BioWare mourned, Arkane in limbo, and Ion Storm's old stories retold

In the second part of his Ion Storm history, Jimmy Maher turns to Stevie Case, a Nebraska freshman in 1996 who had planned a political career until a dorm-mate showed her DOOM and Quake. She won a campus tournament in January 1997 as the only woman on a team called Impulse 9 and became known online as 'KillCreek'. She then travelled to Dallas to play John Romero, lost, and saw him post that deathmatch was a man's game.

She challenged him to a best-of-three with an online shrine at stake for the loser. She won the first game, lost the second, then won the tiebreaker after, by her account, Romero's sexist trash-talk pushed her into a rampage. Maher uses the episode to show the rock-star persona Romero carried into Ion Storm, which the piece's opening quote from Computer Gaming World mocks over Daikatana's delays.

CounterpointThe account of the rematch rests heavily on Case's own recollection, including the keyboard-smashing detail, and Romero or his defenders might tell the story differently or play down the trash-talk as standard deathmatch banter.

Oli Welsh argues that Nintendo is again being underestimated, this time in reviews of Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, which he calls the company's best release of the year so far. He notes that even glowing reviews seem capped at around four stars or 8/10, and that it scores below Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Pokémon Pokopia and Rhythm Heaven Groove, and even below the 'lackluster' Star Fox remake on Metacritic.

His explanation is that critics are not primed to value the skill of simplification and leaving things out, so games aimed at someone other than the reviewer get marked down. He argues that the free-roam leisure sports, such as skateboarding, prop plane and power cruising, are top-drawer design and may be many players' first taste of open-world play.

CounterpointReviewers who scored the game around 8/10 would likely say that rating depth and long-term replay is part of the job, and that lower scores reflect a real difference in ambition rather than a bias against casual audiences.

James Archer argues that the long-running fight over Mass Effect 3's ending overlooked what the game achieved: a 'compendium of endings' that closed dozens of plot threads, character arcs and running gags across a three-game series. He grants that other RPGs are more branching individually, but says none has matched that scale of audacity, and he counts the Citadel expansion as Shepard's real last ride.

His main worry after BioWare's closure is the game's co-op mode, which he credits with player-to-player synergies and an increasingly eccentric character roster, in contrast to modern co-op shooters fretting over small balance changes. He hopes its peer-to-peer setup helps it survive EA's cull.

CounterpointPlayers who objected to the ending, whose backlash prompted BioWare to expand it in 2012, argued that it undercut the choices the series had built up, and that praise for the surrounding game does not answer that complaint.

Alex Sujong Laughlin takes stock of storage across Google Drive, Dropbox (3.19 TB), iCloud and six external drives, with a baby on the way and a growing fear of paying several companies to keep her work. Archivist Margot Note tells her that digital files need active maintenance because of bit rot, and recommends refreshing and migration. Note also gives the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two media types, one copy offsite. Her book says external drives may last about a decade if treated well, and as little as five years if not.

Laughlin sets out to consolidate onto one 8 TB drive and one paid cloud backup and to build a lasting routine. Her first obstacle is that the drive, last used in 2020, needs reformatting for her Mac, which she can only do safely because her wedding photos were also in Dropbox.

CounterpointPreservation specialists could point out that one drive plus one cloud service sits at the thin end of the 3-2-1 rule, and that consolidating trades redundancy for tidiness.

Lauren Morton revisits her 2023 prediction that marketing would seize on 'cozy', and says it did. Google interest in 'cozy games' has roughly doubled since 2023, and Steam games user-tagged cozy that launched between January and October rose from 468 last year to 1,341 this year, a 186% increase. Publicists' use of the word in her inbox has grown too, and she notes the term now covers things like a post-apocalyptic gunsmithing sim.

She argues that cozy players have become a savvy, even 'hardcore' audience, so the movement is shifting from trend to enduring corner of gaming. She expects a possible plateau as cynical marketing and AI copycats test the label, but says it has not peaked yet.

CounterpointSkeptics would note that Steam tags are user-generated and grow as the word gets popular, so the 186% figure may measure labelling more than any real change in the genre, a limit Morton concedes herself.

The new element is a tribute from author NK Jemisin on Bluesky, who said the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games were 'a literal inspiration', that she made lifelong friends in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, and that writer Jennifer Hepler and actor Jennifer Hale were the best in their fields. She added that the industry had killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens ties her remark to the sector's rising budgets and repeated layoffs, which he says fall on developers more than executives. He notes that CD Projekt Red and Warren Spector have also posted tributes.

CounterpointExecutives and analysts who defend cost discipline would argue that rising development costs and uneven returns forced hard choices, and that tributes to past hits do not show the studio's recent games could sustain it.

Previously: PC Gamer explained how leveraged buyouts work, and GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer covered BioWare closure fallout, including Mass Effect items removed from Battlefield 6. — Saturday October 24 edition.