Pokemon Go developer Niantic has launched a new game development fund called the Black Developers Initiative through which the company aims to fund and support the development of games made by Black creators.
“Our intention is to empower Black game/AR developers and provide access, resources, and support so they can build amazing game experiences that inspire people to explore the world together,” reads a line from the announcement.
It brings us great pleasure to announce the Niantic Black Developers Initiative, our commitment to providing access, opportunity, resources, and mentorship to Black game and AR developers. pic.twitter.com/Otmzwuksvl
Teams who are chosen for the fund will receive five months of funding, executive mentorship, and development support to create a playable prototype.
The first participant in the program is a studio called W!CKED SAiNTS, which is developing a prototype for a game called World Reborn. The title is described as “Game of Thrones meets Riverdale with a little dash of Black Mirror.” You can learn more about this game and the developers behind it in the video below.
To qualify for Niantic’s Black Developers Initiative, teams must meet at least one of the following criteria:
Black team member(s) have a direct line to the profits of the game.
The company/studio is at least 51 percent Black-owned operated and controlled as based on the NMSDC requirements defined here under “Certification Criteria” used by the Small Business Administration.
Eligibility is established via a combination of screenings, interviews, and site visits (post-covid). Ownership, in the case of a publicly-owned business, means that at least 51 percent of the stock is owned by one or more Black members.
Black people driving game vision via a leadership position. Leadership is defined as:
Fan wikis are a great resource when you need to quickly look up a certain item, quest, or character from whatever game you’re playing, and it turns out the developers making those games also rely on wiki pages for the same reason. Double Fine’s Tim Schafer recently tweeted in appreciation of the creators of fan wikis, with a heap of other developers from big games also confessing to referencing fan wikis.
“I wonder if you know how often game developers pull from your sites to make presentations about their own games,” Schafer tweeted, with the many games under his belt including Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Broken Age, and Day of the Tentacle. “I know I do it A LOT.”
I just want to thank fan sites and fan wikis everywhere. Not just for being fans, but for helping us find information about our own games. I wonder if you know how often game developers pull from your sites to make presentations about their own games. I know I do it A LOT.
And not just presentations. When you’re making a sequel, and you want to make sure something matches the original, it’s faster to get the information from a fan site than from my musty, disorganized, and possibly-on-a-zip-drive archive. 🙂
Many other developers replied and quote tweeted, noting they also commonly referred to fan wikis. The games represented in their fan-wiki confessions and thanks included Don’t Starve, Civilization, Call Of Duty, Borderlands, Dead By Daylight, EVE Online, Dishonored, and many, many more.
One developer from TTGames, a studio that works on various Lego titles under WB Games, noted that with the amount of different IPs included in the Lego brand, wikis like the Star Wars Wookieepedia and Marvel wiki were vital to their work.
The prevalence of this practice has led some to ask whether leaning on fans’ work so extensively is ethical, however, with some suggesting that fan wikis and contributors deserve a credit in the finished game, or that prominent contributors and editors should even see a part of the game’s profits.
Others have suggested that studios should bear the responsibility of managing the often-extensive game wikis, especially if it’s commonly used as an in-house tool. Only a few developers actively manage their own game wikis. Starbound developer Chucklefish is one example, as told by a Fanbyte feature on fan wikis, with the studio hiring Tom Katkus after he created the game’s first wiki.
In the course of testing the notorious GeForce GT 710 ultra-budget graphics card, YouTuber Kryzzp of zWORMz Gaming has shown just how low-spec Horizon Zero Dawn can be pushed on its PC port. A section of the video shows the game running at an eye-straining 128×72–which can be selected from the game’s visual settings without mods or any extra tinkering.
While Kryzzp’s channel often showcases high-end graphics cards pushing games to their limit, a few videos do the exact opposite. The Horizon Zero Dawn video is framed as a test for the GT 710, with the start of the video showing the low-end card outputting just 3fps when the game is played on Ultra settings at 1080p. The test goes through 720p, 360p, 144p, then 72p, with the card only briefly managing 30fps at the ultra-low resolution.
While the YouTuber refers to it as “Game Boy Advance edition,” an article by The Verge points out that even the 20-year-old handheld console had a higher screen resolution of 240×160. The low-quality Horizon Zero Dawn graphics end up with an almost appealing, retro-game quality–though the lack of any readable text would make it difficult to actually play the game.
Kryzzp has tested ultra-low 144p and 72p resolutions in other games as well, including Far Cry 5, Fortnite, GTA 5, and even Witcher 3. Those videos are worth checking out just to see how differently each game renders low-res settings.
If you’ve ever been jealous of a different country’s selection of movies on Netflix, then you’ll want to pay attention to this new deal from NordVPN. Right now, new subscribers can get a two-year plan for 68% off–just $3.71 a month. Additionally, every new subscription gets a random gift that can be an extra month, year, or two years of service–yes, it’s a gamble. Once you’ve subscribed, all you need to do is log in or check your email to see how much extra time you’ve received.
VPNs let you mask your network and connect to the internet privately. NordVPN works by letting its users select servers to connect through before browsing. This means you can choose a server in a different country, connect to it, and browse as if you’re located there. While this also provides security and privacy, it lets you view content that’s restricted to specific regions, such as livestreams, websites, and streaming service libraries. The majority of services feature different movies for each region they’re available in, so it’s worth checking out what the best streaming services have available outside of your country.
NordVPN is a reliable VPN service, though it has been subject to criticism in the past. In 2019, an unauthorized security breach was discovered at its servers’ locations, and while NordVPN didn’t disclose the information publicly in a timely manner, the company reassured users that no information was acquired–this showed that Nord doesn’t keep records of its users’ activity, which is a great thing for VPN protocol and user safety.
Some of NordVPN’s perks include dedicated IP, a kill switch, and a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with the service. In addition to PC, it’s also available for iOS and Android, allowing you to surf the net privately on the go. If you’re looking for more options, check out our guide to the best VPN for 2021.
Well, this is surprising. The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal has nabbed another high-profile role in a completely different universe. As first reported by Deadline, he will play the leading role of Joel in HBO’s adaptation of the video game The Last of Us. The news of Pascal’s casting comes hot on the heels of Game of Thrones alum Bella Ramsey being revealed as taking on the co-leading role of Ellie.
Pascal’s casting was confirmed by Neil Druckmann, who wrote the video game and is also serving as a writer on the series. “Aaaaand there’s the other half,” he wrote of Pascal in a tweet. “Stoked to have Pedro aboard our show!”
What’s interesting about Pascal’s casting is that, per Deadline, The Last of Us has first position. That means HBO essentially has first dibs on scheduling the actor. However, given that his character on The Mandalorian stays masked nearly all of the time he’s on-screen, chances are that won’t be too difficult.
Thus far, a release date for HBO’s take on The Last of Us has not been announced. With the announcement of the two leading cast members, though, clearly production is moving closer and closer to launching. As for how the show will compare to the game, executive producer Craig Mazin has said the plan is to introduce characters and events fans of the game series have yet to experience.
Don’t worry about it skewing too far from the story told in the games, though. “I think fans of something worry that, when the property gets licensed to someone else, those people don’t really understand it, or are going to change it,” Mazin previously said. “In this case, I’m doing [the series] with the guy who [created the game], and so the changes that we’re making are designed to fill things out and expand, not to undo, but rather to enhance [the source material].”
Image credit: Getty Images/Toni Anne Barson/Contributor
After months of controversy, Lucasfilm has confirmed that Mandalorian actress Gina Carano is not currently employed at the company, and that there are no plans for her to return in the future. The statement comes after Carano made an Instagram post comparing the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany to “hating someone for their political views.”
A statement by Lucasfilm was obtained by io9, reading: “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Carano’s post about Nazi Germany caused the hashtag #FireGinaCarano to trend widely on Twitter. She later deleted the post, but screenshots of it continued to be shared online. The actress’ controversies go back months, however, to before the premiere of The Mandalorian’s second season, in which she featured prominently.
Carano has been accused of transphobia after mocking the practice of including pronouns in Twitter bios, and has also shared sentiments mocking mask-wearing and fuelling COVID-denialism. The controversy was further fuelled by tweets falsely suggesting voter fraud in the 2020 presidential elections.
“They have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months, and today was the final straw,” said an insider source quoted by The Hollywood Reporter.
While not confirmed, Carano was expected to play a part in the upcoming Rangers of the New Republic Star Wars TV show, while other rumors suggested a Cara Dune-centric show was in the works before the actress’ controversial November tweets.
The Last of Us series is being developed by Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin and The Last of Us games’ director and Naughty Dog Co-President Neil Druckmann.
Ticuu’s Divination, the seasonal Exotic that joined Destiny 2 with the start of the Season of the Chosen, is a pretty good time. The bow rips through enemies by turning them into bombs, allowing you to detonate them with careful arrow shots that can create massive chain reactions. The bow can be made even better if you complete the objectives on its Exotic catalyst. They require you to kill quite a few enemies with Ticuu’s Divination, but if you’re smart about how you use it, you can speed through the catalyst and increase the bow’s effectiveness significantly.
Here’s what you can expect from the steps for the Ticuu’s Divination Exotic catalyst and some tips on how to complete them super-quickly.
Step 1: Get The Catalyst
To get started, you’ll need Ticuu’s Divination. If you’re paying for the season pass for the Season of the Chosen, it’ll be available in the box on the pass’s first level. If not, you’ll have to wait until Level 50 to earn the bow. Once you have it, though, you can visit Banshee-44 in the Tower to pick up the Catalyst quest, Points Piercing Forever. You’ll only need to pick it up with one character; it’ll track your progress across your entire account.
Step 2: Level Up Your Season Pass
If you paid for the Season of the Chosen’s season pass, you should hold off on working on Points Piercing Forever until you reach Level 22. At that point, you’ll unlock a buff that gives you quadruple progress on the Exotic catalyst for Ticuu’s Divination, which will save you a significant amount of grinding down the road. Especially when you get to the second step of the Exotic quest, you’ll be glad you waited to take the fast track.
Racking up 100 kills with Ticuu’s Divination goes pretty quickly; the other requirements for this quest step don’t require you to actually land kills with the bow.
Step 3: Fire Up The Bow
The first step in the Points Piercing Forever quest requires you to accomplish three objectives:
Collect 100 Orbs of Power
Defeat 50 Guardians
Defeat 100 Combatants
As it happens, though, you don’t need to use Icuu’s Divination to complete all these objectives; you don’t even need to equip the bow for progress to count. That means that you can knock out the objectives very quickly with the right gear.
First, equip a Masterworked primary weapon that you can easily get multi-kills with against low-level enemies. Anytime you rapidly kill two or more enemies with a Masterworked weapon, it’ll produce an Orb of Power, which means you can create a constant stream of Orbs for yourself. Jump into playlist activities like Strikes or Gambit and you’ll have a matchmade fireteam, whose Orbs you can also add to your total.
For the Guardians Defeated requirement, just hop into a Crucible match. The requirement is very liberal about what counts as a kill and seems to give credit for opponents killed by teammates. This week’s Mayhem playlist is great for racking up lots of kills very fast–we cleared this objective in a mere two Mayhem matches (while also working on a seasonal challenge at the same time).
The last requirement, which requires you to kill combatants with the bow, is easy to accomplish during Battlegrounds activities. Just use Ticuu’s Divination as normal (here’s a quick guide explaining how to get the most out of Ticuu’s Divination if it’s unclear) and you’ll quickly get all the kills you need for this step.
The second step in Points Piercing Forever is the tough one, requiring you to play through lots of activities and to take down a whole lot of Guardians.
Step 4: The Real Grind
The next phase of the Exotic catalyst quest amps up the difficulty a bit. For this phase, you’ll actually have to rack up kills with Ticuu’s Divination–you can’t just add kills to the total that you earn from other means, like you could in the Crucible on the last step.
You’ll need to take Ticuu’s Divination into playlist activities: either Gambit, Strikes, the Crucible, or Nightfall: The Ordeal. There, your job is pretty much to just use it. Here’s the full list of objectives:
Calibrate 200 Points of Data (generated by completing playlist activities)
Kill 50 Guardians with Ticuu’s Divination
Defeat 100 Combatants with Ticuu’s Divination
This is a tough one, much like the Messy Business quest to earn Salvager’s Salvo. The first requirement, “Calibrate Data,” requires points earned from completing playlist activities. You’ll earn more points for wins over losses, and more points for playing tougher Nightfall: The Ordeal activities. In our experience, we earned 4 points for a winning Gambit match and 2 points for losing Gambit and Crucible matches, as well as 2 points for a Nightfall at Hero difficulty.
The Crucible requirement is also a tough one, as you’ll need to rack up 50 kills with the bow and there’s no real way to circumvent it. The good news is that blowing people up with Sacred Flame explosions can give you chances to kill several Guardians with a single attack. The bad news is that you have to get final blows with the bow, which can be tough. In general, you’re going to just need to play a fair amount of Crucible to finish this requirement. You’ll have your best luck in matches with lots of opponents; try to use Sacred Flame explosions to take out multiple Guardians your teammates have already damaged for best results.
The final requirement is the easiest, as you can take down 100 PvE enemies with Ticuu’s Divination relatively quickly. Gambit will work (you’ll get a chance to take out Guardians with your bow during Gambit matches alongside AI combatants), but you’ll probably get this done even quicker in Strikes. We completed the entire requirement in a run through the Sepiks Prime Nightfall: The Ordeal Strike on Hero difficulty.
All these numbers are significantly easier to reach if you’re a season pass holder and earn your way up to Level 22. The buff unlocked there quadruples your progress, which should cut the number of activities you need to complete to unlock the catalyst to about 25. It’ll also cut your Guardian kill count significantly, which is likely to be the sticking point for a lot of players.
When you’re finally finished with all that grinding, return to Banshee-44 in the Tower to complete the Exotic quest and get the catalyst.
Ticuu’s Divination takes a moment to get used to, but used correctly, it’s devastating against groups of enemies.
What Does The Ticuu’s Divination Catalyst Do?
The Exotic catalyst for Ticuu’s Divination is designed to increase its usefulness when blowing up enemies. It gets the Causality Quiver perk, which makes the Causality Arrows perk even better.
Normally with Ticuu’s Divination, hitting an enemy when shooting from the hip marks them with Sacred Flame; hit that same enemy when aiming down the sights triggers Causality Arrow, which makes the Sacred Flame enemy explode. If you land a precision shot while aiming down the sight and hold the arrow long enough to get a perfect charge before firing, your Sacred Flame explosions are larger and do more damage. The Exotic catalyst adds more benefits to this flow.
With Causality Quiver, landing a perfect charge, precision Causality Arrow shot that triggers a Sacred Flame explosion also increases the damage of all your Ticuu’s Divination shots for a time. If you hit an enemy with a Causality Arrow that isn’t marked with Sacred Flame, any enemies that are marked get their duration reset. That essentially means that you can blow up enemies with Causality Arrows for a boost in bow damage, or shoot a non-Sacred Flame enemy with a Causality Arrow to extend the timer on any other enemies you still need to blow up. And as with other catalysts, Ticuu’s Divination will also generate Orbs of Power any time you rack up rapid kills, which should happen just about all the time when you’re triggering explosions.
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Game of Thrones star Bella Ramsey has been cast as Ellie in HBO’s upcoming Last of Us TV show. Ramsey, who is 17 years old, played Lyanna Mormont on Game of Thrones, so she is reuniting with HBO once more for the video game adaptation. [Update: In another major piece of news for the show, Pedro Pascal has been cast as Joel.]
Neil Druckmann, the writer of the game and the TV show, confirmed the casting in a tweet following the story that broke with The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re absolutely thrilled to have Bella join the Last of Us family!” he wrote.
There was speculation online that Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali was offered the other lead role, Joel, but THR’s report said this is not true. The site said Ali did “circle” the project, but he never made a deal.
The Last of Us TV show was co-written by Druckmann and Craig Mazin, who previously worked with HBO on Chernobyl. Kantemir Balagov (Beanpole) is directing the pilot, while HBO has ordered the show to series.
The series is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television. PlayStation Productions, Word Games, and Naughty Dog will co-produce.
“Craig and Neil are visionaries in a league of their own,” said Francesca Orsi, executive vice president of HBO Programming. “With them at the helm alongside the incomparable Carolyn Strauss, this series is sure to resonate with both die-hard fans of The Last Of Us games and newcomers to this genre-defining saga. “
Not much about the show is known, still. The series is expected to follow the events of the first game, with the possibility of also overlapping on content present in the game’s recent sequel. The adaptation is said to not invalidate or retcon the events in either games, but instead to “expand” on them.
The Super Mario Bros. 35 event, the 4th Coin King Special Battle, begins February 11 at 11 PM PT (2 AM ET on February 12) and runs until the same time on February 14. This event takes players through all 32 of the game’s courses in the same sequence as they appear in the original Super Mario Bros., with the main objective being to collect the most coins. After the event ends, Nintendo says it will share the top 10 players in North America.
It’s time for the 4th Coin King Special Battle in #SuperMarioBros35, with World 1-1 to 8-4 appearing in order alongside the original Warp Pipe destination in the first Super Mario Bros.! Results for the top 10 North America players will be posted as well, so train hard! pic.twitter.com/bzQERyIDr9
Super Mario Bros. 35 is a battle royale-style take on the classic Super Mario Bros., released as part of Nintendo’s Super Mario 35th anniversary celebration. The game is free to download and play for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, but it’s a limited-time release; Nintendo says the game will only be available until March 31, the same date Super Mario 3D All-Stars will be pulled from sale.
Beyond the Super Mario Bros. 35 event, a new Ninji Speedrun course is available for Super Mario Maker 2. This course is called Dry Bones Shellscape, and it has players utilizing Dry Bones shells to defeat enemies and overcome other obstacles. As with other Ninji Speedrun courses, the goal is to find the quickest route through the level and see how your time stacks up against other players.
A new #SuperMarioMaker2 Ninji Speedrun course, Dry Bones Shellscape, is out now! Ride in a Dry Bones Shell to stomp on normally unstompable enemies and avoid other enemies by crouching and transforming into a pile of bones. Find some creative ways to make it to the finish! pic.twitter.com/nJZEeWRVmo
Mario’s latest adventure, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, launches on February 12. This version packs in the original Wii U game alongside a brand-new mini-adventure that has Mario and Bowser Jr. teaming up to explore an open-world level and battle a gigantic, enraged Bowser.
We gave the title a 9/10 in our Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury review and wrote, “Put together, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury is a spectacular package. Super Mario 3D World is an absolute joy of classic platforming excellence, and this is the best version of it thanks to some well-calibrated improvements. Bowser’s Fury is peculiar and less polished, but it dares to poke fun at its own oddities and it has a wild creative streak.”
