Month: November 2018

They don’t call it the Wasteland for nothing in the Fallout series. The alternate history, nuclear war-ravaged world is complete with mutated creatures, radiation-soaked zombies, and a mess of other scary things that hunt anybody foolish enough to go wandering around. But despite the hardships of the post-apocalypse, the Fallout series has also always had its survivors, whether they’re farmers learning to live in an irradiated world, organizations hoping to rebuild society, or warlords trying to rule whatever’s left.

Fallout 76 takes a different approach. Rather than the usual single-player RPG that finds players leaving an underground Vault to discover the Wasteland and the people who live in it, Fallout 76 removes NPCs, devoid of various characters to interact with, and replaces them with other players.

The result is a Fallout game that feels a bit strange. Through about eight hours in various sessions of the Fallout 76 beta, it’s been hard to shake a feeling of loneliness while playing the game. Even though you’re surrounded by other players from the start, there’s a feeling that West Virginia is already dead, and you’re picking clean its corpse.

The creepy feeling comes early in the game, after you leave Vault 76, where you’ve waited out the first 20 years of nuclear fallout. Your job as one of Vault-Tec’s best and brightest is to rebuild the world. You’re a little late doing that at the start of the game, thanks to over-partying the night before the Vault opens. As a result, the main quest at the beginning of the game has you following the Vault’s former Overseer as she travels the world hoping to find and take control of three remaining nuclear missile silos–ostensibly to keep those weapons from ever being used again.

Tracking the Overseer’s path through the Wasteland takes you the town of Flatwoods near the Vault, where you learn about some folks trying to make the post-apocalypse a better place: the Responders. This group, mostly consisting of former first-responders like paramedics and firefighters, roam the Wasteland looking to help people, and have set up several communities for that purpose. When you arrive in their town, you take part in an automated process to join up as a volunteer. It’s a tutorial that has you wandering around town, trying to find the people who can teach you to cook, clean your water, and perform other essential survival tasks. The state of the town makes what you’re going to find a foregone conclusion, though, and before long you confirm that none of the nice people of Flatwoods has survived.

Your Responder volunteer training continues apace, thanks to audio diaries left behind by the Responders who didn’t make it, and which give you a sense of the lives they lived as they fought to survive their new world. Before long, you intercept a Responder radio signal that directs you to their headquarters at Morgantown, a larger city with an airport. The signal is pretty desperate: the Responders are expecting an attack by zombie-like people called the Scorched, and they need all hands on deck in order to repel it.

Spoiler alert: They didn’t.

Fallout 76’s lack of NPCs turns its setting into a ghost world, with the player arriving just after the worst has already happened. Stumble on the cabin of an old moonshiner and you might find evidence of his existence, but not the man himself. Head over to Grafton, a town where the mayor is broadcasting a radio signal asking for assistance, and you find the humans are dead and a computer is running the show. The world of West Virginia was full of people before–it just isn’t anymore.

Contrast that with previous Fallout games and it becomes clear why Fallout 76 just feels a bit off. In past games, pretty much the first thing players do is stumble into post-apocalyptic civilization, where the people of the Wasteland aren’t just eking out lives for themselves, but often thriving. One of the first people you meet in Megaton, the first town in Fallout 3, is its sheriff, which shows that the settlement isn’t just a bunch of people barely hanging on, but one that has laws, and someone to enforce them. Places like Diamond City in Fallout 4, or the Strip in New Vegas, show just how strong civilization can become. These aren’t just places where you pick up quests, they’re evidence that Wasteland life continues. They make the world feel substantial and lived-in, and they give your actions in that world stakes.

Fallout 76 makes its approach a little more uncanny by constantly supplying audio diaries and information about those lost souls in whose wakes you follow. A group of audio tapes left by the Responders called Survivor Stories gives the characters just enough backstory to make their absences more haunting. Your path following the Overseer is similarly replete with bits of character-building audio, as your leader visits the important places from her pre-Vault life and talks about her memories. All these tiny stories are well-written and well-acted, which makes them stand out even more. There was life in the Wasteland in Fallout 76–we just missed it.

Adding other players to Fallout 76 at the expense of NPCs is a trade that sacrifices something essential about the Fallout games. The series has always been both somber and satirical in equal measure, but at its heart it was at least a little bit hopeful. The world didn’t end when the nukes fell, it just changed.

Filling the Wasteland of Fallout 76 with players doesn’t make it feel any less dead. We might build camps and buildings, but it’s likely we’ll all eventually put on party hats and aviator sunglasses, flash goofy emotes at each other, and try to murder each other. There’s a transitory lightness to the multiplayer side of games like this that no amount of audio logs can overcome.

Without characters, Fallout 76 has no narrative balance against the people just screwing around in the Wasteland, and therefore, nothing to make the world feel substantial. It’s sad, because the fascinating, engrossing stories of the people who once populated Fallout’s West Virginia are there. They’re just not around to make you care anymore.

The Birds of Prey have found their villain. The upcoming DC universe film that centers around the female trio of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) will find them doing battle with the evil Black Mask. Now, according to a new report, we know who is taking on that role.

According to Deadline, Ewan McGregor is joining the film’s cast to play the baddie that first appeared in a 1985 issue of the Batman comic book. In the comics, Black Mask is a vicious Gotham City mob boss named Roman Sionis. Pitting him against the Birds of Prey certainly make it sound like this will be a much more grounded movie than when we last saw Harley in Suicide Squad–or films like Justice League and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, for that matter. For more information, make sure to check out our explainer on who Black Mask is.

The Birds of Prey movie will be directed by Cathy Yan and will be rated R. The film is currently scheduled for release on February 7, 2020, which means it will arrive before Wonder Woman 1984 hits theaters on June 5, 2020.

There is still plenty more DC action before then. Aquaman, starring Jason Momoa arrives in theaters on December 21, with Shazam following on April 5, 2019. The Joker movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is expected to release on October 9, 2019. The DC universe can’t be contained to movies, though. It looks like Suicide Squad is also crossing over with PUBG.

The Fallout 76 beta is now open to players on PlayStation 4 and PC, in addition to those who were previously playing on Xbox One. With the latest beta session comes a new addition to the game: the Atomic Shop, Fallout 76’s premium currency store. In it, you can purchase new threads for your Wastelander, emotes to communicate with other players, different skins for your Pip-Boy, and a lot more.

Players in the beta right now should have some Atoms in their stock to try on the shop. There’s a lot to choose from: You can snag clothes for your Wastelander, unlock tattoos, change the skin of your Pip-Boy, and even add emotes to your bag of communication tricks, or poses to Photo Mode. There also are extra skins you can buy for your CAMP structures, to make your wasteland home look a little less wasted.

The 500 or so Atoms we started with (and which should come with pre-orders of Fallout 76) won’t get you far on the store, though. You can’t currently buy Atoms, the premium currency of Fallout 76, so it’s not clear how much any of the stuff in the shop will cost in real money. The idea of tattooing an eagle across your Vault-Dweller’s face is pretty tempting, regardless.

Here’s everything that’s currently available for purchase in the Atomic Shop in Fallout 76, along with the prices in Atoms they sport.

Prospect is different from most of the sweeping, universe-scale sci-fi epics that come out these days. No one is trying to destroy any planets or galaxies, there’s no millennia-spanning lore about ancient races seeding the future with mysterious artifacts, and Earth isn’t locked in a desperate war with any distant colonies (that we know of). Instead, Prospect is the story of a man, his daughter, and a bandit trying to simply stay alive on an unforgiving alien frontier. And it has some insanely awesome practical special effects.

Directed by Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl, and based on their 2014 short film of the same name, Prospect follows Cee (Sophie Thatcher), her father Damon (Jay Duplass), and a bandit named Ezra (Game of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal). It’s the plot of a Western transplanted onto a faraway planet: Damon and Cee are essentially gold prospectors who score big before Ezra strikes and turns their lives upside-down. Just replace gold with larvae-like alien bug crystals, cowboy hats and chaps with clunking space suits, and the dusty frontier with a lush jungle pervaded by thick, poisonous clouds of “dust” that necessitate keeping those suits on nearly 24/7. That’s Prospect.

“Unlike a lot of very either futuristic or contemporary-feeling science fiction, our movie isn’t about impressive or magical-feeling technology,” Earl told GameSpot during a recent interview. “We had a mantra up in our pre-production shop that said, ‘Technology cannot save you.’ And that’s very much at the core of what Prospect is. It’s a story that’s driven by the characters, not by any gadgets.”

“We grew up on those classic sci-fi films, like Alien, Blade Runner, the original Star Wars trilogy. I mean, we were the type of kids that would be poring over the Star Wars visual encyclopedia and obsessing over all the guns and ships and all the side characters–the people that you only see for a frame,” Caldwell said. “I think part of what we wanted to do with Prospect was to channel some of that excitement that we experienced, and I think it also informed a lot of the texture and the aesthetic. We very intentionally wanted the world to be rendered not so heavily in green screen backdrops and computer generated stuff, but in physical things that you feel, like it’s a world that you can reach out and touch.”

The pinnacle of that philosophy in Prospect turns out to be the characters’ space suits, creaking hodgepodges of cobbled-together-looking tubes, wires, antennae, plating, visors, and more. They’re straight from the Star Wars original trilogy school of sci-fi design: Space is dusty, dirty, and half broken down, not sleek, shiny, or “futuristic” in a mid-20th-century, Jetsons kind of way. They appear heavy, restrictive, and real, and the actors wear them for about 95% of the movie’s run time.

“The suit took 15 minutes to take off, and I didn’t want to delay production or anything, so I stopped drinking water, and then it became really hot and that became a problem,” Thatcher told GameSpot. “I’m being honest,” she laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so honest!”

“We had to be careful with action scenes, because you get winded faster when you’re wearing [the suits],” Earl explained. “You can’t breathe as readily. I mean, they’re constantly fogging up. We had anti-fog wipes going constantly between takes.”

“They’re just also heavy,” he continued. “We designed them to be as light as possible, but I think after two weeks, Jay Duplass was like, ‘I’m going to immediately go get a massage. I can’t do this anymore.'”

Their dedication to practical sets, props, and effects paid off when it came to immersion for the actors. “It helped create a realistic atmosphere,” Thatcher said. “Sometimes I felt like I didn’t even need to act, because everything was there right in front of me, and I was reacting to my surroundings–especially with the helmet. The helmet helped me the most. Once I put on the helmet, it helped me to fully plunge into the Prospect universe and really get into the mindset.”

It was more than just a stylistic choice. The directors have seen a trend in sci-fi movies: “They’re constantly coming up with excuses for actors to take their helmets and suits off,” Earl lamented. “We were very like, ‘No, no, no. They’re trapped on a toxic moon. They’re trapped in these suits. They’re trapped in these helmets. We want the actors wearing them the whole time.’ And man, I’m happy with the result.”

He did acknowledge the actors’ suffering, though: “I’m glad we did it, but I feel legitimately bad for how much Sophie and Pedro Pascal and Jay Duplass had to endure because of this vision, because man, you wear these helmets and obviously they’re props, but the airflow is pretty restricted, and they fog up. We had whole teams of people that would have to rush in once we yelled cut and whisk the visors off and rub them down. It was a major ordeal. For the record, Sophie, I’m very thankful for your suffering.”

Focus in on any aspect of this movie, and you’ll notice the same dedication. The poisonous dust floating around the jungle isn’t a CG particle effect, but images of real dust, shot in Caldwell’s basement, “painstakingly” layered into nearly every shot. The movie’s unique weapons, which look like railguns and gatling guns cobbled together from plastic, mining tools, and spaceship parts, were designed by a real firearms expert and crafted from 3D printed segments, hand-carved parts, and a handful of “off the shelf” components. Caldwell and Earl started their own production design shop–mostly composed of their friends crafting away for seven months in a warehouse–because they simply couldn’t afford to outsource all the work.

Caldwell said using practical effects is important to keep audiences grounded. “When you’re creating an alien universe, an otherworldly universe, if there’s any suspicion that something’s not real, it takes you out of it,” he said. “And I think for Prospect it was really important that the narrative feel grounded–that we wanted to do otherworldly science fiction that feels very, very real.”

Their obsession over worldbuilding extended beyond the practical effects, too. Every time they wanted to introduce a new element, like a band of mercenaries, a mining company, or a song Cee listens to on her headphones, they had a writing exercise to flesh out far more background story than was needed.

“There’s just so much detail in the real world that you take for granted,” Caldwell explained. “If you set something in a contemporary setting, everywhere you point the camera, you’ve got all of that detail in there. When you’re starting from scratch, you have to really compensate for it, and what we were trying to do was to overcompensate as much as possible–to take as much of the flavor of the world and expository elements out of the mouths of the characters, and put it into what is visually apparent in the backdrop of every scene.”

That degree of attention to detail helps elevate an indie movie with a relatively small budget to an engrossing story that takes place in a believable sci-fi setting. But it’s also that very indie-ness that may make Caldwell and Earl’s way of doing things possible.

“Somewhere half way through production the financier sent down their head of production to check in on things, see how we were doing, and he showed up to set and just started laughing,” Caldwell recalled. “We had triple the amount of detail in our props and in our backgrounds, and the whole set was 360 [degrees], and for him it was just like, no other movie does this. You just figure out what’s going to be on camera, and make it to that. Well, we were actually trying to make complete, fully immersive environments that we could point the camera every direction, and give it a real sense of place.”

That may not be a pragmatic or efficient way to make a movie, but the result is out of this world.

Prospect is the first feature film from Gunpowder & Sky’s sci-fi label DUST. It hits theaters Friday, November 2.

New details have slowly been trickling out about HBO’s first Game of Thrones spin-off series, even as we’re finally learning something about the hit fantasy epic’s final season. The biggest reveal about the Game of Thrones prequel series, though, is probably its name: The Long Night.

Author George RR Martin, who penned the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books on which Game of Thrones is based, revealed the title on his blog following news that Naomi Watts had been cast as the lead of the new show, which is being run by Kingsman and Kick-Ass writer and producer Jane Goldman. For Game of Thrones fans, the name is a huge piece of information that had previously been the subject of speculation, because it suggests the prequel will hinge on a very specific, and very terrifying, moment in the history of Westeros.

The Long Night refers to a time around 8,000 years before the current events of the show, during what’s known in Game of Thrones lore as the Age of Heroes. It was specifically a very long winter–the world of Game of Thrones has weird seasons that can last years, and the Long Night lasted a generation. It was so bad that, according to the Starks’ servant Old Nan, “There came a night that lasted a generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.”

What was extra awful about the Long Night was the arrival of the Others, or White Walkers, for the first time in Westeros. Descending from the North, the White Walkers led an army of the dead that, Nan says, routed armies, swept through castles and towns, and showed no mercy. According to Westerosi legend, it was only when an unknown figure called the Last Hero sought out and allied with the magical folk called the Children of the Forest that the White Walkers were defeated.

So it definitely seems that The Long Night is going to cover a lot of that legendary ground, likely upending fan expectations by showing a truer version than the stories that were passed down around Westeros. From previous rundowns from HBO, we also know that The Long Night will deal with a few legendary figures, specifically Bran the Builder, the founder of House Stark (who also built Winterfell and the Wall), and Lann the Clever, the founder of House Lannister.

There’s also the Children of the Forest, who we know from Game of Thrones were the original creators of the White Walkers. The Children of the Forest made the first of the undead creatures in response to the original humans to settle Westeros, the First Men, basically kicking them off their land and cutting down their forests. The Long Night creates an uneasy truce in the wake of that conflict.

Finally, there’s likely to be some interesting things going on across the Narrow Sea in The Long Night, as well. The generation-long winter didn’t just befall Westeros, it impacted the entire world, and the eastern civilizations have their own legend about what happened. That’s the story of Azor Ahai, the hero in the Lord of Light religion, who used the glowing sword Lightbringer to battle “the darkness.” It’s not clear what exactly that means, or whether Azor Ahai and the Last Hero are one and the same.

Martin didn’t reveal any other information about the show, but he did write that there still are other Game of Thrones prequels in “active development.” Without revealing any potential stories for the other shows, he mentioned that “the readers among you might want to grab a copy of Fire & Blood,” his upcoming book, when it’s released on November 20. That story is also a Game of Thrones prequel, but goes back through the 300 years before the original books to detail the history of the Targaryen family–another fascinating time in Martin’s world, filled with intrigue, war, and dragons.

Meanwhile, we do know that Season 8 of Game of Thrones made at least one cast member cry, and that it’ll have the biggest and most brutal battle in the series’ history. There was also a least a short time when showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss were considering trying to make three standalone movies out of the final season. And while there aren’t too many details out there about what to expect from the end of Game of Thrones, a recently released tie-in video game might hold some clues.

While Game of Thrones is like a game of chess, more than anything else, as characters slowly try to take down various regimes and place themselves in positions of power, the series is just as memorable for its large-scale, epic battle sequences. During the upcoming final season of the HBO series, there will be a battle unlike any other fans have seen on the show, the largest in the series’ history.

The most notable battle sequence from Game of Thrones is the “Battle of the Bastards” which took place in Season 6, Episode 9. Jon Snow fought Ramsay Bolton, each accompanied with their own armies, in an intense and bloody fight which was the highlight of that season. However, Season 8 has its own war that is going to be even bigger, according to Peter Dinklage, who plays Tyrion Lannister on the series. “It’s brutal,” Dinklage told Entertainment Weekly for its Game of Thrones cover story. “It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park.”

Originally, the “Battle of the Bastards” fight took 25 days to shoot. This new sequence shot outside for 55 nights, then continued filming in the studio for weeks afterwards. Just how long they filmed in the studio wasn’t publicized, but it sounds as if it’s easily the largest sequence in the show’s history. It’s directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who also directed the “Battle of the Bastards” and some of the other top battle sequences in the show, like “Hardhome.”

The battle will take place at Winterfell, and while the “Battle of the Bastards” primarily focused on two characters–Snow and Bolton–this next fight will jump between multiple members of the cast. It will feature a giant fight fans have been waiting to see for quite some time. “Part of our challenge, and really, [director Miguel Sapochnik’s] challenge, is how to keep that compelling… we’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence,” showrunner David Benioff explained.

To make the sequence feel grander, Winterfell’s set was expanded. A larger courtyard, a tower castle exterior, and more rooms were added. Everything about Winterfell and this battle is turned up to 11. “Everything feels more intense,” explained Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen. “I had a scene with someone and I turned to him and said, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to do this ever again,’ and that brings tears to my eyes.”

The final season of Game of Thrones, which was almost released theatrically, returns to HBO sometime in 2019. While you may be sad all things are coming to an end in Westeros, don’t fret, as the Game of Thrones prequel series is pushing forward, recently casting its lead role.

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When shooting deers, robbing trains, and hunting for hidden treasure proves arduous, sometimes it’s nice to sit back, relax, and do a little fishing in Red Dead Redemption 2. After a while, you’re likely to get pretty good at it. But after a dozen successful catches, chances are you’re getting curious about the bigger fish out there. The ones the most worth setting out your line for.

Lucky for you, there are plenty of Legendary fish to catch, but you can’t just set up shop at any ordinary lake to find them. There are special locations all around the world where you can catch Legendary fish. You first discover the existence of Legendary fish in the Stranger mission called “A Fisher of Fish” when you’re given a map by Jeremy Gill, the man fishing on the pier of the northeast shore of Flat Iron Lake.

When you find a Legendary fishing spot, it’ll automatically get marked on your map. But if you’ve yet to happen upon these locations yourself, we’ve got you covered. In this feature, we highlight all of the Legendary fish locations, as well as some basic tips on how to catch them.

Out of the 14 total Legendary fish locations, we’ve gathered the the first 10, which are the safest to see for folks who may have not gotten far into the game. We’ll be posting the rest at a later date, so make sure to check back later. You can refer to the screenshot of the map above as a reference to the general locations of each fish, but chances are you have this already and want the specifics. In which case, click ahead!

For a full examination on how to properly fish, we suggest you check out our Red Dead 2 fishing guide. If you’re curious about guides concerning other subjects, check out out our features highlighting all the tips you should know before playing and things the game doesn’t tell you. We also have guides on more specific subjects, like top horse breeds and fishing. Though, if you want to have some extra fun instead, be sure to read our feature detailing the game’s cheat codes.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is out now on PS4 and Xbox One. Don’t forget to read our review. But back to the subject at hand: do you have any useful tips that’ll help nab these Legendary fishes? Let us know in the comments below.