Want to catch up on gaming news? You’re in the right spot! This is Stella’s page dedicated to bringing you gaming news in digestible chunks and exclusive behind the scenes of Snap Aim Podcast, Elevation Station, and video game reviews.
Stella went to Halo Studios in Seattle to talk to Executive Producer Damon Conn and Creative Director Max Szlagor about why they're remaking Halo: Combat Evolved for the 25th anniversary of Halo and what they hope to achieve with bringing this franchise to PlayStation fans. Halo: Campaign Evolved is a complete remake of Halo: Combat Evolved in Unreal Engine 5 and is set to release sometime next year in 2026.
If you’re not aware or caught up on the news of what the Saudi Arabian government is doing expanding so quickly and aggressively into the games and entertainment space, here’s a full comprehensive breakdown of why Saudi Arabia is aggressively pushing its way into gaming and why the country's public investment fund was used to buyout Electronic Arts;
In this episode of Snap Aim, Stella gave the Grounded 2 devs Marcus Morgan and Chris Parker a weird meme request, an actual gameplay addition request, and just asked them a bunch of questions on the creation process for Grounded 2 and what the future roadmap looks like for early access.
We all have a ton of games we're trying to play and finish in our backlog in this big year of 2025 but the new releases keep on coming. Grounded 2 just released July 29th and if you love survival crafting games, you might be tempted to drop your backlog games to hop on Grounded 2. Here are Stella’s thoughts on whether or not you should play Grounded 2 right now.
This episode was recorded July 4th, awful timing but it wasn't really feeling like a particularly celebratory day. Stella covers the Xbox layoffs, the Microsoft AI investment, and the game studios affected by the layoffs.
On June 24th, the new Phasmophobia update Chronicle was released which introduced a massive overhaul on how hunters can gather evidence, what gets hunters bonus points as evidence, a new CCTV system, and more challenges. Chronicle is the biggest update to come from Phasmophobia since it launched five years ago and the team at Kinetic Games isn't slowing down at all. Stella got to chat with Daniel Knight, CEO/Lead Developer (the solo creator of Phasmophobia), and Ben Lavender, their technical director on what we can expect from the 5 year anniversary update and how the journey has been so far with building Phasmophobia's community and playerbase.
Stella spoke with IO Interactive's Rasmus Poulsen, the Franchise Art Director, on their new IP with 007 and what it took to bring James Bond back to video games. 007 First Light will follow a young James Bond, who's just starting out in his British Secret Service career. Stella got to ask Poulsen what the process was like in writing a whole backstory to young Bond and how they stayed true to Bond's personality/character.
Fallout 76 just released their latest update Gone Fission and Stella got to talk to the Fallout 76 developers on the last five years of creating the game, maintaining fresh updates, and what we the players might expect in the upcoming 5 year anniversary update!
In this episode, Stella conducted a deep dive into Bungie's history with stolen artwork and writings. Last week, Bungie confirmed that Marathon, their latest extraction shooter title, had been built off stolen artwork. Prior to this transgression, Bungie had stolen work from other artists and community members three other times (that the public knows of). Here's the deep dive on Bungie's history with Plagiarism.
In this episode, Stella covers the FBC: Firebreak preview impressions rolling in and how this Control spin-off might play. Along with Firebreak, Stella discusses Katsuhiro Harada wanting to bring Waffle House as a level to Tekken and other small gaming news of the week!
In this episode, I talk about the Switch 2 pricing and whether or not it feels anti-consumer, read some odd headlines, get distracted by ADHD discussions, and talk about some real life news/drama.
Stella covers all the news this week from the GTA 6 delay, Xbox handheld leaks, Epic Games winning their lawsuit over Apple, and more!
Stella sat down with Ingwar Dovgoteles — Head of Cinematics / Cutscenes Director / Creative Director, Mykyta Balnov — Lead Compliance Artist, and Mykyta Horodyvskyi — Community and Social Media Manager from GSC Game World to chat about the current state of STALKER 2, the roadmap ahead, behind the scenes insight on development, and how they’ve persevered through war times while creating this long awaited game.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) was last week and Stella got to be one of the 30,000+ attendees. While at GDC, Stella was super busy and signed up for a ton of meetings and hands-on demo time. There’s over 400 exhibitors at GDC so getting through the show floor takes the full week. However, there were some really great standouts that Stella wanted to bring some light to so these are the best demos Stella played at GDC.
On this episode of Snap Aim, Stella and her editor Ivan Rodriguez chat about The Hidden Ones and the latest closed beta that went live. @InfantryInk is an expert fighting games player and got some hands-on time with The Hidden Ones and he discusses the mechanics, gameplay, and more compared to other fighting games. The Hidden Ones is set to release sometime this year 2025 and as a free-to-play model with NO gacha mechanics in unlocking characters.
WB Games just shut down Monolith Productions (Shadow of Mordor), Player First Games (MultiVersus), and WB San Diego (mobile/free to play games) this Tuesday February 25, 2025. The Wonder Woman game in development by Monolith is now cancelled and the question of who owns the Nemesis System is up in the air. Here's the breakdown on who owns the system and what will happen in the future with the WB Games universe.
NetEase Games, developer of Marvel Rivals, laid off their Seattle-based team this week after posting the next season update for the live service project. Not all of the names of those affected have been publicized but in this episode of Snap Aim, we dive into those named, NetEase's earnings in the last year, and why NetEase would dissolve their US team.
In this episode of Snap Aim, Stella sits down with three Respawn developers to chat about the process behind creating Apex Legends content and changes. She talks with Josh Mohan, Associate Design Director, Eric Canavese, Lead Battle Royale Designer, and John Larson, Game Designer.
