Veteran developer Yuji Naka hit out at his former publisher, Square Enix, after a court case over his removal as director of Balan Wonderworld concluded.

Naka is best known for his work on Sonic The Hedgehog, Phantasy Star, and Nights into Dreams. In a series of tweets, Naka said that “Square Enix is no good” and that neither they nor co-developer Arzest are “companies that care about games or fans.”

Naka had served as the director of Balan for much of its development but was removed from the post about six months before the game was released. He resigned from Square Enix shortly after Balan was released and filed a lawsuit against the company. He also floated the idea of retiring from the games industry for good.

In his thread, Naka cited two reasons for his last-minute dismissal. First was he voiced concern about promotional work with a Youtuber, who was to perform and release sheet music for a piano arrangement of the game’s music. “I thought it strange that we would only release an arrangement of the game’s music, and furthermore use a ghostwriter to produce that arrangement,” wrote Naka. “I got in trouble for arguing that we release the original score.”

Naka also cited tensions between himself and Arzest surrounding his comments that the game was submitted in an unfinished state, with known issues left unfixed. “I believe that games should be made by working hard until the very end, until it's a good game that the team thinks their fans enjoy when they buy it,” he wrote.

バランワンダーワールド発売の約半年前にバランワンダーワールドのディレクターから外される業務命令が出されましたので、スクウェアエニックスに対して裁判所で訴訟を提起していました。裁判が終わり業務命令が現時点で効力は失われていると言う事ですので、お話したいと思います。#BalanWonderworld pic.twitter.com/9KE7hLqfor

— Yuji Naka / 中　裕司 (@nakayuji) April 28, 2022

Balan Wonderworld was announced in 2020 and hyped as the long-awaited reunion of Naka and fellow Sonic creator Naoto Ohshima, who is currently the head of Arzest. It was a critical and commercial failure upon release in March 2021, with our review calling it a “half-baked platformer” that was little more than a “jumble of endearing but incoherent ideas” and let down by “fundamentally bad choices.”

While mostly focusing his ire on Square Enix and Azrest, Naka also thanked those who provided “comments and fantastic illustrations” inspired by the game, and offered his “sincere apologies to those customers who bought the unfinished Balan Wonderworld.”

IGN has reached out to Square Enix for comment and you can read our independent translation of Naka's Twitter thread below.

Jack Richardson is a Freelance Writer for IGN.

Activision Blizzard shareholders voted today to approve the company's pending acquisition by Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it's a done deal, with several other hurdles remaining.

Announced via press release today, over 98% of shares voted in favor of the acquisition, which is expected to close sometime in the upcoming Microsoft fiscal year, which is between July 2022 and June 2023.

The voters approved the acquisition at $95 per share - considerably higher than the share price of late, which has been slowly dropping over the last month from the low-$80 range and has been hovering between $76 and $77 per share for the last few days.

The lowering share price ahead of the deal could indicate a lack of shareholder confidence that the deal will ultimately pass. Though the vote was overwhelming, a number of other possible challenges lie between now and the ultimate conclusion of the deal.

One key hurdle is the likelihood of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Lina Khan, its recently-appointed head, has already shown a willingness to tackle big tech antitrust issues, including blocking an Nvidia acquisition and reopening the case against Meta. The deal will also require regulatory approvals abroad, including in China.

The Activision Blizzard acquisition comes at a time of ongoing turbulance within and around the company. The deal itself has prompted accusations of insider trading, but even more notable is the ongoing California lawsuit against the publisher accusing it of fostering a "frat boy culture" as well as subjecting female employees to unequal pay and sexual harassment.

Since the lawsuit, over 1,000 employees have called for the removal of CEO Bobby Kotick after reports that he knew about a number of the sexual harassment and assault allegations. Though it''s unclear if Kotick will remain post-acquisition, he stands to receive a $15 million "golden parachute" compensation if he departs. You can see a full timeline of events related to the lawsuit here.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Supermassive Games knows the appeal of a good horror story. Millions of the studio’s fans have jumped and screamed through Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures games. But the developer recognises that not everyone enjoys horror in the same way. That’s why The Quarry, Supermassive’s upcoming spiritual successor to Until Dawn, has multiple different game modes in order to allow a whole spectrum of horror fans to join in. It can, of course, be a choice-based story game. But, much like the spookiest of shadows, it can morph into other guises.

If you want, The Quarry can be a movie you just sit back and watch for ten hours. Or it can be a movie you direct, where you instruct your cast ahead of time on how they should respond to the adventure’s many threats. And, should you not want to endure the scares alone, The Quarry can even be a multiplayer game.

“The Quarry has probably the widest range of modes that we've done,” says director Will Byles. “We wanted to go and open this up to a much wider audience than just traditional gamers.”

While by its very nature horror will never genuinely have something for everyone, Supermassive Games is determined to offer the right options to allow as many people as possible to experience The Quarry. That effort begins in the main game itself, which as you’d expect plays much like Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures, and games from the likes of Telltale and Quantic Dream. Prominent among these games’ traditional mechanics are moments in which you must quickly react under stressful conditions, something Supermassive Games recognises may push some people away from playing.

Byles offers a hypothetical example of the way The Quarry addresses this problem. “I want to play it through, but QTEs really frighten me and I don't like those, they stress me out,” he says. “So you can turn those off.”

Supermassive has included on/off toggles for not just QTEs, but almost every major mechanic in the game. Combat, clues and evidence collection, dialogue interactions… all of these and more can be tailored to be interactive or automatic. This is an incredibly helpful addition, both in terms of accessibility and approachability. For some people, horror is an intense experience that’s difficult to endure. For others, a disability may make quick or precisie button inputs a challenge. These toggles ensure that The Quarry can be played by as many people as possible.

But what if you want to turn all those toggles off? The result is Movie Mode, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The game plays itself, rendering the interactive movie just a movie. But that’s not to say you don’t have a little control over the experience.

“You can pick a style,” explains Byles. “You can have an ‘everybody lives’ movie, you can have an ‘everybody dies’ movie. Or you can have my favorite one, which is the ‘gore fest’ movie.”

If that’s not quite enough control for you, then there’s Director’s Chair mode. This is, once again, another mode where you watch The Quarry as a movie, but you get to make four important decisions for each of the nine playable characters before the story starts. What do they do under pressure? How do they approach conversations? Do they cope well in fight or flight situations? And how attentive are they to the world around them? These four aspects allow you to tailor each character into whatever kind of personality you want, from horror stereotypes to subversive trend buckers.

“Are they a bit clumsy? They would probably fail QTE's,” Byles says. “Are they argumentative? You set a whole bunch of these little parameters for every character and then you just let them go and see what happens in that movie… It's the closest to literally directing somebody. If you tell an actor to just be clumsy the whole time, that's what they'll do. That's the way they'll play it through.”

Real directors have the ability to shout “cut” and re-film a scene, something which choice-driven games have typically shied away from in order to provide a more genuine sense of consequence. However, The Quarry has a limited ‘lives’ system that will allow players to rewind a maximum of three times and make a different decision. To preserve the shocks and permanence of the branching story, this can only be done on a replay (or on your first playthrough by buying the Deluxe Edition).

“It's just in case you did something and you think, ‘Oh, I really didn't want to do that one’,” says Byles. “You get a choice and a little thing will pop out saying ‘Do you want to use one of your lives?’ There's also a little warning that when you die, it's not because you may have done something just now. It may be because you did something three chapters back. We have to give you a warning that if you do use your life, you’ve got to go all the way back to that point.”

The Dark Pictures Anthology introduced a welcome new addition to Supermassive’s horror formula: co-operative multiplayer. It returns for The Quarry in the form of Couch Play, which supports up to eight players. This pass-the-pad mode allows each player to control the game when perspective switches to their character. It’s a fun spin on a classic house party movie night, and Supermassive has been careful to ensure everyone can join in, even those who don’t usually play games.

“Each [character] can have accessibility options associated with it,” explains Byles. “So if you want to play with your gran who has never played with a controller before, you can dial hers right down and you can dial yours right up.”

Alongside this is online co-operative multiplayer, which makes a few deviations from tradition in order to make the interactive movie format work. Rather than a group controlling a different character each, a host player controls the game and up to seven other players can provide input on the choices made.

Supermassive Games has clearly put a lot of effort into diversifying the kind of experience The Quarry can be. For most people, it’s likely going to be a lot like Until Dawn. But for many others, it may well be remembered as an animated horror movie, a modern version of those early 2000s choose-your-own-adventure DVDs, or perhaps even the first horror game they were ever able to play.

“Stories in film are very vicarious,” says Byles as he reasons why it was important to make The Quarry playable by so many different kinds of people. “They're third person, you sit and watch them, and you empathise with a character. Games have a lot of agency and are much more about who you are. Mixing those two things together is a really, really good thing. Mixing this third person narrative with first person emotion is really, really powerful. I think a lot more people would appreciate it who normally would have a barrier about just playing a game.”

For more from The Quarry, check out our hands-on preview, our breakdown of how a creepy scene of the story was made, and how Supermassive wrote a game with 186 different endings.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.

Obi-Wan Kenobi director Deborah Chow has revealed which movies and shows influenced the new Disney+ Star Wars series, citing two modern westerns as points of reference.

Speaking to Total Film for the new issue of the magazine, per GamesRadar, Chow shared more about her creative vision for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and the surprise inspirations behind the first season, naming Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James and John Hillcoat's The Proposition as two "gritty, poetic westerns" that she looked towards.

The Proposition, released in 2005, and The Assassination of Jesse James, released in 2007, blew out any signs of tumbleweed in the midst of a modern western film boom. Both films offered a very unique visual style, with the former set against some "sprawling and striking landscapes," and the latter capturing "the bleak reality and mythic allure of the Old West."

While the Star Wars franchise has often paid tribute to spaghetti westerns, it has also been heavily influenced by Japanese cinema and pop culture. One need only watch Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress to see the seeds of what would become Star Wars. Chow admitted that she turned to the work of Kurosawa once more for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

"I love Kurosawa," Chow declared. "There's such a strong correlation for me between the Jedi and the Ronin – particularly in this period where all the Jedi are being hunted. I was really looking at what you do if you're the last samurai. You're more than just a warrior. There's also an ethical code that goes along with it, in a world that's vastly changed. That really had a pretty big effect on what we were trying to do."

Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up ten years after Revenge of the Sith, with Ewan McGregor returning to his Star Wars role (alongside Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader) for the first time in 17 years. McGregor said the series is arriving amid a wave of positivity for the prequels, though he admits he got more out of his Disney+ return than the "first three movies put together."

The Obi-Wan Kenobi series will premiere on Disney+ on May 27 with two episodes. Alongside McGregor and Christensen, the series stars Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Moses Ingram, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, and Sung Kang. Deborah Chow is directing the series and Joby Harold is the showrunner, with John Williams and Natalie Holt composing the score.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk followed through on his promise to acquire Twitter, with the social media company announcing the acceptance of Musk’s $44 Billion offer.

By most measures, Twitter is not the most popular social media site. Metrics often have Twitter trailing other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram by considerable margins. That said, Twitter has become an integral platform within the games industry as both individual game developers and companies use the platform heavily to promote their work, their games, or share any and all thoughts they deem fit to tweet.

“Twitter is generally a great networking tool for developers — trending hashtags, asking for advice, the ability to retweet work or portfolios, and just casually replying to tweets has helped many folks connect with each other,” says Victoria Tran Community Director for Inner Sloth, the developers of Among Us.

Twitter is easily accessible to developers and instantly connects them with their players, content creators, and journalists, Tran says. And for corporations, there are advantages to Twitter that don’t exist on competing platforms.

“Twitter is also relatively low lift in terms of producing content — it focuses on words, while other platforms like Instagram and TikTok require more work with images or video,” Tran adds. “It’s a quicker way to connect, and unlike Facebook, you don’t necessarily have to friend request people in order to chat with them,” though this last part comes with its own problems of course.

But for the most part, game developers from indies to AAA find value in Twitter’s approach to social networks. Two AAA game developers currently employed at major studios who wished to remain anonymous said they got some of their first big game industry jobs through Twitter

But news of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has caused a flurry of reactions across Twitter’s most prominent users, including those working in the video game industry. Musk, who is best known as the founder of the electric car company Tesla, is a prominent Twitter user himself who takes to his account to post musings about his many businesses, unsolicited advice on public transit, and sometimes memes. Can this person change Twitter, and if so, what will happen?

Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has tweeted out ideas of what he would like to see changed about Twitter in the past. Musk has repeatedly espoused the virtues of “free speech” and has called Twitter a “digital town square,” including in his statement following the acquisition.

One area Musk could expand on this idea is by loosening rules around what users are and aren’t allowed to Tweet. Short of illegal content, Musk has said recently at a TED conference that he would let “gray area” Tweets exist which could give license to harassment and trolls.

This is the most concerning possibility after the Musk takeover for professionals who run Twitter accounts for some of the largest video game companies.

One Social Media Professional at a North American AAA studio tells IGN, “We can already see a very cautious response from the Twitter userbase, especially among those who are victims or witnesses of harassment and abuse on the platform.”

The employee, who wished to remain anonymous given that their company has yet to put out an official statement, adds that from a professional view, any loosening of standards could lead to a loss of audience.

“We spent months and years cultivating our audiences on this platform, we’re very concerned that they might choose to leave it behind in fear of even more abuse at the excuse of ‘free speech.’ The same goes for brands, as it’s still unclear what some of these features would mean for content moderation and reporting, which is already an issue today.”

Musk’s rhetoric has spooked social media professionals who already contend with changing algorithms and shifting trends on a daily basis. While Twitter is not perfect, the Musk acquisition threatens to put people who work with social media daily into unknown waters.

“Twitter has been the go-to platform for video game developers and publishers for a long time now and its ease of use and accessible audiences made this platform important to rely on,” says Colin Cummings, who runs Social Media and Community for Evolve PR. “If anything disrupts this, or makes this worse, then my role as a community and social media manager just got more important.”

To be clear, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has yet to be finalized and it’s unclear exactly what changes are coming to the service. So far, Musk has only promised to enhance Twitter with new features, including making the algorithm open source, defeating spambots, and “authenticating all humans.”

But for professionals who use Twitter for work, the concern is that there just aren’t viable alternatives to Twitter available right now. “There is no perfect replacement for Twitter and we’ll have to work extra hard to build our audiences, curate a community, and to establish our core communications like blog posts or newsletters,” says Cummings.

The concern is that “the gaming community that has been centralized on Twitter will fracture and spiral off into a dozen different places.”

“He bought Twitter for a lot of money and I feel like it is naive to say nothing is going to change. We just have to hope it’ll be for the better or just a lateral move.”

For others, social media is such a chaotic field, to begin with, that Musk’s takeover of Twitter is just the latest sea change impacting a vital job the uninformed believe is done by interns.

“Social media sites come and go,” says Tran. “Facebook was the place to be, now its organic reach is almost gone. TikTok is the hot new thing. Vine is dead. Just another billion-dollar corporation — or person, in this case — duking it out while everyone else gets tossed in the waves. Just another Monday.”

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Facebook's parent company Meta has announced a new virtual reality headset more powerful than the Meta (previously Oculus) Quest 2 - but it's for work, not games.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Project Cambria in the company's latest earnings call before going into more detail in a Facebook post spotted by PC Gamer.

"Later this year we'll release a higher-end headset [than the Oculus Quest 2], codenamed Project Cambria, which will be more focused on work use cases and eventually replacing your laptop or work setup," Zuckerberg said.

"This premium device will have improved ergonomics and full colour passthrough mixed reality to seamlessly blend virtual reality with the physical world," he continued.

"We're also building in eye tracking and face tracking so that your avatar can make eye contact and facial expressions, which dramatically improves your sense of presence."

Zuckerberg promised that more details on Project Cambria would be revealed in the coming months, but made clear that this is a point of entry for the company's current focus: the metaverse.

Various companies, including Fortnite developer Epic Games, have declared interest in the metaverse but the concept is still in its very early stages with different investors having different ideas.

Meta's version appears to be a complete digital existence, with Zuckerberg hinting that customers' entire workspace will now be within a virtual, or at least augmented, version of reality.

While Project Cambria isn't about gaming, last week's Meta Quest Gaming Showcase made clear the company is still pursuing a more traditional gaming route.

Ghostbusters VR and Resident Evil 4 - The Mercenaries VR were both announced for the platform alongside new virtual reality games based on Among Us, The Walking Dead, and the NFL.

It's not all about the digital space though, as Meta's first retail store, set in the real world (specifically in Burlingame, California) will open next month.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Ex-Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé is a big believer in blockchain technology.

But blockchain, which is used to trade and record cryptocurrency and NFTs, can't just be used by developers as a money making scheme, Fils-Aimé said. Instead it should be player-focused.

Speaking at last month's SXSW event in Texas, as spotted by Nintendo Life, Fils-Aimé said "I'm a believer in blockchain, I think it's a really compelling technology."

"I'm also a believer in the concept of 'play to own' within video games," he continued. "And I say this as a player where I may have invested 50 hours in a game, 100 hours in a game, and there are some games I've invested 300 hours in" he continued. "When I'm ready to move on to something else, wouldn't it be great to monetise what I've built?

"I bet I'd have some takers here today if I wanted to sell my Animal Crossing island from the latest Nintendo Switch version. I'd like to be able to monetise that."

Blockchain would allow that to happen, Fils-Aimé said, but he later clarified that it needs to make sense for the player above all else.

"It can't just be an approach by the developer [who thinks] that it's interesting or it's a way for them to make more money. In the end it's got to be good for the player. But I see an opportunity."

Blockchain, cryptocurrency, and the metaverse have been widely growing and controversial topics within the games industry in the last year.

Companies including Worms developer Team17 have announced NFT projects before backtracking completely following fan and staff backlash, while a Ubisoft executive said simply that "gamers don't get it".

While a number of companies have also invested in the Metaverse, Fortnite developer Epic Games seems to lead the charge in the gaming sphere with Sony and LEGO's parent company KIRKBI investing $1 billion each earlier this month.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Sony has seemingly disabled the ability to redeem PlayStation Plus codes from third-party retailers, or via the PlayStation Store.

Some users have tried to extend their PlayStation Plus membership after news broke that those with simultaneous PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions will get upgraded to PS Plus Premium in June, with the length of the new subscription being equal to their longest current memberships.

But, after purchasing a PS Plus code, users then reported the codes being rejected after an attempted redemption.

This is now a widespread issue, with some evidence that Sony support will also not accept the codes. Examples of this can also be found on ResetEra forums, with one user being told: "On this case right now you will be unable to add those codes to the account since we have disabled the option to redeem PS Plus codes." IGN was also contacted by a user who reported the exact same line being given to them by support.

Stacking a membership is where a user can use pre-paid cards to redeem an extension to their current membership. For example, a user with 12-months left of PlayStation Plus could previously buy another 12-months, stacking their membership to 2-years, even before the subscription expires. This is typically common practice when PlayStation Plus codes are discounted during sale events.

It is now believed by some in the PlayStation community that Sony has blocked this to prevent users from further taking advantage of making any savings on the revamped PlayStation Plus service. Sony has offered no official word, so IGN has reached out for comment.

Many users had already stacked PS Now memberships, after it was announced those with a PS Now account would be upgraded to PS Plus Premium at no extra cost. This loophole was also quickly shut down, and PS Now memberships are no longer available to purchase.

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

A group of quality assurance testers working on Dragon Age 4 have filed an application to unionise.

The employees, who work directly with developer BioWare but as contractors of supporting company Keywords Studios, are attempting to unionize over issues of poor pay, a return to work mandate, and more.

An anonymous source told Kotaku that Keyword employees would have to return to their Alberta-based office on May 9 despite cases of COVID-19 slowly rising since the start of April.

Keyword employees would not be entitled to sick pay if they had to quarantine as a result of COVID-19, the source said, while BioWare employees are allowed to work from home completely.

The return to work ruling was seemingly the final straw for the 15-20 QA testers who allegedly are already subject to poor pay. The source said some employees are being paid $16.50 Canadian dollars per hour - $12.82 U.S. dollars - which is considerably less than identical roles carried out by full BioWare employees.

Other issues were raised including gender-pay discrimination, a lack of useful performance evaluations, and a hostile response to unionising efforts.

The union application was filed on April 20 and is currently being reviewed by the Alberta Labor Relations Board until May 3. A vote to unionise will be held within the next two weeks, and the result will be confirmed by the board within another two weeks.

The source said the group is "very confident" it would win the vote, having taken inspiration from the recent efforts of Raven Software QA employees to unionise, allowing them to have more influence over their workplace.

They became the first union within Activision Blizzard despite alleged attempts from the developer to stop them. The workers were left out of recent pay increases at the company however, with Activision Blizzard saying it was "due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Xbox and Bethesda have announced that a summer showcase will air on June 12 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 6pm UK.

This showcase will include upcoming games coming to Xbox and PC, as well as Xbox Game Pass. Currently, the biggest game Xbox has a set release date this year is the highly anticipated Starfield for November 11. So there's a good chance we'll get some more information on it. Arkane's Redfall is also scheduled to launch sometime in 2022, so a release date for it might be revealed too.

Save the date!

Catch the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on June 12: https://t.co/dmANSvXrbE | #XboxBethesda pic.twitter.com/AMFhrLhAtC

— Xbox (@Xbox) April 28, 2022

While Bethesda already announced The Elder Scrolls VI back in 2018, it might be a while until we hear anything else about it. Since it was annouced before Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, we could possibly receive confirmation of Xbox and PC exclusivity. MachineGames also announced last year that the studio was working on an Indiana Jones game, so more information about it could be shown as well.

One last possible reveal could be Deathloop's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass in this Fall when its timed-exclusivity period on PlayStation 5 expires.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey