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Thank you for showing interest in devil's misfit gaming I just want to tell you a little bit about us we are casual gamers who really enjoy just playing and relaxing. Don't get me wrong we do love to win but I'll be safe we can't win them all. Most of us have families and work 730 to 5 but we do play mostly nights and weekends. We do have a age limit 15 years old or older is required nobody under that age will be allowed to join. What makes us different from other clans. Well we don't really have a ranking structure we have clan leaders and clan generals. We will not require you to be on everyday we understand everybody has a life and things to do we hope to see you become part of our community and help us grow We do have a website and discord. You can also fill out a application on the site Click here to apply on our website Click here to apply online Games me play Warzone 2.0 and Multiplayer  Fortnite  Apex legends  GTA 5 APPLICATION AGE: LOCATION US/EU: GAMERTAG/ACTIVSON: GAME MODES: TIMES ONLINE: CURRENTLY IN A CLAN: Online now:

If you're wanting to build everything Disney Dreamlight Valley has to offer, you'll be gathering a whole lot of materials to do so. One of those you're going to need is Dry Wood, which is used to craft a variety of different pieces of furniture and is occasionally required to complete quests. We'll tell you where to round it up below. Where to get Dry Wood in Disney Dreamlight Valley Dry Wood can be found laying on the ground near trees in the following biomes: Forgotten Lands Frosted Heights Sunlit Plateau Dry Wood is gray and can be found in multiple biomes.Because wood drops are random, you may find that there aren't many pieces of Dry Wood when you visit these locations. If that happens, pick up all of the other types of wood around all three biomes, then wait just a bit to hopefully get more Dry Wood to spawn in them. It goes without saying (but we'll say it anyway): If you're noticing you're a bit light on wood drops in general, it might be best to plant more trees in the biomes you're needing specific types (like Dry Wood) from. For more on Dreamlight Valley, head over to our comprehensive guides hub. View the full article

Building everything in Disney Dreamlight Valley means collecting a wide variety of materials, including multiple types of wood. Dark Wood is arguably the rarest of the different types in the game, only spawning in a single biome, which is likely to require quite a few hours of playing to unlock. We'll tell you everything you need to know below. Where to get Dark Wood in Disney Dreamlight Valley Dark Wood only spawns in the Forgotten Lands, which is likely to be the last biome that most players unlock due to the high Dreamlight cost required to remove the night thorns blocking the path. Once you've gotten together the 15,000 Dreamlight to gain access, however, you should have no problem finding Dark Wood. Dark Wood only spawns in the Forgotten Lands.Multiple types of wood spawn in the Forgotten Lands, so if you're not seeing much Dark Wood around, you may need to pick up other kinds and wait for new spawns. If you're still having trouble getting enough Dark Wood, try planting more tree in the Forgotten Lands to increase the amount of wood that drops there. For more on Dreamlight Valley, check out our comprehensive guides hub. View the full article

As you play Disney Dreamlight Valley, you'll quickly note that Dream Shards are quite the commodity. These special little shards are used for a variety of purposes, including as part of quests, to craft certain items, and to combine with Night Shards to make Purified Night Shards. Here's how to get more Dream Shards. Where to get Dream Shards in Disney Dreamlight Valley Dream Shards can be obtained in multiple different ways, so you're guaranteed to come across some naturally as you play. But here are the main ways to get them. Digging You can find quite a lot of Dream Shards by seeking out cracked pieces of ground throughout your valley and digging at those spots. You'll also be able to stock up on Night Shards this way, making it the most efficient method of gaining a good amount of both types quickly. Digging up cracked spots in the soil will frequently reward you with Dream Shards.Feeding Critters Each time you feed a critter, you run a pretty good chance of getting a Dream Shard to drop. To improve your chances even further, feed them their favorite food. This helps you work towards potentially earning them as a companion, too! Removing Night Thorns Every time you remove a Night Thorn in your valley, there's a decent chance of having a Dream Shard pop out. You'll have plenty of these to clear out at the beginning of the game, but afterward, ten of them will spawn in a random biome each day. Clear these out daily to keep your valley looking nice and earn some Dream Shards in the process. For more on Dreamlight Valley, check out our comprehensive guides hub. View the full article

Fire Emblem Awakening is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, February 4, 2023. Below, we take a look at how a strict sales mandate from Nintendo almost spelled doom for the series, until it didn't. Even among Nintendo's collection of top-tier IPs, Fire Emblem stands as one of the strongest. Announcements of new Fire Emblem titles frequently headline Nintendo's beloved Direct presentations, where they are received with a flurry of excitement and anticipation. But things weren't always this good for the Fire Emblem series. In fact, around a decade ago, Nintendo was ready to toss Fire Emblem into its vault of forgotten franchises. But in an amazing turnaround, the game that developers feared might be the final Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem Awakening, turned into the series' savior--though the influence it's had on the series over the past decade is not without some controversy. According to a 2013 interview in Spanish publication Hobby Consolas, The Fire Emblem series had been declining in popularity during the Wii and DS era, and leaders at Nintendo told the team and co-developer Intelligent Systems that the series would be shelved if the new game didn't sell at least 250,000 copies. With the knowledge that this might be the last Fire Emblem game in mind, the developers came up with some truly wild ideas, including the possibility of setting the game in the modern-day world, and even on Mars. Ultimately, however, the team stuck with a traditional fantasy setting. They then decided to look at story and gameplay elements that had been received positively in previous FE games for ideas about what to implement and build upon. Awakening's story treads familiar territory for Fire Emblem, but includes many of the elements that made the previous narratives memorable: struggles between opposing nations, mysterious artifacts of hidden power, a dark force manipulating behind the scenes, and some extremely powerful and sometimes-humanoid dragons. Taking control of your player-controlled character, you join up with Chrom, prince of Ylisse, and his band of vigilantes protecting the populace from the dangerous bandits and creatures that roam the land. Two crucial "new" features were also visible from the very beginning of the game. Upon starting, players could name and customize a playable avatar character unit, who is of crucial importance to the story. You also had the option of selecting a "casual" difficulty setting that altered an element some players considered essential to Fire Emblem: permadeath. In previous games, units killed in battle were forever lost, but casual mode would auto-revive them at the end of battle. Getting a primary unit killed off was still an instant Game Over, but this mode helped take a lot of the pressure out of the game's more challenging encounters for less experienced strategy/RPG players--and removed the fear of losing your favorite character to a stray critical hit. While these gameplay additions were new to players outside of Japan, they actually weren't introduced in Awakening: Both the customizable player unit and the Casual Mode debuted in the previous Fire Emblem game, a remake of Mystery of the Emblem for the Nintendo DS. But since that game wasn't released outside of Japan, Fire Emblem Awakening was many overseas players' first experience with these features, and their reception proved to be very positive--so much so that they have been carried over to most of the main Fire Emblem games released since. But the biggest impact Fire Emblem Awakening would leave on the series involves not the tactical gameplay, but the characters. Taking heavy inspiration from the fourth Fire Emblem game (the as-of-yet-unlocalized fourth game, Genealogy of the Holy War), Awakening put a heavy emphasis on building inter-character relationships. By setting up units to fight close to or directly with each other during combat, they would build a rapport. After battle, you could choose to view support conversations where the two characters grow closer to each other, raising their support level. This provided tactical benefits in battle--pairing up two units directly gives stat boosts and benefits like damage nullification. But perhaps even more importantly to a lot of players, this allowed you to pair up characters in romantic relationships of your choosing. You'd even get a chance to meet and recruit the children of your carefully crafted couples through time-travel shenanigans. Support conversations and their accompanying combat benefits have existed in Fire Emblem for quite some time, and paired unit couples having children is a concept present in the aforementioned FE4. But the emphasis put on Supports and romance in Awakening--even allowing you to pair off your avatar with your dream waifu/hazubando--was unlike anything that had come before in the series. And this focus proved tremendously successful for Awakening, bringing in new fans who were unfamiliar with Fire Emblem and strategy games in general. It's not hard to see why this worked so well: "Shipping" characters together has been a thing in media fandom since time immemorial, and Awakening both outright encouraged it and rewarded you for it, both gameplay- and story-wise. It's not a stretch to say that Awakening's success was in large part due to its appeal to an audience more interested in hooking units up than deep strategic planning. Awakening's glowing reviews and retail reception had more than just saved the series: It had single-handedly turned Fire Emblem into a powerhouse franchise again, this time on a global scale. Awakening's success would have far-reaching effects on the main Fire Emblem series as a whole from this point on--but not all of the longtime fans would be happy with it. Recognizing how well the heavy emphasis on character relationships in Awakening went over, the developers would go heavy on this newfound focus for the next installment, Fire Emblem Fates, which featured not one but two warring kingdoms filled with units to play matchmaker with, each with their own (sold separately) campaign and a third DLC campaign to play. However, Fates's reception proved more mixed. Reviews and sales were very strong, but some players (me included) found the gameplay portions disappointing, the story an absolute mess, and the whole thing overly long and bloated. Fanservice, however, was cranked up to 11, to the delight of many--but the handful of voices from longtime series fans that had bemoaned the loss of focus on tight strategy gameplay became noticeably louder. Since then, Fire Emblem has walked a delicate tightrope of balancing rewarding strategy gameplay with the popular relationship and social aspects Awakening established. Fire Emblem Echoes and the recent Engage, which put more emphasis on the strategy/RPG elements, were viewed as disappointing to some players and critics who came to enjoy the relationship focus of previous titles, but were welcomed by others who preferred these elements as more of a bonus than a primary focus. But Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a critically beloved title and the best-selling game in the series so far, was another entry that heavily pushed character relationships to the forefront. It's clear that, despite how some old-school fans might feel, social elements help make the series' games special to modern players. The way Awakening has transformed this genre-defining franchise has cemented its legacy for years to come. View the full article

The future of blockchain games  The epidemic in recent years has produced profound changes in people's lifestyles, and many of their activities have started to be developed in the virtual world, which plays an important role in promoting the development of the universe of meta. Games, as an important part of the universe of meta, will be the first industry to gain the benefits , but the following conditions are still indispensable for blockchain games to achieve better development.   - Wallets and Exchanges. Through the use of wallets, game users can truly take control of the assets in the game, and exchanges provide a trading platform and liquidity for these game assets NFT, helping users trade and revitalize their game assets. Wallets are a key application for depositing blockchain assets. Currently, wallets such as Metamask are not enough to support the extensive adoption of block games, and wallets will further advance community drive the popularity of blockchain games.  - Game playability. The biggest difference between blockchain games and traditional games is that gamers are also investors. Many blockchain games have gone out of course, treating all users as investors only and forgetting that the essence of making games is to develop high-quality games that users are interested in paying for. If most people play a game just to make money, and no one is ready to pay for it, it becomes a side-scam. The revenue of the participants of the side scam comes from the money of the people who come later, and if there are not enough people who come later, they will not be able to cash in the revenue, leading to the breakdown.  - Speed and performance. A high level of concurrency is the characteristic of game applications, so Wax, Coinan Chain and Polygon, which are public chains with a high level of concurrency and low fees, have attracted a large number of game developers. In the future, with the maturity of technologies such as Ethernet Layer 2 and slice scaling, as well as the maturity of other gaming public chain technologies compatible with EVM, blockchain games will have a better development and operation environment.  - Cross-chain and interaction. Cross-chain and interaction of game assets will be a direction of future development of metaverse games, and blockchain should be connected and accessible like the Internet. The maturity of cross-chain technology in the future will promote the cross-chain transfer of game assets and NFT, and improve the interaction experience of the system                                                                                     The game should maintain the operation of the project by relying on the payment of some users or selling profitable products, just like the new blockchain game Fairy Cat in 2023, which developed diverse gameplay for players and increased the playability of the game, thus got the recognition of many players. Blockchain games need to work hard on game experience and playability. Token economics is essentially just a kind of interest structure , and even good token economics cannot replace the development, operation and profitability of the project itself. It is believed that with the maturity of the above conditions, more and more game developers and investors will enter this industry and together promote the production of some blockchain games with beautiful graphics, first-class experience and high playability.  

Whether you're a Hitman veteran or a more recent convert who just got their start in this World of Assassination, the new roguelite Freelancer mode is gonna force feed you a slice of humble pie and make you feel like a fake gamer. That's a good thing--this mode is, in essence, the endgame for this rebooted Hitman trilogy. Short of actual new maps, Hitman Freelancer is a great way to tie this experience off because it's extremely tough in some brand-new ways, and the overall structure is very different from what we're used to thanks to the new framework. Before, each mission was completely self-contained. Nothing you did in one mission would matter in the next. But in Freelancer, death has consequences: you lose everything you had in your inventory, and half of the money you've been earning for jobs. Not to mention you might have to start over from scratch. But succeeding at Hitman Freelancer is not impossible, and the learning curve isn't as steep as it may seem at first. So much of it is just about getting a handle on what's important and what isn't. That would take hours if you just dive in head first without guidance--a delightful experience, and the way we went about procuring our understanding of this mode, but not everybody has the time. So if you wanna skip the self-tutorial period, we've got eight pieces of advice that you'll wanna consider as you and Agent 47 go hunting. Freelancer is hard mode While this mode does skip one of the most annoying aspects of Master difficulty (bloody kills rendering a disguise unusable), Freelancer is hard mode from the very beginning, and the further you get into it, the harder it gets. You'll notice early on that guards have eagle eyes and tend to respond to murders in larger numbers than you're used to. By the third tier of its tiered mission structure there will be a security camera around every corner and you'll get immediately melted by guards if you hold a letter opener in public. This isn't meant to dissuade you from trying the mode. No, this is just our way of telling you that you need to have a healthy respect for what you're going up against here. While there are still fun and games to be had in Freelancer mode, you'll need to take everything pretty seriously if you want to get very far. Remember what actually matters Hitman Freelancer is full of distractions--bonus objectives to complete, safes to crack, couriers to take out, loot to steal, etc etc. But, ultimately, that stuff doesn't matter. What does matter is killing your target and not getting killed in return. That's it! Having better guns and money to spend is great. But in this mode, where you cannot save or load your game, where if you screw up you might have to start over from the beginning of the entire campaign, your survival matters far more than a safe that's surrounded by guards who can see through your disguise. While that extra 3,000 merces--the mode's exclusive currency--might come in handy later if you can pull off the heist, it's probably not worth the time or risk involved to get it. So don't be afraid to leave money behind. You'll need luck to make it to the end Quit clowning around and get in there.There's something you need to accept up front when you start playing Hitman Freelancer: you will lose campaigns even though you did everything perfectly. Sometimes it's just bad luck, and sometimes it's bugs. Sometimes NPCs witness a murder through the floor or ceiling and compromise our disguise. Sometimes you spawn into a level in a hostile area with a guard looking right at you. And with the way alerts spread stupid fast in this mode, that kind of thing is often a death sentence. Since losing a deep run already feels pretty bad as it is, regardless of whose fault it is, it's best to accept now that your failures aren't always your failures. Luck matters. Silenced guns are your best friend We'll admit that we didn't fully appreciate just how hard we leaned on our default silenced pistol until we no longer had one by default. Because, holy cow, it really does change the equation in your head when you walk into a mission with literally nothing. It's a good thing at first, as that added complication helps get you acquainted with the extra overall difficulty. But as that difficulty ramps up over the course of a campaign, a silenced weapon is going to help you so much. There are five ways to get a silenced gun: as a reward for increasing your Freelancer Mastery, as a reward for defeating a Syndicate, by buying one from an arms dealer during a mission, by looting one off a guard who's carrying one (such as the penthouse guards in Dubai, all of whom have either a silenced SMG or assault rifle), or by looting a silenced pistol from an assassin (they all carry one) during a mission to take out a Syndicate leader. You only get to keep one of each type, though, so there's no need to take out every guard in Dubai just to collect their guns. Don't leave your gadgets at home While you get to keep your guns for new campaigns as long as you don't lose them during a mission, you're guaranteed to lose your gadgets when your campaign ends. So there's not really any reason to leave that legendary explosive duck at home if you have spare inventory space. Gadgets are use-them-or-lose-them items, so use them already. While your natural instinct will be to save the really rare stuff for when an objective calls for it, the nature of Freelancer mode demands that you stuff your pockets as full as you can with as many different gadgets as you have available when it's time to head off on a mission. Be prepared for some messed up spawn locations Random spawn points add a fascinating new wrinkle to Hitman levels.One of the quirks of Freelancer mode is you cannot start any mission with a disguise, and the game will randomly pick your spawn point. So, for example, in Marrakesh you might be spawned into the back of the military base, where you'll be trespassing and every NPC is armed. Or in the Hokkaido morgue right behind two morticians who will scream for help if they see you, as pictured above. Most of the maps have spawn points like that, and Colorado pretty much only has that. It's just something you'll have to accept and learn to deal with, which honestly isn't usually mega-difficult so long as you're ready to go as soon as you load in and keep your cool. Leader suspects will have only the traits listed, no more and no fewer When you're on the hunt for a Syndicate leader, Diana will give you a list of traits for the correct target: four physical characteristics, and three behavioral ones. The correct target will display exactly the characteristics listed, and only the characteristics listed. So, of course, if the target is supposed to have a tattoo but the suspect you're looking at does not, then that suspect isn't the target. But the inverse is also true: if the suspect has a tattoo but the target description doesn't mention a tattoo, then that suspect isn't the target. A suspect having an extra trait is just as disqualifying as them not having a stated one would be. Napoleon Blownapartes Sometimes you'll get really unlucky and have a target who just hangs out in a busy crowd with no real openings for taking them out without causing a whole scene that will quickly get you killed. And in those cases I like to use the Napoleon Blownaparte gadget. This thing, which you cannot take home with you, is a very common, but also very special, item in the new Freelancer chests that are scattered around each level. This thing is actually two gadgets in one. It's a noisemaker at first, drawing the attention of anybody who's near it. And then it's a remote explosive. But since it looks like a toy, you generally can toss it on the ground wherever you want without getting in trouble, then slip out of the room before blowing it up. It's messy, but it's also relatively safe compared with most assassination methods in crowded areas. It's also expedient if you've been in a level for a while and just want to move on. Just be sure you toss it near your target rather than at them--beaning somebody in the face is still a crime! View the full article

Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it's story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what's going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what's drawing our attention across the solar system. I was playing a legendary PsiOp mission on the EDZ with GameSpot's own Jean-Luc Seipke earlier this week, and I spent a good deal of time just blankly staring at DIM (the third-party Destiny Item Manager) trying to figure out what would give me the easiest time. We were planning on going into the activity without a third guardian, and since the activity isn't matchmade, it can get pretty dicey. That being said, it's not that I had difficulty deciding what I wanted in my overall loadout, but the Power weapon slot was bothering me. Legendary seasonal activities aren't necessarily hard, but they can be challenging if you don't go into them with a somewhat decent kit. Unfortunately, Destiny has suffered at times when it stifles creativity--where the meta basically amounts to, "use this weapon, or you're stupid." In this case, it's Heavy linear fusion rifles. They have dominated the PvE space for what feels like an eternity now, especially with the introduction of the burst-fire versions such as Stormchaser or Fire and Forget. Countless beefy yellow bar enemies, raid bosses, and other baddies have been on the receiving end of these overpowered weapons. If you were lucky enough to have one with damage-boosting perks, a Veist Stinger Origin trait, Enhanced craftable mods, or an Adept Big Ones perk (hello, Reed's Regret), it was a no-brainer. You used a linear (and Arbalest) if you were serious, and if you didn't…well, let's just say your clanmates probably had the higher DPS numbers. Ok, I might actually miss you a little bit. This isn't a foreign concept to me, and I get the need to min-max your stats and build; some of my friends get the majority of their joy from doing this. The higher the damage numbers, the happier they are, which is fine. For me, though, that's not where the fun lies. Instead, the best eras in Destiny are when you have more weapons in the sandbox being viable. When you can bring a machine gun or a grenade launcher to the fight and still be very effective, you're deciding your loadout not on what gives you the higher number but on what feels more fun. On Wednesday, Bungie dropped a sandbox tuning preview for Season 20, and it had me grinning from ear to ear because we are moving towards exactly that. The main takeaway is that Linears are getting a significant 15% damage decrease against all Champions, minibosses, and bosses. Yeah. Woof. This does not affect Sleeper Simulant or Queenbreakers, and I'm going to jump in front of this bus now and plead, please do not just resort to Sleeper and try something different. Honestly, the Legendary linear changes are the biggest thing to note, but that's not to say there weren't other compelling changes made to Power weapons. Machine guns and Heavy grenade launchers were also buffed, with machine guns getting a blanket 10% increase to base damage. Meanwhile, grenade launchers have been fairly lackluster since the bonkers season in which Anarchy reigned supreme thanks to a busted seasonal artifact. In Season 20 they're being buffed to be more viable (except for the Exotic Parasite, which is already quite powerful). Improved projectile collision (you'll miss less), a larger blast radius by about a meter, and damage buffs of 40% to minions and 20% to Champions, minibosses, bosses, and vehicles all are tantalizing reasons to use these weapons a bit more day to day. But if we're talking pure DPS on a stationary boss, then yeah, even with the buffs, you'll probably be ill-advised to go waltzing in with a grenade launcher. And of course, immediately after the sandbox changes were revealed, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and everything in between concluded that we're probably going back to an Izanagi-dominated DPS meta. Other folks still feel Arbalest will be a beast, but I'm gonna dig my heels in a little bit. We're in a rare moment in the Destiny content cycle where there's an opportunity for discovery whenever the sandbox undergoes certain changes. Whether we're able to actually make interesting builds that defy the looming Izanagi meta is up for debate. Truth is, no amount of creativity can stand against the allure of maximizing damage, especially with the new Lightfall raid just around the corner. Watch--as soon as the changes go live, we're gonna get the community doing what they do best: push the damage barrier to its limit. But personally? I hope the next video I click on Twitter isn't just a static Izanagi reload but something a bit more creative and outside the box. The thrill of buildcrafting is finding something that works that isn't just a copy/paste of every streamer or YouTuber out there, at least for me, and I strongly encourage you to experiment as much as possible. The sandbox changes come at a great time because we also got to see a sliver of the incoming Lightfall Exotic weapons and armor, and they really do look exciting as hell. Most of the armor shown is synergistic with Strand, the new subclass exclusive to Lightfall. Titan's Abeyant Leap and Warlock's Swarmers were more ability based with Strand, but the Hunter's Cyrtarachne's Facade has some great PvP precision weapon benefits. Once a hunter grapples using Strand, they're given extra body armor, increasing their flinch resistance, so you'll want to get your snipers ready for that. The standout Exotic weapon reveal for me, though, especially in light of the sandbox changes, is Deterministic Chaos. The Heavy Void machine gun ties itself deep into Void 3.0's best perks: weaken and volatile. Just hold the trigger, and every fourth bullet turns into a heavy projectile that weakens targets on impact, letting them take crit damage. On top of that, every fourth heavy projectile (so every 16th round) will make targets volatile on impact. That…sounds amazing. Of course, if it takes eons to get to that 16th round, it renders my excitement moot. However, all I can think about are boss encounters that require sustained damage and the fact that you now have a Void 3.0-friendly weapon that weakens targets without you needing to use up a subclass fragment, and maybe…maybe we won't need to bring a Divinity to every boss fight? This small sampling of new Exotics serves as a gentle reminder Destiny has created a kingdom of making our guardians powerful through a varied arsenal and imagination. The sandbox changes have been consistent in one thing: tipping the balance in letting different weapons a chance in the spotlight. The changes Bungie listed this time feel no different, and personally, I'm thrilled that the biggest losers of the bunch are the legendary linears. Death to them all! They had their time, they dominated easily, and over half a year of a linear fusion rifle meta was enough for me to have my fill. Seeing the new Exotics, and scouring my vault to brush the dust off some different ol' reliable weapons for once is something I'm going to celebrate. View the full article

Fortnite is several weeks into the first season of its fourth chapter. In real time, it's been going strong since the summer of 2017, and though Epic doesn't share player counts, by any available metric it seems to still be doing incredibly well. But in the live-service world, Fortnite's success feels increasingly rare. While there do exist other major successes in the pocket of the games industry where studios operate one game for years on end, many others are closing their proverbial doors for good, which is extremely scary both for players worried about gaming history and future developers concerned with the trends they may be tasked with chasing. Can live-service games survive modest successes, or must they all be as massive as Fortnite to make it? This is not an investigative feature that can bring closure to some of these questions, I admit. Rather, I'm merely mourning the loss of yet more games that will soon be lost to time, including another of my all-time favorites. When Velan Studios took to social media to alert players that its PvP dodgeball game, Knockout City (KOC), would be closing forever in June, it genuinely ruined my night. Roughly one year after breaking away from EA to self-publish the game and reimagine its economy for a free-to-play world, it seems KOC's successes were not numerous enough to keep the game going. Kinda Funny's Blessing Adeoye Jr. put it best: What actually are we doing? According to Velan, more than 12 million players jumped into Knockout City in its two years on the market. While that includes months in Xbox Game Pass and a year as a free-to-play game, it boggles the mind to think that even a fraction of those players who were buying into the game's Brawl Pass and optional cosmetics couldn't keep the game going. Most games would love to boast player counts of this sort, so for Knockout City, and games like it, to sink despite 12 million players giving it at least a try suggests development teams either have unrealistic expectations to meet or the in-game content for sale wasn't eye-catching enough. Knockout City isn't the only one, either. In January alone, we saw the teams behind last fall's brawler-royale Rumbleverse, Apex Legends Mobile, Ubisoft's Hyper Scape, and even Marvel's Avengers announce closures that each feel premature when compared to their original visions. If Marvel can't survive, maybe there are deeper issues in play here. Other high-profile shutdowns in recent years include EA's intended Destiny killer Anthem, ahead-of-its-time co-op shooter Evolve, and what I'd argue is Harmonix's best music game in an illustrious catalog, Fuser. No doubt it can be a good thing when a game comes to an end. Not every game needs to live on forever. But the problem is these games and many others are intended to, but due to what looks like an unstable market, far too many fail, even when they've found a passionate fanbase. It's hard to quantify how costly and dangerous this can be for video game studios. We've seen some live-service games close only for their studios to follow, like when Motiga's MOBA Gigantic failed to survive a rough launch and the studio was soon shuttered by publisher Perfect World. But even in the best case of a game closing, where the developers' jobs are safe, the disappearance of these games is a devastating blow to game preservation. For many games, living beyond their server closures will be limited to YouTube videos and firsthand accounts from players who got to experience them. We might even live in a post-Fortnite world someday, but it would seem to come on Epic's terms, not the competitiveness of the live-service market. So few can sit atop that mountain, but for Fortnite, Warzone, Rocket League, and a handful of others, it seems comparatively cozy. Again, I'm sadly without answers to these economic problems, and I come here only to lament the feeling that one of my favorite games (Fortnite) is indirectly and partly responsible for the closure of another (Knockout City). Were Knockout City's goals too lofty, or is the live-service world just not sustainable for most who enter it?Epic's battle royale has defined the live-service world for over half a decade, and it seems as though many other publishers are unable to predict how large of an audience they will be able to retain or make plans to sustain a game at those levels. They want to be the next Fortnite, but there's not enough room at the top. Each of these games is built on an economy that relentlessly vies for not just your money, but your time, too. There must be at least some space to survive between industry-defining hits and games hemorrhaging money. From the outside, games like Sea of Thieves, Genshin Impact, Rainbow Six Siege, Warframe, and more seem to have built up communities that can keep them going strong. And yet, it feels like so many more come and go even with fans of their own tearfully seeing them off. For there to be a way forward, game makers must be able to reliably predict the size and habits of its fanbase, and then pivot when that base expands or shrinks. Is this an unrealistic level of maneuverability in a volatile industry? Must it be that a live-service game dominates its genre, if not its industry, or else it has a shelf life of a few months or years before being effectively wiped from video game history? Where do we go from here? I don't know, and it's scary to consider that maybe no one else knows either. View the full article

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf might be farther from release than previously thought, according to a new report. Two anonymous sources interviewed by Insider Gaming disclosed that the game lacks features, voice lines, and is still using placeholder text. The report claims that, although rumors suggested that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will release in 2023, the game is likely still further out. The sources also share details of the game's structure. Although multiplayer was cut from the game earlier in development, the report claims that some of systems connected to multiplayer remain. Players interact with a central hub between quests, where they can talk with party members, as well as buy and customize equipment. Completing missions will net players more crew members and resources to spend back at base. One of the sources claims the combat takes cues from Final Fantasy XV, with a real-time combat system. Players are also unable to directly control crew members, instead selecting an ability for them to use during combat. According to Bioware itself, the game was playable from start to finish in October 2022. A report from 2021 suggested that Dreadwolf was in good shape and progressing toward release. None of these reports necessarily contradict each other, however it's difficult to know what Dreadwolf's actual release window will be. View the full article