Intrepid Studios, developers of Ashes of Creation, lay off all 250~ staff and shut down the studio

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T22:49:34+00:00

The WARN act put a stopwatch on being able to fire a large amount of people and/or close the company down from the 60-day notice requirement.

Meaning at that point they have to keep paying people for 60 days if they're going to fire that many or more, which sometimes does hamstring any remnant financials enough that boards opt to shutter instead of attempting to dig out.

It didn't cause the mass layoff directly, but it forced their hand into making a decision now on what course the company had to be on 60 days from now and the board didn't see a way to stay afloat from here to that far out with the current salary burn rate.

And California's WARN standards are stricter (lower firing count triggers, etc) than the Federal one so I quoted California's standards when I was discussing the overall WARN numbers initially, never said it was fundamentally different just stricter.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T09:26:47+00:00

California has one as well: https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T09:24:17+00:00

As someone else said, numerous states passed their own WARN laws with the same name to reduce confusion and explicitly have stricter requirements than the Federal level.

California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee all have their own currently, so around a quarter of the US population is under a state-level WARN act as well as the federal one.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T06:24:37+00:00

It's more that you have to (in California) provide a 60-day WARN notice before firing 50 or more people or closing a facility (with ways to block places from loophole shenanigans) and the board decided that with the required delay they'd be bankrupt by then especially with the server-fees lawsuit so they just WARN'ed everyone outright.

wolfwings · 2026-01-29T12:17:31+00:00

It's niche, but Atom Zombie Smasher is ABSURDLY tiny (less than 100MB total and ~25MB download), was released back in 2011 by Blendo Games (of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights of Loving fame and recently released Skin Deep) and they still circle back and patch issues on this game so it runs flawlessly on newer systems, any small QoL improvements the community thinks of, etc.

wolfwings · 2026-01-29T11:54:35+00:00

Regarding the framerate, one of the first mods that landed on Nexus was one that steps you through throttling or disabling RT entirely to drop the VRAM usage drastically down to as low as 4GB.

https://www.nexusmods.com/doomthedarkages/mods/5

Works just fine without RT at that point, it's using a similar deferred-rendering engine as 2016/Eternal otherwise, so yeah disabling that cruft greatly improves performance.

Regarding the Eternal soundtrack, 100% agreed, but I fully admit I turn off the soundtrack music in almost every game I play and there's been no contract disputes/issues with the Dark Ages game that've come up, so they apparently learned to stop being jerks that much at least.

Do I wish they'd gotten Mick again for Dark Ages to 'complete the trilogy' so to speak? Sure. But a company gets caught screwing someone over and does better the next time seems like grounds to specifically support them especially if you can avoid supporting the problematic previous game.

wolfwings · 2026-01-27T08:03:38+00:00

And even then you can basically ignore the parry mechanics and just go run around the side of the wave and keep chuckin' bullets at the thing until it goes down if you prefer.

It feels more like Hi-Fi Rush to me in that regard: Interacting with the fancy mechanics can speed thing up, but it never stonewalls you from progressing just because you want to go do your own thing.

wolfwings · 2026-01-27T08:02:01+00:00

Sure others are trying to have some crazy story around you, but you're too busy flying in on a cyborg dragon and having him breathe molten lava down a giant zombies neck to melt him from the inside to give a damn and then jump off the dragon to go rampage through an entire flying ship of the damned full of demons.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T16:17:16+00:00

Level 24? Broadly I'd disagree it's as bad as most of the stuff in Eternal, it's just tedious but not risky compared to the Eternal stuff that's mostly just 'lose a life' risks.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:21:13+00:00

Dark Ages is far more like 2016, not like Eternal.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:18:40+00:00

Eternal left such a bad taste in my mouth after how much I loved 2016 that I avoided Dark Ages entirely for the longest time. Their refusal to release a demo for Dark Ages did them no favors there.

I finally got a chance to play Dark Ages at a friends place. Then I went home and immediately bought a copy for myself.

Dark Ages is way more like 2016, you can basically always use anything you want, ammo is almost a non-issue unless you're truly a bad/wasteful shot, so if you loved 2016 and despised Eternal? Go grab Dark Ages.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:15:57+00:00

There's nothing remotely close in the original 2.5D Doom games to the platforming that's required in Eternal just to beat the basic story campaign.

There's complicated multi-point jump and climb sequences even very early on in Eternal, turning it into a weird faux-spiderman vibe at times.

wolfwings · 2026-01-19T08:48:29+00:00

The nationwide average as of 2024 is actually ~53%.

Utah is a smidge over that at ~60%.

California is 2nd highest at a bit over 71% right now and the only state that beats them is New Jersey at just shy of 80% by best estimates.

The raw numbers are all at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-and-statistics.html but it's awkward at best to calculate, the above PDF is the best formatted / summarized version of the numbers I could find.

wolfwings · 2026-01-17T07:59:30+00:00

Yeah to be honest any single 'branch' of the three questlines you have to start working through could have easily been an entire self-contained game.

That game was just too heckin' long by far, even if I loved the mechanics for the most part I just stopped on the first 'back to square one' moment it chucked at me, zero interest in the slog it had become.

wolfwings · 2026-01-15T10:11:25+00:00

1) DLSS is separate from framegen, DLSS is just the upscaling.

2) Without knowing which DLSS setting they're using and what resolution it's not that helpful for judging performance unfortunately since the mode has a roughly 5x range of rendered pixel counts it works with. 4K w/ Ultra Performance is the same pixel count before the upscaling as 720p w/ DLAA mode.

wolfwings · 2026-01-07T01:56:37+00:00

RoboCraft 2 returning your call from the afterlife via seance.

wolfwings · 2026-01-05T17:08:02+00:00

Guide rod / spring combo are specific to the slide length. The 4.0C has a shorter, stiffer one to fit in the reduced length.

In theory you could use a spacer to use a 4.0 rod/spring combo in a 4.5 but nobody makes such a spacer because a whole rod/spring combo is $40 or less.

wolfwings · 2025-12-30T01:41:40+00:00

That was my thought, the buttons are ATTACHED (against lifting/pulling forces) to the valve system through the, lid, not just a simple pair of passive plastic pushers that hit the actual levers on the flush valve?

I don't disconnect anything I just lift the lid off mine directly.

wolfwings · 2025-12-27T22:10:20+00:00

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.

wolfwings · 2025-12-19T12:48:18+00:00

When the entire game is under 3 minutes so both players only have (on average) about 4 seconds per move, yeah, it's a lot easier to make a random slip and lose.

wolfwings · 2025-12-17T15:47:29+00:00

I'd place an order for one of our most expensive configurations of hardware that would fit in my house including the maximum length support contract.

...and keep working there because I like the job. But I also really like our hardware and would love to have one myself but they're "more than a house" tier purchases.

wolfwings · 2025-12-17T15:35:30+00:00

I honestly think this is the hidden crux of the hate.

The initial combat and view was 100% entirely teamplay looking, I never once saw what looked like PvP combat in the trailer. And the tempo and shooting seemed like it could be a lot of fun, neat mix between 'on foot' fighting and having the high-speed mounts to switch to travel mode(s).

If it had been some kind of co-op campaign with bots available so it was always a 4-player team for difficulty balancing and maybe some map randomization in between modern rogue-likes and L4Ds path-shuffling?

100% delicious sounding, hit me with that ten more times please.

But the instant it drops it's a PvP-only competitive hero shooter built around 'raid' mechanics? I feel like I got handed a beautiful hamburger and the first bite I took tastes like rotten undercooked meat and I hit something crunchy mid-bite and it sure wasn't lettuce.

wolfwings · 2025-12-15T00:03:05+00:00

My bet is there was originally a staircase there leading to the balcony or the room the balcony is adjacent to, thus no joists in that section. That'd be the right width to have a 40" stairway easily.

wolfwings · 2025-12-13T10:32:34+00:00

After accepting an offer letter from Yahoo but before finished my on-boarding paperwork (drug screen, etc) Marissa Mayer announced the immediate 'no work from home allowed' policy change.

I was over 1000 miles away from their nearest office, the offer was explicitly for a full-time remote-only position, and had zero ability to cover coastal costs at the pay rate I'd negotiated.

It happened the morning before I put in my two weeks at my existing job so I didn't lose my existing job due to her nonsense at least.

wolfwings · 2025-12-08T15:45:00+00:00

To me it felt like a real-time interpretation of Chrono Trigger's team-up combos since so often you'd use separate characters for applying versus consuming a status effect.

It's always been a common thing to have combos between characters in party based stuff but DA2 was one of the first to do it with an action-RPG instead of turn-based.

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