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Game designer and writer Chris Avellone has announced that he’s finished up work on Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. He’s also working on a secret project that may be announced in the next month.

Avellone is known as the writer behind several story-driven video games, including one of the most popular Star Wars titles ever made: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords. His more recent work includes Divinity: Original Sin II, Prey, and Into the Breach–the first of which made our top 10 games of 2017 list and the latter of which is one of our favorites for 2018. Avellone was also on the writing team at Obsidian for Fallout: New Vegas and he was the lead storyteller for Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Other than Jedi Fallen Order and his secret, unannounced project, Avellone’s future work also includes Dying Light 2.

I can’t say 100% b/c of NDAs, but the ones I can say: I just finished up work with Jedi: The Fallen Order – and beyond that, there’s another big bomb dropping in a month! Er, I mean, maybe. Ahem.

— Chris Avellone (@ChrisAvellone) March 1, 2019

Jedi Fallen Order is being made by Respawn, the developer behind the first-person shooter Titanfall 2 and battle royale game Apex Legends. Respawn CEO Vince Zampella officially announced the upcoming Star Wars game at E3 2018. He described Jedi Fallen Order as a dark story that transpires between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. You’ll take on the role of a Jedi Padawan that escaped Order 66, and, armed with a lightsaber, explore an Empire-ruled galaxy. Exact details haven’t been announced yet, but there are certain characters, places, and storylines we hope to see unfold in Jedi Fallen Order.

EA has announced that more details about Jedi Fallen Order will be revealed at this year’s Star Wars Celebration. The event is scheduled April 11-15, with the Jedi Fallen Order reveal set for Saturday, April 13 during a special panel. Hopefully, during the Star Wars Celebration, we’ll get some more information about the new season for The Clone Wars. The animated series is getting a surprise seventh season–after being cancelled in 2014–but there hasn’t been much talk about it since the Comic-Con 2018 announcement that the show was coming back.

Jedi Fallen Order is currently scheduled for Fall 2019. Previous announcements stated the release date would specifically align with the holiday season, but an EA financial report may have implied that the game could be coming out earlier than that. That same report revealed that EA has new Plants vs. Zombies and Need for Speed games planned as well.

New Pokemon Set Includes Pikachu with Afro, Ninja Outfit

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Pokemon Center DX in Japan, The Pokemon Company has revealed a new line of celebratory Pikachu plush toys.

Headlining the set is a Pikachu with a lovely cherry blossom-filled afro, as well as Pikachu in a ninja outfit, kabuki makeup, and wrestler outfit.

The set celebrates the March 14, 2018 opening of Pokemon Center DX in Tokyo, which is also home to the Pokemon Cafe that we visited last year. The Pokemon Cafe will also have a special promotion similarly featuring Sakura Afro Pikachu.

Anthem Really Needs To Steal This Apex Legends Idea

There are a lot of super-smart systems and ideas in Apex Legends that improve on the overall battle royale genre. The inventory system makes it easy to navigate the many weapons in the game, the respawn system makes it possible for smart, brave, and lucky teams to save their teammates from the great beyond, and the Legend system gives everyone on a team a specific set of abilities to help out their squad. But the best thing Apex Legends brings to battle royale is its ping system, which allows players an extremely effective way to communicate even without actually speaking to each other.

The ping system makes team communication in Apex incredibly easy and fluid, whether you’re playing with friends or with random people you squad up with. You can mark enemy locations, suggest where the team should go, and point out weapons and attachments your teammates might need. Having those markers show up in-game makes it easy to get your point across to other players, and in some cases, is even more effective than actually talking to your team. It’s also highly accessible to players who might not otherwise have the means or ability to speak to teammates.

Others have taken notice of how useful Apex Legends’ ping system is. Epic Games introduced a similar system to Fortnite in the game’s latest update, making it a little easier for squads to talk to each other in the game. That might be considered an acknowledgment of how popular Apex has become in just a few weeks since its release, as well as how intelligent and useful the system can be.

Fortnite isn’t the only game that should take a page from Apex’s communication capabilities. Another recently released Electronic Arts game could greatly benefit from implementing something similar: Anthem. In fact, BioWare could seriously improve many of Anthem’s problems immediately by adding a ping system of its own. It’s actually something that should become standard in the shared-world shooter genre.

BioWare means for Anthem to be a squad-based shooter in which players are constantly working together to beat hordes of enemies. There’s more to it than just shooting: Anthem has four classes of its javelin mech suits you can choose from when you start a mission, and each has its own special capabilities. Using your abilities in concert with other players can create combos that do extra damage, inflict status effects on enemies, and give you special bonuses like dealing extra damage or spreading those effects to even more bad guys. Especially at high levels, combos and team coordination are pretty important.

But like most shared-world shooters, such as Destiny 2 or The Division 2, it’s very easy to go through most or even all of Anthem without talking to anybody. The game supports matchmaking all the way through it, which means you can drop into any mission with a group of three other randoms. And anybody who’s spent even a few minutes in a game like this knows that almost nobody talks to each other. Like most online games, chats are often filled with annoying or even toxic people, so even those players interested in actually cooperating usually remain silent. If you’re not in a party chat with other players, chances are, you’re not communicating with them–especially since Anthem offers no text chat. Your only options are voice and a few character emotes.

That’s annoying in most cooperative shooters, but it’s especially problematic in Anthem. You can play BioWare’s shooter solo, but that’s not the way it was designed or intended. Play with other people you don’t know, however, and it feels like you’re just blasting away at things without any real organization between you and your teammates. It’s even worse in those missions when Anthem expects you to solve a puzzle. Nobody talks, nobody knows what anyone else is doing, and everyone just floats around trying different things until, seemingly, someone has the good sense to look up the solution online and input it.

It’s not hard to imagine how Apex’s ping system would instantly mitigate all of these issues in Anthem, and make it a much more fun and cooperative game besides. Even just the ability to call out and mark enemies or call out locations for combos would go a long way. Anthem’s combos require a Primer ability, which sets up the combo, and a Detonator ability, which triggers it; a ping system would make it very easy to tell your teammates which kind of ability you need and where. Since the javelin class that does the detonating also matters in executing the combo, pings would make it a lot easier to make a plan and execute it.

That’s to say nothing of the benefits of being able to ping puzzles to work together on solutions, and its myriad potential uses in Anthem’s freeplay mode, when you can just fly around with some pals getting into trouble and searching for loot out in the world. Marking locations, suggesting destinations, warning teammates about threats or showing them things they should stop and pick up–it all could be easily communicated with a system similar to Apex Legends’.

Respawn Entertainment has created a pretty major and extremely useful innovation for the shooter genre with its ping system, and it’s something that even more games are surely going to emulate. And if the shared-world shooter genre is going to expand, it absolutely should capitalize on this idea. Pings in Destiny 2 or The Division likely would improve them in a lot of the same ways as Anthem could be, and lots of others kinds of games would benefit from similar communication tools. It might be tough to find ways to squeeze a ping button into those games’ current control schemes, but the huge benefits of better communication would be worth reshuffling them.

Now that Apex Legends has cracked the code, imagining a similar game without a smart, easy, highly accessible way to communicate with other players is a little tougher. Games like Anthem that are serious about teamwork and cooperation should implement something similar as soon as possible. The ping system can make teamwork-based games smarter, more accessible, and most importantly, a lot more fun.

Here’s Why There Are no Good Video Game Movies…and How to Fix it

Why are there no good video game movies? It’s a question we ask ourselves every time another Resident Evil sequel comes out in theaters, every time a huge IP like Halo or Mortal Kombat goes direct-to-video, every time we see a movie like John Wick or The Raid that shows us how it woulda/coulda/shoulda been done.

What gives? Why are so few film adaptations of video games being made, and in the off chance that they are, why do they always seem to range from “forgettable and bad” to (and this is usually the best-case scenario one can hope for) “so bad that they’re actually kind of funny”?

Turns out there is a load of answers to these questions, ranging from creative to financial to philosophical. Let’s take a look at some past and present examples and see if we can’t come up with some answers, shall we?

Resident Evil 2, Kingdom Hearts 3 On Sale For $45 Right Now (PS4, Xbox One)

New games seem to be going on sale faster than ever these days, and two of the biggest games of 2019 so far are following the trend. Resident Evil 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3, both of which released just over a month ago, are already available for $15 off their launch price. Using the code EMCTWTU48, you can drop the price from $60 to $45 on both of these critically acclaimed titles.

Capcom’s remake of Resident Evil 2 does justice to the original while improving nearly every aspect of the experience for the better. RE2’s amazing visuals, expanded story, terrifying survival horror atmosphere, and challenging bonus modes have some claiming it could be a Game of the Year contender. “Resident Evil 2 is not only a stellar remake of the original, but it’s also simply a strong horror game that delivers anxiety-inducing and grotesque situations, topping some of the series’ finest entries,” wrote GameSpot’s Alessandro Fillari in his Resident Evil 2 review. Another reason to pick up RE2 now: its free DLC, The Ghost Survivors, just released for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

Kingdom Hearts 3 is the long-awaited culmination of a series that began 17 years ago. Like the other games, you explore various Disney and Pixar worlds as Sora with companions Donald and Goofy along for the ride. The plot is convoluted and the finale left some fans feeling underwhelmed, but GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain ultimately scored it an 8 in his Kingdom Hearts 3 review. “It’s everything fans love about the series: a thrilling action-RPG that celebrates Disney and Pixar, all the while ensuring themes of friendship, heroism, and pure-hearted goodness shine bright,” he wrote.

This promo code expires on March 4 at 11:59 PT / 2:59 ET or sooner based on availability, so don’t wait if you want to snag these worthy games.

Buy Resident Evil 2 — PS4, Xbox One — $45 with code EMCTWTU48
Buy Kingdom Hearts 3 — PS4, Xbox One — $45 with code EMCTWTU48