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'Payday' Dev Starbreeze Kills Co-Op 'Dungeons & Dragons' Game
Product Reviews

‘Payday’ Dev Starbreeze Kills Co-Op ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Game

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After the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s been talk of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast releasing more games based on Dungeons & Dragons. Bad news for fans looking forward to that: one of them, a title codenamed “Project Baxter,” has been fully canceled.

The title was in development over at Swedish developer Starbreeze, best known for the Payday franchise and 2012’s Syndicate. In a recent announcement, CEO Adolf Kristjansson said the “difficult but necessary decision” came as the studio is prioritizing a full revamp of its co-op heist franchise Payday. As such, “Baxter” development has been ended, and some of its assigned developers will be “redeployed across Starbreeze’s projects.” Others will be let go and given help by Starbreeze to find employment elsewhere.

“Baxter” was first announced in 2023, with Starbreeze at the time stating it’d feature “signature cornerstones” of its prior works like a live-service model and cooperative play. While the studio’s been quiet on it since then, the game would’ve released sometime in 2026 for “all major platforms.” Around this time in 2024, Starbreeze showed off concept art with a tease that it would show more in the near future.

Dungeons & Dragons is no stranger to live-service games: before Baldur’s Gate 3, there was a co-op-focused reboot of Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance in 2021, and its online servers shut down this past February. Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D, also cancelled five unannounced games prior to Baldur’s release, some of which were likely D&D games. At the time of writing, a single-player action game from Giant Skull set in the D&D universe—and led by Star Wars: Jedi director Stig Asmussen—remains in development.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.



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Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev
Game Updates

Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev

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Even the most fervent Super Earth bootlicker wouldn’t deny that Helldivers 2 has been suffering some technical problems, especially after the performance-sapping Into the Unjust update. Developers Arrowhead say a patch is coming, and in the meantime, have shared the first in a series of techy blog posts burrowing into the engineering side of how the co-op bugshooter comes together. Entry number one doesn’t deal with framerates, though: instead it explains the game’s longer-running issue with its increasingly gargantuan, 150GB-ish install size.

Earlier this year, players had already discovered the most immediate cause of Helldivers 2’s swelling: its installation is stuffed with duplicate files, spanning weapon models to tree and rock textures. This had not only ballooned the install size over time, as successive updates added more and more assets, but left PC players with the unanswered question of why their SSDs were filled with photocopied rocket launchers. Especially as the PS5 and Xbox versions, weighing in around a third of the size, exhibited no such duplication.

As the post (credited to deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong) now explains, including multiple file copies was Arrowhead’s solution to the slow loading times of creaking old hard drives. A lingering inconvenience to some PCs, but not the exclusively SSD-equipped consoles.

“The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time,” Armstrong writes. “An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to “seek” or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.

“Imagine a large game level with various objects – trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”

I know the feeling – I recently flooded my flat with spare scissors, having tired of never remembering where I put our sole original pair. Hard drives might have more reliable memories than me but when it comes to Helldivers 2, Arrowhead evidently don’t consider the time they would spend searching for individual, non-duplicate files to constitute an acceptable loading speed.

The post also considers alternate solutions, including removing or repacking certain duplicates – which would make HDD loading slower, but potentially cut the file size – or split off 4K textures as an optional download, something Armstrong says is not “natively” supported by the game’s engine but could still be made possible.

It’s tempting to mutter “Or everyone could just be sensible and get an SSD.” I’d probably be muttering it myself, had almost every facet of gaming PC building and ownership not become so miserably expensive in the past few years, in turn making cheap mech drives genuinely harder to upgrade from on tight budgets. Hopefully Arrowhead can find a fix that works for everyone.



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Helldivers 2 Dev Explains Why The Game Takes Up So Much Space On PC
Game Updates

Helldivers 2 Dev Explains Why The Game Takes Up So Much Space On PC

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Have you ever noticed that Helldivers 2 takes up a lot more room on PC than it does on either Xbox Series X|S or PlayStation 5? At 150GB, the game is roughly three times bigger on PC than on consoles. According to Arrowhead game studio deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong, the reason why is that Helldivers 2 is still catering to a small segment of PC users.

In a lengthy post on Steam, Armstrong wrote that Helldivers 2’s install footprint is so large because most of it is duplicated for the benefit of players who still use mechanical hard disk drives. It’s an antiquated process that features duplicate data grouped close together in order to reduce loading times. Armstrong notes that the duplication is not necessary for players who have long since upgraded to solid state drives, but Arrowhead has had difficulty determining how many players remain on mechanical HDDs.

“How many Helldivers 2 players are still using mechanical HDD? The truth is that we don’t currently know,” Armstrong wrote. “Even the Steam user surveys are unable to give us data on mechanical HDD use in the overall gamer population. Our best estimates put it at around 12% of all PC gamers, but the data is very unreliable and relies on a lot of extrapolations. Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication. Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.”

Armstrong laid out some potential solutions and noted that the next update will make some progress towards shrinking the file size. However, he warns that players may not notice the difference “because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains.” For a medium-term solution, Arrowhead plans to bundle common assets together rather than featuring so many duplicate files. The downside is that it will make the game slightly slower for mechanical HDD users, but he hopes to keep the load times to “less than 30 seconds.”

Going forward, Arrowhead will also work to improve its engine and improve compression techniques that reduce the need for duplication. However, Armstrong added that the studio doesn’t know yet if the impact on load times will make this an infeasible solution.

Arrowhead Game Studio CEO Shams Jorjani recently stated that the team’s goal for Helldivers 2 is to keep it going forever, rather than moving on to Helldivers 3. The studio also released a patch that tackled cave crashes and audio bugs. More recently, Arrowhead acknowledged a long list of problems to address, including “issues including performance drops, stability hiccups, freezes, and the annoying audio bugs.” An update is planned for later this month, but many of those issues may take more time to fix.



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A Palworld character looks at the camera.
Game Reviews

Ex-Capcom Dev Has Absurd Take On Palworld Lawsuit

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Palworld has been controversial from the get-go. With strikingly similar aesthetics and game mechanics to Pokémon, the game has been accused of plagiarism by fans and lawyers alike. And according to ex-Capcom dev Yoshiki Okamoto (Monster Strike, Folklore), you–yes you–shouldn’t even be playing Palworld until and unless the lawsuit is settled in Pocketpair’s favor. “I don’t want the world to think [Palworld] is acceptable,” Okamoto said, urging folks not to play the game.

It was only a matter of time before Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, ever-quick to use legal means to shut down anything they consider a misuse of their IP (unless, of course, that IP is used to promote the rounding up and abuse of real humans), would sue developer Pocketpair. And in a recent video (h/t PC Gamer), Okamoto said Pocketpair has committed such a grave sin in their creation of Palworld that it “transcends the boundaries of war” and that “by playing the game you are supporting it, so please don’t buy it.”

Okamoto has been torched in the comments over this assertion, especially considering his suspected use of the term “anti-social force,” which is not a punk band name, but rather an actual term used to describe fraudsters and yakuza-owned businesses. (It’s not entirely clear if he actually used this term, as he deliberately obfuscated the final kanji in both the video’s audio and its subtitles.)

Folks in the comments of this wild video have rightly argued that many of Okamoto’s own games involve monster battling and the capturing of your foes to do your bidding, mechanics which are also at the core of Pokémon. Others are just voicing their frustrations with Nintendo’s now-predictable behavior when it comes to the alleged misuse of their ideas.

Read More: Nintendo’s New Pokémon Patents Threaten The Entire Monster-Taming Genre

Telling folks that they shouldn’t play a game until the courts deem it okay to do so (as if courts, in 2025 of all times, are rational machines of truth) is a bold move. And it doesn’t seem to be paying off for him, Cotton.



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Sleep Awake, a visually inviting horror game from the lead dev behind Spec Ops: The Line, has a demo out now
Game Updates

Sleep Awake, a visually inviting horror game from the lead dev behind Spec Ops: The Line, has a demo out now

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a new game from Spec Ops: The Line director Cory Davis. As far as I can tell, the last game he made was 2016’s Here They Lie, a survival horror game. He’s currently working on another horror game in fact, Sleep Awake, which is a horrendous name, though I think it’s doing some interesting things. Weirdly, he’s making the game alongside Nine Inch Nails guitarist (for live shows, anyway) Robin Finck, and while the game doesn’t have a release date, it did just receive a demo.


Lemme tell ya, if there’s one thing you can take away from Sleep Awake it’s that PS3 games are back! Let me define what I mean here so I don’t just sound like I’m trying to press some buzz words for the fun of it. I think a key thing about the PS3 era of games is that there was so much more scope for much more intimately designed, linear spaces, with much more room for detail compared to the PS2, but not quite enough resources to design something completely lifelike.

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In a lot of ways, these intricately designed games often just had facades up, they looked bigger and more impressive than they actually were. The upside is that it also often made for interesting art direction, and a better established sense of space. So many big budget games now do look life-like, but the tradeoff is that all of this detail gets lost through the sheer quantity of it.


Sleep Awake’s demo was only short, and very much felt like one long corridor, but it was an interesting to look at corridor. Your classic case of random bits of graffiti and wall carvings to denote story, interacting with random objects that does nothing but let you look at them close-up, data logs with bits of flavour text to build up the lore, it’s all there.


Speaking of lore, or story I suppose, this game is set in a world where there’s some kind of weird illness thingy that whisks people away if they fall asleep, so the protagonist is doing what they can to stay awake at all times, which occasionally leads to some hallucinations.


To be perfectly honest, the narrative didn’t feel all that compelling. As mentioned, the demo was short, and did quite a bad job of bringing me into this world, it felt too jarring and disconnected. There also just wasn’t really anything to actually do apart from walk around, look at some bits, and one very short section at the end where I had to hide from an enemy. I’d be remiss to not mention the fact that the writing was stilted and awkward, and the main character’s performance matched that feeling a little too well unfortunately.


Still, the atmosphere and visuals pulled me in all the same. There’s parts that are intercut with live action footage which, to its credit, actually unnerved me. A real arthouse, ’70s vibe about it I feel I could really get down with. It is certainly going for a unique look, and I felt charmed by its 2009 throwback vibes, even if I’m uncertain of whether it’ll be any good or not.


Still, it’s a curious thing to have a game from someone that designed one of the most discussed games of the 2010s, and someone that plays guitar for Nine Inch Nails sometimes. Worth a punt! You can try it out on Steam.



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Zane, from Borderlands 4, pinches his fingertips expressively as he tries to communicate something so someone off screen.
Gaming Gear

Borderlands 4 dev clears up the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage, and I feel like a combat log is in order so I didn’t have to find this out on a Reddit thread

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Borderlands 4 has a ton of possible builds to choose from—it’s one of the strengths I highlighted in my Borderlands 4 review—but I do have one teensy-tiny complaint, and it’s that I would like some of the tooltips to be a smidge more straightforward about what is what.

This feeling has returned full-force after seeing a developer kindly explaining the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage on the game’s subreddit (thanks, TheGamer), which probably isn’t the place you should have to go for this sort of clarification.

Turns out, it’s a rectangles/squares situation. Except this is Borderlands, so lead character designer Nicholas Thurston uses guns and shotguns as the metaphor: “Skill Damage and Action Skill Damage is like Gun Damage and Shotgun Damage. All Skills are skills, but only some are Action Skills. Same as all Guns are Guns, but only some are Shotguns.” Simple, then.


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Thurston then explains that Skill Damage impacts basically everything involving the word “Skill”, including passive skills and traits and, you guessed it, Action Skills. However, Action Skill damage only boosts whatever’s on the Action Skill itself.

Other modifiers, like Melee Damage and Minion Damage, can apply to an Action Skill if it also does those things. For example: “Amon’s ‘Onslaughter’ does Melee Damage with his fist, this would get Skill Damage, Action Skill Damage, and Melee Damage … Forgedrones (as an example) only benefit from Skill Damage, as they come from Passive Skills, as well as Melee Damage.”

In a separate comment, Thurston also explains that there’s no real difference between “status chance” and “status application chance”, and that all instances of the former should be the latter: “if something doesn’t, that’s a goof on our part that we’ll need to investigate and correct.”

And hey, props to Thurston for coming in and clearing some of this up, but it does beg the question whether or not the series needs a little more transparency on just how everything works.

Most ARPGs, a genre which Borderlands shares most of its DNA with, have combat logs that let you mouse over your damage and get a peek at the math going on underneath the hood, allowing you to test whether all those floating modifiers are actually being fed into the machine properly.

And while BL4 does have training dummies, not having any proper mouseovers for its various tooltips—or a way to check on your damage after the fact—does hamper the otherwise stellar buildcraft somewhat. I probably shouldn’t be having to do napkin math to figure out why a non-legendary gun is causing Total Existence Failure.



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A screenshot featuing the Call of Duty Beavis and Butthead collab skin.
Esports

Black Ops 7 dev adresses long-time CoD complaint with big update

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Treyarch’s Matt Scronce has explained why the Black Ops 6 devs hadn’t totally dumped an issue that Call of Duty fans have been complaining about for a while. Though it has been “drastically reduced” for Black Ops 7.

Since Call of Duty started molding into one with the launch of the CoD hub, there have been a few issues that have lingered from game to game. Players have voiced their complaints on big collabs, devs seemingly not focusing on the realism side of CoD, and even the in-game performance of guns.

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On the latter part of that, fans have complained for a while about visual clutter when firing. Wacky scopes, some filling too much of the screen, and gun smoke flying up after shots have all caused players headaches at some point.

The visual smoke has, at times, been toned down, but the developers have accepted that they’ve not gone too far enough at times. However, that should change with Black Ops 7.

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CoD devs reducing visual noise in Black Ops 7

Ahead of the Black Ops 7 multiplayer beta, Treyarch’s Matt Scronce announced that “drastically reduced visual noise” when firing weapons in the upcoming release. 

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The design director noted that it “is a common piece of feedback across the board but also specifically from our keyboard and mouse players.” Though, he was quizzed on why it’s not been eradicated before, given it is a common complaint.

“Will only speak for us, but we pulled back considerably over the course of Black Ops 6,” he added. “It’s a balance between visual flavor and gameplay. Want to make sure gameplay is prioritized on day 1 for Black Ops 7.”

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Will only speak for us, but we pulled back considerably over the course of Black Ops 6. It’s a balance between visual flavor and gameplay. Want to make sure gameplay is prioritized on day 1 for Black Ops 7.

— Matt Scronce (@MaTtKs) September 26, 2025

Scornce has also revealed that Treyarch would love to bring back Pick 10 as a create-a-class system at some point, but they’d like to make changes to it as well. 

He also announced that three perks have had their slots switched up ahead of the multiplayer beta. So, Tryarch are taking feedback on board.

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Sucker Punch studio head Brian Flemming promotes Ghost of Tsushima.
Game Reviews

PlayStation Studio Boss Breaks Silence On Dev Fired For Charlie Kirk Joke

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For the last week, a war has been waging in the YouTube comments of each new Ghost of Yotei trailer as the PlayStation 5 exclusive nears its release date early next month. That’s because a developer at Sucker Punch Productions joked about the assassination of Charlie Kirk on social media. Sony confirmed it parted ways with the employee following a right-wing pressure campaign, but declined to issue any further statement. Now studio head and co-founder, Brian Fleming, has commented on the firing directly in a new interview.

The Sucker Punch artist Drew Harrison, a nearly 10-year veteran of the studio, had posted “I hope the shooter’s name is Mario so that Luigi knows his bro got his back” on the day the assassination took place. Less than 24 hours later she confirmed she fired. “Drew Harrison is no longer an employee of Sucker Punch Productions,” a spokesperson for Sony told Kotaku at the time.

“The facts are accurate,” Fleming Stephen Totilo’s Game File on Friday when asked about the situation. “Drew’s no longer an employee here. I think we’re aligned as a studio that celebrating or making light of someone’s murder is a deal-breaker for us, and we condemn that, kind of in no uncertain terms. That’s sort of our studio, and that’s kind of where we are.”

YouTube / Kotaku

Despite Harrison’s swift firing, angry internet users, urged on by clout chasing culture warriors like Mark ‘Grummz’ Kern, have been demanding Sony take action against any staff members who may have liked or reposted Harrison’s comment, while also targeting other companies and their employees over potential anti-Kirk sentiment. That included Bethesda, which was accused of mocking the right-wing podcast’s supporters when it posted a clip from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle of the famous Nazi puncher saying to a kitten, “You don’t care much about these fascists, do you?” It was later deleted.

Microsoft Gaming employees were also targeted, including by Elon Musk. “We’re aware of the views expressed by a small subset of our employees regarding recent events,” the company announced in response on September 12. “We take matters like this very seriously and we are currently reviewing each individual situation. Comments celebrating violence against anyone are unacceptable and do not align with our values.” A spokesperson for the company declined to comment when asked if anyone had been fired from Microsoft following these investigations.

“Sucker Punch is amazing & one of the last few bright shining lights in the game industry,” Harrison posted this week. “I still support them and I cannot condone any animosity directed at them. It’s truly all the best people.”



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Skate Passes 2 Million Players As Dev Fixes A Major Issue
Game Updates

Skate Passes 2 Million Players As Dev Fixes A Major Issue

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A lot of people have played EA’s new Skate game since it launched on September 16. How many? According to the developers, the new Skate–the first in 15 years–reached more than 2 million players in its first 24 hours.

“Beyond stoked”

“We’re beyond stoked to welcome everyone to San Vansterdam! Thanks for your patience as we flex our servers to keep up with all the hype. Keep riding and we’ll see you out there!” the developer said.

Skate is a free-to-play game that’s available in early access across PC and console (and coming to iOS and Android later). There is no Switch 2 version.

While the game is free, EA is selling a Founder’s Pack ($25) and a Founder’s Pack Deluxe ($50) that include a variety of extras. Some early-access games raise prices when they reach 1.0, but when Skate’s 1.0 release comes in about a year, the game will remain free, EA has said.

Major issue fixed

Beyond the launch-day server struggles for Skate, one of the issues that players called out was a “soft lock” bug that prevented players from progressing beyond certain parts in the game. Many people were impacted by this issue, and developer Full Circle has now addressed it.

If you’re just getting started with the new Skate, check out the gallery below that covers a few things you need to know before dropping in.



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Hell Is Us Dev Is A Little Salty Over Hollow Knight: Silksong's Shadow Release
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Hell Is Us Dev Is A Little Salty Over Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Shadow Release

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After years of anticipation, Team Cherry only gave the video game industry and players two weeks notice that Hollow Knight: Silksong was about to arrive on September 4. While a handful of indie games were moved away from that date, Rogue Factor had already staked out the same release date for Hell is Us six months earlier. Now, Hell is Us’ creative director is sharing his belief that Silksong’s shadow drop negatively impacted Hell is Us’ sales, and he doesn’t sound happy about it.

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête acknowledged that Team Cherry had the right to pick any date it wanted to during his appearance on the Friends Per Second podcast (via This Week in Video Games). However, Jacques-Belletête feels that the decision to do so on such short notice was “a little callous.”

“When you know you’re that big, I think a shadow drop is a bit like–‘wow,'” said Jacques-Belletête. “As the ‘GTA 6 of indie’ … to shadow drop something like this is a little callous.”

According to Jacques-Belletête, discussions were held between Rogue Factor and publisher Nacon about delaying Hell is Us. But there were too many complicating factors, including the need to refund any pre-orders that had already been placed.

“We decided to keep the date, and I’m happy that we did,” added Jacques-Belletête. “We’re still much bigger than some of the smaller ones who would have gotten a lot more affected and who decided to change their dates. Changing the date of Hell Is Us would have been a pretty big [endeavor].”

Jacques-Belletête went on to note that he believes Silksong’s release hurt Hell is Us’ sales, but also acknowledged that he doesn’t currently have the sales numbers available to illustrate that point.

As for Silksong, it debuted with a massive concurrent player count on Steam during its first weekend. A common complaint about the game is that it’s too difficult, and mods designed to make Silksong easier were released almost immediately. Team Cherry subsequently released its own patch to lower Silksong’s difficulty.



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