Author: Trafficblast

Stowaway is now available on Netflix.

[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Every space narrative, by nature, is a survivalist film. When the nearest help is millions of miles away, when any number of tiny knobs can spring haywire, and only the barest of materials separates you from the vacuum of space — the possibility of your demise looms omnipresently.

The three-person crew of Hyperion’s Mars expedition knew those risks, of course. Both the morally assured medical researcher Zoe (Anna Kendrick) and the clear-eyed biologist David (Daniel Dae Kim) spent three years training and pitching their proposed research for this scientific mission. Their two-year trip also represents the third and final journey to Mars for their experienced commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette, sporting her natural Australian accent). On the other hand, there is a person who didn’t sign up for this responsibility. Hours after launching, Marina discovers a wounded passenger hidden in a cramped compartment. No one knows how he got there. They only know he’s injured, and his presence introduces a bevy of dangerous, unforeseen variables.

Directed by Joe Penna, co-written with Ryan Morrison, following the pair’s Mads Mikkelsen-starring Arctic, Stowaway is the duo’s second pulse-pounding survivalist film. In fact, their two works share a few commonalities: They’re claustrophobic affairs; while Arctic partly takes place in a downed airplane, the Stowaway crew’s craft looks closer to a submarine in its narrow slinking hallways than a built-out second home. The inclusion of an unlikely character, usually a person who inhabits the protagonist’s chances of survival, ignites both dramas. These protagonists are ultimately forced to choose between their lives and saving a person they barely know. In Arctic, the individual is a young woman left critically injured after her helicopter crashes on the remote tundra. In Stowaway the discovery of a badly wounded Michael (Shamier Anderson), a launch pad engineer, induces a chain of cataclysmic events that put the entire crew in jeopardy.

[ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/04/21/stowaway-exclusive-official-clip]

Stowaway is set in the not-too-distant future, a future where a Mars colony exists and trips are made semi-regularly. The agency behind this fraught mission, Hyperion, probably isn’t a government-backed organization. The ship these characters are traveling in was originally designed for two people. To accommodate a third person, engineers redesigned the craft by subtracting protective layers from the ship’s outer hull while packing the vessel with only the most necessary of supplies. The minimalism of this space vehicle translates to the modest production design wherein exposed wiring hangs from the walls, provisions are strapped in as though on a cargo plane, while the cockpit, featuring a few panels and even fewer monitors, looks closer to a stripped-down simulator than instruments needed for traveling to another planet. The specter of adding a fourth person immediately adds strain to their meager surroundings, as does the loss of their life support system, a component they damaged while trying to free Michael from a sealed compartment.

Zoe, David, and Marina work tirelessly to stretch their resources to accommodate the surprise passenger. They even come to like Michael, an amiable young man working toward a Mechanical Engineering degree while supporting his younger sister. Though the soft-spoken passenger didn’t envision himself here, now that he is, he volunteers to help in any way possible. His charitable, sincere nature makes the situation’s unavoidable truth difficult to face: With a dwindling oxygen supply, made more precarious once the crew’s proposed fixes go for naught, only three can survive while one must perish. Presumably, the one is Michael.

It’s a situation that could easily be played for high melodrama, but Penna is too clever to fall into that trap. See, you won’t find many weightless scenes in Stowaway. Penna cares little for the operatic poetry of humans floating in space. Instead, he grounds these characters; they walk about the ship seamlessly. This allows Penna to smartly use the presence of gravity itself as an element for adding greater weight to this crisis. Penna also relies on his strong cast to further the anxiousness in a way that’s not fueled by obvious dramatic choices.

[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=the-best-sci-fi-movies-on-netflix&captions=true”]

After playing the plucky a cappella leader of the Pitch Perfect franchise, Kendrick retrofits the same can-do attitude of that character to Zoe to realistic effect. Kim imbues David with a careful realist undergirding that in lesser hands would be confused with maliciousness. When David informs Michael of their inescapable circumstance, he delivers the news in an overtly calm voice. Sitting by a window with a view of space, welcoming reminders of Tony Stark in Endgame, Michael receives the soul-crushing information with an equally quiet poignancy. While her most emotional scenes arise from speaking to an unseen, inaudible Jim, located at mission control, Colette, in what amounts to a series of monologues, likewise steers away from any expected overacting.

Tantalizingly, there isn’t much space in this space film. The movie’s intensity stems from the ensuing claustrophobia. How Penna introduces space’s terrifying void into the narrative’s thrilling climax, is accomplished through a deceptively simple premise. To save Michael, Zoe and David must venture outside the craft, climb the tethers to another ship attached 450 meters away without damaging their vessel’s electronics or slipping away into space. Some parts of the tether are fully gravitized, while other sections give way to weightlessness. The VFX in Stowaway isn’t mind-blowing. They’re workmanlike and noticeable, particularly in the visually generic liftoff sequence. But the tether scene is a perfectly paced, heart-pounding piece of filmmaking holding similarities to Ad Astra, wherein the perilous openness of the cosmos, Hauschka’s unnerving score, and Morrison’s taut editing combine for frenzied fits of panic. The scene serves as a further example of the nimbleness Penna and Morrison have for these types of narratives.

Unfortunately, following the harrowing sequence, when disaster strikes again, the film’s ever-tightening spring unwillingly unwinds. See, Stowaway succeeds by stringing out the inevitable: One person must ultimately die. But once the inevitable arrives, Penna strives to mix the melancholic with the apropos, and the previously strong tension, without some final deeper meaning to tease, melts to nothingness. The final image further misses the solemn mark Penna intends to hit, driving Stowaway, in its final burn, firmly off course.

[ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/24/stowaway-official-trailer]

The release of Genshin Impact on PS5 is fast approaching, and developer MiHoYo has just let us in on some brand new details about the port. Here’s what PS5 players can expect when Genshin Impact launches for PS5 on April 28.

The Chinese studio has already announced that the native PS5 version of the game will play in 4K with enhance textures across the board, featuring faster load times, higher image quality, and better performance.

In the new blog post, MiHoYo revealed that it built certain systems for the PS5 from the ground up, future-proofing it for upcoming updates. This includes a new graphics library for enhanced visuals, and a customized file-loading system to better take advantage of the PS5’s fast load times.

“In future updates, we will have much more potential to elevate the visual quality and game performance,” MiHoYo’s technical director Zhenzhong Yi promised. Thanks to these new systems, even players who’ve already been playing Genshin Impact on the PS5 through backwards compatibility will see big improvements in performance. Yi says that loading screens seen when fast-travelling or when entering domains will now last only for a few seconds on PS5.

Upgrades have also been made to how the game interacts with the DualSense controller, though Yi says that more time will be needed to fully integrate the new controller. For now, controller vibration has been optimized for the PS5, while players can expect further improvements in future updates.

PS5 players will also get a small amount of new content, in the form of a redesigned version of the unearthly Qingyun Peak. “We’ve given this location a bit of a makeover,” Yi said. “We hope you like the surprise!”

The PS5 version of the game will launch for free on April 28, the same day as Genshin Impact’s next big update drops. Check here for more information on what will be added in Update 1.5.

Oculus held its first livestreamed game showcase this week, and it spent a good amount of the 25-minute runtime focused on Resident Evil 4 in VR–a Quest 2 exclusive. New footage gives us a good look at how combat will feel in the game, as well as a rundown on which systems have been changed and which have been left the same.

Most notably, the VR port adapts Resident Evil 4’s third-person viewpoint to a first-person experience, and a lot of tweaks have had to be made to accommodate for that. Using weapons will be a more physical experience with the Quest 2’s motion controls, allowing for finer melee weapon control, dual wielding, and the ability to manually reload firearms–which also adds the threat of fumbling a reload in a tense situation.

While the game offers VR-style teleportation as a movement option, as well as Roomscale tracking, the developers expect most people will navigate with the analogue stick as they would in a non-VR game. The developers also have made sure the VR version of the game is comfortable to play while seated, given the game is longer than most designed specifically for VR. Enemies have been balanced to adjust for the increased difficulties of navigating in VR, but Oculus expects the game overall to feel scarier and more tense in VR.

Notably, all the cutscenes will exist in their original forms, meaning there will be some shifting between third-person and first-person perspectives while playing. Many of the world’s textures have also received a revamp, given the age of the original game and the shift to a first-person perspective.

The port is coming exclusively to the Oculus Quest 2 later this year, though no specific release date has been given yet.

With the first three Resident Evil games having received full remakes in recent years, fans have long expected Capcom to announce a full, non-VR remake of Resident Evil 4. While nothing has been officially announced yet, Resident Evil Village is due to release soon–and developers have said the upcoming series installment is heavily inspired by RE4.

The Assassin’s Creed’s universe is receiving a massive expansion as developer Ubisoft has announced multiple new projects in the highly successful franchise, though none of them involve a new game. Instead these new AC projects will instead span multiple books, podcasts, and graphic novels.

Each new project will fall into one of three categories: “Classics” or stories adapted directly from the games, “Chronicles” or new stories starring established characters, and “Originals” which feature brand new characters and settings. The new project formats will include full novels, Chinese comics called “manhuas”, and “podcast dramas” with voice actors portraying characters in the story.

Partners joining with Ubisoft in this new initiative include Asmodee Entertainment through its publishing wing Aconyte Books, Dark Horse, and VIZ Media.

“With so many creators from all over Asia delivering innovative content”, Julien Fabre, Associate Director of Publishing, said in the official press release, “a priority for Ubisoft has been to forge new relationships with talented partners in the region.”

Some of the specific new projects announced include Assassin’s Creed Fragments, a series of young adult novels with the first three books’ settings as 19th Century Japan, 13th Century Scotland, and 17th Century France respectively, and Assassin’s Creed: Blade of Shao Jun, a manga series starring Shao Jun from Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China and a new modern-day protagonist named Lisa.

This is not the first time the franchise has ventured into different media, the most notable examples being the full-length 2016 Assassin’s Creed feature film starring Michael Fassbender and the 2017 comic series Assassin’s Creed: Uprising which marked the end of series antagonist Juno’s story.

More information about each of the new stories announced today can be found at the official site.

The latest game in the franchise was last November’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which recently saw its next downloadable content pack Wrath of the Druids delayed by two weeks to May 13.

Jeff Kaplan served as, until his recent departure, the Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment. But for Overwatch fans not tuned into Activision-Blizzard’s corporate hierarchy, he may most humbly be known as “Jeff from the Overwatch team.” That’s how he introduced himself at the start of every Developer Update video, a greeting that downplayed his status as Game Director, and emphasized that Overwatch was a team effort. But while he didn’t shout them from the rooftops, his achievements speak for themselves: Jeff Kaplan was, for 19 years, one of Blizzard Entertainment’s most vital and important innovators.

Blizzard recruited Kaplan in May 2002 specifically to help it expand into a whole new genre: the MMORPG. Back at the start of the millennium, the studio’s experience was predominantly in the real-time strategy space, and the team lacked the expertise to help inform the company’s next venture. And so Rob Pardo, one of Blizzard’s lead designers, looked to the most obvious place to find an MMO expert: an MMO itself. At the head of EverQuest’s prominent Legacy Of Steel guild, he found exactly the kind of person Blizzard was looking for: a player named Tigole, a passionate (see: outspoken) and well-known member of the game’s community. Outside of EverQuest, he was known as Jeff Kaplan.

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/04/20/jeff-kaplan-overwatch-2-director-leaves-blizzard”]

Pardo invited Kaplan to a series of lunches. “With hindsight, what I didn’t realize at the time was that those guys were interviewing me for a role with World of Warcraft,” Kaplan recalled during an interview with Game Informer.

Six months later, Kaplan joined the World of Warcraft team, helping design quests for what would eventually become the genre-defining MMORPG. A significant part of the reason behind World of Warcraft’s success was its approach to questing, something Kaplan helped shape. Previous MMOs, like EverQuest, had very few scripted quests and were largely freeform, player-directed games. But Kaplan, along with his design partner Pat Nagle, forged World of Warcraft’s questing system as a near-constant supply of hand-crafted missions.

Player testing only reinforced the need for numerous quests. “Our old estimates for how many quests we thought we were going to do versus how many quests we ended up doing were radically off,” Kaplan told Edge. And so the world of Azeroth was designed that it would always have new stories for you to explore, even if that was just killing six rats for a farmer.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=By%202008%20Kaplan%20was%20World%20of%20Warcraft%E2%80%99s%20Game%20Director%2C%20leading%20the%20charge%20on%20one%20of%20the%20series%E2%80%99%20landmark%20expansions.”]This approach helped make World of Warcraft significantly more accessible to MMO newcomers. Unsurprisingly (at least in hindsight), his efforts were part of its colossal success. After several promotions, by 2008 he became World of Warcraft’s Game Director, leading the charge on what is still to this day considered one of the series’ landmark expansions, Wrath of the Lich King. With a focus on story (entwining the player’s story with that of legendary antagonist Arthas), Kaplan ensured that WoW’s second expansion was a vital part of not just Blizzard’s MMO, but the entire Warcraft mythos.

Kaplan left World of Warcraft behind the day after Wrath of the Lich King shipped. His new calling was, naturally, Lead Game Designer on a new MMO that was in the works. He was the guy Blizzard employed for his MMO expertise, afterall. This new project was going to be the most ambitious thing Blizzard ever made, and its working title reflected that: Titan.

But Titan would never see the success that World of Warcraft did. In fact, Titan infamously would never see the light of day. In the desperate struggle to make something – anything – from the ashes of Titan’s design, Kaplan came up with what is, undoubtedly, his greatest achievement at Blizzard: Overwatch.

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2017/04/14/jeff-kaplan-critiques-igns-overwatch-team”]

Kaplan was enamoured with the class designs and RPG abilities that fellow designer Geoff Goodman had created for Titan. “I started thinking about a more tightly scoped game using that Geoff Goodman concept of dozens of classes with abilities,” he explained to Edge. Kaplan envisioned a game in which these faceless classes became playable heroes with names and backstories. But rather than an MMO, this would be a PvP shooter.

“Team Fortress 2 was just mega in my mind,” Kaplan told Game Informer while discussing Overwatch’s genesis. “There was such inspiration from that, so as we were rolling off of Titan and we were coming up with ideas that we as a team were super passionate about, we really chased our hearts more than anything else.”

Kaplan’s vision was embraced by the team, which led to them pitching it to Activision. “They were super polite and super nice to us, but you could sense this undercurrent of, ‘Oh god, of all things, what are you idiots doing?’” Kaplan recounted to Edge. But while perhaps another shooter alongside Call of Duty was not part of Activision’s original plan, Kaplan says the character designs won over CEO Bobby Kotick. “What that bought us was that we had until March to put together a core combat demo of the game,” said Kaplan.

A successful demo led to full development, and Overwatch would eventually be revealed at BlizzCon in 2014. Its fresh new world and innovative rethinking of MMO and MOBA-style class abilities as shooter mechanics quickly won the hearts of fans.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Kaplan’s%20Developer%20Update%20videos%20are%20the%20gold%20standard%20example%20of%20direct%20transparency%20with%20a%20game%E2%80%99s%20player%20base.”]As Overwatch’s Game Director, Jeff Kaplan became something of a community celebrity. Following in the footsteps of Hearthstone’s Game Director, Ben Brode, Kaplan made himself the face of Overwatch. His friendly, mild-mannered personality was endearing, and he was soon lovingly known as ‘Papa Jeff’ by the community. Kaplan has always taken this in his stride, ever happy to join in on a meme, even going as far as to sit by a fire in near-silence for an eight-hour festive livestream just for the fun of it.

But it was really Kaplan’s innovative approach to communication that made him such an effective face for Overwatch. His Developer Update videos are, to this day, the gold standard example of direct transparency with a game’s player base. On a semi-regular basis, Kaplan would explain in clear detail the changes coming to Overwatch, and why those changes were being made. He used straightforward language, so the updates felt like a friend talking with you, rather than a marketing team talking at you. All this made it easy to understand the thinking behind Overwatch’s many alterations, and invited players to feel like they were part of the decision-making. There’s perhaps no better example of this than Role Queue, the team composition system created after years of back-and-forth debate between players and the Overwatch team.

Combined with being ever-present on the Blizzard forums, there was a constant sense that Kaplan cared about Overwatch’s players, or at the very least was actively listening to them. And even in moments when the conversation could become exceptionally heated – the Mercy resurrection rework was a particularly rough time – Kaplan would be there answering questions. It always felt as if players were part of Overwatch’s development. It’s hard to imagine this would be the case without Kaplan’s particular approach, and Blizzard would be ill-advised to abandon the strategy going forward, especially in regards to Overwatch 2.

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2017/04/22/overwatchs-jeff-kaplan-responds-to-ign-comments”]

No matter what approach the company takes going forward, though, Blizzard won’t be the same place without Jeff Kaplan. But it’s also important to remember that Kaplan never saw himself as the ivory tower leader on his projects. He was always Jeff from the Overwatch team, never Jeffrey Kaplan, Game Director. His Developer Updates would regularly champion his colleagues, be that the design decisions of Aaron Keller, the heroic creations of Geoff Goodman, or the lore drops from Michael Chu. Kaplan was a team player, and, at least as far as outsider perceptions go, seemed to foster that approach among his peers. And as Keller steps up as Game Director, it seems sensible to expect at least some of Kaplan’s spirit to remain.

Over 19 years, Jeff Kaplan has been one of Blizzard’s most important voices. Recruited for his passion, his work helped shape one of the core pillars of not just World of Warcraft, but modern MMO design. His strength of vision helped rescue Blizzard’s most notable disaster, and turn it into what is arguably the developer’s most significant mainstream game in Overwatch. And as the head of that project, he refined communication between developers and players in a way few other studios have been able to replicate. He will be missed. But, just like Blizzard superstars Mike Morhaime and Chris Metzen, who also stepped away from the company in recent years, Jeff Kaplan leaves behind him a legacy of hugely successful creativity and innovation that has inspired not just those at Blizzard, but studios all over the world.

[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. 

Here’s some good news for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender–a new wave of Funko Pops has just gone up for preorder on Amazon. The standard-size figures cost $10.99, while a super-sized Aang All Elements figure runs $19.99. All the figures will release July 23, but you can lock in your preorders now.

And you might want to, because there’s no telling if they’re going to sell out.

Preorder New Avatar: The Last Airbender Funkos

[poilib element=”commerceDeal” parameters=”slug=avatar-the-last-airbender-funko-pop-preorders”]

The figures in question include the previously mentioned white-eyed, floating Aang, which is how he looks when he’s locked and loaded with all the elements and ready to destroy everything that stands in his way. Other regular-sized figures in the new wave include Suki, Ty Lee, Ozai, and Admiral Zhao.

They all look great in the classic big-head Funko style. Zhao’s armor looks rad. Suki’s face paint is on point. Ozai is surrounded by a pool of fire, and Ty Lee is ready to rumble in a martial arts stance.

These are far from the first Avatar Funkos, though. You can check out more previously released characters here.

[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

[widget path=”ign/modules/recirc” parameters=”title=&type=articles%2Cvideos&tags=us-shopping&count=3&columnCount=3&theme=article”]