When Microsoft laid off an astonishing 9,000 people in July, the long-awaited Perfect Dark reboot was among the casualties. The main studio working on it—The Initiative—was shuttered, but co-developers Crystal Dynamics tried to salvage the project by cutting a publishing deal with Take-Two. The deal never eventuated because Take-Two and Microsoft couldn't agree on who would retain ownership of the Perfect Dark franchise.

Nevertheless, it looks like Take-Two did get something out of those discussions: former The Initiative boss Darrell Gallagher and Perfect Dark director Brian Horton will found a new 2K Games studio. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier announced as much today, before Gallagher confirmed on LinkedIn.

"I'm excited to share that I will be joining 2K as SVP, Studio Head, where I'll be building a new studio and leading an ambitious opportunity unlike anything I've taken on before," he wrote. "I've spent my career believing in what's possible when great people come together with a bold vision. I can't wait to get started with the exceptional team at 2K!"

Gallagher founded The Initiative in 2018, and the studio's sole known project was the aborted Perfect Dark reboot. Before joining the Xbox Game Studios brood, he worked with Activision, Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics.

Brian Horton also confirmed the new 2K Games studio, albeit in fewer words, with the title of Vice-President Head of Creative. Horton has worked with a huge range of studios including Crystal Dynamics (dating before its collaboration with The Initiative) Insomniac Games, Infinity Ward and more.

While the new 2K Games project will almost certainly not be a Perfect Dark game, it'll be interesting to see if it ends up resembling one. If it does, that couldn't be a bad thing: Ted Litchfield absolutely loved what he saw of the reboot in 2024, making Microsoft's unceremonious cancellation all the more painful.

In light of July's catastrophic layoffs, Xbox boss Phil Spencer somehow mustered the courage to assert that Microsoft's gaming business has "never looked stronger".

It's been more than seven years since Shadow of the Tomb Raider put a bow on Lara Croft's big reboot trilogy, and since then, series fans have been desperate for even a morsel of information on what's coming next. Now, finally, it seems relief is in sight, as a big Tomb Raider reveal has been teased for The Game Awards later this week.

"Did you miss her?" the official Tomb Raider account asks on Twitter. "She missed you." The message encourages you to tune into the annual TGA showcase on December 11 "for a look at the future of one of gaming's most iconic franchises." The news was initially revealed in Fortnite, as part of a TGA-branded island built for players to vote on their favorite fanmade creations in the battle royale hub.

The teaser includes an image showing a silhouette of Lara Croft posing proudly with the old-school dual pistols that helped define her appearance in the original 1996 game. If you squint just hard enough, you can just about make out pouches and holster straps around her legs that hint at the old costume, too.

It's possible that this reveal is tied to some non-gaming multimedia project, like maybe the upcoming Prime Video series, but I'm inclined to believe it's going to be our first look at the new Tomb Raider game Crystal Dynamics first announced way back in 2022. You don't tease "future of one of gaming's most iconic franchises" without knowing that fans are going to expect a video game reveal.

The most telling bit is the new-look Lara. As far back as 2021, Crystal Dynamics was talking about its intent to "unify" the old-school Tomb Raider timeline with the modern Survivor trilogy, and we've occasionally seen new versions of the character blending '90s camp costuming with a more realistic appearance for the character herself. The idea of a "unified" Lara Croft design has grown powerful in the minds of fans, and this new teaser certainly seems to suggest something along those lines.

For now, we have only two concrete bits of information on the new Tomb Raider game: it's being developed in Unreal Engine 5, and it's going to be published by Amazon Games. For a couple of years now, it's seemed that Crystal Dynamics only emerges from its silence to announce another round of layoffs before going quiet once again. Here's hoping this reveal at The Game Awards turns out to be a little more unequivocally positive.

These are the best Tomb Raider games ever made.

Jonathan Rogers, one of the co-founders of the studio behind Path of Exile, isn't afraid to call his own game too old to be the perfect action RPG. The first PoE had its moment and now it lives comfortably on updates made to please its most dedicated fans. It's not going anywhere, but it's also not going to be the next big thing.

Path of Exile 2, however, could be the game at the end of Rogers' "quest to make the perfect ARPG," he told PC Gamer in a recent interview. Despite its differences to PoE 1, some of which have gone away over the last year in early access, "it was never really about making it feel distinct," he says.

In the last year, Grinding Gear Games has been navigating the treacherous waters of making a sequel that veers pretty far away from the vibe of the first game. If PoE 1 is a rampage through thousands of monsters, PoE 2 is a dance with far fewer, but more threatening monsters—a fundamental shift in the feel of the game. And not everyone has been a fan of the pivot, especially when any class that feels remotely like PoE 1 inevitably gets gutted in a patch.

PoE 1 veterans want to feel like gods and go fast in the new game; Rogers wants combat to feel methodical. Despite those fundamentally different desires, he believes he can make everyone happy.

"It's been incredibly tricky to split the difference, just incredibly tricky," he says of balancing the game for players who want to slide through combat at blazing speeds and players who want an uphill battle. "There have been times where—in moments of weakness—I'm like, maybe we can't appeal to both of those groups … But I definitely believe that you can make an experience that has both good combat and delivers on the kind of feeling of like I feel powerful and good and can do these things as well."

Rogers thinks that the team is getting close to finding where the line is "in terms of speed versus methodicalness," although getting there hasn't been easy, as the frustrations around the nerf-heavy Dawn of the Hunt update earlier this year made clear.

In the current version of PoE 2, some of the roughest edges have been sanded off and replaced by things that work in PoE 1, like having more than one life in endgame maps. It's still its own game, but some compromises have been made to appease players who aren't interested in PoE 2's almost soulslike encounters.

According to Rogers, borrowing ideas that worked in the first game isn't off limits as long as they make it better. PoE 2 was only ever about "fixing the things that I perceived as problems we couldn't fix in PoE 1," he says, and to make something that isn't as dated.

"PoE 1's strategy is not attracting users now," he added: It's about pleasing the players that come back every three months for a new league. "The days of that game growing are much less likely than PoE 2," he says. "I mean just literally only for just graphics reasons. There's a lot of people who won't play a game that looks that old."

PoE 2 is about to add a class that never made it to PoE 1: druids. Everyone will be able to see GGG's take on the classic RPG archetype when its next update, The Last of the Druids, launches on December 12.