Author: Trafficblast

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s Stormtroopers Have Their Own Personalities

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When designing the enemy Stormtroopers you’ll fight in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Respawn crafted individual personalities for each one. So even if you’re fighting a whole squad, individual troopers will behave and act differently.

“Under the helmet they have personalities, and so we’ve kind of given them nicknames and call signs,” Fallen Order narrative lead Aaron Contreras said, according to PC Gamer. “So it looks like a horde of faceless grunts. And they are because they’re Stormtroopers, but they each have a specific personality and they’ll interact with each other in ways that are specific to their personality. [So] when one’s left alone, it could be the guy who’s terrified or it could [be] a guy who’s super gung-ho and he’s like, ‘Now it’s my time to shine and take out a Jedi!'”

Individual Stormtroopers will also act differently depending on the make-up of a fight as well. The more observant among the group may inform their peers of their lack of ranged support if they notice you’ve cut down all of the snipers first. For the most part, Stormtroopers will also stay out of the way of the Purge Troopers if one is in their midst, allowing you to duel with the alpha killer. Of course, defeating said leader will cause the Stormtroopers to react, and those reactions will depend on their prewritten personalities.

Though each Stormtrooper has a call sign and personality, their individuality stops there. Fallen Order lead level designer Jeff Magers said that each trooper does not have their own individual name. Though Contreras did add, “Not yet,” so there may still be a possibility that some troopers get even more individuality between now and Fallen Order’s launch. As seen in The Last of Us Part II, giving enemies individual names and designing them to care about one another can make for some deeply unsettling combat encounters.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is scheduled to launch for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on November 15. We recently got three hours of hands-on time with Fallen Order at a preview event, coming away excited about the upcoming Star Wars game.

Jojo Rabbit: Taika Waititi And Stephen Merchant Talk Nazi Comedy And Rugrats

With Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi–following in the footsteps of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin–has made a funny and poignant satire about Nazis in 2019. It’s a coming-of-age comedy starring a young boy in Nazi Germany that is hilarious, emotional, and topical, thanks to Waititi’s unique sensibilities.

Jojo Rabbit stars Roman Griffin Davis as the titular Jojo, who is obsessed with everything Nazi-related–and also has an imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler himself, played by Waititi. Jojo is an enthusiastic Nazi youth, but he gets his worldview turned upside down once he discovers a Jewish girl named Elsa who his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding in their attic.

GameSpot was able to talk to writer-director Taika Waititi (director of Thor: Ragnarok) and co-star Stephen Merchant (who plays Gestapo agent Captain Deertz) with a select group of journalists after the film’s US premiere at Fantastic Fest in September, to discuss the making of the movie, tackling the thorny subject matter, and turning Hitler into a subversive comedy icon.

The opening credits of Jojo Rabbit play over a montage of vast German crowds going absolutely insane for Hitler, all while a German-language cover of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” plays over their fanatical cheers. Treating Hitler like the Beatles seems like an odd choice, but for Waititi, it made sense.

“For me it was that Hitler was like a pop star for Jojo,” the filmmaker explained. “Where I had posters of bands in my bedroom when I was growing up, I feel like in those days Hitler was that for some people. It is very easy to see how people can become enamored and brainwashed by these personalities.”

This is an important aspect of what makes Jojo Rabbit such a special and important movie today. Jojo isn’t portrayed as a monster, but as a dumb little boy who wanted to be accepted by a group and chose the worst club to join. When he meets Elsa, she quickly dismisses him not as a violent monster, but as a kid who got involved with the wrong crowd. “I don’t think that Jojo is an idiot,” Waititi explained. “When children were indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth and were taught all these ideas, a lot of them were very bright kids, but that doesn’t mean that they were not easily influenced.”

For Merchant, this feels relevant to today’s politics. “I think what’s interesting is the film’s humanizing of people with Nazi beliefs,” Merchant told us. “Because there’s this tendency to demonize them as this other thing, and I think the danger with that is that it suggests that it couldn’t happen again. Not to us, because we’re right-minded people. What Jojo plays into is the way people can easily be seduced by the dark side.”

Though the first trailer focused on the comedy aspect of the movie, the “Nazi summer camp” that was prominently shown only lasts about 15 minutes, after which Jojo Rabbit becomes a poignant and at times quite emotional coming-of-age tale. For Stephen Merchant this use of comedy as a hook was what drew him into the movie.

“Taika uses humor as a way of kind of seducing and relaxing an audience,” Merchant told us.

Indeed, though the first act of the movie gets plenty of laughs at the expense of the ideology that has turned the kids at the summer camp into mindless drones, Jojo Rabbit quickly becomes more dramatic as it introduces the reality of the war and what it was done to people. The movie then starts getting darker and darker as it shows things like children being used as soldiers, and public hangings for those who were considered different.

Despite dealing with heavy and serious subjects, Jojo Rabbit doesn’t go fully into the horrors of the war. We see people dying, but it is always off-screen. We glimpse the people who’ve been publicly executed, but only their dangling feet. For Waititi, this was very much intentional.

“I wanted to keep it like Rugrats,” the director explained, as everyone in the room chuckled. “I wanted the movie to feel like it came from a kid’s point of view and how they interpret these things. When I was a child seeing violence in my life, my memories are not accurate. I think they’ve been put through a child’s filter where they feel more cinematic or cartoonish. So I wanted to keep some sort of innocence around this stuff and not be gratuitous. I don’t want to see people get shot in my films, really. I don’t need it to be graphic.”

Jojo Rabbit hits theaters Friday, October 18.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare To Use Battle Passes For Post-Launch Content

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare releases next week, and the team at Activision laid out how it will handle post-release content. The company had already announced it would be removing season pass and DLC maps to ensure a more unified player base, but it wasn’t clear how the game would handle monetization. It has answered that lingering question now with the announcement of a Battle Pass system.

According to the announcement, the Battle Passes will be timed to live seasons, with both a Free Stream and Premium Stream of content to earn. The Free Stream will let you unlock anything with an impact on gameplay, like base weapons and attachments. The Premium Stream will earn you cosmetics items. You’ll also be able to earn COD Points with the Battle Pass.

However, the Battle Pass won’t be ready to go on day one. It will launch sometime later in 2019. Activision says this is because right now the company is focused on the game launch, and also because players will have plenty to play through and earn from the base game to start anyway.

“Understandably there are still questions around how the economy will evolve throughout the post-launch, live seasons,” the announcement says. “We recognize this will take time to fully demonstrate. Please know we are committed to delivering a fair system guided by the principles we’ve outlined here, and will continue to monitor feedback and player engagement to help us achieve that goal.”

Recently, Infinity Ward’s Joel Emslie ruled out loot boxes for Modern Warfare, and this sheds more light on the approach the studio is using instead. The company also recently clarified that its PC download size, listed in specs at 175 GB, is the number including a series of post-launch content.

Modern Warfare releases on October 25. For more details, check out our pre-order guide.

Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch Review

Nintendo’s latest weird game-fitness-thing, Ring Fit Adventure, has been a lot more difficult than I expected. Not because its attempt at integrating fitness into an RPG is too complicated or obtuse, but because its honest-to-goodness workout is kicking my butt. For the past two weeks I’ve spent a daily session not much longer than my regular gym time with it, and it almost always leaves me sweating. But it’s a challenge I’m excited to face every day, even when I’m not feeling its simple adventure elements as much as that burn.

The ring itself is basically a fancier pilates ring with a slot to attach a Joy-Con, allowing you to use it as a more traditional fitness device with custom workout routines and quickplay challenges built into Ring Fit Adventure. There’s even a neat feature to do exercise reps with the ring that count toward your daily experience while the actual Switch is still in sleep mode. But it’s the surprisingly lengthy adventure mode campaign that serves as the main attraction. It actually does a decent job of adapting fitness ideas into an RPG adventure, ideally played about 30 minutes to an hour at a time. That said, Ring Fit Adventure clearly attempts to be an accessible RPG that can still be played by people who have never even heard of Final Fantasy, so don’t expect a lot of depth to its mechanics.

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Iron Fist Star Jessica Henwick in Talks for Lead Role in Matrix 4

Marvel’s Iron Fist star Jessica Henwick is reportedly in discussions to take an undisclosed lead role in The Matrix 4.

According to Deadline, the actress caught the attention of casting directors after giving a strong performance during the audition process, though at this stage it is unconfirmed which character Henwick would be playing in the film.

The outlet, however, indicates that Matrix 4 director and co-scribe Lana Wachowski has been on the lookout for a “female-like Neo character” to take on a major role at the “forefront of the new film” alongside Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, who are reprising their iconic roles as Neo and Trinity, respectively.

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Google Stadia’s Controller Won’t Be Fully Wireless At Launch

The Stadia’s “wireless” controller will only be wireless when played on a TV via a Chromecast at launch. For everything else, you’ll have to plug it in using a USB-C cable.

One of the selling points of Google’s controller when it was unveiled in March was its seamless connectivity. Its own Wi-Fi connection stays constantly connected to Stadia’s data centres, meaning you don’t have to re-sync the controller to, say, your phone (if you needed to start playing the game on something portable after being kicked off the TV. Again.)

But it turns out that this system no longer the case, at least for the near future. A new explainer video for Google about how Stadia works contains contains a small-print disclaimer saying, “at launch, wireless play is only available on TV using a Chromecast Ultra.”

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