Today we’ve got many stories for you - a change in EA’s approach to game development, massive developments with Halo Infinite and a truly mind bending Indie Title.

Iron Man Development Won’t Feature EA’s Frostbite, Will Feature Fans

Motive released a blog post for the public, with an update on their upcoming game - EA and Marvel’s collaboration on Iron Man. Community Council model in place - so Iron Man and Marvel Fans will be giving feedback to the team throughout development. Also used by the team on Dead Space to great effect Unreal Engine 5 chosen as the Engine for the game - not EA’s native Frostbite.

This is the big one, as a game this high profile could have been a showcase for EA to promote their own tools. If they’re happy to let teams work on projects the way they want - that suggests great things about how permissive Management is now compared to the Mass Effect: Andromeda era EA. The project is still in pre-production though, so that’s likely to be many years away before it’s something for the public to play.

Halo Infinite Season 5 Gives The Game A Boost

Halo Infinite Season 5 continues the slow crawl of 343 Industries as they try and bring the game back in line with player expectations. Firefight will be coming back mid-season, there’s new Arena Maps, a new DMR and the return of extraction mode.

• But the big deals are some long term asks from the player base.
  1. Match XP can now be found in Custom Games - so you can level your (non expiring) Battlepasses while playing any mode
  2. Armour Cores are finally being reworked - with helmets and armour coatings now being applicable across any character.

All of this is great, and while it’s not hitting Battlefield 2042 numbers on Steam, or even Halo Infinite launch numbers on Steam - there’s some good movement on the game over the last few days and months.

https://steamdb.info/app/1240440/charts/

But the biggest deals come with the killer app for Halo. Forge now has AI Functionality. You can spawn Marines or Covenant in and start working through building PvE maps or Horde Modes or even go wild with the possibilities. So obviously people are building arenas for players to have Covenant-Mon Battles.

https://x.com/DanTheBloke/status/1714784077541146712?s=20

But if you think that this is some sort of complex, hardcore toolset, maybe take a look at this novice player who managed to build a Single Lane Moba-Lite map in under 90 Minutes.

https://imgur.com/cRNX3XN

Give it a month or two - and we could start seeing some truly incredible experiences starting to appear.

Reporting Crashes is Making More Problems for Mortal Kombat

MK1 has problems - there’s been some real technical issues with the PC port especially. It’s not stopped people enjoying the game en masse, but for those affected, crashes have really impacted the experience for a few. Now usually, PC crashes are a complex issue that can be impacted by dozens of individual factors on a given PC. That’s why when a game crashes usually, you’re prompted to send a report to the devs to help them identify why. Mortal Kombat 1 is seemingly skipping that step and potentially causing havoc as it does so.

As identified by Steam User LouRagou -

Many of us are experiencing all kinds of crashes. You need to know that every time your game crashes, an automatic report is created on your c: Drive, at this location :C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\MK12\Saved\Steam\Crashes

All those reports provide complex info on your crashes, BUT Each report weighs nearly 1Gb of space

Remember to go there and delete all the "Crashes" folders regularly, otherwise your C: drive could get overloader quite fast (My c: drive lost up to 30Gb of space in a few days because of this)

So if you’re wondering why your PC is suddenly running out of space, and you’ve been dealing with crashes in MK1… Now you might know why.

Those Hungry for New RPGS after BG3 might have to Wait for Pillars of Eternity 3

Speaking to TouchArcade - Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer talked a little bit about the excellent project he recently helmed - Pentiment and various other things he cares about. It’s well worth the read!

But he was also asked the dream game question, what would he do with no budget? The answer - based on him hearing about the budget for BG3, he’d love to take a swing at Obsidians own CRPG in a similar way.

I think if it truly was an unlimited budget, I think I would try Pillars 3 because I know what the budget was for Deadfire, which was not a whole lot and I have heard from multiple people what the budget was for Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m not gonna talk about numbers, but if I got that budget, sure, I’ll make Pillars 3.

I think that would be a lot of fun to do, to do like a high production value party based fantasy RPG. I’m pretty happy with Pillars and Deadfire, but I do think that if it were not crowdfunded, I would probably make it turn based. I’m not saying to not have a real time with pause system, but I do think that the Deadfire turn based system which I can’t take credit for, that Nick Carver and Brian MacIntosh, was really cool. But, the game wasn’t designed for it, so actually designing the game for turn based, fewer encounters, smaller encounters, but much more tactical, I think that would be a lot of fun, and having awesome cinematics and all that stuff. That would be great.

It’s worth remembering that the distinction between PoE2 and BG3 are several orders of magnitude. As IGN put it based on their own numbers - BG3 had significant financial backing behind it.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire was funded through a crowdfunding campaign Obsidian launched on Fig in 2017 with the goal of raising $1.1 million, with $2.25 million open for equity. The goal was met in under 23 hours, with the funds further raised to $4.4 million by the end of the campaign. Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Studios, on the other hand, had a budget of $100 million.

So an important piece of context - for all intents and purposes, BG3 did have an unlimited budget.

Friday Indie Highlight - Mosa Lina is the Ultimate Immersive Sim

Mosa Lina from the three part developer collective of Stuffed Wombat, Silkersoft and Lukke. It’s been developed around a simple principle - they don’t think current Immersive Sim design is all the genre can be. Immersive Sims are generally thought of as games where you can solve problems in multiple ways to complete the level. A good rule of thumb is that if you can stack objects to get past a tall obstacle, you’re playing an Immersive Sim.

• In a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, certain problems have fixed solutions.
  • If you want to go through a small hole, you can transform into a small creature or a gas cloud.
  • It’s less about creative problem solving, and more about bringing the right skill for the job.

But what if the problems have no fixed solutions? Because the problem was randomly selected from a handcrafted set of player tools, levels, obstacles and objectives - without the developer ever testing them?

It's literally impossible for me to check if all levels are beatable with all combinations of tools. This is what makes it so satisfying: There is no premeditated solution for you to follow. You're forced to get creative.

The game continually spits out randomised problems. It's up to YOU to solve them, because I've never seen them before.

Mosa Lina is hostile game design by the developer’s own admission - testing and challenging the player to really think creatively - and break the game as they do so. This is the kind of game that Steam’s algorithmic generation is made for, and the fact that currently it’s being served with almost universally positive reviews says it’s finding an audience.