“The launch of Mass Effect Legendary Edition – the remaster of the first three Mass Effect games – reignited the passion of fans around the world, driving sales performance well above our expectations,” said EA CEO Andrew Wilson.
EA did not share exact sales numbers for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, but it proved to be popular on Steam, reaching highest-ever player count for any Mass Effect or BioWare game. It reached an all-time peak of 59,817 players, and was the second-highest ever player count on Steam for an EA game, trailing only Apex Legends.
EA’s other exclusively single-player game for 2021, Josef Fares’ It Takes Two, also outperformed EA’s expectations.
Despite the success of EA’s lonely single-player games, it was the publisher’s portfolio of multiplayer live service, sports, and mobile games that staved off a significant chunk of net income decline. EA emphasized it is continuing to focus on live service games and developing them as ongoing ecosystems rather than adhering to traditional sales models. The company reported a total revenue of $1.55 billion, up 6% from last year.
It’ll be interesting to see if EA’s other single-player remaster project, the Dead Space remake, proves to be as successful. EA executives said a new Dead Space is one of the most-requested games second only to the Skate franchise. IGN spoke with the developers at EA Motive about how the horror remake is being rebuilt in EA’s Frostbite engine.
If you’re curious, you can check out this infographic EA released that shows we’re all (mostly) good people who would never say mean things to attractive aliens.
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Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/investment for IGN.
If you took Torchlight, mixed in a heaping helping of Norse mythology, and topped it off with the looming apocalypse countdown from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, you’d have something that looks a fair bit like Tribes of Midgard. This fast-paced, colorful action RPG doesn’t give you a lot of time to breathe and explore its exciting world when you’re racing against time. But when you work together with friends to overcome its challenges, that tension can be rewarding.
There are two distinct ways to play Tribes of Midgard, and both revolve around protecting a seed of the World Tree at the center of an upgradeable settlement. Endless mode just lets you see how long you can last against infinitely increasing waves, but it’s the less interesting of the two. I’ll mostly be talking about the story-based Saga mode, in which you have about two hours to complete a set of objectives and defeat a final boss before an endless winter overtakes the map and renders it uninhabitable.
By day, you’ll roam around a set of diverse and increasingly dangerous areas completing simple quests, levelling up, and gathering materials and souls to upgrade your gear and your settlement. The quests themselves are pretty straightforward and predictable: Go kill something, bring me some items, clear out a mini dungeon. The satisfying combat holds this all together, but Midgard soon reveals itself to be more of a time management game than anything. Get as much done by the light of day as you can, because every night you’ll have to warp back to your settlement to defend it from the minions of Hel. Given how diverse, detailed, and intriguing the world can be though, I often found this hindered my ability to really explore and enjoy it.
Fi Fi Fo Fun
Throwing a comically oversized wrench into this routine are the lumbering jotnar, who will appear from time to time at the edges of the map and slowly plod toward your village. They’re not the most challenging bosses in the world, with slow and obvious attack animations that are fairly easy to avoid. But their massive health pools present a strategic challenge: waiting too long to take them out might mean you can’t topple them in time before they wreck your base. Of all the tribulations Tribes of Midgard sent my way, these were probably my favorites.
The issue is, even though single-player is listed as a feature on Steam, this is all just too much to keep up with by yourself. Tribes of Midgard is very clearly intended to be a co-op game, and it definitely works much better when you can get a big squad of up to ten vikings together with a clear plan and good communication. But alone, it feels like if I’m not sprinting from objective to objective with the efficiency of a speedrunner, there’s no way I’m going to be able to finish everything before the Fimbulwinter sets in. Being able to increase the time available before the Apocalypse in solo mode would make it much more enjoyable, since certain things like gathering speed don’t scale when you’re alone.
On your way to doomsday, you’ll have to personally harvest a lot of resources like wood and stone that can be used to build new base structures, upgrade defenses, and level up your NPC crafters. This is an interesting resource management layer, but it often felt like a lot of the upgrades weren’t worth my time. Since certain materials like stone are so rare, if I spent them to strengthen my base rather than on critical objectives like repairing the bridge to a boss area, it seemed like I was setting myself up for failure. Especially in a group, it seemed easier to just defend the base ourselves and save on materials.
Woe to the Vanquished
The indignity of losing your Tree or freezing to death is mitigated a fair bit by the fact that you still earn profile XP and account-bound currency based on how many days you survived and how many bosses you killed, even if you die or have to abandon a session. You can also unlock new character classes by completing certain achievements. Eventually you can earn the ability to start with better gear or more resources, but the benefits for grinding out profile levels drop off after a while since you’ll mostly be unlocking side-grades and crafting recipes, where I would have liked to see some even stronger starting gear for all that time investment.
At least new playstyle options offer some incentive to keep at it. The starting Warrior is a good all-arounder with an upgraded dodge roll that will let you avoid trouble. I really liked the Berserker, who does more damage the longer she stays on the attack. And you can open up some really nice synergies later on with support classes like the Warden, who can decrease crafting costs and teleport back to base on a reduced cooldown.
I should also mention that there is a premium currency you can buy with real money, but it’s only used for cosmetic items, there are no randomized loot boxes or gambling elements, and you can unlock everything without paying other than the Deluxe Edition exclusive cosmetics.
On this week’s episode of IGN’s PlayStation show Podcast Beyond!, host Jonathon Dornbush is joined by Tom Marks, Mark Medina, and Taylor Lyles to discuss the latest news in the world of PlayStation, including the confirmed delay of Kena, the reported Horizon Forbidden West delay, and updated release windows for Solar Ash, Stray, and more.
Plus, we discuss some of the PS5’s new software update beta, like the updates to trophy tracking and M.2 SSD compatibility, Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut new details about updates to the Legends multiplayer mode, and much more.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior Features Editor, Host of Podcast Beyond!, and father to his Boy, Loki, who is a dog. You can find Jonathon and cute photos of Loki on Twitter @jmdornbush.
EA said that it will be able to add real-world college athlete likeness to its upcoming NCAA Football game “very seamlessly” thanks to a “database structure” of the game’s technical architecture.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling that student athletes can profit off of their name, image, and likeness, the doors have been opened for companies like EA to potentially return to using real-world athletes in sports games. To this point EA’s response has measured, saying that it is watching for developments and plans to explore the possibility of implementing real-world athletes into their games.
“We are building architecture of the game with database structure if and when that comes online we can add it to the game very seamlessly,” EA Chief Operating Officer Blake Jorgensen says.
The statement indicates that EA is certainly building up some sort of technical infrastructure that would allow it to more easily implement real-world athletes’ name, image, and likeness. What form that ultimately takes though, and how quickly it can be achieved, remains unknown.
For now, don’t expect any new developments anytime soon. EA announced it was returning to college football games way back in February 2021, despite the lack of student athletes’ likeness.
Details (including release date) have yet to be announced for EA Sports College Football, or any other college sports games EA may have plans for. Collegiate Licensing Current indications are that the next college football game may not arrive until 2023.
James Gunn was recently asked about that time in 2019 when the acclaimed director Martin Scorsese said Marvel movies aren’t cinema, calling the comments “awful cynical.”
As reported by The Playlist, Gunn was asked during his appearance on the Happy. Sad. Confused. Podcast how he felt about Scorsese’s two-year-old comments seeing as though Gunn is responsible for some of the most critically-acclaimed and unique superhero films.
“I just think it seems awful cynical that he would keep coming out against Marvel and then that is the only thing that would get him press for his movie,” Gunn said. “He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.”
But Gunn doesn’t necessarily disagree with Scorsese either. “There are a lot of things that are true about what he said,” Gunn added. “There are a lot of heartless, soulless, spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening.” Gunn says he has had plenty of encounters where he approached film directors asking them to elevate the blockbuster only to see these directors “cater to every single studio whim,” which Gunn says grossed him out.
Despite Scorsese’s comments, he is still one of the most respected directors in film, and Marvel movies are still some of the biggest in the world. So basically, all of this back-and-forth exists mainly for debate.
Gunn’s next superhero movie, The Suicide Squad, is out this weekend and IGN’s review says it’s a great one. Meanwhile, Scorses is hard at work on his next project Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple TV Plus (which recently cast Brendan Fraser!).
The Suicide Squad is introducing moviegoers to some of the weirdest and most obscure DC villains this side of Condiment King. And none are more bizarre than Peacemaker, the vigilante so devoted to peace that he’ll kill literally anyone to preserve it. Not only does this DCEU movie sequel feature John Cena as Peacemaker, but the character will also then branch out in his own spinoff series on HBO Max.
Haven’t heard of Peacemaker? The Suicide Squad writer-director James Gunn describes him as a superhero, supervillain, and the world’s biggest douchebag.
“He’s like a douchey Captain America,” agreed Cena when his take on the character was first revealed during DC FanDome.
“[Peacemaker is] a guy who believes in peace at any cost, no matter how many people he needs to kill along the way,” Gunn added.
But just who is this violent vigilante? Let’s meet Christopher Smith, a.k.a. DC Comics’ Peacemaker. In this article, we’ll cover the following:
Christopher Smith was a pacifist when he made his first appearance in Charlton Comics’ The Fightin’ 5 #40. A member of a paramilitary force dedicated to keeping the world safe, only non-lethal weapons were kept in his arsenal—until the character was revamped in an explosive four-issue miniseries in 1988. After the Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which he made his DC Comics debut, this new version of Christopher Smith still wanted to keep the peace… so much, in fact, that the haunted crimefighter is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure it.
“I’m Peacemaker,” the unstable anti-hero yells, “and I’ll kill to keep the peace!”
Born Christopher Schmidt, Peacemaker was the only child of a wealthy couple. Smith’s father, a former Nazi concentration camp commandant, valued strength and power above all. He died by suicide when Smith was just five years old. Smith saw it happen. The troubled young boy would go on to the military after completing high school, where he came face to face with the horrific realities of war.
Accused of massacring innocent people, Smith was arrested and tried for war crimes. While serving his sentence, he agreed to join a secret Pentagon anti-terrorism program called Project: Peacemaker. The agents in the program trained on a high-tech military base but were never deployed, and Smith was eventually freed on his promised parole. The idea later inspired Smith to become a costumed crimefighter as a form of penance for the terrible crimes both he and his father committed.
As he unleashed his form of justice, Smith often heard the voice of his father in his head. It continued to plague him well into his raging crusade for peace. The vigilante suffered from delusions that not only was the spirit of his father haunting him, but also that the voices of those he had slain were trapped inside his unusual helmet.
Peacemaker operated under the Agency, a secret government organization that sent the well-armed warrior on anti-terrorism missions around the world. His fragile state of mind made him an unpredictable asset, and the Agency attempted to keep him as stable as possible through therapy and highly trained agents working with him.
He was said to have been killed at the hands of Eclipso on a mission for Checkmate (a division of Task Force X, the same super-secret government organization that spawned the Suicide Squad), but years later he returned to the hero business to help new Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes. Smith was also identified as a potential recruit of the fear-powered Sinestro Corps because of the terror he had inflicted as Peacemaker, but the yellow power ring ultimately rejected him. He served as a partner and mentor to Jaime for a short time.
Peacemaker was last seen joining the fight against Doctor Manhattan in 2019’s Doomsday Clock #13. This is strangely fitting as the story that became Watchmen was originally pitched as “Who Killed the Peacemaker?” As with many of Watchmen’s characters, who were based on Charlton Comics players, Peacemaker was the inspiration behind the Comedian.
The anti-hero is a master of weapons. He wields deadly, technologically advanced weaponry and wears bulletproof body armor as he dispenses justice. The strange-looking silver helmet on Peacemaker’s head is capable of emitting ultrasonic frequencies to overwhelm the senses of anyone in range, as well as scramble electronic signals. The helmet also contains long-range sensors for detecting any hostile forces in the area.
Peacemaker has other high-tech gadgetry at his disposal, including a decked-out jet plane and a jetpack that grants him the ability to fly.
While Smith wasn’t officially a member of the Suicide Squad in the comics, he did operate under the purview of Amanda Waller and Task Force X like that top-secret team. DC FanDome gave fans their first look at the gun-toting character as he finally joins the team in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad sequel. Peacemaker is among a number of new Task Force X recruits, all of whom are charged with infiltrating war-torn Corto Maltese and destroying a secret laboratory that may or may not contain the enormous starfish kaiju known as Starro.
Little is known about the HBO Max Peacemaker series, which will also feature John Cena as the character, but we do know the series will serve as an origin story for the character, which doesn’t rule out the possibility that Peacemaker will die in The Suicide Squad. The cast also includes Steve Agee as John Economos, Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Robert Patrick as Auggie Smith, Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt, Chris Conrad as the DC Comics character Vigilante/Adrian Chase and Nhut Le as Judomaster.
The eight-episode HBO Max series, begins production in 2021 and will debut on HBO Max in January 2022. “Peacemaker will be live-action and action-packed. His shotgun will be single action. His favorite movie is Action Jackson,” Gunn teased on Twitter.
The Peacemaker TV series is expected to debut in January 2022, and will feature eight episodes in its first season.
Aug. 4, 2021: This story has been updated with the latest information about The Suicide Squad.
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Kelly Knox is a freelance entertainment writer who also contributes to StarWars.com, DCComics.com, Nerdist, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and comics.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson told investors “you should think of Battlefield as a service,” indicating the direction the popular first-person multiplayer shooter will take with the upcoming Battlefield 2042.
“I think that is our orientation. But more important, I think you should think of Battlefield as a service,” Wilson said during EA’s Q1 FY 2022 investors call on Wednesday.
Notably, EA did not clarify whether or not the Battlefield franchise will release every other year like previous entries. The implication is that EA will continue to treat Battlefield like an ongoing ecosystem that sees regular updates.
Wilson pointed to EA’s continuing shift to live service-focused games for the future throughout the investors call, saying games like Battlefield 2042 will “reinvent what our epic scale games are.”
With the recent announcement of Battlefield 2042’s Portal mode, which allows players to create custom matches combining wildly different eras of Battlefield weaponry and mechanics, it appears EA is hoping user-created content will spur long-term, continuous growth for the franchise.
“This really forms the foundation for what we think the future of Battlefield is,” Wilson said, adding that different versions of Battlefield, including an upcoming mobile release, will “change the nature of what happens from launch to launch” and that EA aims to focus on “365 day engagement on a platform level.”
Most modern MMOs have their own take on the usual questing, exploring, and dungeon crawling, with player-versus-player combat as an afterthought, but Crowfall skirts all of that entirely. Instead, it focuses on relatively short PvP campaigns that last for at least 30 days – seasons, basically – that are meant to culminate in full-on, guild-vs.-guild warfare by the end. If you stick with it that long you might even experience a siege or a fortress battle. And if you’re especially lucky, you might even get to build your own realm. However, much like the similarly PvP-centric EVE Online or older games like Dark Age of Camelot, it’s unlikely that the average person will ever get to do that without joining the most powerful guild on the server – or being willing to pay for the privilege of decking out your custom realm via Crowfall’s cash shop.
Crowfall’s single best feature is its character creator. Among the 12 fantasy races and 11 classes are some genuinely interesting picks, like the giant Stoneborn and the gerbil-esque Guineceans. All of them offer totally unique abilities and the class system is versatile, allowing you to switch your role on the fly by slotting Major and Minor Disciplines in and out at any time. This system is especially robust thanks to the highly detailed Crowpedia, which you can pull up directly from the talent tree menu and get an overview of each area of specializations your classes, races, and Disciplines can follow. There is a bewildering quantity of traits and abilities you can mix and match, and it’s always fun to play around with and experiment with different traits. It’s also cool that each class also features three different Promotion Classes, which are subclasses that allow you to push your customization that much further.
However, all that choice doesn’t always amount to a great experience in the end.
There’s an introductory leveling arc from one to 30 that encompasses the tutorial, and it’s pretty short in practice. But the thing MMO fans have to be aware of is that this tutorial is the only place in Crowfall in which you’ll find any quests at all – and even then, they only amount to basic “run here, do this” kind of stuff at best. While it’s important for you to learn your class before being trusted to lead a full-blown siege, this whole tutorial section feels like a meaningless buffer. For one, until close to the very end, it’s only teaching you how your class operates when fighting small groups of PvE enemies and no other players.
It’s great then that with subsequent alt characters, you can simply use the Sacrifice mechanic – where you can sacrifice items and gold to shrines in exchange for experience points – to simply exchange your way back up to level 30. But this is hindered by the fact that sacrificing too many items at once and reaching the next level stops you from receiving more experience points. That’s right: if you drop an entire pile of gold into the sacrifice altar, you only receive enough experience to level up one time. If you use too much at once, that’s too bad, because the rest of the stack disappears into the ether. You can work around this by deliberately splitting up your items and planning it all out, but the fact that you would need to do that 29 separate times to go from one to 30, is a testament to how clunky this interface is.
But even if you train your character all the way up to that level by doing the PvE tutorial content, once you get out into the PvP zones, it’s clear just how unprepared you actually are to fight other players without switching up your playstyle or even reworking your entire class specializations. Builds that promised to be interesting against the AI enemies you fought in the tutorial quickly melt down into min-max territory, since domination in PvP combat ultimately boils down to who can hit the hardest the fastest, and who has the numbers on their side.
Since the tutorial skims over the important facets of guild-vs.-guild and faction-vs.-faction warfare, it’s easy to immediately feel lost if you weren’t taking notes. There’s really no bridge between Crowfall’s tutorial and Crowfall itself; you have to find one in the form of other players, and this is hit or miss. What I soon discovered is that whether you have any fun in Crowfall is determined by how much you’re willing to grind, and the most interesting facets of Crowfall’s endgame – castle and keep conquests, and the Eternal Kingdom system where you can eventually design your own zone – are locked behind a herculean undertaking of many players grinding in organized repetition.
Or you can just join a faction and run around in the Skypoint zone and its neighbors, like The Solarium and The Arboretum, where you can casually gank other players. But this is boring, since Skypoint is a small zone without much room for any kind of tactical engagements, often leaving you running in circles while you capture the same points and kill the same group of players for loot and gold. Strongholds exist in Skypoint, but they’re not quite as captivating or rewarding to engage with as their endgame counterparts.
A step up from Skypoint is the faction-vs.-faction game mode called The Shadow, which is theoretically more player-friendly than the guild-vs.-guild-focused endgame, but ends up falling flat in that regard. On one hand, it’s impossible to coordinate with the rest of your faction in-game if nobody is responding to the specific “Faction” chat channel. If that’s the case, good luck organizing at all, since the maximum number of players you can invite to your party is six. Even if you do manage to coordinate enough support, you still need to wait hours or potentially days for the next keep to become available to siege.
On the other hand, despite The Shadow being a supposed “bridge” between the tutorial and The Dregs, it’s easy to spin your wheels here for hours with very little to show for it. This is especially aggravating given that the rewards you get for winning an entire 30+-day faction-vs.-faction campaign are equivalent to what you can earn from a few hours of farming low-effort targets in The Dregs. For this reason, most guilds worth their salt will still end up steering clear of The Shadow anyway, other than to troll new players – which completely defeats the purpose of having an “easily accessible” faction-vs.-faction mode in the first place.
As it stands, the real end game is supposed to begin in Crowfall’s guild-vs.-guild area, called The Dregs. Again, if you’re the kind of MMO player who likes to go solo most of the time, you need not apply. In fact, everything in Crowfall’s guild-vs.-guild area is designed to be effectively inaccessible to solo players. But the shift into joining a guild – let alone finding one that’s both welcoming and active – is jarring when first ascending out of the unclear and monotonous tutorial section.
But okay, let’s assume you’ve gotten your group together: it still doesn’t seem like there’s much to do besides rove around the open world and gank smaller groups of players while capturing outposts and attempting to dominate parts of the various disconnected zones located across your server. That might be entertaining enough for a few hours, but it doesn’t hold up for long. The only two meaningful alternatives to this are sitting in a circle and harvesting ore and wood for hours to build your guild’s stockpile, or farming the same boring elite enemies and bosses for loot.
That’d be fine if any of those systems were fun to engage with, but they’re simply not. For a game that is so focused on PvP above all else, Crowfall’s battles lack a feeling of rhythm and deliberate pacing. You can simply hold the left mouse button near an enemy and it will eventually die. In Crowfall’s best moments, it’s slippery; at worst, it’s brain-numbing.
Despite all of the different skills and abilities I could dole out to my character through the Discipline system to liven up my humble Guinecean Duelist – or my later alt, my Stoneborn Champion – each and every battle boiled down to a frantic button mash where I held my left mouse button down while randomly tapping the assortment of DPS abilities on my hotbar, some of which at least used a secondary resource called Pips that would refresh intermittently as I attacked. However, this was still too lenient to afford any interesting interplay to my skills, especially since none of them needed to preempt one another in order, a la Final Fantasy 14. Some Major Disciplines – equippable skill sets that can augment your class – do offer up combo skills that need to fire off in sequence, but it still takes a lot of extra work to find the right match of Disciplines that keep your character effective and fun to play.
Granted, Duelist is a class that is supposed to be able to do a ton of melee or ranged damage in a short period of time, but playing as one gets old quickly; every fight in the open world boils down to a skirmish where you and your opponents basically slide around and whittle one another’s health bars to zero without much more strategy, nuance, or class interplay beyond the basic “Healers heal, tanks take a lot of damage, DPS stabs things.” This simplicity undermines all that aforementioned customization that makes the character creation so interesting.
The only clear caveats here are the Ranger class, which can see much further than the average character, and the Assassin’s (and the gerbil-like Guinecean’s) ability to move around undetected by enemy players. Both of these feats make it viable for some players to slip off to the side and go on scouting missions, which is interesting in theory, but doesn’t actually help much once the fighting starts if your side is grossly outnumbered, and especially if the opposite team has the funds to bring in siege weaponry.
Crowfall might’ve been onto something here with its player-versus-player metagame as well, but the unfortunate reality is that there’s a deep, empty divide between the repetitive tasks that make up the nuts and bolts of what you’re actually doing moment-to-moment compared to the theoretically much more interesting Eternal Kingdom system and siege events. Those are dotted across each map, beckoning you to join them, but they only happen at specific times of the week and are only really available to hardcore players: yes, it’s possible for a casual group to eventually work their way up to building an empire in Eternal Kingdom or fighting in castle sieges in the Dregs, but good luck with that. On paper you can earn it, but in practice it’d take weeks of organized effort, harvesting materials in the wilderness, and repeatedly grinding outposts and forts around the clock for a reasonably-sized guild of at least 30-40 players to even touch upon the interesting parts of the endgame, let alone win a campaign. Sure, you can always join the biggest guild on the server and coast on their success, but that’s hardly a great solution considering that the whole appeal of Crowfall in the first place is building up your own guild and guiding it to success.
At least these zones look great: Crowfall’s minimalist art style is colorful and clean, making it simple to parse in the heat of the action. But the animations are stiff if not downright cheesy, aggravating the earlier issues I mentioned I had with the combat system.
Crowfall’s interface is clean-looking as well, but it doesn’t function as well as it first appears. The map is difficult to make heads or tails of, and that makes coordinating with your allies tougher than it should be. It’s extremely minimalistic, forcing you to scroll over its various quadrants and call out coordinates to your teammates in order to figure out where they are if there are more than six of you playing together at once.
On top of that, Crowfall’s in-game text chat system is not viable for communicating with your party or to your broader faction or guild when you’re trying to coordinate anything in the moment. This is because you need to tab all the way to your inventory screen in order to switch chat channels. And, instead of collating them together, there’s a unique channel for each type of communication, making it easy to completely ignore critical messages from your faction or guildmates if you simply leave the default General channel open. Worse, the built-in voice chat system rarely works at all. If you can, go with Discord or some other app to talk to your friends as you play.
And it goes without saying that your experience hinges upon who you play with. The right group of players (if you can find it) will make this process much more enjoyable. Crowfall can be the type of game where you turn off your brain, sit around with a group of friends, and joke around while grinding your way through The Dregs or Skypoint. The fact that it’s possible to lose all of your loot when you die – especially in The Dregs, where it can take a long time to cover ground – adds just enough tension to make things interesting for a group of engaged players, and I was lucky enough to find my way into a rather casual guild that did exactly that. But I stumbled around for almost a week and a half, skipping from one inactive guild to another, before I finally discovered this group that actually seemed to genuinely enjoy Crowfall despite all its faults.
We love us a good many-things-for-less bargain, and so that’s our discount theme for today. Because you know what? Some franchises are just worth owning in their entirety. Case in point(s): the Batman Arkham, Trine, BioShock, Tomb Raider, Contra, Borderlands, Mass Effect and Halo series. They’re all here, and they’re all priced to own.
As James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad heads to theaters, one thing that has become clear from the trailers is that Task Force X is going to have to battle Starro at some point during the course of this misadventure.
Who? Why, Starro the Conqueror, of course. Otherwise known as the very first supervillain the Justice League ever battled and one of the most powerful psychics in the DC Universe. But if you need to brush up on your giant starfish lore, we’re here to help. We’ll break down the colorful history of this very odd villain and why he’s making his live-action debut in a Suicide Squad sequel of all places. These are the topics we cover here…
Some villains are exactly who and what they appear to be. Starro is a gigantic alien parasite who resembles a starfish. His never-ending thirst for conquest has taken him from one end of the DCU to the other, seeking out worlds to enslave. Between his enormous size, his prodigious psychic powers, and his ability to spawn millions of spores, Starro is all but an unstoppable force. Fortunately for Earth, the Justice League has always managed to find a way to loosen Starro’s suction-cupped grip on the planet. We wouldn’t be so optimistic about Amanda Waller’s band of D-Listers managing the same feat in The Suicide Squad.
Starro made his original debut in 1960’s The Brave and the Bold #28, the issue that also introduced comic readers to the Justice League of America. Whereas the DCEU and DC’s contemporary comics depict Darkseid as the all-encompassing threat that brings together Earth’s most powerful heroes for the first time, back in the day a giant, psychic starfish was the only call to action Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter needed (Batman and Superman couldn’t be bothered).
Starro’s creation is credited to writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky, though editor Julius Schwartz also contributed to the original Starro conception. Schwartz once indicated the “Starro the Conqueror” name was inspired by Ray Cummings’ sci-fi novel Tarrano the Conqueror, which deals with a Machiavellian alien who plots to conquer worlds through strategic assassinations. Interestingly, the character Tarrano as he’s depicted on the book’s cover bears more than a passing resemblance to Green Lantern’s arch-rival Sinestro.
As for why the creators opted for a giant starfish, that seems to have been yet another case of DC tapping into the monster movie craze of the time, specifically the growing popularity of Godzilla and other Japanese kaiju characters. DC fans have pointed out the clear similarities between Starro’s design and the starfish monsters from 1956’s Warning From Space, so that may have played a part in Starro’s creation.
Thanks to his ability to asexually reproduce, Starro has a habit of cheating death, nursing himself back to full size, and returning to threaten Earth all over again. The character has served as an infrequently recurring villain over the decades, appearing in various Justice League comics as well as other titles like Adventure Comics, Teen Titans and REBELS. Little by little, DC has revealed more about the villain’s unusual background and even pushed the self-styled “Conqueror” in a more heroic direction.
Starro’s Powers and Abilities
Starro has all the strength and durability you’d expect from a kaiju-sized starfish, along with other powers like flight, energy manipulation, and regeneration. So long as some piece of his body survives, Starro will always eventually grow back to full health.
His greatest strength, however, is his psychic talent. Starro is a telepath who can control the minds of others, even powerful heroes like Green Lantern. Starro can also spawn millions of smaller duplicates of himself, which can then attach themselves to his prey and control their bodies so long as they remain bonded. Basically, Starro combines all the worst things about kaiju and the Xenomorphs of the Alien franchise.
Normally, Starro in his full-grown form is several hundred feet tall – enough to knock over buildings and generally wreak havoc on major cities. But in some cases, he’s grown large enough to cover entire oceans and terraform planets.
Fortunately for Earth’s heroes, Starro has a few weaknesses that are easily exploitable. Often these weaknesses seem to be completely arbitrary plot devices. For example, in his original battle with the Justice League, the team’s obligatory, useless sidekick Snapper Carr saves the day because his quicklime-covered body proves immune to Starro’s powers. In a later battle, Starro receives a power boost by drawing in polluted water, only for Aquaman to turn the tables by summoning a flood of clean water.
While traditionally DC has used the names “Starro” and “Starro the Conqueror” pretty much interchangeably, it was only fairly recently that fans learned the two are actually different characters. As revealed in the 2009 REBELS comic from writer Tony Bedard, the real Starro the Conqueror isn’t a starfish at all. He’s a humanoid alien who managed to bend an entire race of parasitic starfish to his will.
According to this revamped origin story, originally Starro’s race consisted of waves of mindless, nomadic parasites who traveled the galaxy in search of civilizations to turn into helpless slaves. These aliens finally meet their match when they attempt to conquer the planet Hatorei, which is populated by a race of peaceful, psychically connected beings. One of the Hatorei, Cobi, is driven mad by the destruction of his homeworld and is able to psychically overpower the Starro attached to his face. Using that Starro as a link to the others, Cobi is able to psychically bend the entire race to his will. He becomes Starro the Conqueror – the true power behind an endless armada of parasitic starfish.
That story played out shortly before DC partly rebooted its comic book line with the New 52, so it’s unclear whether this revamped approach to Starro still holds true in 2021. He may be back to just being a giant, psychic starfish with a gluttonous appetite.
Starro has undergone another major transformation in recent years, pivoting away from his traditional villain role to become an ally to the Justice League. That evolution begins in 2018’s Justice League: No Justice, which features a united team of Earth’s greatest heroes and villains responding to the fallout of Dark Nights: Metal. After spending some psychic bonding time with Martian Manhunter, Starro feels the call to be a hero. He makes good on that desire when he helps save Brainiac’s people, the Coluans, from an all-powerful Omega Titan. Starro tries and fails to take over the Titan’s body, only to be ripped to pieces. However, his heroic sacrifice buys enough time for the Coluans to evacuate their world.
That’s not the end of Starro’s tale. Batman is able to save a piece of the starfish’s body, which he nurtures in a jar. That reborn, pint-sized Starro becomes known as “Jarro,” basically the Justice League’s answer to Baby Groot. Jarro even refers to Batman as “Dad” and dreams of one day becoming the new Robin. No one has the heart to tell Jarro what usually becomes of Robins after a year or two on the job.
Starro in TV and Games
Given his massive size and unusual appearance, it should probably come as no surprise that Starro has yet to make a proper live-action appearance. To date, we’ve only seen cameos of and references to this villain on shows like Arrow, The Flash, Smallville, and Powerless. However, Starro does have a long history of appearing in DC’s animated projects (both TV series and DVD movies) and video games.
TV: Starro’s first TV appearance came in an episode of 1967’s The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. He later popped up in Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Young Justice. However, Starro’s biggest role to date has been in Batman: The Brave and the Bold (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) where he becomes the main villain of Season 2.
Games: Starro has served as a boss character in DC games like the Nintendo Wii version of Batman: The Brave and the Bold and DC Universe Online, and has cameoed in games like Injustice: Gods Among Us and Batman: Arkham Knight. Only one game – the MOBA title Infinite Crisis – actually allows gamers to play as Starro.
We’ve finally reached the era where a giant psychic starfish is just par for the course in a big-budget superhero movie. Starro will play a role in The Suicide Squad, though whether he’s meant to be the film’s main villain or just one foe among many is unclear.
Based on what we know about the plot of The Suicide Squad, Task Force X is sent on a search-and-destroy mission to the politically unstable nation of Corto Maltese. In the comics, Corto Maltese houses a top-secret laboratory/prison called Jotunheim, which houses a number of top-secret experiments and weapons dating back to the Nazis. We can probably assume a Starro specimen is being kept in the lab. And given that these mercenaries aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the supervillain box, one of them will probably set Starro free by accident. How will a crew of expendable killers with mostly minor super-powers stop a being as powerful as Starro the Conqueror? That should be interesting to see.
Based on the poster above, it also seems Peter Capaldi’s character, The Thinker, is somehow connected to Starro. Given that The Thinker uses his custom-built “thinking cap” to control the minds of others, it may be that his powers are derived from Starro. Or it could be that Clifford DeVoe is forcibly recruited for the mission because his cap makes him one of the few resistant to Starro’s powers.
DC didn’t reveal Starro’s existence in the film until the first trailer debuted. Given that we still don’t know who or what Taika Waititi is playing in the movie, we could easily see him providing the voice of Starro. After previously playing Korg in the MCU and IG-11 on The Mandalorian, voicing a psychic starfish may be the only logical next step for Waititi.
