Author: Trafficblast

It has been more than five years since the release of Splinter Cell: Blacklist, so fans are understandably eager to find out what’s next for Sam Fisher. In a new interview, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot offered an explanation for what’s taking so long to bring the franchise back.

He told IGN that Ubisoft won’t bring back the franchise until it can do something novel with it. Not only that, but some of Ubisoft’s development teams became too anxious to want to work on a new Splinter Cell game due to pressure from fans, Guillemot said. And third, Ubisoft’s other big franchises like Assassin’s Creed are “taking off,” which has led the company to focus on them instead of Splinter Cell.

“When you create a game, you have to make sure you will come with something that will be different enough from what you did before,” Guillemot said. “Last time we did a Splinter Cell, we had lots of pressure from all the fans saying, ‘Don’t change it; don’t do this; don’t do that.’ So some of the teams were more anxious to work on the brand.

“Now there are some things and some people that are now looking at the brand; taking care of the brand. At one point you will see something but I can’t say more than that,” he added. “Also because of Assassin’s Creed and all the other brands taking off, people wanted to work on those brands more. so we have to follow what they like to do.”

Ghost Recon: Wildlands contained a very strong tease for Splinter Cell, with Sam Fisher voice actor Michael Ironside doing the voice in an Easter Egg. A Splinter Cell Easter Egg was also spotted in Ubisoft’s 2019 game Far Cry: New Dawn.

Further fuelling the rumors about a new Splinter Cell is the news that original Splinter Cell designer Clint Hocking has returned to Ubisoft where he is working on “unannounced projects.” Guillemot was asked if Ubisoft might bring back Splinter Cell for the next generation of consoles, which are apparently coming soon, but Guillemot wouldn’t be drawn into that conversation.

If Ubisoft does have a Splinter Cell announcement to make, it could happen during the company’s E3 2019 briefing in June, but nothing is confirmed at this stage.

Back in 2012 it was reported that Tom Hardy would star as Sam Fisher in a Splinter Cell movie, but whether or not that’s still the case is unknown.

What would you like to see from a new Splinter Cell game? Let us know in the comments below!

George R.R. Martin does not want HBO’s Game of Thrones to end. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter from the final season’s NYC premiere, Martin said he would have wanted the show to run longer. But while the main show is ending, there might be a prequel series someday, and of course he continues to write new books.

“I don’t think it should be the final season. But here we are,” Martin said. “It seems to me we just started last week. Has it been longer than that? The time has passed by in a blur. But it’s exciting. I know it’s an end, but it’s not much of an end for me. I’m still deep in writing the books. We saw five other sequel shows in development. I think I’m going to be hanging around Westeros while everyone else has left. (Laughs.)”

Martin said in 2018 that Game of Thrones could have run for as many as 13 seasons, thanks in part to the breadth of detail and history from the book series. Showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff originally only wanted seven seasons, so Martin and company were successful at convincing them to do at least one more than they set out to.

The “five other sequel shows” is a reference to the Game of Thrones spin-offs that HBO has in various stages of development. The first of these hasn’t started shooting yet, though the producers are “getting very close” to beginning, Martin said. HBO has committed to filming a pilot episode for the show, but there is no guarantee it’ll get picked up to series. Whatever the case, Martin said he’s excited about the cast and crew for what he described as a “very different” show than the mainline Game of Thrones program.

“They have a great director and an amazing cast. I’ve been following along closely. I have my fingers crossed,” he said. “It’s different. It’s definitely very different. It’s set thousands of years in the past. You’re looking at a whole different era of Westeros. No dragons, no Iron Throne, no King’s Landing. It will be interesting to see what the fans make of that.”

Jessica Jones director SJ Clarkson is directing the show, which will star Naomi Watts. X-Men: First Class’ Jane Goldman will serve as showrunner.

Game of Thrones Season 8 premieres April 14 on HBO. For more, you can find out why actor John Bradley thinks Game of Thrones has changed TV forever.

Preacher, the AMC TV show based on the comic book and led by Superbad’s Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is coming to an end. It has been announced that the drama will end after its fourth season. It was Rogen who confirmed the show’s cancellation, writing on Instagram, “It’s been a wild ride. Thank you all.”

Rogen also released the first teaser for Preacher Season 4, which confirms an August 4 premiere date. Check it out below.

Preacher stars Dominic Cooper (Need for Speed, Mamma Mia) as a preacher named Jesse Custer from Texas who isn’t exactly the model of faith. The show also stars Custer’s vampire friend Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) and girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga). The comic book series on which it is based was created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

As Deadline reminds us, Rogen and Goldberg are leaving Sony TV–the producers of Preacher–for a new deal at Lionsgate.

Preacher Season 3 aired in 2018. The show’s showrunner is Sam Catlin, who wrote and produced episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad.

It looks like Microsoft is gearing up to announced a half-dozen more Xbox Game Pass titles this week. The Xbox Game Pass Twitter account posted a cryptic tweet where it asked, “What if we announced six more games on April 10?”

It would be a bad look to post this tweet and not follow up with new Xbox Game Pass announcements on April 10, so this is pretty much confirmation that it’ll happen. However, there were no teases about what games might be announced.

The latest addition to Xbox Game Pass was Minecraft, which arrived last week and represents one of the catalog’s biggest releases ever.

Xbox Game Pass is Microsoft’s all-you-can-play subscription service on Xbox One that provides members access to a growing catalog of games that users can download and play for as long as their membership remains active. In addition to Minecraft, some of the other marquee titles include Halo 5 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection, as well as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Just Cause 4, all the Gears of War games, Doom, and more.

The service costs $10 USD/month, but new subscribers can sign up for $1 USD/month. It’s only available on Xbox One, but Microsoft has talked about bringing it to every device.

Xbox Game Pass is separate from Project xCloud, which is Microsoft’s upcoming game-streaming service that will enter public trials later this year.

Although it hasn’t been confirmed, it looks like Anno 1800 is becoming an Epic Games Store exclusive. Originally scheduled for a Steam release, Anno 1800 will be discontinued on Steam after its release date of April 16.

We’ll update this story when we confirm which PC game store Anno 1800 is going to.

“Sales of Anno 1800 will be discontinued on Steam after April 16th due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store,” a notice on Anno 1800’s Steam page reads. “The publisher has assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam.”

The notice doesn’t list what other store is getting the exclusive, but given what’s happened over the past few months, it makes sense to assume it’s Epic. Since 2018, several titles have left Steam just prior to release and gone to Epic instead. Some games have even been pretty major triple-A titles too, such as Metro Exodus and The Division 2. Prior to Anno 1800, Borderlands 3 was the latest triple-A title to join the Epic Games Store as an exclusive, although it’s only an exclusive for six months as opposed to other titles’ year-long exclusivity.

Also, when Ubisoft announced The Division 2 would be an Epic exclusive, Epic revealed that its partnership with Ubisoft would continue with “additional select titles.” No further details were supplied at the time, but Epic did tease that those titles are all scheduled for release “during the coming year.” Anno 1800 fits that criteria, so it would make sense to see the game launch on Epic come April 16.

There’s been a lot of vocal discontent for games that launch exclusively on Epic, especially if the titles were initially scheduled for release on Steam. After the announcement that Metro Exodus would be leaving Steam for Epic, both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light were heavily review bombed by players disappointed in the decision. The same happened to Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel after the reveal that Borderlands 3 would be an Epic timed exclusive.

Just days after the release of Shazam, screenwriter Henry Gayden is reportedly already set to write the Shazam sequel alongside director David F. Sandberg and producer Peter Safran. That’s according to a new report from The Wrap.

While details of the plot, returning cast, and release time are still unsurprisingly vague (what do you expect? The movie just came out) the confirmation of a sequel is really no surprise. After all, those post-credits stingers left a pretty major cliffhanger dangling in the air.

With any luck, we’ll see a full return of the cast, including Asher Angel’s Billy Batson and Zackary Levi’s Shazam, who anchored the first film with plenty of heart and humor as well as Mark Strong’s surprisingly sympathetic Dr. Sivana who, we can only hope, has a few more villainous tricks left up his sleeve.

Shazam’s already raked in an impressive sum of money in the box office after opening this weekend–which really isn’t surprising, considering just how great it is. It’s also jam-packed with all kinds of obscure DC Comics references and Easter eggs–were you able to spot them all?

And while we wait for more Shazam details to come trickling in, don’t forget that there are other DCEU movies just over the horizon. Take a look at the brand-new trailer for Joker, Joaquin Phoenix’s standalone villain origin story heading for theaters on October 4, and keep an eye out for the very latest from Birds of Prey, on track for February 2020.

Bethesda has announced that the new repair kits coming to Fallout 76 can be earned in-game or bought with real world money. The kits are designed to repair weapons and armor without needing to waste resources.

“Repair Kits are new utility items that will help you spend more time looting and shooting, and less time toiling away at a workbench fixing your gear,” Bethesda wrote in the latest Inside the Vault blog post. “We’ve received lots of requests for Repair Kits, and we’re excited to add them in the weeks following Patch 8.” Patch 8 is scheduled for tomorrow, April 9.

Patch 8 adds two types of repair kits: basic and improved. Basic kits are single-use and repairs any one item to 100% condition. You’ll be able to unlock them in the in-game Atomic Shop with Atoms–Fallout 76’s microtransactions that can be bought with real money or earned by completing challenges. Improved kits are also single-use, but they repair a single item to 150% condition, allowing them to last much longer than they normally would. The improved repair kits can only be earned for completing in-game content, such as defeating the Scorchbeast Queen.

Following Patch 8, more of Fallout 76’s Wild Appalachia expansion will release on April 16. A new dungeon, called The Burrows, will be unlocked for you to explore with a squad of other players. Bethesda plans on releasing further details about the The Burrows during next week’s Inside the Vault, but promises the dungeon will be a “daunting new subterranean battleground.” Next week’s Inside the Vault will reveal more details about Fallout 76’s upcoming in-game camera and memory book features too, which brings a new quest and challenges on April 16.

Player vending, which allows you to set up your own store to sell items to others, has been delayed. No longer coming in Patch 8, player vending is now scheduled for Patch 9, which is currently expected to release sometime in May.

Wild Appalachia is the first of three large content drops scheduled for Fallout 76 in 2019. Nuclear Winter, coming this summer, brings a new game mode and features to Fallout 76, along with a new prestige system and two challenging raids. This fall, Wastelanders adds a story expansions that includes a new main questline, factions, events, and features.

Fallout 76 is available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

A new movie about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien is coming to theatres next month. Among other things, the film confirms the correct pronunciation of the man’s last name.

It is “Tol-Keen,” not “Tol – Kine” or any other variation.

A clip from the new movie, Tolkien, was released on Twitter and it clears up any potential confusion about how to pronounce the legendary author’s surname. Watch as actor Harry Gilby, who plays young Tolkien, stands up in class to correct his teacher.

Tolkien hits theatres on May 10. It’s directed by Dome Karukoski (Heart of Finland), based on script from David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford.

Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Men series) plays the adult Tolkien, while Lily Collins (To The Bone, Stuck In Love) plays Tolkien’s wife, Edith Bratt.

In addition to Tolkien, Amazon is working on a new Lord of the Rings TV show that the network is reportedly spending $500 million to produce.

Outside of movies and TV, a new Lord of the Rings video game focusing on Gollum is in development for PC from developer Daedalic Entertainment and due out in 2021.

Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds is getting involved with a new TV show, and it might not be what you expect. Reynolds is producing the new ABC game show “Don’t.”

As reported by Variety, the original game show is a “comedic physical game show” where families of four take part in mental and physical challenges where they “don’t” do something. Examples include “don’t forget,” “don’t slip,” or anything else, it seems.

Here’s more from Variety’s description of the show:

“Each episode will focus on one family as they go through the ‘Don’t’ tests. If they succeed, they’ll win a cash prize. But if the family fails a challenge, one of them will be eliminated. When just one contestant is left, the last remaining family member must compete on their own. Whatever money they’ve earned, the family keeps.”

Reynolds has a history with ABC, as he starred on the late ’90s sitcom Two Guys and a Girl (which was originally titled Two Guys, A Girl & a Pizza Place). More recently, the Deadpool franchise joins ABC owner Disney after that company bought the Deadpool series from Fox. He also has some experience with game shows, as he showed up on a South Korean game show as part of viral marketing for Deadpool 2.

“All my life, the word ‘don’t’ has tortured me,” Reynolds said. “From ‘don’t curse’ to ‘don’t play ball in the house’ to ‘don’t eat the crab salad you left in the sun for three days.’ I cannot wait for my personal trauma to become the next great ABC family show,” Reynolds said.

Go to Variety to get the full story.

The next big Ryan Reynolds movie is Detective Pikachu; Reynolds voices Pikachu.