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It's been over two years since Square Enix announced the setup of Studio Istolia, headed by Hideo Baba, and Project Prelude Rune. It's been three-quarters of a year since we last heard anything significant in terms of news from the studio, too. Since then, Hideo Baba left Square Enix entirely, as it appears that I missed last month. That's usually not a good sign for a studio that has yet to produce a game, and it appears that is true here, too.

As of yesterday, all social media accounts for Studio Istolia were closed down, and as much evidence of the original trailers as Squenix could was purged from the internet. Apparently the Studio Istolia website had been redirecting users back to the main Square Enix site since around the time Baba left the studio and the company. Square Enix have yet to comment officially on this change, but the logical conclusion is that the studio and game are both now dead.

Update: Square Enix have confirmed that the studio has been shuttered.

Source: Siliconera, GamesIndustry

The next round of dates for Distant Worlds and A New World were announced late last week, carrying us largely through the fall for the former and into early 2020 for the latter. It's been since January and November respectively since we got new show information, so some of these new dates might be up your alley. For Distant Worlds:

• Seattle, September 11 and 12

For A New World:

• Austin, October 4
• Oklahoma City, October 5
• Quebec City, November 23
• Kansas City, January 17, 2020

Tickets are on sale for all of these shows.

I'd also missed that ANW released a second album of recordings at the start of the year. I saw a tweet the other day mentioning that the album would also be appearing on streaming services soon, but I don't yet see it on my Spotify. Keep your eyes out if you've read this far.

Source: Distant Worlds, A New World

I mentioned in a thread at the forums yesterday that Square Enix staff seemed pretty excited about today's State of Play presentation by Sony. Turns out they had good reason to be, as part of that presentation was a debut trailer with cutscenes and battle gameplay from the FF7 remake that has long been in the works!

It's just a minute long, and it mainly focuses upon the very early stages of the game that introduce us to AVALANCHE in the Reactor raid. We also get a glimpse of Aerith and Cloud's first interaction, though, and at the very end a little tiny bit of Sephiroth himself. It's still hard to tell whether the battles are going to go into an all-action mode, or whether they are just a very, very fancy variant of ATB, but what you can see already looks very pretty indeed.Source: Siliconera