Category: Games

Bethesda has revealed The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood, a new story chapter that serves as a prequel to the events of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It will launch on separate dates in June for PC and consoles.

Revealed in a livestream on the Bethesda Twitch channel, the chapter will launch on PC on June 1 and June 8 on consoles. Blackwood will task players with “uncovering the schemes of the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon,” who served as the primary antagonist of Oblivion. 30 hours of story content is set to be added to the game, set over 800 years before the events of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

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This update will also introduce Oblivion Portal World Events, quality-of-life features and a Companions system similar to the single-player Elder Scrolls games, where players will be able to recruit, develop and customize NPCs to fight alongside them.

It’s all part of a year-long ‘Gates of Oblivion’ content roadmap for Elder Scrolls Online. The expansion will send players to famous locations related to the fourth Elder Scrolls game, including Leyawiin and Blackwood itself, which is “caught between the Argonian homeland and Imperial province of Cyrodiil.”

The Blackwood narrative will kick off with the Flames of Ambition DLC, which adds new dungeons that “reveal the threat of Mehrunes Dagon”. Flames of Ambition is set to launch on March 8 for PC, Mac and Stadia and March 16 for Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

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Bethesda’s stream also teased an “end-of-year story DLC” which will take players to the Deadlands, Mehrunes Dagon’s personal realm. In other Bethesda news, a Naughty Dog veteran recently joined Elder Scrolls Online developer Zenimax Online to work on a “new, unannounced AAA IP.”

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

A Tomb Raider anime series is in development at Netflix, and will be set after the events of Crystal Dynamics’ most recent trilogy of games.

The streaming service announced the news in a press release on Wednesday. Tasha Huo, who is working with Netflix on The Witcher: Blood Origin, will write and executive produce.

Legendary Entertainment is working with Netflix on Tomb Raider after previously working with the streamer on the Lost in Space remake. It was also announced on Wednesday that Legendary is working on a Skull Island anime series at Netflix.

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dj2 Entertainment is also working on the Tomb Raider anime. It’s the latest in a long line of video game adaptations for the company following the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. They have a movie based on Sleeping Dogs in development along with TV shows based on My Friend Pedro, Disco Elysium, Life is Strange, and more.

There’s no word yet if Camilla Luddington, who played Lara Croft in the reboot trilogy, is part of this project. The actress is currently starring on Grey’s Anatomy and recently played Zatanna in the animated Justice League: Dark movie from 2017 and its 2020 sequel, Apokolips War.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider was the last game released in the series. It came out in 2018 and earned mostly positive reviews from critics. IGN’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider review praised the game and said, it “convincingly leaves her in a place resembling where she was when we were first introduced to her more than 20 years ago.”

The Tomb Raider movie franchise is also still in full swing. The sequel will be written and directed by the creator of Lovecraft Country with Alicia Vikander once again playing Lara Croft.

Anybody looking for some current anime recommendations on Netflix can check out IGN’s updated list of the best anime on Netflix.

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Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has packed on the praise for Eternals filmmaker Chloé Zhao and, more specifically, the pitch that she delivered for her upcoming MCU Phase 4 movie.

Rolling Stone magazine recently published a profile piece on Zhao, featuring insight from Feige and others in the industry about the process of bringing her visions to life on the big screen. Feige commended the Eternals helmer for catching his attention with her ideas for the upcoming MCU entry, as he apparently referred to “Zhao’s pitch for the movie the best he’d ever heard.”

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“Not only does Chloe make remarkable, small, personal movies in a remarkable, small, personal way, but she thinks in grand, cosmic, gigantic terms, which fit perfectly with what we wanted to do,” Feige explained, speaking about Zhao’s journey to the MCU. “Eternals is a very big, sweeping, multimillennial-spanning story. And she just got it.”

During last year’s D23 Marvel panel, Disney officially revealed the celestial costumes for Thena, Ikaris, Ajak, Phastos, Kingo, and the rest of the Eternals. Despite being a clan of god-like beings, Rolling Stone says Zhao wanted to keep the story grounded and experimental, “like you’re right there in this space with these characters,” so she shot the movie with the same rig she used for her indie film Nomadland.

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Marvel’s Eternals, the third film in the MCU’s Phase 4, features a stellar cast consisting of Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Kit Harington. Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ridloff, Brian Tyree Henry, and Salma Hayek. Reportedly the most “sci-fi” movie of the MCU, Eternals follows the exploits of an immortal alien race created by the Celestials as they reunite to protect humanity from their evil counterparts, the Deviants.

Sadly, Eternals was part of the huge slate of Disney movies that were delayed towards the end of last year, with the movie now scheduled to arrive on November 5, 2021. For more on Marvel Studios’ future slate of projects and releases, read our breakdown of the biggest and most noteworthy developments in the MCU, on Disney+, and in Marvel’s comics this year.

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

Sony has revealed that Destruction AllStars, Control: Ultimate Edition (PS4 and PS5!), and Concrete Genie are the PlayStation Plus games for February 2021.

Announced on PlayStation.Blog, all three games will be available on February 2, 2021. While Control: Ultimate Edition and Concrete Genie will only be available until March 1, Destruction AllStars will stay until April 5.

Alongside this news, PlayStation also shared its newest State of Play, and it is focused entirely on Destruction AllStars. It lasts nearly eight minutes, and gives an in-depth look at the “car-smashing, heart-pounding, thrill-seeking world of Destruction AllStars.”

Destruction AllStars screams onto PlayStation Plus next week.
State of Play arms you with everything you need to know before leaping into the arena. pic.twitter.com/YVqwsElZBD

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) January 27, 2021

Control: Ultimate Edition is a welcome one, as there was a bit of controversy over the fact that this version was the only one that would get the next-gen upgrades. Those who purchased the base game would have to buy Control again to get these improvements.

Control was our game of the year in 2019, and in our review, we said “thanks to a strong supporting cast, a well-written script, and plenty of intriguing breadcrumb trails, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my adventure through the shifting rooms of Oldest House. Jesse’s personal story feels like an afterthought next to that, but there’s enough to Control’s world that I remain invested in uncovering every secret, even though the story’s over.”

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Concrete Genie was released on PS4 in 2019, and in our review, we said “Short and very sweet, Concrete Genie is a spellbinding experiment in player creativity.”

Concrete Genie also includes two additional modes that were designed for PS VR.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Fall Guys developer Mediatonic wants to bring the whimsical battle royale game to more platforms and add cross-play support for “all the different platforms.”

CEO and co-founder Dave Bailey told GI.biz that while Mediatonic is keeping its expansion plans under wraps for now, the aim is to bring Fall Guys to more platforms … eventually.

“We haven’t said much about the roadmap for this, but what we can say is we want this to reach as many people as possible,” he said. “We want it to come to every major platform, and we’re working hard to achieve that.”

Recent speculation suggested that Fall Guys was headed to Xbox Game Pass, but publisher Devolver and Microsoft itself shot down these rumors immediately. Still, fans are hoping to see the game on Xbox, along with Switch, sometime down the road, and Bailey’s comments do track with the idea that Fall Guys will be on other platforms at some point in the future.

Fall Guys is coming to another platform, mobile devices–but only in China.

Bailey also said he hopes to bring cross-play to Fall Guys on all platforms over time. “We want to come to all the different platforms, and hopefully connect those platforms so people can play together. If we do that right, that can be a superpower for other ambitions around original games and that publishing business, too. It’s really propelled everything forward by quite a bit,” he said.

And speaking about Fall Guys in general, Bailey said the team has only “just scratched the surface” of what’s possible for the battle royale title. The original pitch for the game was to create the “greatest game show on Earth,” and Mediatonic plans to deliver on that ambition.

“When you think about it in that way, there’s a million different ways we can take this and I hope people will see that come through in future,” Bailey said.

Next up for Fall Guys is the Season 3.5 update, which introduces a new level, along with Sonic and Godzilla costumes.

Sony has unveiled February’s lineup of PlayStation Plus freebies for PS5 and PS4 users. We’ve known about one of the upcoming free games since the PS5’s launch. Destruction AllStars, which was originally slated to release alongside the console, will be available to PS Plus subscribers in February. The vehicular combat game is a PS5 exclusive and joins Concrete Genie and Control: Ultimate edition, which is getting a free PS5 upgrade on February 2. All three games will be available to claim starting February 2.

Destruction AllStars is an online multiplayer title developed by Lucid Games. Players take control of one of 16 playable characters, each of whom has their own vehicle with unique weapons and moves. As the title suggests, the goal is to zip around the arena and destroy your opponents’ vehicles. If your vehicle gets destroyed, you can compete on foot, which understandably will make it tougher to emerge victorious. Destruction AllStars will be free for subscribers until April 5.

Control: Ultimate edition‘s PS5 version releases on February 2, the same day it becomes free for PS Plus subscribers. It will be available for both PS4 and PS5 users. The Ultimate edition comes with both DLC packs, and PS5 owners will get a free upgrade that lets you play in two different modes: Performance and Graphics. Performance will run the game in 60 frames-per-second, and Graphics mode features ray tracing. The stellar action-adventure from Remedy Entertainment earned an 8/10 in our Control review.

Concrete Genie is an action-adventure game starring Ash, a young boy who happens upon a paintbrush that turns his doodles into reality. It earned a 7/10 in GameSpot’s Concrete Genie review for its colorful art style and charming story.

February 2021 PS Plus Free Games

Available February 2 to March 1

• Control: Ultimate edition
• Concrete Genie

Available February 2 to April 5

• Destruction AllStars

Warner Bros. has released a sizzle reel of its upcoming movie releases, which includes new snippets of Mortal Kombat and The Suicide Squad, among others.

The reel, showing off the movies that will arrive in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day, includes several shots of Mortal Kombat, including new looks at an unmasked Scorpion sword fighting with masked attackers, and Sonya Blade pointing to the words “Motal Kombat” on a picture and saying, “It’s an invitation to Mortal Kombat” (just in case you didn’t understand what the movie was called, I guess).

This year every @WBPictures movie will be in theaters and streaming exclusively on HBO Max.

The biggest premieres every single month. pic.twitter.com/5ipY3x4mBi

— HBO Max (@hbomax) January 27, 2021

As for The Suicide Squad, we see a familiar rainy long shot of the titular squad, set to the words, “So this is the famous Suicide Squad” (also just in case you didn’t guess), as well as Idris Elba’s Bloodsport saying, “no one likes a show-off”, to which John Cena’s Peacemaker replies, “Unless what they’re showing off is dope as f-“, before being cut off. We also see a split-second of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn escaping a collapsing building.

The reel comprises a huge list of movies coming from Warner Bros. and HBO Max: The Little Things, Judas and the Black Messiah, Tom & Jerry the Movie, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, Those Who Wish Me Dead, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, In the Heights, The Suicide Squad, Reminiscence, Cry Macho, King Richard, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Malignant, The Many Saints of Newark, Dune, and the untitled Matrix 4 (no footage of that one, I’m afraid).

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Mortal Kombat will arrive on April 16, and we recently got new images and details, including a mention of the fatalities. The reboot includes Mehcad Brooks as Jackson “Jax” Briggs, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero, Tadanobu Asano as Raiden, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Sisi Stringer as Mileena, Josh Lawson as Kano, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Max Huang as Lung Lao Max, and Lewis Tan as an all-new character.

The Suicide Squad, from director James Gunn, is described as a gritty war movie, and has a truly bonkers cast, from Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, to John Cena as Peacemaker, to Idris Elba as Bloodsport, to Sylvester Stallone and Taika Waititi. It will arrive on August 6.

Warner Bros.’ decision to release its movies in theaters and streaming has been highly controversial, with director Christopher Nolan saying “they don’t understand what they’re losing”.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Today marks the 10th anniversary of The Last Story‘s original release in Japan, and game director Hironobu Sakaguchi is commemorating the occasion by sharing a ton of concept art of the acclaimed Wii RPG on Twitter.

The concept art was drawn by artist Kimihiko Fujisaka and ranges from various character sketches to battle system mock ups. You can see a selection of the concept art below, while more can be found on Sakaguchi’s Twitter page:

The Last Story was developed by Mistwalker, the studio Sakaguchi founded after leaving Square Enix back in 2004. Sakaguchi himself is most famous for creating the Final Fantasy series, and his studio similarly specialized in RPGs, releasing notable titles like Blue Dragon and, more recently, the mobile game Terra Battle (which recently ended services after six years on the market).

The Last Story released exclusively for Wii in Japan in 2011, and in the US and Europe the following year. It was one of the titles championed by Operation Rainfall, a fan movement at the time geared at convincing Nintendo to localize three late-gen Wii RPGs (the other two being Xenoblade Chronicles and Pandora’s Tower). The game was greeted with critical acclaim from various outlets, including GameSpot. We scored it a 9/10 in our original Last Story review and wrote:

“The Last Story is a fantastic game; one that pushes the JRPG genre forward in ways that are innovative yet still complementary to the tradition of the genre. Its rich narrative straddles the line between emotionally affecting and breathtakingly action packed; its thrilling battle system is a unique, modern take on everything that has come before. And its visuals are some of the best ever seen on the Wii, pushing the system to its limits with its beautifully detailed environments and dazzling special effects (even if there’s a little frame rate stutter during more complex scenes).”

Mistwalker’s next project is Fantasian, a mobile RPG releasing for iOS as part of the Apple Arcade subscription service. Little has been revealed about the game so far, but its world is constructed out of real-life dioramas, which are being photographed and imported into the game. Fantasian does not yet have a release date.