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Take a look at all the Overdrives from the main roster of the upcoming fighting game, Guilty Gear Strive. Captured from the beta on PS5.When Disney cut ties with actress and former MMA competitor Gina Carano on February 10, it looked to many like a sudden move in response to a single social media post. According to a new story from The Hollywood Reporter, though, Carano’s exit from the Mandalorian and Disney was months in the making.
Exactly two months earlier, on December 10, Disney unveiled a whole host of Marvel and Star Wars content, including ten new Star Wars shows. Among those was Rangers of the New Republic. At the time, we and many others assumed Rangers was a vehicle for Carano and her character Cara Dune. Carano appeared in seven episodes of The Mandalorian across the show’s two seasons, and her story arc in the second had her picking up a Rangers of the New Republic badge, seemingly contemplating a new path for herself.
Indeed, that was exactly what Disney had planned, and THR says her agency, UTA, was negotiating for a pay raise for the actress, who was reportedly pulling in $25,000 to $50,000 per episode of The Mandalorian. Carano was meant to be part of that presentation, but an anonymous source told THR that Disney pulled her off the presentation. Sources say that Disney had repeatedly warned Carano even before the February 10 tweets Disney described as “abhorrent and unacceptable.” Carano had previously posted tweets mocking mask wearing during the coronavirus pandemic, promoting misinformation about voter fraud, and expressing transphobic views. Those tweets led to the initial warnings, while her February 10 tweet comparing American conservatives to Jewish people just before the Holocaust is what sealed Carano’s fate. The decision was reportedly made by Lucasfilm executives, going higher than Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau.
A few Disney stars have flirted with disaster in recent months. Black Panther star Letitia Wright retweeted a video questioning the safety of the coronavirus vaccine in December, and deleted her Twitter in response to the blowback from the post. It’s hard not to think about James Gunn here. Disney had fired Gunn in response to offensive tweets he’d posted nearly a decade previous and had already apologized for before they were resurfaced by right-wing activists and personalities. In that case, Disney moved quickly in response to the tweets, only to re-hire Gunn a year later to direct Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Since Disney pushed her out, Carano has announced a partnership to produce a film with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, stating that she has “only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before.” The future of the Cara Dune character is in question, though THR says that its sources suggest recasting is likely. Season 3 of The Mandalorian is a ways off, likely hitting in 2022 after the Book of Boba Fett series announced as a stinger to the Mandalorian’s Season 2 finale, so Lucasfilm and Disney have plenty of time to make a decision.
Streaming giant Netflix and gaming giant Valve have surprised the internet with the announcement of a new animated series based on the Dota game franchise. The companies each took to their Twitter accounts to announce the series, with a release date of March 25.
Both tweets refer to the series as “anime.” Some anime fans may wind up debating that classification–hard to tell, though, since we currently know nothing about who’s actually making the show. Netflix simply posted a teaser video in which a man identifies himself as Davion, Dragon Knight, a character from the game Dota 2. He then battles a dragon, before the logo Dota: Dragon’s Blood appears. The teaser says the series was made “in collaboration with Valve.” Meanwhile, Valve said in a tweet from the official Dota 2 account, “We’re excited to announce a brand-new anime series exploring the Dota universe like never before. As fellow fans of Dota and its passionate global community, we look forward to sharing this new adventure with you when it premieres on Netflix March 25.”
We’re excited to announce a brand-new anime series exploring the Dota universe like never before. As fellow fans of Dota and its passionate global community, we look forward to sharing this new adventure with you when it premieres on Netflix March 25.https://t.co/rHcL5QSi5b
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) February 17, 2021
Finally, Netflix’s official listing for the show describes its premise in brief: “After encounters with a dragon and a princess on her own mission, a Dragon Knight becomes embroiled in events larger than he could have ever imagined.”
Dota began life as a player-made mod for the game Warcraft III and is credited as the origin of the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre that also includes League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, among others. Valve partnered with the original creator of Dota to develop and release Dota 2 in 2013, and the genre has been going strong ever since.
The streaming series Dota: Dragon’s Blood looks similar to other animated video game adaptations Netflix has produced recently, including the Castlevania series and last year’s Dragon’s Dogma series. However, it’s unknown at this time whether these shows are related in any way.
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Developer Larian Studios is holding another Panel from Hell livestream for Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s sure to be full of pretty big announcements–for context, last year’s Panel from Hell livestream revealed the date for when Baldur’s Gate 3 would launch in early access.
The livestream is scheduled to begin on February 17 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. You can watch the livestream via the video embedded below.
On the Baldur’s Gate 3 website, Larian Studios writes that this livestream will “divulge all the secrets in [the game’s] biggest patch yet.” The patch in question is Patch 4, scheduled to go live in Baldur’s Gate 3 sometime this year.
In GameSpot’s Baldur’s Gate 3 early access review, David Wildgoose writes, “To some extent, it is fascinating to play Baldur’s Gate 3 today with the knowledge you will be able to follow its progress over the coming months–and possibly years–with a kind of academic interest in how AAA RPGs are built. You’ll be able to witness first-hand how rough cuts are beaten into shape and finally polished. And for some small section of the audience, that alone will be worth the price of admission. For the rest of us, however, there’s no rush. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done yet. It’s okay to wait until it is.”
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There’s a quote from author Douglas Adams about how we adapt easily to new things in our younger years, but how “anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” It’s easy to look at tweets and essays from Hollywood’s old guard as little more than old men screaming at clouds shaped Netflix and Disney+ logos when they talk about the way streaming services and comic book movies are changing filmmaking, but a new essay from Martin Scorsese has a lot more to say than the idea that new things are bad.
In a new essay in the March 2021 edition of Harper’s Magazine, Scorsese looks at the lifetime and impact of Italian director Federico Fellini, which is interesting in its own right, but he bookends it with thoughts on the current state of cinema that both lament the passing of the old age but accept the reality of the current world.
“As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form,'” Scorsese writes. “Gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form.”
“‘Content’ became a business term for all moving images,” he continues, correctly assessing that it encompasses everything from cat videos to television episodes to superhero sequels. The term as its used today, Scorsese says, “was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience, but to home viewing, and on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience.”
Scorsese acknowledges that streaming platforms have been good for directors like him in their own way–Netflix produced Scorsese’s The Irishman and Pretend It’s a City, while Apple TV will get Killers of the Flower Moon–but says that streaming platforms present all content on a level playing field, which he says “sounds democratic, but isn’t.”
“If further viewing is ‘suggested’ by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre then what does that do to the art of cinema?” he asks.
Often when directors talk about modern moviemaking, they take aim at things like superhero movies (as Scorsese himself has previously done) as a cancer that needs to be excised from cinema, but Scorsese doesn’t have anything bad to say about the movies themselves, the viewing experience (we’re looking at you, Christopher Nolan), or even streaming as a delivery medium. Instead, Scorsese’s pain point is the way streaming platforms are engineered. He differentiates services like Criterion Channel and MUBI because these services are curated rather than engineered.
Scorsese argues that curating movies isn’t undemocratic or elitist, but human; it’s someone putting a list together and sharing it, rather than a machine trying to assess what art you might like based on math.
“Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else,” he argues. This leads into his discussion of Fellini’s work and the way it was discussed and shared.
Toward the end of the piece, Scorsese comes back around to how Fellini, and the age of cinema he was a part of, and the current age of streaming piece together. He acknowledges that it’s only natural for people to focus on modern creations and that older artists would “eventually recede into the shadows with the passing of time,” but suggests that curation of film shouldn’t be left up to the people who stand to make money off of it.
“We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema,” he writes. “In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word ‘business,’ and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property—in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the ‘Art Film’ swim lane on a streaming platform. Those of us who know the cinema and its history have to share our love and our knowledge with as many people as possible. And we have to make it crystal clear to the current legal owners of these films that they amount to much, much more than mere property to be exploited and then locked away. They are among the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated accordingly.”
All of this is, of course, reframed thanks to the pandemic. For the last year, American moviegoers have been unable to take movies in through theaters, removing the communal experience from moviewatching almost entirely, save for people diving into late-night Netflix watch parties and the like. The future of theaters is even more questionable, and we’ll be that much more dependent on viewing algorithms, which are built for the profit of the service, not the engagement of the viewer.
Image credit: Getty Images/Jon Kopaloff/Stringer
Blizzard is preparing to unveil what’s coming next to Hearthstone at its BlizzConline event. This year promises to be bigger than most, as the company will not only be debuting its new expansion and annual changeover, it will also be making some big changes to how the card pool in Hearthstone works.
We haven’t gotten much information about the next expansion for Hearthstone, but Blizzard has started to issue teasers for whatever it is coming next. A short teaser-trailer titled “Quill You Be Ready” shows a lone adventurer in the middle of a dry landscape, who is then surrounded by the Horde logo.
Those clues have led many in the fan community to conclude that the next expansion will take place in the Barrens, a savannah-like setting in Kalimdor, under the control of the horde. The “Quill” in the title appears to be a clue as well, as the primitive Quillboar race is from the Barrens.
As usual, the spring expansion to Hearthstone will mark the changeover into a new year of content. For example, the current year is called the Year of the Phoenix, the umbrella term given for the three expansions that appeared throughout the 2020-2021 content calendar–Ashes of Outland, Scholomance Academy, and Madness at the Darkmoon Faire.
Each year of Hearthstone content includes three major expansions, alongside any bonus updates like the addition of the new Duels mode with Darkmoon Faire. The annual cutoff also rotates out certain sets into the Wild format, making room for new expansions that will be playable in Standard mode. Blizzard has suggested that its expansion plans from now on will also include mini-expansions mid-season, so we can likely expect three of those as well.
But this year will be even more of a radical change because, as already announced, Blizzard will be retiring the Classic and Basic sets into Wild in favor of a new approach: the Core Set.
As long as Hearthstone has existed, the main building blocks have been the Classic and Basic sets. The Basic set was a free, earned set in Hearthstone that you would unlock by leveling up each class, while the Classic set gave eager card collectors something to hunt when cracking open Classic packs. These are the cards that defined class identity and mechanics, and for the entire history of the game, Blizzard has built expansions around these features.
That will change this year. Instead of static Basic and Classic sets that never change, Blizzard is introducing the new Core set. This will incorporate hand-picked cards from the Basic and Classic sets and bring back some from Wild, and even introduce a bundle of new cards. Unlike the Basic and Classic sets, the Core set will change every year, allowing Blizzard more flexibility in rebuilding the foundation of Hearthstone for new expansions, providing a more dynamic experience. So this first set will be Core 2021, to be followed by Core 2022, and so on.
Also, unlike the Classic set, the Core set will be absolutely free, just like Basic. All of the cards in the Core set will be granted automatically if you’ve leveled up your characters the requisite amount, and each year when the Core set rotates, you’ll automatically be granted all of the new Core cards. That should make it easier for new and lapsed players to jump aboard.
Basic and Classic cards will be merged into a single “Legacy Set.” But we don’t know much about what cards will be included in Core 2021. We know it will consist of several Demon Hunter cards, as that class was added post-release, and the Priest card Shadowform will be returning from the Hall of Fame. Other than that, Blizzard has not revealed what’s included in the set of Core 2021 cards. The company plans to tell us more about the Core set at BlizzConline.
One other big change coming to the game, though, has already been announced. Hearthstone is adding a Classic Mode. This will let you play the game with the original bundle of cards, exactly as they appeared in 2014, before any balance changes. Many of the cards from this era have significantly changed since their debut, so this mode will be a welcome nostalgia trip. It also sports its own ladder and matchmaking pool, so you can compete, unlock achievements, and even reach Legend rank completely in Classic Mode if it strikes your fancy.
The new season will also bring a new Tavern Pass. The battle pass-like system grants experience for unlocking achievements and completing daily, weekly, and occasional event-based quests. Those experience points then go toward unlocking rewards like gold, card packs, alternate hero portraits, and even a special seasonal version of The Coin. And like every battle pass, you can unlock certain rewards only by buying into the pass.
The system was surprisingly controversial when it debuted last year because fans calculated that it was actually granting less gold than the previous quest-based reward system. Blizzard explained that it had planned to offer XP boosts through special events that would make it grant more rewards. But based on feedback from fans, the company concluded that it should rebalance its rewards track to be more generous without the need to take part in special events.
For the next Tavern Pass, we can likely expect Blizzard to maintain something similar to the rewards track changes it already made, with a more generous structure. It’s also probable that the new Tavern Pass will offer a new set of cosmetic rewards or another seasonal Coin. For example, reaching the end of the previous Tavern Rewards track allowed you to select one of 10 exclusive hero portraits. It’s possible Blizzard will just bring back the same selection, letting you pick another from the pool across multiple seasons until you collect all 10.
The release timing for the new Hearthstone expansion is unknown, but we can make an educated guess. Blizzard has tended toward short announcement-to-release cycles recently, usually no more than a month. That would make a release for the next expansion likely to come in March.
For the last six years straight, the first expansion of the year was released in April. However, the Year of the Phoenix winter expansion came in November, rather than December as previous expansions usually had, so it’s possible that Blizzard is intentionally shifting plans to adjust the timing for new expansions to come earlier in the year. A March release would also mean that Darkmoon Races, the mini-set released in January, would have come midway through the expansion season between November and March.
Often when Blizzard unveils a new year, though, it’s much more than just the upcoming expansion. It has often dropped clues for the full year of expansions, and last year, it even included an expansive content roadmap that teased additions like the new Duels mode. So we may get much more detail to come at BlizzConline.
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Bravery Network Online has been released on Steam Early Access. Buy the game by February 23 and you’ll save 10 percent–knocking the price down from $25 USD to $22.49 USD.
This stylish turn-based battle RPG sees you recruit fighters, forming a team to face off against opponents. The game includes traditional battle moves like kicks and punches, but it has its own unique flavor with its more unorthodox moves. For example, you can try to get your foe to forfeit by hurting their feelings or get them flustered by flirting with them.
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For those looking to just battle it out against computer-controlled opponents, Bravery Network Online features several single-player stories that explore the post-post-apocalyptic world. But if you’re brave enough, Bravery Network Online has an online mode too, complete with a rankings system.
Granted, if you try to go online right now, you may encounter a few issues. With the game now out, Bravery Network Online’s server is being hit hard. “We’re aware the server has been having hiccups due to the increased number of players,” the game’s twitter account said. “We apologize and will be working to increase the stability of the game tons over the coming weeks!”
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Gaming on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has gotten a lot better in recent years, thanks to innovations like Apple’s Arcade subscription service and Xbox’s Project xCloud. If you’re a fan of mobile gaming, then you’ll be happy to hear that one of the best mobile controllers is down to its lowest price yet. The Android version of the Razer Kishi is currently $66 at Amazon. Prices on Amazon fluctuate regularly, so it’s unclear how long the Kishi will stick to this price.
The Razer Kishi interfaces with your Android phone via USB-C: all you need to do is slide a compatible USB-C phone into the controller and make sure it’s connected securely. This connection ensures there’s no latency tied to your inputs, giving you the edge needed in games like Call of Duty Mobile and Fortnite as well as the vast number of console games on Project xCloud, which comes with Game Pass Ultimate
While the USB-C port is occupied while using the controller with your phone, the Kishi features a USB-C port of its own that supports passthrough charging of your phone. Most Android phones can fit into the Kishi as well, making it a versatile device that can provide almost any phone with console-style controls for on-the-go gaming.
The Android version of the Razer Kishi is the only model discounted to $66 at the moment, but if you have an iPhone, you can snag that version of the Razer Kishi for under $100 from a number of reputable third-party sellers with Prime shipping.
There are a bunch of different mobile controllers available, and if you’re interested in looking at some of those options, check out our guide to the best mobile gaming controllers available right now.
Bridgerton’s very own Duke of Hastings AKA Simon Basset AKA actor Rege-Jean Page has officially joined the cast of Paramount’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons film, THR reports.
Page is joining Chris Pine (Star Trek, Wonder Woman), Michelle Rodriguez (Fast and the Furious), and Justice Smith (Detective Pikachu) in the film, which is being directed by Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
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Page, who has previously starred in Mortal Engines and ABC’s For the People, rose to greater stardom as a result of his role in Bridgerton, Netflix’s Regency era debutante drama. In IGN’s review, we gave Bridgerton a nine out of 10, calling the chemistry between Page’s mysterious and conflicted Basset and Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne Bridgerton “impeccable.” The series was watched by 82 million viewers in its first month, according to Netflix.
Plot details for Dungeons & Dragons are under tight wraps, so it remains to be seen who Page will be playing, and whether the plot will keep things strictly fantasy or marry that with real-world tabletop play.
Dungeons & Dragons is currently slated for release on May 27, 2022 due to delays resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’ve wrapped up Bridgerton, make sure to check out why we think it’s the next big cinematic universe to take inspiration from.
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Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/Lady Whistledown for IGN.
Xbox has announced plans to expand its gaming accessibility initiatives by building out the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines (XAGs) and launching a “platform-provided” program tapping gamers with disabilities to get their feedback on further improving accessibility.
The XAGs, which were launched in January 2020, have new improvements that make them both easier to understand and implement for game developers. These improvements include adjusting the language to make it clearer to grasp, adding “scoping questions” to help developers identify specific elements, and updating goals to make them easier to understand.
Xbox is also bolstering its partnership with the Gaming & Disability Community to ensure that disabled gamers have their voices heard and limitations respected. The company is including gamers with disabilities in the accessibility testing programs. This collaboration will see games tested against the XAGs by members of the disabled games community to request and suggest more ways video games can be accessible to the 61 million people with disabilities. This initiative is an “industry-first, platform-provided” program, Xbox said in a news release.
This comes two years after the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which has been a success for Microsoft by letting gamers with disabilities create setups geared toward their capabilities.
