, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 27: In this photo illustration, the DeepSeek app is displayed on ... More an iPhone screen on January 27, 2025 in San Anselmo, California. Newly launched Chinese AI app DeepSeek has surged to number one in Apple's App Store and has triggered a sell-off of U.S. tech stocks over concerns that Chinese companies' AI advances could threaten the bottom line of tech giants in the United States and Europe. (Photo Illustration by) DeepSeek has rolled out an update to its R1 model, ushering in a new era of coding assistance at a much affordable cost. While users have yet to uncover every enhancement, the newly fortified programming capabilities stand out as potentially transformative. Novice and experienced programmers alike can now instruct DeepSeek to build simple, interactive video games and run them in Python. And for those without Python or Pygame installed locally, DeepSeek can translate its output into HTML5, enabling anyone to launch and test games directly in a web browser, no environment configuration required. This flexibility not only accelerates prototyping but also reduces technical barriers, making game development accessible to a wider spectrum of users. What sets DeepSeek apart from competing models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT o3 is its cost structure. By offering these advanced coding features free of charge, DeepSeek positions itself as an ideal solution for educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and individual creators operating on tight budgets. Students and community groups that previously lacked the resources to subscribe to premium AI services can now explore interactive programming projects without financial constraints. Beyond game development, DeepSeek's enhanced coding engine can scaffold website building from scratch. Users can prompt DeepSeek to fetch and leverage publicly available datasets, say, a Github repository containing 19th-century British novels, and transform raw text into dynamic web applications. In a single workflow, DeepSeek can generate code that ingests the dataset, constructs word clouds, performs sentiment analysis, and displays interactive visualizations. Users can also engage in multiple rounds of prompts to ask DeepSeek to improve the website with more specificity. This end-to-end functionality has the potential to streamline data journalism, digital humanities research, and business intelligence initiatives, simplifying the tasks between data extraction and front-end development. The implications extend far beyond academic research and entertainment. From financial analysts automating statistical models to healthcare professionals building real-time dashboards, DeepSeek's zero-cost coding assistance lowers the threshold for data-driven decision-making. Organizations can explore prototyping analytics tools and spinning up web-based reports with higher efficiency. DeepSeek's R1 update, especially the enhanced coding skills, may help democratizing software creation. By integrating powerful code generation with an open-source model, DeepSeek opens an avenue for innovators to experiment, iterate, and launch applications at minimal cost.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Elden Ring Nightreign review – FromSoftware brings multiplayer mayhem to the Lands Between
A standalone spin-off from FromSoftware's incredibly successful yet mostly single-player dark role-playing game Elden Ring, the multiplayer-oriented Elden Ring Nightreign is a curious beast, often feeling like an amalgamation of several different experiences all at once. Each session begins with players, either solo or in teams of three, dropping into a small but dense world, working to urgently gain as much strength as possible as a rapidly closing ring tightens around them – a very Fortnite experience. Rather than other players, they fight a variety of monsters and explore locations lifted directly from the Elden Ring universe. After each match, they also gain upgrade materials to modify future runs and advance the game's story, similar to a rogue-like game … so it's a Fortnite/Elden Ring/Hades experience? This is getting complicated. Every session is an engagingly frantic race against time to craft an on-the-fly strategy that takes you across the whole map. Each match is split into three days: on the first two, you pick areas to rush through, besting local bosses to gain minor buffs to your strength or loot weapons with powerful passive abilities, before escaping the rapidly closing ring that saps your health and is sure to end your run. Each night culminates in a larger and far more challenging fight than you've faced thus far, amping up the pressure even further. It's quite the stressful slog, but day three is what you're battling towards. As the day dawns, you step into a barren arena, ready to face one of several tough-as-nails mega bosses specifically designed to be tackled by multiple players. Nightreign is overwhelmingly designed for three-person teams. You can choose to head out on your own, but doing so is a severe challenge. There's no one to get you back up if you accidentally die rolling into a boss's attack, and many of the enemies designed to be tackled by a team of allies frequently overwhelm you. Ultimately, this is a game all about momentum. The feeling of pressure as you navigate the world is palpable. Every second, you're constantly questioning yourself: am I wasting too much time by checking what's around this corner? Can we take down this boss quickly enough to warrant the reward? It's an incredibly stimulating experience, as you rush to analyse your equipment and make build-defining decisions on the fly, but so much has been modified for the sake of speed that the nuance typical to FromSoftware games is somewhat lost. There's no choice of stats when levelling up, for example, with levelling now reduced to the mash of a button when you reach a rest point. And while the world has been painstakingly populated with smaller enemies, beyond taking down a couple in the first few seconds of a run to hit level 2, there's little point engaging with them, since tackling bosses is the main way to get more powerful. This momentum gives Nightreign its 'just one more run' feel, but the pace feels more rapid than necessary, reducing much of the world to a distraction that wastes your precious time. It's also why the bugs present in the review version we played feel particularly frustrating. Spending five minutes tackling a dragon that then flies through a wall and ends up being untargetable feels particularly unfair. One of the more loathed mechanics from the Dark Souls series is the requirement for you to run back to the boss arena every time you die. When this was updated for Elden Ring, allowing you to respawn right outside the arena, fans rejoiced. Yet the Nightreign experience is such an extreme move back in the other direction that it feels almost Sisyphean. Every run requires you to spend around 35 minutes to reach the final boss, but those bosses often have unique mechanics that can wipe out unsuspecting teams in just a couple of hits. Dying to a new move you've not seen before, requiring you to spend another 35 minutes rolling that boulder back up the hill, feels grossly disrespectful. Considering the success of Elden Ring in applying FromSoftware's dense level design ethos to an open world, it's disappointing that the developer appears to have missed the mark with Nightreign. Where that game iterated, Nightreign takes shortcuts. It is billed as a standalone release, yet so much environmental content is carbon-copied from Elden Ring – often thrown in haphazardly – that the world feels more like a particularly polished fan-created mod than a whole new title. FromSoftware's experiment in upending its established gameplay formula is admirable, and taking down gargantuan foes alongside friends really adds to the joy you feel at finally besting what at first felt like an insurmountable task. It's just a shame that the game's skewed pacing and overreliance on Elden Ring's pool of assets so greatly mars the experience. Elden Ring Nightreign is out Friday 30 May; £34.99
Digital Trends
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Marathon is fighting the ultimate uphill battle
Ever since its initial reveal, Marathon has had an air of skepticism surrounding it by the gaming community at large. At first, I mostly attributed this to Bungie's uneven approach to handling its premier live service franchise, Destiny. Between decisions like removing past expansions, vaulting weapons, and more underwhelming updates than positive ones, I could completely understand the hesitancy around the studio attempting to launch and maintain a second live service game. As we've inched closer and closer to its release date, the general outlook seems to have only gotten more dismal. Yes, there have been some very concerning controversies that shouldn't be swept under the rug, but Marathon is suffering from a more systemic problem with live service games as a whole that it will need to overcome to succeed. Recommended Videos The trust is broken Live service games are labelled as such because they're meant to be living, evolving experiences that players can keep coming back to for months and years. MMORPGs were the progenitors of this model, but now we've seen it applied to all sorts of genres. Despite its ups and downs, Destiny is still the poster child for what we now call live service games and the model so many have tried to imitate. As with anything successful in the gaming industry, it wasn't long before every big player wanted a piece of that pie. The allure of a perpetual money-maker was too great to resist, despite the reality being much more complicated. Sony was arguably the one to invest the most heavily in the model, at one point boasting over 12 live service games in the works. Between released and cancelled projects, that number has shrunk to possibly two, those being Marathon and Fairgames. While we can't discuss the broken trust between gamers and the current and upcoming slate of live service games without mentioning Concord, the root of the problem goes back much further than that. The first game I recall raising major red flags in the gaming sphere was Anthem. Even before all the behind-the-scenes problems in development were brought to light about the game, fans were leery about a studio known for RPGs seemingly trying to hop onto the latest trend. Anthem launched to a less-than-stellar response and quickly went on life support. It failed to satisfy BioWare's core RPG fans or any potential Destiny converts due to a lack of both a satisfying story or a compelling endgame grind. Before launch, EA shared a roadmap calendar detailing three acts of content, and when nothing beyond Act 1 was released for over a year, BioWare promised a major overhaul of the game, unofficially called Anthem 2.0. All of these plans were cancelled. Since then, we've seen more major games make bold claims about months and years of future content, only to pull the rug out from players after a middling — or downright abysmal — launch. Examples include Redfall, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and, of course, Concord. That last one is likely the one that broke the camel's back for most gamers due to how unprecedented it was. This was a PlayStation first-party release with prime showcase placement, an ambitious roadmap of content, an experimental storytelling method, and even a tie-in episode in Secret Level before the game had even come out. That game failing would be bad, but it being scrubbed from existence is catastrophic for gamers' trust in PlayStation and live service as a whole. Not only do we have to be concerned about a game simply breaking all promises of support, but also the entire experience being ripped from us. While I don't think the sins of one game should be borne by another, I can't blame anyone who has adopted a more wait-and-see approach to new live service games. If we can't count on a name as big as PlayStation to make good on its promises, why should we think differently for any other studio? Trust isn't given anymore, it needs to be earned. The impressions I have seen from both major pundits and average players in forums for Marathon feel a lot like what the sentiment was for Concord before launch. The general feelings appear to float around a 'it's pretty fun to play, but there's not enough there right now' type of vibe. Justified or not, that's a death sentence for a game that relies on a large population of people being willing to support the game at its weakest so that it can even attempt to reach its full potential. Gamers have long memories — at least when it comes to being burned. A roadmap and a 'trust us' from the development team just doesn't cut it anymore. Marathon could very well have the potential to be amazing, but it has to start out great to even have a chance to get there. Not enough people will settle for even good, and with so many people perfectly content sitting on the sidelines to see if it fails before it even gets off the ground, it will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bungie shouldn't be let off the hook for blatant plagiarism or the apparent crashing moral at the studio. Rumors swirling about how the unrealistic amount of money it needs to make to be considered a success don't help either, but Marathon's fate wouldn't look any more certain even if that had never occurred. Until enough live service games earn our trust back, each game is fighting an uphill battle that gets steeper with every failed attempt.
Forbes
23-05-2025
- Forbes
Unboxing The State Of AI With Andrew Ng
Alt title: Looking at Vibecoding and Human Skill Sets Description: We're in the middle of a revolution in tech, and part of it is this idea of vibe coding. For a lot of people, it started with Andrej Karpathy's now infamous text about just letting the computer do the work, and leaning back and chilling and vibing to it. Pretty soon everyone was talking about 'vibecoding,' the idea that you don't have to know how to write a program if you just ask AI to do it for you. On the one hand, this brings a fundamental democratization of tech to a larger audience. On the other, what does it mean for coding? I came across this example of a team that wanted to build a game from scratch using AI. So they tried asking Claude. The computer wrote the code, all right, but they were left with buttons that didn't work, and serious bugs that needed to be fixed. Eventually, the computer fixed the bugs, but only with extensive prompting from the human. Here's how the author described what happened after an initial failed attempt where the program didn't launch: 'The AI went back to work, and its second attempt actually launched. I also cheated a bit and checked the code, noticing another issue: … I continued this back-and-forth with Claude, refining through natural language rather than code edits. Fourteen iterations later, I had something satisfactory enough for me to share without being ashamed.' So the takeaway here is that you may not have to do the hard coding, but you'll still have to move the program development along by helping the computer make decisions or correcting its mistakes, however you describe that process. In the April event at Imagination in Action, I interviewed Andrew Ng about this and other parts of the tech world. He's got a long and impressive career, including academic work at MIT. One of the big points that Ng brought up when I asked him about vibecoding was that in past iterations of this revolution, when we make advances, we find that people still get value out of their coding skills. He mentioned everything from punchcards to COBOL: after COBOL was developed, he said, people were wondering if they still needed to code or not. Ng pointed out that today, he personally wouldn't hire people who don't know how to code. It's still a good skill to have, he insisted, even if the machine can do it, to some extent. 'Last year, there were some people advising others to not learn to code,' he said. 'I think we'll look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given, because as AI helps with coding, coding gets easier, and that means more people should do it, not fewer.' Ng also mentioned excessive hype in the industry, and attacks on open source that often get thrown together with safety issues. 'I think there are a few lines of hype that have been amplified because of the fundraising of PR goals of a small number of companies, and that has really distorted perception,' he said. He talked about the use of sandboxing for making sure systems are safe, and promoted the idea of open source technologies to deliver value to the world at large. As for valuable skills, he said, people should know how to prompt LLMs, as well as having basic coding skills. 'I think at this moment in time, we are already seeing a very clear performance gap in many jobs. (Knowing) how to code, it's absolutely huge in software engineering, but it's already very (necessary) outside software engineering. As AI becomes better, as security becomes better, I fully expect this performance gap to continue to grow.' He talked about how 10X programmers tend to make more money than others, and how the technology saves people a lot of time. He also addressed the funding challenges to universities. At the end of the day, Ng suggested, we should still know how to code, even if we don't have to do it every time we open the terminal. This made a lot of sense to me, because we're also experimenting with collaborative platforms that blend together the terminal, the collaboration hub, and the hosting system, as in the Microsoft Azure AI Foundry agent system I described a few days ago. It's all part of reinventing how we build software and what it means to be a professional in the age of AI. Let's continue to think about what the workforce will look like in a few years. When Ng talks about 'more powerful workers,' I think part of what he means is that we'll be working inside of these tools that really make us all 10X, effectively.
