The One Thing EA Has Always Been Good At Is Killing Video Game Studios

What do you do when you want to play Fallout 4 again, but you already know how that first firefight in Concord goes, and how every fight after it ends? You’re not alone: One Reddit user with more than 1,000 hours in the game asked the same thing after trying every build and mod they could think of. Hundreds of hours in, even a world this big can start to feel like a to-do list — another settlement under attack, another warehouse full of raiders, another supply run. Once you’re running the Minutemen, Preston Garvey’s quests do start cycling back through places you’ve already cleared. Here are eight self-imposed rules to get you out of that rut, from swearing off anything invented after the Dark Ages to hunting animals for a living to taking over Nuka-World as a raider warlord. Vault-Tec guidelines: Start a new character on Survival difficulty. Treat dying as the end of your run. No reloading allowed. Climb out of Vault 111 and you’ll find yourself in the Commonwealth, a ruined version of Boston in the year 2287. It’s already a hostile place, with raiders, feral ghouls, and super mutants roaming the rubble. Survival mode makes it a lot less forgiving.

As a millennial homosexual who once was pursuing a music education degree, Glee was an incredibly formative TV show in my life when it aired on Fox from 2009 to 2015. To anyone who didn’t watch the show, Glee probably just looked like a bunch of musical theater singers trying to sing the latest pop hotness and being woefully ill-equipped for it. But those of who watched it know that wasn’t the case. I mean, it was that, but it was also the most cursed, out-of-pocket satire-turned-issue-of-the-week musical drama known to man. Despite having been off the air for over a decade, it has maintained a place in pop culture because it mixed a commitment to over-the-top, not-always-PC humor with efforts, however flawed, to bring attention to social issues, even as it spoke about them in an often tongue-in-cheek way. Now, the show is apparently coming back, with at least some of the original cast returning, as a Disney+ and Hulu joint. I do wonder just how contemporary it can be, as the show was pretty whipsmart about weighing in on modern topics and singing current songs when it was airing on Fox.

For years now, every time I’ve taken a day off or a full-blown vacation here at Kotaku or my previous job, there was always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind: “What if BioWare shuts down while I’m gone?” Much of my career has involved talking about this studio’s work, and with every step I heard publisher EA’s executioner take toward the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio’s execution block, I worried more and more that I wouldn’t be working that day to write about the end of a studio whose work pretty much put me where I am today. Now, that day has come, and even though I’d braced for it, I’m still gutted and angry, because things didn’t have to be this way. On a professional level, I run a semi-popular podcast about BioWare games, and cut my teeth writing about how games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age allowed for levels of player expression you wouldn’t find in most AAA games. In a way, my entire ethos about what roleplaying in video games is was born out of playing and thinking about these games. Personally, however, I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without playing Mass Effect 19 years ago.

Brian VanHooker is a Pop Culture Writer specializing in Celebrity Interviews and In-Depth Oral Histories in the areas of Comedy, TV, Film, Cartoons, Comic Books, 80s/90s Nostalgia, Fatherhood, Retro Games and Food (especially Pizza). He was the Senior Features Writer at Cracked and a Staff Writer at MEL. He has written for Inverse, Inside Hook, Maxim, Men's Health, Fatherly, SFGate and more. He's the co-creator of the comic book/cartoon Barnum & Elwood and The Tramp, an award-winning comedy pilot starring John O’Hurley. He also hosts a TMNT interview podcast called Turtle Tracks and was once called a “Good Guy” by Mr. T. Do you have to stick around until after the credits for the new DC movie?

Patricia is the former editor-in-chief of Kotaku, where she spent a decade writing and editing. Prior to that, she served as the Culture Editor at Polygon, and as a reporter at The Verge. Hernandez specializes in Pokémon TCG, Nintendo, and offbeat internet culture stories. Bethesda is presenting a handful of new post-apocalyptic RPG experiences for Fallout 4

Microsoft is in the middle of decoupling its cloud gaming service from Game Pass. Starting today, Xbox Insiders will have the option of streaming games even if they aren’t current subscribers. It’s turning what was once known as Xbox Cloud Gaming into Xbox Cloud Playtime with a pay-as-you-go model that’s more flexible. The program is expected to roll out “more broadly” in November. At that point, people will be able to pay for cloud gaming time a la carte starting at $0.40 an hour. Here are the pricing packages: 10hrs for $4 25hrs for $8 50hrs for $12 These “Cloud playtime packs” are ad-free and “high-quality streaming,” but Xbox has also moved toward offering an ad-supported streaming tier for people who just want to try it out or are less worried about connection quality and interruptions. This new model comes as Xbox has started limiting the number of hours existing Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream each month. How do the prices compare to those from competitors like Geforce Now? Nvidia’s cloud gaming service requires you to already own the games but provides up to 100 hours of “premium monthly playtime” for just $10 a month.