Botany Manor Reviews - OpenCritic

Hellblade: A Journey of the Mind in Collaboration with Cambridge Neuroscience

Meet the Cast of Senua's Saga: Melina Juergens as Senua

Separately, Microsoft Gaming and NetEase have also entered into an agreement to explore bringing new NetEase titles to Xbox consoles and other platforms.

Very smart of Microsoft to use the Activision-Blizzard deal as leverage to also benefit Xbox consoles, NetEase lately has been opening dozens of studios around the world with some very senior employees, snatching up very high ranking employees of Japanese studios, so it could mean even more Japanese support as well. Other platforms may also mean Windows Store and Microsoft' upcoming Mobile Store.

Yeah, I think Microsoft is already looking ahead into offering an overarching Xbox experience and I expect that they do something with mobile soon. They have now a lot of bigger mobile titles inhouse and this contract allows them to offer also more mobile third-party titles, so this seems all in-line with something liek a mobile Gamepass.

Watched it and very much enjoyed it. I am happy how much the team was allowed the freedom to fully commit to this, something clearly visible in the details. Like how much effort was going into the speech bubbles with their scripts and how it is filled in naturally. Or how the art director speaks about the marginalia and how they adapted it from historical script. That is something clearly not often happening in big game development. And Josh says it: he felt less crunched. I hope MS is happy with this and allows more smaller projects with such full creative freedom.

EDIT: One thought I had to this: Redfall is the product of managers limiting creative freedom because they wanted a product for what they seen as market demands. And Pentiment on the other hand is the result of creative freedom. Sure, most projects need to strike a balance in between, but it should clearly show management, that they shouldn't fiddle too much in the creative process.

NetEase's Upcoming Games.

• Bloodstrike (Mobile + PC)
• Marvel Rivals (PC)
• Racing Master (Mobile)
• Tom and Jerry: Chase (Mobile)
• Harry Potter: Magic Awakened (Mobile)
• Once Human (PC)
• Where Winds Meet (PC)
• Project: BloodStrike (Mobile)
• Project: E.O.E (Mobile)
• Project: Extreme (PC)
• Project Mugen (PC/Mobile/PlayStation)
• Developing Visions of Mana for Square Enix

NetEase's Studios 

• NetEase Games
• Ouka Studios - Ryosuke Yoshida (Ex-Capcom Combat Designer - 10 Years)
• Grasshopper Manufacture - Founded by Goichi Suda (Creator of No More Heroes)
• PinCool - Ryutaro Ichimura (Chief Producer of Dragon Quest)
• Nagoshi Studio - Founded by Toshihiro Nagoshi (Creator of Yakuza)
• Studio Flare - Japanese Studio - Toshimichi Mori (Creator of BlazBlue)
• NetEase Games Tokyo
• GPTRACK50 - Hiroyuki Kobayashi (Senior Producer at Capcom - 27 Years)
• Quantic Dream
• Jackalyptic Games
• T-Minus Zero Entertainment - Rich Vogel (Executive Producer at Bioware)
• Jar of Sparks
• Anchor Point Studios - Paul Ehreth (Lead Designer on Control)
• NetEase Games North America
• BulletFarm - David Vonderhaar (Studio Design Director at Treyarch)
• NetEase Games Montreal
• SkyBox Labs
• Big Brain Game Studios
• Worlds Untold - Mac Walters (Lead Writer at Bioware)
• Spliced
• NetEase Games Korea
• Fantastic Pixel Castle

It's crazy that Josh said Pentiment was the longest he has ever worked on a game as well (excluding cancelled projects), at 3 years. I hope if he comes back to AAA that he is ready for that to be beaten, Lol. Though I only listened to part of the interview and it seems to me more like he doesn't have much of an issue with the length of time and more when they have to cut a bunch of stuff, if he works on an AAA for 5 years or so but they don't cut a lot of stuff mid-development then he may have a much happier experience.

The lil gator game was unexpectly fun...

The netease deal seams good business wise curious what some studios will make ..

Did not got much from the deals this week, except for Jade of Empire.