Assassin’s Creed Valhalla director Eric Baptizat has left Ubisoft after 16 years to join EA Motive as game director on an unannounced project.
According to Axios, Baptizat joined Motive back in April, but whatever project he’s working at EA has not been announced yet. It has been rumored recently that EA Motive is working on a reboot of a “fan-favorite” franchise with eyes on a July reveal.
Baptizat is credited as game director on Valhalla but has also been in senior development positions for games well-received games like Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, and Assassin’s Creed Origins.
EA Motive was founded in 2015 by industry veteran Jade Raymond, another ex-Ubisoft senior developer. However, Motive has undergone some changes since then. Raymond left in 2018, EA merged BioWare Montreal into the Motive umbrella and Motive opened a second Vancouver location.
After helping out on Star Wars Battlefront 2, EA Motive shipped the space fighter sim Star Wars: Squadrons. Speaking with IGN, Motive’s new GM Patrick Klaus says Motive was working on “several” new unannounced projects that are a mix of both original games and some based on established franchises.
Amazon is continuing to build out its team for Season 3 of The Boys. Laurie Holden has been cast in a recurring role for the upcoming season, as reported by Variety.
Holden joins a trio of new actors announced earlier this week as recurring cast members on The Boys Season 3. Sean Patrick Flanery will play Gunpowder, Miles Gaston Villanueva will play Supersonic, and Nick Wechsler will play Blue Hawk.
The Boys Season 3 has already started filiming, though Amazon has not yet announced an official premiere date for new episodes.
In our review of the finale of The Boys Season 2, IGN gave the episode a 9, saying the season “concludes in the same delightfully irreverent and gratuitous fashion we’ve come to expect from the series.”
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J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.
Samuel L. Jackson is finally getting his due from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The organization announced that Jackson, Elaine May, and Liv Ullmann will receive honorary Oscars at next year’s Governors Awards ceremony. The Academy also announced that Danny Glover will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
After working in film and theater during the 1970s and ’80s, Jackson broke out in the ’90s with major roles in films like Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever and Jurassic Park. After receiving a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Jackson has appeared in over 100 films, joining projects across a wide range of scale and genre. He is considered to have the highest-grossing filmography of any actor, with a body of work that has earned over $5.6 billion at the box office in the United States and Canada.
Elaine May is a celebrated writer, director, and actress. She has been nominated for two competitive Oscars, for Best Adapted Screenplay for 1978’s Heaven Can Wait and 1998’s Primary Colors. Almost a decade after rising to fame as a comedic duo with the late Mike Nichols, May became only the fourth woman to join the Directors Guild of America when she signed with Paramount to direct her 1971 debut A New Leaf.
Ullman is most well-known for her collaborations with the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, starring in films like Persona, Cries and Whispers, and The Passion of Anna. She received Oscar nominations for Best Actress for her performances in 1971’s The Emigrants and 1976’s Face to Face.
While Glover has never been nominated for a competitive Oscar, the actor has accrued a diverse body of work that spans from big blockbusters like the Lethal Weapon series and Predator 2 to small independent films like To Sleep with Anger and Sorry to Bother You. The Academy is recognizing Glover for his lifelong commitment to advocating for economic justice, heath care, and education access in the United States and Africa.
Glover will be the 41st recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. It was most recently presented to Tyler Perry at this year’s Oscar ceremony. David Lynch, Wes Studi, and Lina Wertmüller received honorary Oscars at the most recent Governors Awards, which was held in 2019.
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J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.
The nine-page report from ODNI analyzed 144 reports of UAP between the years 2004 and 2021, but anyone hoping to see the government confirm extraterrestrial threats will be disappointed as ODNI has deemed any explanation for mysterious aircraft as “largely inconclusive.”
However, the report does say that “a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics,” though whether this is a result of human or systems error, spoofing, or other explanations requires further analysis.
“Limited data and inconsistency in reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP,” the report says. “No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019. The Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020, but it remained limited to USG reporting.”
The analysis largely narrowed in on UAP incidents that were witnessed firsthand by military aviators and from systems, the analysts deemed “reliable.” Despite the 2004-2021 research window, most of the reports come from the last two years “as the new reporting mechanism became better known to the military aviation community.”
There’s No One Answer for UAP
According to the report, there are multiple types of UAP observed over the years and the government has created five categories to describe them. They are airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S, industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a “catchall ‘other’ bin.’
Of the 144 reports from United States Government sources, analysts couldn’t come away with easy conclusions. Though an example of just how broad the UAP category is, the report states that one reported UAP the government identified ended up being nothing more than a large balloon.
“We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon.”
According to the report 18 incidents in 21 reports were observed to have unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics.
“Some UAP appeared to remains stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.” In a small number of incidents, some systems processed radio-frequency energy with these UAP sightings.
Aliens? Still Inconclusive
ODNI says additional resources are required to dive deeper into the UAP phenomena. At the very least UAP are a clear flight safety issue and in some cases “pose a challenge to U.S. national security.
However, explaining UAP will require deeper analysis, data collection, and resource investment. The long-term goal for the UAP Task Force (UAPTF) is to widen the scope of its research and broaden its dataset to hopefully draw more concrete conclusions. The UAPTF has requested additional funding for research and development to help expand its data collection both past and present.
In recent years the U.S. government has been more forthcoming in acknowledging brushes with mysterious flying objects. In 2020 legislation was passed that asked the UAPTF to collect all available information regarding mysterious flying objects and present a “detailed analysis” of their findings.
While ultimately the goal was to uncover whether foreign forces may have access to unknown aerial advancements, rather than finding aliens, the report presented today shows a wide range of possibilities. Potentially foreign aircraft, or just a large, deflating balloon.
For years, fans of Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s comic Fell have waited for the creators to resume work on the acclaimed, unfinished crime series. But with Ellis now facing numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, news of Fell’s return has met with considerable backlash online. Now publisher Image Comics has confirmed it won’t be publishing new issues of Fell.
Image issued the following statement to IGN:
“This week’s FELL announcement was neither planned, nor vetted, and was in fact, premature. While finishing Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s FELL is something we’ve been looking forward to for years, Image Comics will not be working with Warren on anything further until he has made amends to the satisfaction of all involved. It is our sincere hope that the conversations that are beginning now will result in positive changes for everyone. Please visit SoManyOfUs.com.”
Ellis, the creator/writer of Netflix’s Castlevania series and comics like Planetary, Transmetropolitan, and Red, was accused by multiple women of predatory behavior and sexual misconduct in June 2020. The website SoManyOfUs.com contains several dozen testimonials, with many detailing incidents of Ellis sending sexually explicit messages or using his position to pressure them into sexual relationships.
Ellis has largely disappeared from the public eye since these allegations surfaced, deleting his Twitter account and ending his long-running email newsletter Orbital Operations.
In a now-deleted statement, Ellis wrote, “I have never considered myself famous or powerful, to the point where I’ve made a lot of bad jokes about it for twenty-odd years. It had never really occurred to me that other people didn’t see it the same way — that I was not engaging as an equal when gifted with attention, but acting from a position of power and privilege. I did not take that into account in a number of my personal interactions and this was a mistake and I own it.”
A year ago when the revelations about Warren Ellis came out, we removed him from the Death Metal books in the hopes that accountability would be taken, amends made, and comics would move forward and be better through difficult but crucial good work.
In a statement released on June 23, So Many of Us wrote,
“When we published SoManyOfUs.com on July 13, 2020, we expressly did not want to ‘cancel’ author Warren Ellis. Rather, we shared constructive ways to address the all-too-common issue of powerful men’s abusive behavior. We challenged people to rethink past actions and to consider how—and why—they may have facilitated harmful behaviors and environments. We called for openness, accountability, and growth, extending an offer of working with Ellis on some form of transformative justice. Since his public statement a year ago, to the knowledge of these authors, Ellis has still not taken direct responsibility for his destructive behavior nor attempted to tackle the circumstances that allow such behavior to go on unchecked both on and offline.”
The website updated its statement on June 24, revealing that Ellis has now reached out to the group in the hope of creating “a mediated dialogue.” Ellis has also published his first new newsletter in nearly a year, writing, “I have, of course, been silent and isolated for too long, and should have addressed things sooner and proceeded with more speed. I apologize.”
Ellis’ latest statement seems to preclude the possibility of any new published work for the foreseeable future. Fell may one day return to the stands, but both its publisher and creators have acknowledged now is not the time.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
Lucasfilm is beginning to pull together its team for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. Matthew Robinson has been tapped to write the screenplay for director Patty Jenkins’ upcoming Star Wars film, per The Hollywood Reporter.
While the title of Rogue Squadron has been used for both Star Wars video games and tie-in novels, the upcoming movie will not adapt any of these previous stories and will instead feature an original narrative. The film is currently slated to release during the holiday season in 2023. After helming Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984, Patty Jenkins will become the first woman to direct a Star Wars film.
After the release of The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars has migrated to streaming, becoming one of the main draws for Disney Plus with programs like The Mandalorian and the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron will be the first theatrically released Star Wars feature since the Skywalker saga’s conclusion.
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J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.
Scarlet Nexus takes us to a world where humans have developed psionic powers and the ability to connect their minds to each other. This has dramatically transformed life as we know it, allowing for a new era of connected consciousness and advanced technology. However, things aren’t all sunshine and roses for humanity–the populace lives in fear of the Others, grotesque brain-consuming monsters that randomly emerge from a mysterious belt that surrounds the planet. Their destructive impulses have rendered many areas uninhabitable, forcing humans to congregate in cities under the protection of the Other Suppression Force–an army of elite psionics trained to handle Other attacks. Yuito and Kasane are two fresh-faced recruits to the OSF, and they find their skills quickly put to the test during attacks. When a mission goes awry, they will be forced to take sides and fight to expose disturbing truths lying under the surface.
The setting of Scarlet Nexus is an intriguing mix of cyberpunk imagery, dystopian society, and pure sci-fi that captures your attention immediately. You get the feeling from the get-go that something is off about everything that’s going on, which only increases when you first lay eyes on the Others–horrendous aberrations that mix familiar organic and inorganic objects into monsters that move like living creatures, but feel disconcertingly unnatural. Additionally, the cutscenes are primarily presented in the form of comic-style still panels, giving the game the distinct feel of a high-stakes, episodic manga. It’s slick and distinct, which gives Scarlet Nexus a lot of personality.
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You begin the game by choosing either Yuito or Kasane as your primary playable character. Yuito is a fairly standard action-game swordsman, while Kasane is more of a technical fighter with her ranged daggers. Both characters have combo attacks, jumping strikes, dodges–the usual array of 3D combat maneuvers. However, they also have the ability to use psychokinetic powers, introducing an additional unique element to combat. By holding R2, they can grab a background object and slam it directly into a foe, potentially catching the enemy off-guard and opening them up for further combo attacks.
Combat doesn’t feel exceptionally good initially–it’s a little floaty and disjointed, especially when playing as Kasane. Chaining attacks together, in particular, can be hard on more resilient foes in the early stages. But it quickly improves with the addition of the SAS: a system where your playable character can connect their brain to other squad members and temporarily make use of their powers. Hook up with Hanabi, and she’ll give you pyrokinetic fire slashes that can set enemies ablaze. Borrow Kagero’s invisibility to hide from aggressive foes and you can perform sneak attacks. Utilize Tsugumi’s clairvoyance and you’ll be able to spot hidden enemies and weak points, and tap into Gemma’s sclerokinesis to quickly mitigate enemy attacks. Using these skills transforms combat from a fairly standard affair to something much more interesting, as certain abilities will be particularly advantageous in given situations–but you also have to learn to manage these skills, as they are all on cooldown timers.
Even more combat augmentations open up the further you go into the game. As you level up, you can fill out nodes in your Brain Map, which unlock special skills that grant new offensive and defensive capabilities to utilize in battle. You’ll also learn the Brain Drive, a super-powered mode that activates after filling a gauge that increases your damage output and combo ability. Finally, there’s the Brain Field: an absurdly powerful but extremely risky state that puts your psychokinesis into overdrive and lets you deal massive damage, but can kill you if you stay in it for too long.
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More mechanics get added into the mix, as well. Guard meters are introduced. Using the right skills and attacks you can break them down to render enemies helpless and perform a devastating Brain Crush attack for bonus loot. Unique objects also appear in environments that allow you to perform elaborate and immensely satisfying QTE-powered psychokinesis attacks, like pounding an Other into the ground with a marble statue or running over a line of enemies with a runaway train. And by establishing a good rapport with your teammates, you unlock the full potential of their abilities as well as new options like follow-up attacks on downed foes.
Outside of the story missions needed to progress, you can revisit already-explored areas for experience and sidequests. These sidequests are the standard-issue “kill enemy X” or “collect item Z” missions, sometimes with additional requirements like defeating foes with a certain SAS power. They don’t add much to the game in terms of story or worldbuilding, making their role that of an excuse to revisit areas to farm experience and items. Collecting enemy drops and environmental data is important, however, as you can trade those items at the store for exclusive weapons, upgrade plug-ins, and most importantly, items to give to your teammates during story breaks.
Giving your crew things they like raises their affection for you, unlocking “Bond Episodes” where you can hang out and learn more about their individual quirks and backstories. As their bond levels raise, you’ll have access to improved SAS functionality and additional attack and defensive options. They’ll also use their presents to decorate your team base, which is a nice visual touch. Bond Episodes range in tone from the completely ridiculous to dead serious character drama, but no matter what you wind up seeing, you’ll come out of it appreciating your in-game teammates even more.
It’s a good thing that the combat and character interactions of Scarlet Nexus are fun, because its story is a trainwreck. What starts as an intriguing sci-fi tale of superpowered youths being used to fight hideous creatures by a shadowy government gets completely derailed after a few chapters, becoming a hodgepodge of increasingly bizarre plot twists and inexplicable character actions. While you get different perspectives (and different progression) depending on your choice of Yuito or Kasane as your lead, you’ll still experience the same major “WTF was that nonsense?” events.
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While I won’t get into spoiler territory, a good example of how frustrating the plot can get is realizing that most of the mid-game conflict could be easily resolved if everyone would just sit down and talk about what’s going on (which Yuito repeatedly asks to do) instead of trying to kill each other. What’s even more befuddling is that some of the enemy characters still ask to hang out with your lead while this stuff is going on, making for a bizarre disconnect between narrative and characterization. Even once all that is resolved, there are numerous plot threads that become incredibly flimsy when you give them deeper thought. But as ridiculous as the story wound up being, I was interested in seeing how much more utterly bonkers it could get throughout, so I guess that’s something in its favor
Even though the plot devolves into a trope-filled sludge pool by the end, I don’t feel like Scarlet Nexus was a waste of time. Yes, the excitement of combat begins to taper off towards the end of Scarlet Nexus’s twenty-odd-hour runtime–and the areas in the final stretch of the game feel overly long–but I had a good deal of fun mixing up my SAS abilities, crushing enemies in my Brain Field, and watching my team have a video game tournament at our base to settle an argument over living space boundaries. It might not be a new pinnacle of action-game storytelling, but Scarlet Nexus is still plenty of fun in the right places.
While there are two more sequels planned, Fast 9 almost works as a finale to the two-decade-old Fast & Furious saga, ending on a sweet note about family (because it’s all about family) that also keeps the spirit of the late Paul Walker and his character Brian O’Conner alive. There’s also a mid-credits scene that nods to the “Justice for Han” fan campaign.
Fast 9 director Justin Lin has confirmed that Brian O’Conner is still alive in the Fast universe. When Paul Walker died in 2013, Furious 7 had not yet completed filming so the movie was overhauled to essentially write his character out of the series going forward. At the end of Furious 7, Brian and his girlfriend Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) flee the outlaw life in order to raise their children in safety. And while the specter of Walker looms over the subsequent Fast & Furious films, and Brian and Mia have been mentioned, the series avoided directly bringing Brian back … until the very last scene of Fast 9.
In Fast 9, Mia rejoins Dom and the crew to track down and stop their renegade agent brother, Jakob Toretto (John Cena). Mia tells Dom that Brian is looking after his namesake, Dom’s toddler son Brian, and their own kids while she’s on this mission. The crew eventually succeeds in thwarting the latest deadly machinations of Charlize Theron’s Cipher, who survives to hack another day, with help from a betrayed Jakob, whose heel-face turn to the good side is a staple of the franchise’s antagonists (see Deckard Shaw, but more on him in a bit).
With their mission complete and Roman and Tej now back from outer space (!!), the crew convenes for a family dinner at Dom’s home in L.A. There’s an empty chair with Mia telling Dom that its occupant is on their way but running late. That’s when the scene cuts to a familiar blue car, a Nissan Skyline driven by Brian in past movies, pulling into the driveway before cutting to black. While we never see the driver, the implication is clear: Brian O‘Conner is back with his family.
It’s a bittersweet moment that allows fans of the franchise to imagine seeing Brian reunite with his loved ones without using any stand-ins or digital effects to actually show Paul Walker.
Following the aforementioned Brian O’Conner nod, there is a mid-credits scene that delivers on the fan campaign #JusticeForHan … but maybe not to the extent that some fans would like.
Fast 9 reveals how and why Han Lue survived being “killed” by Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) in the mid-credits scene of Fast & Furious 6 (well, technically in Tokyo Drift but retconned to have been at the hands of Shaw). While Shaw was certainly out to kill Han, it turns out Han’s actual fiery demise was all staged using technical wizardry by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), who had recruited Han to work for his covert ops agency. Faking his death allowed Han to stay in Tokyo and protect Elle (Anna Sawai) from those who want her DNA to unlock Project Ares.
In the years since Han’s “death,” the Fast franchise redeemed Deckard Shaw, even turning him into a quippy antihero who partnered with Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs in their own 2019 spin-off movie. Needless to say, Fast & Furious not only redeeming but elevating the man who ruthlessly murdered Han, one of the series’ good guys, never quite sat right with many fans, and the “Justice for Han” social media campaign was born. Even Jason Statham said Han deserves justice.
Once it was revealed that Han would indeed return from “the dead” in Fast 9, the speculation has been not only on how the movie would explain that but also whether Han would get his revenge on Shaw. The mid-credits scene of Fast 9 teases the latter … but nothing more.
In the mid-credits scene, a hooded kickboxer is seen pummeling a punching bag. It’s Deckard Shaw, who then zips open the bag to reveal a prisoner inside. (The man is part of a criminal operation involving tech.) Shaw zips the bag back up to answer the door. And when he opens it, a very alive and well Han is standing there. The mid-credits scene ends on Shaw’s shocked face.
We don’t know whether Han and Shaw then fought each other or if Han simply explained everything to him. Presumably, the Fast crew or perhaps Mr. Nobody explained to Han how Shaw had proven himself an ally in the ensuing years so no harm, no foul. But still … Shaw left him to die in a fiery wreck! Whether fans will truly see Han bring justice to Shaw in a future film or even in a Hobbs & Shaw sequel remains to be seen.
Earlier today, NIS American several entries from its cult favorite Trails RPG series would be making their way west. This was cause for celebration for fan group Geofront, which helped to translate two of the games — The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, also known as the “Crossbell duology” among fans.
Geofront announced the partnership on its official website, confirming that the group’s patches would serve as the basis for the official localization. As part of the agreement, Geofront has pulled the patches from its website, urging fans to celebrate the official releases instead.
In a lengthy article on the group’s website, team members also posted personal statements about what the partnership meant to them.
“Somehow—for some reason—everything has worked out. Not just worked out, but worked out in the best possible way,” wrote Zerker, the Trails From Zero project lead.
Group co-founder OMGFloofy said the group was happy that NIS America was keeping the localized titles along with the logos. “[T]he team working with the games has been amazingly receptive to everything we’ve done and what we want to discuss with them regarding the games.”
Geofront isn’t the first fan group to have its work officially adapted by a publisher. Back in 2010, XSEED licensed the fan translation for Ys: The Oath in Felghana and released it on PSP and Steam. Nevertheless, it’s relatively rare, with publishers generally preferring to use the work created by their own in-house localization team.
Geofront’s work arose from the lack of any kind of official release for the Crossbell duology for more than a decade. Originally released on PlayStation Portable in 2010 and 2011 respectively, Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure remained tantalizingly out of reach of fans despite the rising popularity of Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel — both of which eventually made it to North America. A separate fan translation of Trails to Azure was released in 2018, with Geofront completing its own translation in May 2021.
They are part of the larger Trails franchise, which now comprises several games set across multiple sub-series. Referred to as the Kiseki series in Japan, they are part of the even larger Legend of Heroes RPG series, which has roots extending all the way back to Japanese PCs from the 1980s. Of the many games released under the Legend of Heroes banner, the most famous in North America is likely the Trails of Cold Steel tetralogy, which recently wrapped its run on Nintendo Switch and PS4.
In addition to Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, NIS America also announced English releases of Trails into Reverie and Boundless Trails. All four were leaked on the Epic Games Store ahead of a Nihon Falcom 40th anniversary event.
Trails from Zero will be the first of the games to be released in Fall 2022, with the rest following in 2023 on PS4, Switch, and PC. It’ll be a long wait, but that isn’t diminishing Geofront’s excitement, even as it prepares to hand the reins over to NIS America.
“While our time with Crossbell may have come to an end, we know everyone on NIS America’s localization team working on these two games will preserve the love and care we put into them. They have welcomed us with open arms, because, at the end of the day, we aren’t as different as we seem,” wrote Trails from Azure’s project lead, referring to simply as Scott. “We all have so much passion for what we do — and it shows. Now, more people around the world will finally get to experience these two masterpieces in English and see the passion that both teams have put into getting Crossbell over the language barrier.”
Rainbow Six Extraction has you pay a hefty toll if you decide to abandon your teammates in the middle of a match. Leaving your squad will make your operator literally go missing in action (MIA).
“In terms of players who choose to abandon a mission/match, you’ll be looking at a match forfeit and automatically have that operator be MIA,” Rainbow Six Extraction creative director Patrik Méthé told GameSpot. “All match progression will be lost as well. Players can also get temporary matchmaking bans if they frequently abandon matches.”
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In Extraction, any of your operators that go MIA become unplayable. Usually that happens if your operator goes down during a mission, but apparently that also occurs if you willingly leave a match. Regardless of how your operator goes MIA, to get them back, you and your squad need to go and extract them, literally pulling them out of the alien force’s clutches.
Thankfully, this punishment will only be handed out to folks who willingly abandon their squad. If you accidentally leave–like your internet cuts out–Extraction will allow you to get back into the action without fuss.
“If a player disconnects from their match, they will be able to easily rejoin the mission in progress with their friends, without penalty,” Méthé said.
