Gears of War: E-Day is almost here, but that doesn't mean its developers have been spared in Microsoft's latest wave of layoffs as part of the Xbox "reset." While The Coalition, the studio currently working on the Gears of War series, was not mentioned by name in Matt Booty's "Continuing Our Reset" blog post, story director Juan Vaca announced on LinkedIn that he is now looking for work.

"I am part of this round of Microsoft layoffs and am open to new opportunities in games/film/tv," he wrote. "If your team needs a director/storyteller please reach out." It is perhaps especially galling given that Gears of War: E-Day went gold just days before the layoffs were announced, with a full release planned for Oct. 6.

It has felt increasingly like there is simply no amount of success, sales, acclaim, or back-breaking work you can demonstrate in the games industry to avoid some pencil pusher's job cut scythe. It's not just Microsoft's massive rounds of layoffs—take a studio like Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor, which furloughed most of its staff despite glowing reviews and over a million copies sold. This situation with Vaca echoes when, last year, a writer on Apex Legends was laid off just one day after a character she spent a year writing was unveiled.

For a primer on all the most reliable ways you can get laid off in the games industry, check out our guide on that very phenomenon. It is a sobering time to wish you could cheer on the medium's every step forward, given that the reward for doing the work seems to be a kick out the door.

I've always been content to admire the Dark Souls games from afar, rather than get particularly into them myself, and part of that is probably a crumb of leftover resentment from trying to wrangle the multiplayer features in those early games. Love it or hate it, it's esoteric at the best of times and not terribly consistent. If you've a mind to mod those annoyances out of Dark Souls 2, now's your chance.

That's thanks to Yui, a soulslike modder who made similar mods for Elden Ring and Dark Souls. Her latest creation, Dark Souls 2: Seamless Co-op, just released into alpha last week and promises a straightforward co-op experience with up to five other players. "With this, it's theoretically possible to play the game from the tutorial up to the final boss completely in one co-op session," the release blog on Patreon notes. I'm sure one of you will be doing just that with a DDR mat or something.

While you could try to do a full playthrough with a buddy in the original Dark Souls 2, it'd involve a lot of stopping, starting, summoning, and fog walls. With this mod, there are no fog walls, progression is synced up, and the session won't end when someone dies—instead, they respawn at their last bonfire.

If you're worried this will take all the sexy mystery out of Dark Souls' purposefully friction-heavy online play, you may be glad to know the mod's features are accessed via a bunch of unique items with titles like "Pharros' Heliograph" and "Petrified Fingers." It's a very different—and as Yui's release blog notes, a much easier—way to play DS2, but a welcome way to enjoy it with your friends, especially if you've been exploring its every corner since its release.

Yui has been aggressively supporting the mod since release, already patching out a major performance glitch that affected players with Intel processors (including PCG associate editor Ted Litchfield, if you want to get specific). If you run into problems while playing, be sure to check back on the Nexus page or Yui's Patreon—she may have already fixed it.

The latest stage of Xbox's delicately named "reset" arrived last Tuesday—but its impact on World's Edge Studio, the developer now behind the Age of Empires series, was only briefly mentioned in Xbox CCO Matt Booty's announcement. On sites like resetera and LinkedIn, former employees of the RTS developer have shared that it was hit especially hard.

"What a morning," said former World's Edge creative director Adam Isgreen on resetera, posting under the verified account name Tempus Chaoti. "FYI World's Edge was not spared completely—just under half the studio was let go—myself included. Been fun, y'all!" This is in addition to the studio now answering to Activision alongside Sea of Thieves developer Rare.

Andrew Martz, former senior software engineer at World's Edge, posted on LinkedIn adding that "as part of that reorg, our next project was canceled and a large chunk of our studio was laid off. I was part of that layoff."

Isgreen also had more to say on LinkedIn, reflecting on his time working on the RTS series: "I didn't think I'd be working on RTS games again years after their first 'heyday,' but am I ever proud of what our studio team and partners were able to do with the series and juice the genre's return. I think the fans would agree (mostly!) that we delivered the goods for all of 'em."

While layoffs are always devastating to the affected workers, this latest round of calls from Xbox is especially baffling, and Microsoft's track record of destruction goes far beyond the games industry, it's still alarming how little regard for this medium's history has been shown in this "reset." This situation with World's Edge Studio echoes the company's treatment of id Software and countless other teams earlier this year.