1. 📰 Age of Empires studio World's Edge reportedly lose nearly half their staff and a new game project in mass Xbox layoffs (direct link) (👍51 👎0)

from Strategy Games♟️| RTS, 4X and Grand Strategy (!strategy@lemmy.world) lemmy

Age of Empires studio World's Edge reportedly lose nearly half their staff and a new game project in mass Xbox layoffs

Further details have emerged of the impact that Microsoft’s Xbox consolidation and job cuts programme is having on affected workers. Over on LinkedIn, World’s Edge studio creative director Adam Isgreen – I haven’t confirmed if this is the owner of that ResetEra account – wrote that he, among “many” colleagues, were among the 268 staff in Xbox’s latest round of redundancies. "I am of course disappointed that this is the way the time with World's Edge and Age ends for myself and many of my talented teammates that were also impacted," Isgreen says. Andrew Martz, a senior software engineer at World’s Edge, also shared on LinkedIn that he was among the layoffs, and that "our next project" had been shelved as a direct result of the Activision move. World’s Edge have, however, remained in broad control of the RTS franchise. 🖊️️🤖

Posted by mrmaplebar


2. 📰 "We opted out of some things really early on": How the small team making No Law plan to make it look as big as Cyberpunk 2077 (direct link) (👍38 👎1)

from Computer RPG Games (!crpg@lemmy.world) lemmy

"We opted out of some things really early on": How the small team making No Law plan to make it look as big as Cyberpunk 2077

First thing on the table: Neon Giant are not as big as CD Project Red. Image credit: Krafton / Neon Giant"We picked a really, really difficult game to make, and we know that," Frick says. Image credit: Krafton / Neon GiantThe land mass of Port Desire is significantly smaller than Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. Though, as Neon Giant wanted to avoid any loading screens, that created its own limitation on how they build environments. Image credit: Krafton / Neon GiantThe process of picking constraints, as often happens, led to creativity. 🖊️️🤖

Posted by Agent_Karyo


3. 📰 Age of Empires studio World's Edge reportedly lose nearly half their staff and a new game project in mass Xbox layoffs (direct link) (👍25 👎0)

from Real Time Strategy (!rts@reddthat.com) lemmy

Age of Empires studio World's Edge reportedly lose nearly half their staff and a new game project in mass Xbox layoffs

Further details have emerged of the impact that Microsoft’s Xbox consolidation and job cuts programme is having on affected workers. Over on LinkedIn, World’s Edge studio creative director Adam Isgreen – I haven’t confirmed if this is the owner of that ResetEra account – wrote that he, among “many” colleagues, were among the 268 staff in Xbox’s latest round of redundancies. "I am of course disappointed that this is the way the time with World's Edge and Age ends for myself and many of my talented teammates that were also impacted," Isgreen says. Andrew Martz, a senior software engineer at World’s Edge, also shared on LinkedIn that he was among the layoffs, and that "our next project" had been shelved as a direct result of the Activision move. World’s Edge have, however, remained in broad control of the RTS franchise. 🖊️️🤖

Posted by Zagorath


4. 📰 Management game Car Park Capital's cities are utopias of public transport networks and green living, or they were before I got done with them (direct link) (👍14 👎0)

from Tycoon Games (!tycoon@lemmy.world) lemmy

Management game Car Park Capital's cities are utopias of public transport networks and green living, or they were before I got done with them

Car Park Capital is a management game that looks to be straight out of the 90s, born from the same Bullfrog sensibilities that gave us Theme Park and Theme Hospital. Starting with the second problem first, I bring up the city heatmap which shows me where there is the most need for a car park. In moments like this, Car Park Capital looks like it could be a lost Bullfrog game. Again, there is a great deal of the Bullfrog in Car Park Capital. Car Park Capital isn't a complex game. 🖊️️🤖

Posted by Agent_Karyo


5. 💬 What JRPGs will you be playing in October? What games have you played in September? (direct link) (👍13 👎0)

from World of JRPGs (!jrpg@lemmy.zip) lemmy

Posted by tamlyn


6. 📰 Ecco the Dolphin: Speedrun World Record Progression (Any%) (direct link) (👍14 👎1)

from Speedrun video games (!speedrun@sh.itjust.works) lemmy

- YouTube

Posted by Die4Ever


7. 🖼️ How's Road Trip going? (direct link) (👍6 👎2)

from Truck Simulators (!trucksim@lemmy.world) lemmy

I lasted about half an hour before switching back to my truck. It's not bad, just meh.

Posted by LimpRimble


Inactive communities 👻

These communities have had no posts in the last month:

Here is a popular post from one of the inactive communities. 🪦♻️

💬 Zork 1, 2 and 3 have been open-sourced by Microsoft (direct link), posted in Interactive Fiction (👍9 👎0)

Good news for Zork fans!

This detailed blogpost by Andrew Plotkin gives a good rundown of where things now stand: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork-is-open-source

Posted by b72


The main links are using lemmyverse.link which should redirect to the post on your own instance. If you have not used this before, you may need to go direct to https://lemmyverse.link/ and click on 'configure instance'. Some apps will open posts correctly when using the direct link.

️🤖 indicates a summary generated using AI - 🖋️ TLDR This, 🖊️ news3k, 🖍 Deepseek. It is possible that the summary does not accurately convey the meaning of the original article, refer to the source material if in any doubt.

Multicommunity: gaming-genres.json

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7 comments in c/gaming@lemmy.zip view that post
[–] 13 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

They didn't "lose" shit, those people got canned by microsoft. After doing great work with Ensemble's legacy, no less.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    in the process of moving from Xbox’s direct control to Activision’s.

    Ugh, Activision? AoE might be cooked.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    After 4 I'm pretty sure it is.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    The franchise has been going in an absolutely fantastic direction. aoe2 stumbled a little with a few really bad DLCs and more mediocre ones over the past 2 years, only really starting to recover since April this year. But aoe4 has been going from strength to strength after a fairly shaky launch (the Season 3 update is really how it should have launched), and Age of Mythology: Retold has been absolutely incredible with a series of banger DLCs. And even aoe3's recent revival has shown how fantastically the franchise has been going.

    As someone who almost exclusively plays Age games, and certainly doesn't play any other Microsoft games, this really feels like it's come out of absolutely nowhere.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I have plated the whole AoE series for decades and was so excited when AoE4 came out, but I just couldn't get into it. It seemed so simplified that it lost it's charm.

    What did you think of it?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Remember to never buy gamepass, xbox, or anything MS. It will only fuel them doing this to other companies.

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  • 4 comments in c/strategy@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    Well, this is a bummer. I felt they all had already been catering far too much to the competitive scene - for example, my biggest gripe is that I want maps to be much larger. They really aren't much larger than they were two decades ago and it seems like we should be able to support larger maps. I'd love to be able to build up a wonderful base, then go on a rampage around the map, having it make sense to start up new towns to take over more and more of the map. But it seems like most people want quick games. meh.

    I know people like me are a minority, but I'm surely not the ONLY one.......

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Cool, good to know that any new games won't be worth my time

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    I hope you're wrong but it definitely is not looking good.

    The remakes are decent, but the franchise never really recovered from the closure of the original developer, Ensemble Studios, by Microsoft in the mid 2000s. Luckily the AoE2 community (and to a lesser extent the AoM community) is still going strong today. AoE2 has had something of a resurgence in the last few years, even.

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