Gaming is a weird world and every month Game Ranks puts together the weirdest gaming stories, points at them, and laughs. We of course invite you to point and laugh with us. I’m folks, it’s Falcon and today on Game Ranks, the top 10 weird gaming stories of May 2025. And number 10, Hideo Cojima of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding fame has given his assistant a USB stick packed with game ideas to be used after his death, which is a weird thing to do. He’s calling it a kind of a will. I I’ll give you the quote. Uh, I gave a USB stick with all of my ideas to my personal assistant, kind of like a will. Perhaps they could continue to make things after I’m gone at Cojima Productions. This is a fear for me. What happens to Cojima Productions after I’m done? I don’t want them to just manage our existing IP. I get that. But also maybe just use like a Google Drive. Use the ideas now and every time you have an idea for the future, put it in a Google Drive folder. One that is accessible, you know, to the rest of Cojima Productions or at least your assistant. I don’t know. It’s weird. This is a weird thing to do. This implies that this man does not log his ideas or at least didn’t until sometime recently. I don’t I don’t know. The whole thing’s strange. But then again, when has he ever not been strange? If he wasn’t strange, he wouldn’t be the developer and mastermind he is. So, on some level, it’s not really a criticism, just a curiosity. Moving on to uh number nine, Cyberpunk 2077 has a sequel that is called Project Orion, and it’s heading to Chicago. I mean, not real Chicago. It’s Chicago done wrong, apparently. Cuz Night City, a I guess kind of fictional Los Angeles that really isn’t that attached to the real Los Angeles, wasn’t enough. We had to point at a much more real city. I mean, Night City is a hypothetical kind of amalgamation of the West Coast as a city, whereas in Night City, there were advertisements in Cyberpunk 2077 for a mag lev line that would connect Night City to Chicago by 2080. So, I mean, it was probably a pretty deliberate choice, but also Chicago kind of is done wrong. It’s not like a bad place. It’s actually a nice place, but a lot of it is a bad place. At number eight, you know how uh the original Fallout 1 and 2 source code was thought to be lost? Well, it’s not. Rebecca Heinman, who was a co-founder of Interplay and a key figure in the original Fallout development, revealed that she’d preserved the source code for both of these games. I mean, she hadn’t prior because she had been ordered to destroy all of it upon her departure from the company. This is kind of awesome because obviously game preservation is not a high priority for anybody who cares about making as much money as they can from their intellectual property as possible because preserving things and keeping them around makes it so you can’t easily whip up demand for a remake later. Oh man, you can’t play that one cuz it’s it’s I mean it’s just like impossible to get it installed and we don’t have the source code so we can’t fix it. So, we’re just going to we’re just going to remake it. So, uh I mean, we should all put our hands up in a salute to Rebecca Heinman, who defied orders and said, “You know what? I’m saving the source code. I’m saving it. I’m keeping it.” And number seven, something else from uh the world of Fallout, although completely different in nature. Do you remember when Fallout 76 launched and uh it was devoid of NPCs, riddled with bugs, and had terrible net code, and just was bad? Well, it turns out the developers felt just as doomed as the players did. Uh Dan Nani, a former lead at Bethesda’s Dallas studio, recently opened up about the chaos that went down during the launch. Basically, the main team was still scrambling to finish the base game, and his team was kneedeep in developing the nuclear winter expansion, a 52-player battle royale mode that nobody saw coming, especially not the developers themselves. Basically, the people in charge were just tossing tons of random stuff at everybody just hoping that something would work. And somehow it eventually did. Like their efforts eventually culminated in the Wastelanders update which did introduce human NPCs and breathe some life into the game. Today the game has a dedicated player base and ongoing expansion. So like impressive on top of weird. At number six, EA um they found a weird way to suck. So, if you’ve ever wondered why EA just deprioritizes the loyal RPG gamer fan base for, you know, the entire Dragon Age series, say for the original, which was a game that was very much a classic RPG and contained a ton of elements of classic RPGs. Um, former Boware lead writer David Gator shed some light on uh the dismissive attitude they had. EA, not Boware specifically. Um, so according to Gator, EA executives often referred to what they called a nerd cave. This sort of metaphorical space in which the diehard RPG enthusiasts uh, well, I guess they lived there, metaphorically speaking, but that group of people they said would always show up to buy their games. Uh this mindset led them to not care about catering to this fan base and instead focus on attracting a broader audience by favoring sort of actiony and slick gameplay over, you know, the slow and cumbersome RPG mechanics that uh in terms of Dragon Age really were only present back in the first Dragon Age that I mentioned and sort of talked about that. Gator actually expressed frustration because he advocated for classic RPG elements in boware games and EA did not have it. They did not like that he was advocating for that. They shut him down, etc., etc., which basically made the marketing department an enemy of or at least in conflict with the creative departments. He also uh basically credited this focus as culminating in the failure of the live service game Anthem, which if Anthem didn’t happen, apparently Gator said this actually refocused Dragon Age: The Bail Guard into a single player RPG, which I mean, say what you want, there’s plenty to criticize about that game, but it being a single player RPG is way better than it being a live service game as it I have to imagine was originally planned. And also Mass Effect 5 is in pre-production. I don’t even want to think about what that would have been. Moving on to number five, and this is not completely unrelated to number six. Microsoft had these grand plans to launch its Xbox mobile game store last year. It was basically a new way to purchase and stream games directly from their devices. These ambitions were thwarted by what? Apple’s App Store policies, specifically that Microsoft wanted to have an external payment system that Apple was pissed with. Everybody should just understand Apple’s not going to let go of that. Anyway, Microsoft basically didn’t launch because of the Epic Games lawsuit that was going on that, like I said, Apple was just like, you know what, I’ll burn a pile of money. I don’t care. So, Microsoft just been waiting it out. They haven’t said what they’re going to do yet either. It’s kind of hilarious, honestly. Apple’s just like, I don’t care what any of you want to do. That’s not what we’re doing. And number four, Lies of P is introducing difficulty options. Yes, that’s right. The game that prided itself on punishing players daring to blink during combat is now offering modes that won’t make you question your life choices. Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe you’ll question your life choices for reasons other than the difficulty level of a video game. Maybe you won’t. The upcoming Overture DLC though, which is set to release this summer, is bringing two new difficulty settings, Butterflies Guidance and Awakened Puppet. Basically, it’s for accessibility purposes. A lot of people don’t actually love Soulc Crushing difficulty, and they want more people to buy the game. The original difficulty level is now aptly named Legendary Stalker, which does actually sound pretty cool. The update’s also including a boss rush called Battle Memories and then a version of the boss rush called Death March, which is harder, bringing us back to that whole life choices questioning thing. Granted, I’m sure that irritates certain folks who really think that suffering is an essential part of a Soulslike experience. I’m okay with it. I think that they should be able to sell more copies of it. And if that’s something they think will, you still have the option to play it exactly like how it was released. It’s just a little weird. you don’t usually patch in difficulty levels into a souls like and number three in the latest episode of Star Citizen finds some way to upset people. The incomplete game that has raised over $800 million from its community over 13 years managed to piss people off by introducing a ship upgrade um called Flight Blades. And it was initially only available through realworld cash purchases priced between $9.60 and $42. Basically, they would enhance ship speed and maneuverability and were basically a blatant pay to- win feature. The game’s forums got nearly 2,000 critical responses. Um, pretty swift backlash, I’d say. Cloud Imperium delayed the release of the Flight Blades in response, announcing they’d be earnable with in-game currency. Woo! The community director, Tyler Witkin, attributed this as a mistake caused by the studio’s accelerated development pace, which includes 11 updates planned for the year. He committed to ensuring that smaller components like flight blades and bomb rags would be available in-game, not with real cash, earnable in-game from day one in the future. Again, I’m gonna say this. Cloud Imperium and Star Citizen having the words accelerated development pace in any of their materials is kind of hilarious. It doesn’t really matter the circumstances, but at this point the circumstances, they’re not weird for Star Citizen, but they would be weird in any other situation. At number two, Cojima misses the hate. Apparently, Death Stranding 2 is testing a little too well for his taste. I guess the legendary game developers feeling a tad melancholic. Not because his game is flopping, but because it’s not. Cojima recently revealed that during play test for the original Death Stranding, a whopping 60% of players told him it was a terrible game. But rather than being disheartened, Cojima found the divisiveness invigorating. He thought that was a good balance. Like, I definitely do get that when you’re trying something new, it’s going to get push back. Death Stranding 2 is of course a sequel and a lot of people have played the original and gotten it. Like when everybody has access to it and there’s reviews that talk about it and whether or not you actually fully get what’s going on, you get what the game is. And I think coming back here to Death Stranding 2 on the beach, it makes it so that people are primed to enjoy it, at least to a greater extent than the first time around. And the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. So much so that Cojima admits he’s just a little bummed by the lack of controversy. Our man prefers to make art that challenges rather than universally pleases. And for that, I respect this man. However, it’s not shocking to me that people get Death Stranding 2 better than they do Death Stranding 1. Not because it’s less controversial or easier to understand or something like that, but because it is the second Death Stranding. People are aware of and acclimated to the first one. There are expectations that have been set. It makes sense at this point. That being said, I don’t expect to get what the hell is going on in this game. And finally, at number one, you know how Sony pivoted to live service pretty hard year or so ago, maybe two, and it kind of culminated last year when Concord was kind of universally hated and did horribly. Well, you know how recently we found out that Sony has canled two live service projects, most likely in the wake of that Concord failure, got rid of them. They’re saying if at first you don’t succeed, just immediately try again. don’t learn anything, just do it again. Like they’ve started up a new internal studio called Team LFG, which stands for Looking for Group, and they’re developing live service. Like, they’re dedicated to developing live service games. Now, the new studio does come with some industry veterans from titles like Halo, League of Legends, Fortnite, Recck Room. Like, these are big games, people who know what they’re doing. But first off, people are sick of live service games, just period. They make a ton of money because they prey on people who haven’t really played games before, which yes, is a good business model for making money, but they do burn people out. There’s a certain player churn that you get when you’re just doing live service games that you don’t get when you do uh narratively fulfilling games that satisfy and provide you with some degree of catharsis and closure. This is evidenced by the fact that there’s kind of a few live service games that are good and work and then all of the other ones fail. I get the allure of trying to make one of the ones that works because they’re like infinite money machines. Like Fortnite makes a crazy amount of money and it’s not even a game that people buy. But I think Sony’s just proven they can’t do it and they’re still trying to do it, which is not a normal Sony thing. So, normally Sony kind of gets what is to be done. I don’t