Hindsight is 20/20, that’s why we do this.

Oh hello there, I’ve been away from the Weekly News Roundup for a while, with Sarah and Viki taking the reigns of bringing the week’s biggest stories to you like an online newspaper to go with your breakfast in bed. But here I am, cameo-style, to bring you this week’s news, and *checks notes* oh, it’s been a relatively quiet week. Well, let’s focus on the stuff that did happen.

Diablo 4 might be back on the table following a slew of new job openings

I’ve been feasing on the recent turbulence at Blizzard lately. It’s been like a really boring soap opera that I can’t stop watching. And it seems that a lot of the company’s recent turbulence is, partly anyway, down to Blizzard’s decision to announce mobile title Diablo Immortal rather than a full-blown sequel for the series, and then everyone lost their shit.

And given that rather sour aftertast that some had toward Blizzard, it’d make sense that the company is, at the very least, gearing up for that return to the Diablo series proper. If you take a look at the careers page on Blizzard’s website, you’ll spot that there’s a host of new roles solely for an unannounced Diablo title. Now, Blizzard has confirmed in previous messaging that there are several Diablo games in the works, though Diablo Immortal is the only one we’ve heard about so far.

It’s an educated guess that Diablo 4 is at the centre of these new jobs posts, which are looking for everything from artists to designers. And it’s a move that makes sense for the developer, having suffered on both a PR front and in its business model, which has seen a handful of key figures leaving in recent months; the move to return to a series that’s got a huge fanbase and has been preety vocal in wanting to see a return to it, would surely see both of Blizzard’s recent problems with its fans and finances getting brushed aside, right?

Of course, it could always be the case that the jobs are for an entirely different Diablo project; Blizzard is yet to announce anything specific, so I’ll just be here, eating popcorn and waiting for it all to kick off again.

Star Wars is cancelled, but EA promise to return to the franchise (again)

EA quietly cancelled its open-world Star Wars game this week, reported Kotaku. Sources from EA confirmed that the title, which was being developed by EA Vancouver under the name “Project Orca,” had been shelved by EA.

The decision comes after EA deemed the project’s development too long to be viable, and has instead turning its attention to a smaller sized Star Wars title. There aren’t any details on this new project, though Kotaku report that its being lined up for a 2020 release, supposedly aiming for a release on next-gen consoles.

The news means that EA is now relying on Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to release the only Star Wars title since Battlefront 2. Though EA has made clear that the franchise is still part of the company’s plance, saying in a statement that it’s, “fully committed to making more Star Wars games… and we’ll share more about our new projects when the time is right.”

That 1-Shot Demo was pretty popular, eh?

It took only four days for more than one-million people to download the Resident Evil 2 1-Shot Demo. It’s a number that’s seen the highest number of peak players on the game’s Steam version, with almost three times the number of players trying the game compared to the downloads of the Resi 7 Beginning Hour demo, a figure that’s led to suggestions that the Remake could prove to be the most successful game in the Resident Evil series’ history.

Strangely, while the numbers for the times the demo was downloaded is ridiculously high, only 29% od players had actually finished the demo at the start of the week. Much of this is probably down the the 20-minute time limit the game sticks to, meaning that if you’re spending your time looking for secrets, trying to find those annoyingly misplaced buttons for the locker room, or just getting lost in Leon’s eyes, you probably got kicked out of the game before being able to finish it.

And Finally… nothing

Usually we include one of the stranger stories of the week at the end of our Weekly News Roundup but I can’t find one. So, here’s a picture of a cat being friends with a mouse instead. Enjoy.

Source: Life with Cats