Microsoft has filed a patent application, published in July and titled 'Generative Narrative Game Experience With Player Feedback,' for a system that uses generative AI to alter quests, storylines and world details based on individual player behavior. The technology would track player actions through a 'narrative state graph' and could also factor in facial expressions and other emotional signals to decide which characters or areas to expand.
Microsoft has published a patent application titled "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access," describing a system that uses signals from a game engine to insert ads at natural pause points like boss fights, loading screens, or cutscene transitions. The system would display a video or static ad and reset a timer before searching for the next opportunity to interrupt gameplay. Microsoft has not confirmed whether or when this system will be implemented in actual games.
The U.S. government and several legal and business groups have submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court supporting Apple's bid to overturn a civil contempt ruling stemming from its App Store dispute with Epic Games. The contempt finding arose after Apple began charging a 27% commission on purchases made through external links, which Epic argued violated a prior injunction. Apple maintains the injunction's original wording never explicitly barred such a commission, and that lower courts wrongly invoked the 'spirit' of the order rather than its text.
Riot Games has postponed the launch of team voice chat for League of Legends, which had been announced for NA/OCE regions in the upcoming 26.20 patch. The League of Legends Dev Team said on social media that the feature was pushed back to meet quality standards, but did not give a new release date or specify the reason for the delay.
Anti-aliasing is the graphics setting that smooths jagged, stair-stepped edges created when curved or diagonal lines are drawn on square pixel grids. Modern games offer multiple approaches, including supersampling methods like MSAA, post-process filters like FXAA and SMAA, and temporal techniques like TAA and DLAA that reuse data from previous frames.
Microsoft is cutting 268 more jobs across Xbox as part of the restructuring it began in July, with Halo Studios, first-party developers and central Xbox Game Studios functions most affected. A newly formed team under Activision will develop the next Halo title, while Rare and World's Edge also move under Activision's oversight, and Obsidian shifts to Bethesda. Compulsion Games, Double Fine and Undead Labs have been spun off as independent studios with funding and IP rights intact.
Microsoft's Xbox division is transferring future Halo game development to Call of Duty publisher Activision, part of a fresh round of 268 layoffs. The move follows Ninja Theory's failed sale talks, with the Hellblade studio now facing a proposed closure after two potential buyers walked away. Xbox says it is three-quarters through a restructuring plan that has already eliminated 1,600 jobs immediately, with 3,600 total cuts planned.
Sonic the Hedgehog series boss Takashi Iizuka told Tokyo Game Show attendees that Sega executives once wanted to cancel the entire Sonic franchise, and that he had to fight internally to keep it alive. He credited the 2020 live-action film, whose character redesign followed fan backlash, with proving continued demand and enabling sequels; the franchise has since sold over 1.5 billion copies worldwide.
Actor Austin Abrams, who stars in Zach Cregger's new video game adaptation 'Resident Evil,' revealed he drew inspiration from the horror-comedy 'Shaun of the Dead' when developing his character. Abrams said he embraced an unpolished, everyman approach to surviving a zombie outbreak rather than playing his role as a conventionally heroic action figure.
A solo developer built a game backend called GDT (Game Development Toolkit) that has run every title they've shipped since 2016, including Marooners, Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo, Crash Drive 2 and 3, plus a seventh game built by another studio. The PHP version, roughly 20,000 lines running on Google App Engine with Firestore, supported Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, mobile and web without a player-noticed outage in ten years, and has now been replaced by a C# version on Cloud Run.
Researchers from the University of Bristol and Oxford used the Isambard-AI supercomputer to analyse all 172.6 hours of live play across the tournament's 104 matches, finding over 93,000 visible brand appearances for unhealthy food, alcohol, gambling and speculative products. Food and drink brands made up 70% of these appearances, with soft drinks, fast food, sports drinks and crisps brands dominating exposure, which the team estimates generated 267 billion impressions in the UK alone.
Microsoft is combining Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios into a single studio that will focus on Forza Horizon and Fable, according to a memo from Xbox content chief Matt Booty. The move effectively ends Turn 10 as an independent studio after it lost most of its staff in layoffs last year and had been largely maintaining Forza Motorsport since.
GoKawiil