Mirroring Helldivers 2's continued regional delisting woes, the upcoming PC port of Sucker Punch's 2020 historical samurai slice 'em up, Ghost of Tsushima, has been removed from sale on Steam and other PC storefronts in nearly 200 countries and territories that are not served by Sony's PlayStation Network.

Previous Sony PC ports like God of War or Horizon Zero Dawn were single player only and did not require signing into Sony's proprietary online service to play. After a delayed rollout due to Helldivers 2's initial server woes, an attempt by the publisher to institute a mandatory sign in requirement was met with a massive backlash, leading the company to stand down.

One aspect of the situation Sony did not seem to anticipate was that Steam, and thus Helldivers 2 on PC, were available in more countries than PSN, with players in non-PSN supported regions potentially getting locked out of the game they had paid for and been playing. Even after Sony reversed its decision, Helldivers 2 has remained unavailable for purchase in those areas. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has said that he's pushing for this to be reversed, but a few new countries were actually added to the restricted list on Steam after his remarks.

Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima, whose cinematic, story-driven single player campaign is its primary draw. A post-launch co-op multiplayer mode, Legends, seems to be the sticking point with Tsushima's delisting. While the base game will not require a PSN sign-in, this multiplayer mode will.

SteamDB shows that the same purchase restrictions as Helldivers 2 were added to Tsushima on May 10, and it remains unclear whether this is being driven by Sony, Valve, or both. Each company has an incentive to avoid refunds and disgruntled players. Indeed, some players in affected regions have reported receiving refunds for Tsushima pre-orders without even asking for them.

It's all a bit of a cluster, and it remains questionable whether capturing more PC users into the PSN ecosystem is worth the lost sales and poor publicity among this desirable audience. Over half of Helldivers sales in the US were on PC, and while the PS5 has handily beaten Microsoft's Xbox Series offering this generation, Sony has missed its 2023 fiscal year target for PS5 sales. Meanwhile, a VGChartz analysis from January shows the PS5 has lagged behind the PS4 in sales for much of its life cycle. 

Russ Nickel, former lead writer of Helldivers 2, was recently interviewed by Inverse, where he explained that developers Arrowhead didn't decide it was going to be a service game until well after beginning work on it. Its popularity sure suggests it was the right call to make. "This feels like what live service was born to do", Nickel said. "For a while, Arrowhead didn't know if the sequel was going to be a live-service title. But as we talked about it more, it was clear that this would make for such a cool live service experience, one where the story can change constantly so it really does feel alive."

"When I joined," he went on to say, "there was already a game that was fun to play. And then the back half of development was adding in the narrative and figuring out exactly what that playable prototype would become."

A big part of the reactivity is down to Arrowhead's official Game Master Joel, who serves the same role on Helldivers 2 as a DM does in a game of D&D—only with millions of players instead of, like, five or six at the outside. 

Nickel is a dungeon master himself, and says that experienced helped him as a game writer. In videogames, just like in D&D, you learn that no plan survives contact with the enemy. "You build the sandbox with plans," Nickel said, "but you have to be able to let go of those plans. I love how collaborative it is. It's so crazy to me that right now there's a dungeon master who is playing a game with 10 million people, and they're all collaborating on a story."

While Nickels was lead writer on Helldivers 2 during development, he's no longer attached to the project, with his co-writer Stephen Flowers taking on the role. The two are still in touch, however, and go way back. "We were roommates and did improv together for a long time", Nickels said. "So we have that 'yes, and' background. In games, I think there's a lot of improv, being fast on your feet, being able to see what someone else does and 'yes, and' it and go forward from there."

The most recent development in the ongoing saga of Helldivers 2 is a major order that will let players unlock Anti-Tank Mines if it's completed. All they have to do is defeat two billion automatons.

Mass Effect and Dragon Age veteran David Gaider has hit back against his former publisher's apparent "hunger" for AI development tools, referencing developer BioWare's biggest failure to do so.

Earlier this week, Andrew Wilson, CEO of BioWare owner EA, doubled down on the company's commitment to AI. During an earnings call, Wilson suggested that "more than 50% of our development processes" would be affected by generative AI in the future and that there was a "real hunger" to use the tools across the company.

Several figures across the industry have hit back against Wilson's aims, but perhaps none more cuttingly so than David Gaider, who worked at BioWare for 17 years from 1999. In his time at the studio, he helped shape several massive CRPGs, as well as the developer's pivot towards the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

In a tweet, Gaider said that the 'hunger' that Wilson referred to "is the allure of a spreadsheet where the labor costs suddenly show as a teeny tiny bar compared to the other bars." He also suggests that the benefit of AI is to executives, rather than developers. In a follow-up, he says, "They want you to believe the devs under them are super stoked to work generative AI into their processes, but I assure you what they took as excitement was really a veiled wail of despair."

That despair, Gaider claims is "not unlike the time that team was informed of their new 'really cool' live service mandate." It's not hard to see what he means by that - having made its name with expansive, story-driven, single-player RPGs, BioWare's next game after Mass Effect Andromeda was Anthem, an online multiplayer game that failed dismally after its release in 2019. Despite its live-service plans, development on Anthem was unceremoniously ended two years after release (and after its promised overhaul failed to manifest). Since then, BioWare has turned back to its bread and butter, with Mass Effect 5 slated to follow Dragon Age Dreadwolf, which is expected out within the next 12 months.

Check out our list of the best BioWare games, ranked.