Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Ok, deep breath. My last day at Polygon will be August 15th. I’ve been deliberating how to write that for literally months, but there it is. I’m leaving Polygon, which I helped to co-found in 2012. I’m not leaving for a job at another outlet, which would be totally fine, or to…
Big, slow, sweeping strategy games expose their rules in a way no other game does. Call of Duty doesn’t have floating numbers above enemy heads, telling you their movement speed, for example. But in most 4X and grand strategy games, there is no attempt to hide exactly how everything works: the stats, their interactions, are…
EA’s pre-E3 (pre3?) press conference came and went with all the fanfare of a trip through a Wendy’s drive-through, despite Janina Gavankar’s valiant efforts to hype the audience for Star Wars Battlefront 2‘s probably-gonna-be-fine campaign mode. Much of the presentation’s audible thud could be attributed to the extended Battlefront 2 multiplayer demonstration, which came complete…
It’s E3 2016, and that means new video games are being announced left right and center—like a new sequel to the DC Comics brawler Injustice: Gods Among Us, which told an alternative tale of Superman gone bad. The game inspired a comic tie-in of the same name, and—against all the odds—it’s been one of DC’s…
A documentary about the creation of Horizon Zero Dawn was created by the Dutch organization VPRO, and yesterday Kotaku pulled an interesting GIF from the video that showed how the game renders its large environments. “Every time you move the camera in Horizon Zero Dawn, the game is doing all sorts of under-the-hood calculations, loading…
Horizon Zero Dawn is the latest contender for “best-looking console game ever made,” and with its incredibly detailed open world, unnaturally beautiful lighting and weather effects, and rock-solid performance at 4K resolution, it may capture the crown for the moment. It’s gorgeous on its own, but one Twitter user, SunhiLegend, has been getting a good…
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game that suffered from animation issues and a number of rough edges that hurt the enjoyment of the story itself. It’s nearly impossible to sit back and get lost in a world when that world has yet to be finished. Yesterday, BioWare announced that a series of patches would fix…
League of Legends’ design director said earlier this month that it’s a matter of time before the game adds an openly gay character. Choices like that don’t sit well with some of LoL’s more conservative fans, and in replying to one of them, Greg Street says the game is simply a reflection of the current…
EVE Online is about to get its biggest, most expensive warship ever: the Molok. A version of the game’s giant Titan spaceship that’s aligned with the Blood Raider pirate faction, it’s going to cost three to five times the price of an Avatar-class Titan. But all that cash outlay comes with serious benefits, like the…
A woman was apparently targeted for abuse over the awkward facial animations in a video game. Bioware A woman identified as working on the animations for the video game Mass Effect Andromeda became the target of an online harassment campaign Saturday that saw her online accounts flooded with misogynistic messages. Allie Rose-Marie Leost was bombarded…