Gaming has long been a social activity: the original two-player Pong, yelling about screen watchers in GoldenEye, logging into Battle.Net for Warcraft II, MMOs like Everquest, and even forums for comparing Sims houses. Playing with friends always enhances the quality of the game and even makes losing more fun. So why haven’t gamers had a social media network of their own?
Sure, there are Twitch and Discord, but those aren’t true social networks. Those are focused on streaming and communication. A lot of gaming networking still uses traditional social media like Facebook and Twitter, but those fall short when it comes to features that gamers want. That’s where the folks at PvP. have joined the battle.
Enter PvP
PvP is the first true gamer social media network, and it’s in the early stages of development. They’re looking for investors and users who want to get in on the ground floor of what will be the biggest community for gamers. It will have the best of everything that gamers want: the chance to brag about their big wins, find out the latest gaming news, view the latest eSports matches, check out what’s popular, and coordinate with friends across games and platforms.
Want to find new challengers to test your might? PvP will help you do that. Want to see great clips of other players and showcase your own? PvP has your back. You can even throw down with your favorite Twitch gamers by finding their matches in real-time. This is the social media network founded and led by gamers and designed to be the social media network gamers need.
PvP is leveling up fast
This investment opportunity isn’t just a pipedream, PvP has been in the beta phase and is now prepped to open to the public. They have had more than 125,000 users on their mobile app with twice the average engagement time of other social media mobile apps. PvP predicts massive growth, focusing on the 21 million active gamers in North America, a market worth tens of millions of dollars.
Across the entirety of the possible market, there is $11 billion that more than 500 million possible users are holding onto, waiting to be tapped by PvP. The founders believe that they can obtain two million active users on the network by the end of 2022 and bring in more than $100 million in revenue by 2024. This is every savvy investor’s opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
With rewards for investors who put in as little as $500, PvP is looking to open up investment in this groundbreaking company to the average person. If you missed out on the GME craze and have been perusing the best gaming stocks, investing in PvP could very well be your chance to join something big while it’s still in its early stages.
High-level players
The founders themselves have a deep well of experience in startups, gaming, and investing. CEO and co-founder Phil Stover is the founder and partner in Blue Skies Ventures, a company that invests and advises start-ups in Silicon Beach. CTO and co-founder Chris Gray is the founder of Crave Games, an eSports software solutions company. With decades of experience between them, they’ve built a strong team with deep roots in the gaming community, and they are ready to tap into a huge market with a great product.
The combination of gaming and social media has the chance to become some of the biggest generators of engagements and sales conversions for advertising companies. With millions of potential users who regularly engage and are active in the network, PvP is poised to become the beating heart of the global gaming community.
Loki Season 1 did what its predecessors WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier avoided, serving up the big reveal that comics fans had basically been expecting — and that the show had been hinting at throughout its six episodes: Jonathan Majors made his MCU debut as classic Marvel time-traveling villain Kang the Conqueror, or at least a Variant of the character known as He Who Remains.
The series also ended this first season by shattering the “Sacred Timeline,” which sets up the upcoming events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and probably a bunch of other Marvel projects as well.
If you’re not familiar with Kang or why he has the potential to be the next Thanos-level threat to the MCU, we’re here to shed light on this powerful villain and also explain the finale of Loki. These are the topics we’ll be covering here:
Loki Season Finale Explained
Who Is He Who Remains/Kang the Conqueror?
Kang’s Origin
Kang’s Powers and Abilities
Kang’s Many Identities
Kang and the Young Avengers
Kang the Conqueror Actor Jonathan Majors and Marvel Universe Connections
In the Season 1 finale of Loki, Loki and Sylvie finally make it to the end of time (should that be capitalized?) to confront the mysterious figure behind the TVA. No, not the Time Keepers, who we learned a couple of episodes back were fakes, but the actual figure who has been overseeing the pruning of the Sacred Timeline: He Who Remains.
Majors plays the character as a fun figure, one who perhaps has gone a little bonkers living forever at the end of all time, knowing everything that is going to happen.
Well, to a point. As the episode proceeds, He Who Remains explains his backstory, but also that they are now reaching a moment in the timeline where he will no longer know how things are going to play out — a juncture that will finally free him of the self-imposed prison he has been living in as master of the timeline. And it’s up to Sylvie and Loki to decide what comes next.
But first, about that backstory: He Who Remains explains that it all began with a Variant of himself, a scientist from the 31st century, who discovered that other timelines/realities exist. At first things were friendly as other versions, or Variants of this scientist, began to meet up across different timelines. But then some Variants turned to conquering, and the Multiverse War we learned about in Episode 1 began. In the end, He Who Remains… well, remained. As the winner of the war, he created the TVA to keep other timelines from coming into existence in order to avoid another multiversal conflict.
And so now He Who Remains wants out, and Loki and Sylvie have a choice: Become the new masters of the Sacred Timeline, or kill He Who Remains, which will bring about the multiverse once again and, inevitably, the return of an untold number of He Who Remains/Kangs who will wind up re-starting the war. Loki wants to take over, if only to avoid the inevitable conflict that will result from killing He Who Remains. But Sylvie wants to kill He Who Remains, choosing the chaos of a multiverse — and free will — over all else. After fighting Loki, she kisses him — and then pushes him back through time to the TVA before stabbing He Who Remains, who doesn’t even fight back. We last see Sylvie at the end of time, contemplating her decision as the timeline splinters into an infinite amount of variations — a multiverse.
The finale ends with Loki landing back at the TVA, but he soon realizes that it’s a TVA from a different timeline, because Mobius and Hunter B-15 have no idea who he is. And then he sees it — a statue of He Who Remains, who now looks a lot like Kang from the comics. Is Kang the Conqueror now the master of time (and the TVA)? We’ll surely find out in Season 2, which was revealed in post-credits tease that simply shows TVA paperwork being stamped with the words “Loki will return for Season 2.”
Who Is He Who Remains/Kang the Conqueror?
It’s not easy recapping the convoluted history of Kang the Conqueror. He’s a villain who’s gone by many names and many different motivations in his countless clashes with the Avengers and Fantastic Four. But through it all the basics have stayed the same. Kang is a man who sees himself as the rightful master of the world. Using the power of time travel and the most sophisticated weaponry his future world has to offer, Kang has repeatedly sought to rewrite history to his own whims and ensure his own rise to power.
Kang’s love of time travel is exactly what makes him such a dangerous and seemingly never-ending thorn in humanity’s side. No matter how often he’s defeated, banished or even destroyed utterly, some version of him is always out there, waiting and plotting. In the Loki Season 1 finale, He Who Remains is clearly a Kang Variant, but apparently a more benevolent one than the Kang (or Kangs) we’ll likely get moving forward in the MCU.
While the first appearance of Kang the Conqueror is featured in 1964’s The Avengers #8, the character technically debuted a year earlier in Fantastic Four #19. We’ll try to summarize Kang’s confusing origin story as simply as possible.
Kang’s real name is Nathaniel Richards. Originally a historical scholar from the 31st century (and possibly a distant descendant of either Reed Richards or Victor von Doom), Nathaniel discovers Doctor Doom’s ancient time travel tech and uses it to travel back to the era of ancient Egypt. Crowning himself “Rama-Tut,” he lords over his new subjects and uses his futuristic tech to make himself seem like a god. That is, until the Fantastic Four show up to end his reign.
After escaping to the 20th century, Rama-Tut meets Doctor Doom and uses Doom’s distinctive armor as inspiration for his next supervillain identity, the Scarlet Centurion. However, he’s again defeated by Earth’s heroes and attempts to return to his own timeline.
This is where Kang the Conqueror is born. Richards accidentally travels forward too far in time, arriving in an era when human civilization has collapsed. As the only person left who understands the advanced but forgotten technology of the 40th century, the newly minted Kang is able to quickly conquer his new timeline and even extend his new empire beyond Earth’s borders. Not content to be ruler of a futuristic empire, Kang begins a recurring game of toying with time and attempting to rewrite history to suit his own whims.
Kang’s Powers and Abilities
As an ordinary human from the 31st century, Kang has no innate superhuman powers. However, he’s a gifted physicist and historian, using his knowledge of science and history to manipulate the timeline and accumulate power. His distinctive green and purple suit of armor (inspired by Doom’s own armor) both enhances Kang’s strength and allows him to survive in whatever inhospitable environments he may find. Kang has a time-ship that allows him to freely travel through the time-stream, and he’s also assembled a vast army comprised of the best warriors from throughout history.
Kang also sometimes wields a ray gun that can sap a person’s strength and willpower, along with various doomsday weapons only a 40th century tyrant could dream of.
Kang also seems to be functionally immortal. Because he’s so fond of abusing the timeline for his own selfish ends, there are countless variations of Nathaniel Richards in existence. No matter how many times Kang is defeated, there’s always another incarnation of the Conqueror ready to continue his crusade.
Kang is every bit as convoluted a character as one would expect from a man whose favorite hobby is manipulating time. But part of what makes Kang such a confusing character is that he’s had so many different names and identities over the years. It doesn’t help that these various characters weren’t all originally conceived as being the same person, so a lot of these connections have been forged after the fact. If you’re familiar with the comic book storytelling term “retcon,” Kang is basically its living embodiment.
As we’ve already covered, Nathaniel Richards uses names like Rama-Tut and the Scarlet Centurion early on in his career as a time-travelling tyrant. But taking up the mantle of Kang isn’t his last identity shake-up.
At some point in his long life, Kang gives up his name and his empire to instead forge an alliance with an advanced alien race known as the Time-Keepers. In exchange for true immortality, Kang agrees to preserve the timeline and ensure the Time-Keepers’ rise to power. At that point he becomes Immortus. Ironically, his younger selves are responsible for much of the damage Immortus is tasked with undoing.
Kang has held other cover identities while masquerading as a 21st century human, including a small-town mayor named Victor Timely and a business tycoon named Mr. Gryphon.
If all this isn’t complicated enough, thanks to time travel these various incarnations of Kang basically coexist alongside each other and sometimes collude or wage war against one another. There’s even an entire team of Kangs known as the Council of Cross-Time Kangs. Picture the Citadel of Ricks in Rick and Morty, but with less alcohol and self-loathing.
Kang and the Young Avengers
There’s another notable incarnation of Kang who may well factor into the MCU at some point. The 2005 series Young Avengers introduces a team of teen heroes modeled after classic Avengers but with very different backgrounds and origin stories. The team’s founder, Iron Lad, isn’t a descendant of Tony Stark, but is actually a teen version of Nathaniel Richards from a splinter timeline. Kang attempted to travel back in time and rescue his younger self from a group of bullies who had left him hospitalized for months. Kang saves himself and gives the young Nathaniel an advanced suit of armor in the hope of hurrying along his transformation from ordinary man to Kang. But instead, young Nathaniel is horrified by his older self and travels back in time to form a new team of Avengers.
Ultimately, this version of Kang is killed and Iron Lad is forced to wipe his own memories and return to the future, restoring the proper timeline. But he leaves behind a copy of his consciousness inside his armor, which fuses with the broken remnants of Vision to form a new version of that iconic Avenger.
Kang the Conqueror Actor Jonathan Majors and Marvel Universe Connections
We know Jonathan Majors will be back as Kang in Ant-Man 3, but Kang’s love of time travel and perpetual habit of returning to threaten the Avengers all over again make him perfectly suited to become a recurring antagonist across the MCU. It doesn’t hurt that he has deep connections to so many different Marvel characters and teams. Will he also play some kind of a role in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness or the reportedly multiverse-focused Spider-Man: No Way Home? Nothing is confirmed yet, but it would seem likely.
As mentioned before, Kang may well be a descendant of Mister Fantastic or Doctor Doom. Both characters have certainly played a key role in his development as a villain. He also has connections to major characters on the cosmic side of the MCU. In the comics, Kang once competed with the Grandmaster for a chance at godlike power, and he attempted to claim the so-called “Celestial Madonna” (better known as Mantis) as his bride.
Decades after it was originally published, Marvel added more layers to the events of Fantastic Four #19 by revealing Nathaniel’s true motivations for travelling back in time and becoming Rama-Tut. He was actually seeking out a young En Sabah Nur, the mutant destined to become Apocalypse, to crown him as his heir. He never succeeded, though Apocalypse turned out to be a chip off the old block in terms of harnessing futuristic technology and seeking to dominate the world.
With Kang now firmly linked to the Fantastic Four, Avengers and X-Men, Marvel forged yet another connection in the 2015 series Uncanny Inhumans. There, Black Bolt gives his son Ahura to be fostered by Kang, seeing the time travelling tyrant as the only safe haven in a world growing steadily more hostile toward the Inhumans.
TV: Given his status as one of the greatest Avengers and Fantastic Four villains, it should come as no surprise Kang has enjoyed a healthy career outside of Marvel’s comics. His first animated TV appearance came way back in 1967’s Fantastic Four animated series, with the episode “Rama-Tut” adapting the events of Fantastic Four #19. Whether as Kang or Rama-Tut, the villain has appeared in numerous other Marvel cartoons like X-Men Evolution and Avengers: United They Stand. He even had a brief cameo as Immortus in an episode of X-Men: The Animated Series. But Kang’s most significant animated appearances have come more recently. He played a recurring role in both Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (voiced by Jonathan Adams) and Avengers Assemble (voiced by Steve Blum). He made his live-action debut in Loki.
Games: Kang has appeared in F2P games like Marvel: Avengers Alliance and Marvel: Contest of Champions, but his most notable video game appearance so far has been in 2017’s LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2. Kang (voiced by MCU veteran Peter Serafinowicz) serves as the main villain of the game and is also available as a playable character.
Halo 2’s announcement trailer influenced the design of a new gameplay feature in Halo Infinite, according to Infinite’s lead multiplayer designer Andrew Witts. Specifically, the bit where Master Chief grabs a BR-55 rifle that’s dispensed from a mechanical wall rack before jumping into space.
In a developer spotlight blog, Witts detailed his background as a game developer and revealed which parts of Halo Infinite’s design he’s most proud of, and how 343 Industries is trying to improve upon previous Halo games.
“If I’m playing multiplayer and I play it for the first time and I’ve never played a map, I don’t know where weapons are spawning,” Witts said. “We wanted to make it a better experience for players, and we invested into what we call Item Spawners. The Item Spawners are assets like Weapon Racks and Equipment Spawners.
“It’s nothing new for Halo in terms of what players expect, but we wanted to call out where weapons spawn in the world,” he continued.
“We developed these awesome Halo 2-inspired weapon racks, a callback to the Halo 2 announcement trailer where the gun comes out of the wall and Chief grabs it. We put the weapon racks on the walls because we wanted to develop a visual language around scavenging in the game so that players can make split-second decisions around where to find a weapon. Map knowledge is still an important skill to maintain but we wanted to find a way to ease the burden of developing that knowledge by creating assets that pop off the environment enough that you can make quick decisions on what item you want to fight for next.”
Witts also said that the wall-based weapon racks factor into Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer design, allowing for new weapons to be introduced more quickly.
“We wanted it to be possible to spawn a new weapon on weapon racks across all the maps versus needing to wait for that new map to be in the current playlist rotation to come in,” he said.
Witts also dived into how the development team took inspiration from various Halo levels, including Halo 2’s “Delta Halo” mission, where the UNSC drops heavy ordnance pods during your assault on the Covenant.
“We wanted people to play [Big Team Battle] and see those weapon pods incoming and hear that crunching crash in the ground with a Halo 4 impact but have the excitement of combat of the Halo 2 mission,” Witts said.
Expect to see other eras of Halo’s canon explored through multiplayer, as we recently learned that the first season will be themed around “the heroes of Reach.“
Season Four Reloaded arrives July 15th with our latest round-based Zombies map, “Mauer der Toten,” as well as plenty of new content in Multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone. Join us as we go behind the scenes with long-time Zombies developers Craig Houston, Anthony Saunders, Kevin Drew, and Mark Maestas for a deep dive into what awaits in Berlin.
One of MTV’s most famous TV shows, Cribs, is making a comeback. The network has announced it’s reviving the series with a new series of episodes, the first of which will debut on August 11.
The original Cribs premiered in 2000 and had more than 100 episodes across its various forms. The new version will keep roughly the same format as the original, apparently, with a camera crew taking a tour of a celebrity’s home and showing off how the mega-rich live their lives. Some of the celebrities in the new season will include Martha Stewart, Big Sean, JoJo Siwa, Kathy Griffin, Snooki, Marsai Martin, and Rick Ross, among others, according to the announcement at Deadline.
Cribs is not the only classic MTV show to be rebooted in recent years, as the network also greenlit new version of Behind the Music, The Real World, and Dating Naked.
“The pop culture phenomenon that revolutionized the celebrity home tour genre will invite viewers for a peek into the everyday–and unexpected–lifestyles and rituals of their favorite personalities,” reads a line from MTV’s announcement.
MTV is owned by ViacomCBS, but the report didn’t say if the new version of Cribs will also air on the network’s streaming service, Paramount Plus.
Space Jam: A New Legacy debuts on Friday, July 16, in theaters and on HBO Max.
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It’s impossible to watch Space Jam: A New Legacy without comparing it to the original 1996 Space Jam starring Michael Jordan. The sequel, which features LeBron James as its basketball star this time, makes big strides in updating the premise for 2021, but ultimately acts as a calling card for Warner Bros. properties the way Ralph Wrecks the Internet was for Disney. There’s still, however, a surprising amount of heart in this story, reminding audiences to stay true to yourself, but to keep things fun as well.
The movie takes on the same beats of the original film: an all-star basketball star is trapped in a universe where he plays a high-stakes basketball game against a team composed of, by some measure, pro-basketball players. This time, however, the stakes are more personal. The movie’s LeBron James is a multi-championship winning, social media-influencing entrepreneur/basketball player who only wants his sons to focus on basketball. His son Dominic has greater passions for video game development and feels misunderstood that his dad won’t let him be himself.
After LeBron rejects what is essentially a deep-fake pitch from Warner Bros.’ AI program, Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle), LeBron and Dom are kidnapped by the scorned Al-G and trapped in the studio’s Serververse. LeBron is challenged to a basketball game where winning means saving his son AND his likeness. However, the game of “basketball” Al-G challenges LeBron to is based on the version from Dom’s video game, where participants play with style and fun rather than with the rigid fundamentals of the sport. It’s a lesson LeBron struggles to learn throughout the film, which is more than enough time for Warner Bros. to showcase a huge chunk of its catalog of movies and TV shows.
The original Space Jam placed the weight of the movie on Michael Jordan’s back, but in this more fleshed-out (pun intended) sequel, LeBron also has an engaging supporting cast of characters that evens out LeBron’s more grounded performance. So while LeBron’s performance in Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck garnered him praise and confidence in leading the Space Jam sequel, it’s harder to see his charisma past a string of lines that are nothing more than stern, motivational mantras. LeBron’s fictionalized version is just a 2D avatar of himself, ironically becoming the very thing Al-G Rhythm wants. However, when the script allows James to lean into being Looney or playing the compassionate father, he is the ultimate showman athlete.
Removing himself from his superhero armor, Don Cheadle is an unhinged villain as the all-powerful king of the Serververse. Channeling his unnerving spoof performance as Captain Planet, Cheadle’s Al-G pits son against father with a smile on his face, manipulating their relationship all for his own gain by hacking into LeBron’s social media feeds. Al-G’s ease of control of technology outside of the Serververse is questionable, but also serves as a reminder of the larger surveillance state we actually live in.
The emotional core of the film is Cedric Joe’s Dom, who has defeat and hope written on his face as he sorts through this complicated relationship with his father. He avoids tropes of being either a jock or a tech fanatic by being both; he could be great at basketball, but his face lights up when he talks about his true passions in tech. It’s surprising, and a little hard to believe at times, that LeBron wouldn’t encourage his son to be the best in anything he wanted to do.
There’s no denying that the movie is visually exciting, inviting comparisons to Warner Bros.’ similarly flashy Ready Player One. The movie seamlessly transitions through different styles, from Looney Tunes to Bruce Timm to classic Ben Day comic book styles, while also mixing in live-action modern and Old Hollywood film aesthetics. The most impressive feat of the sequel is now incorporating video game design as a form of entertainment, and the CGI of the digital/video game space is impressive. The Goon Squad is a team of elemental monster/human hybrids, favoring to show more physical resemblance to the pro-basketball players over the extended cameos in the 1996 movie. The worlds and characters also move smoothly within these dimensions, with only a few of the Looney Tuners looking a bit off. (Here’s looking at you, Bugs.) The background live-action characters we see at the game, however, are distracting and underwhelming. It might have been better just to digitally insert actual movie characters, instead of seeing unsettling Halloween costume versions of Pennywise cheering alongside White Walkers and Droogs.
And yet, for all the spectacle, our Looney Tunes characters are sidelined and wasted in this sequel. Even Zendaya’s buzzy casting as Lola Bunny gets lost when you have dragons and the exciting Goon Squad filling every second in the Serververse. As Warner Bros. faces tougher competition than it used to — with Disney and Pixar’s continuous output, the rise of adult-oriented animation, and anime becoming more accessible and popular in the U.S. — it feels more like a passing of the torch. And that’s a little odd, considering the Looney Tunes brand has been revived on HBO Max with new episodes and if anything, this should serve as a revival of the franchise for new audiences, or even a reminder for old fans.
Hello IGN readers — I’m the new Community Lead for IGN, Jada Griffin. You may have seen me on NVC as well as commenting and moderating across Twitch and Youtube during E3 last few weeks. I wanted to take some time today to introduce myself as your point of contact to the IGN Team. To kick things off, a bit about myself and what I like to do and play. In my past life, I worked as a journalist covering everything you frequently see under the IGN content umbrella. I have led community efforts, content teams, and worked directly with game developers in a business development capacity for various companies like FANDOM. While I enjoyed these areas I worked in, I inevitably found myself missing the connections I made when working closely with the communities connected to those industries. All of this brings me to this exciting new opportunity at IGN.
I’m sure you all might want to know more about what kind of gamer I am, too. I play just about everything, so you can expect to see me across IGN in various discussions, podcasts, and live streams discussing easter eggs, optimized builds and loadouts, and probably my latest 100% game completion. A few of my favorite games include Apex Legends, Monster Hunter, Halo, LoL, God of War, Final Fantasy, and — my favorite franchise of all time — The Legend of Zelda. I could spend my entire introduction just talking about these games and others that have found their way into my list of all-time favorites. Instead, I would like to spend some time talking about my goals, intentions, and hopes for the future of the IGN community.
Games and entertainment (and tech and science, and the other topics IGN is increasingly exploring based on our audience’s interests) will always be topics that incite heated discussions of differing views. These viewpoints are born of our collective passion for the things we all enjoy. When we connect with games, characters, movies, etc, we often forge bonds with them. They sometimes then become larger than life itself and take on a greater personal meaning. This passion empowers communities and is one of the things I want to begin highlighting.
While many will probably agree with the fact that since its launch Final Fantasy VII has been the benchmark for what a traditional FF game should be, my aim is to have our community be one that ensures fans of FF can champion their favorite and share their point of view without the fear of toxicity.
What to Expect
Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be releasing blog posts like this to speak to various topics to further strengthen the connection between the IGN staff and our community. One of the first posts you can expect will be around subjects like our updated guidelines for communicating within the IGN community. Other topics will include discussions around how we approach reviews, moderation, upcoming initiatives, and updates to our existing formats and content.
Now, I cannot speak for what has transpired within the IGN community in the past. However, I can address the steps we will be taking to put our best efforts into making this already great community even better, this will be through feedback surveys, Discord AMA’s, chatting regularly with viewers during streams, and more. I hope being transparent with you all about our practices, goals, and initiatives fosters and nurtures our relationship.
This is where the community comes in. I am looking for your input and feedback. I’m not here to just moderate comments, I’m here for the bigger picture. This is a two-way street, and I’d like to be a resource to the community so we can make the best decisions possible to help you feel more connected to us and our work. This is going to work best with your input and assistance, with it we can make the community an even more vibrant, diverse, and inclusive space for everyone. There will be more options in the future for putting forward your suggestions but for now, the comments section of this post is a great place to start!.
I look forward to working with you.
“Be Brave Enough to be Kind and Wise enough to continue learning how to be both”
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Jada Griffin is IGN’s Community Lead. If she’s not engaging with users here, chances are she’s developing her own games, maxing the Luck stat in her favorite games, or challenging her D&D players with Intense combat or masterful puzzles. You can follow her on Twitter @Jada_Rina.
Anyone that’s played The Last of Us Part II knows that there is a sequence while playing as Abby that sees her chase after Tommy. They also know that you don’t actually make it to Tommy and defeat them.
However, news popped last week that if you go too fast during this specific sequence, you can actually catch up to Tommy and kill him, as reported by Kotaku. This article spurred TLOU2 technical designer Asher Einhorn to create a lengthy thread on Twitter yesterday to explain how difficult it was to design this chase.
This sequence actually started off as a systemic prototype for a sniper enemy I made way back in 2016. This person was going to live in a number of levels and they would reposition if they saw you too close to them.
As noted by Eurogamer, Einhorn says that the Tommy chase in TLOU2 started as a sniper prototype he started working on in 2016 before the studio opted to turn this sequence into a boss fight. TLOU2 director Neil Druckmann decided that Tommy should be the boss.
“Tommy wasn’t going to die in this sequence, so we had the extremely difficult challenge of creating a boss fight where you weren’t going to win, AND one where you couldn’t even shoot him,” Einhorn said.
Einhorn said the team knew that if players shot at Tommy and he didn’t die, people would say he has “plot armor,” thus ruining the tension, so the team had a challenge before them: creating a boss fight where you aren’t supposed to win, despite feeling like you can.
So with that, I could focus more on the scripting. This whole sequence is pretty custom, and Tommy has a controller in each beat that will kill the player when out of bounds and punish them if they try to get a shot off at him.
Einhorn continued and said that it was important to the team to make the fight feel fair, which is why “Tommy gets into position before you can get to a good vantage point…so that you can’t ever really discover that Tommy is essentially invincible [as] he will shoot you pretty much as soon as you try to aim at him.”
Einhorn’s thread talks about how the team ultimately decided to create a sequence that linearly leads you forward, using destructible objects to make Tommy feel legitimately dangerous until Abby reaches the terminal lobby.
This next section was, to be blunt, a fucking huge pain in the ass to make work, but actually a lot of fun to do. I love doing this stuff. We wanted it to feel like you were just catching up to Tommy, that you almost had him, and that it was your brazenness that gets Manny killed pic.twitter.com/2y59m50fjE
Einhorn says that ultimately, he feels the sequence “suffers a little because it’s just not long enough to let the beat breathe.”
“I think it needed to be a much larger space, with more forced route crossing and zigzagging and way way more destructible things for Tommy to hit as he shoots you,” one of Einhorn’s final tweets in the thread reads. “It’s not quite the matrix lobby fight I wanted it to be, but I hope it’s still cool.”
“I was thinking about this sequence a lot post-launch because it was just SO much work but that work isn’t especially noticeable,” they continued. “We’re trying to prevent the player from doing something they’ve done all game so far and have it not be frustrating and that was SO hard. But ultimately, when you play it, you don’t FEEL the effort that’s been put in like you would with a bigger dramatic set-piece.”
Google is adding a new way for developers partnered with its streaming service Stadia to make income through Stadia’s Pro subscribers. According to an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, 70% of all monthly revenue generated by Pro subscriptions will be split between developers based on how many “session days” players have spent on a developer’s games.
Stadia Pro gives subscribers access to a library of streamable games for a monthly fee, similar to other services like Xbox Game Pass. One user playing a game once a day counts as a “session day.” However, if they play a game twice in one day, that’s still only one “session day.”
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Now Playing: The Rise And Fall Of Stadia Games And Entertainment
In the same interview, Google also said that it will introduce a limited 85/15 revenue split for titles sold individually on the Stadia Store starting October 1 until the end of 2023. The company will also introduce an affiliate marketing program for Stadia Pro partners in the first half of 2022. In an interview earlier this year with GamesIndustry.biz, Stadia’s developer marketing lead Nate Ahearn said that the service is “alive and well.”
Google Stadia has had a rough 2021, especially after the company laid off all of its internal game developers back in February. However, Google has repeatedly announced that the service has more than 100 games coming later this year. However, with the introduction of Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming streaming service through Xbox Game Pass, there’s a lot more competition in the cloud gaming space than there used to be. Though Xbox Cloud Gaming is still in beta, it’s been widely available on iOS and PC since late June.
Since launching, Chivalry 2 has been plagued with a number of bugs, most of which relate to its party system on PC. Developer Torn Banner Studios has been working on a massive patch to address these issues, as well as some others, including the game’s performance on Xbox Series S consoles. However, the patch has been delayed due to issues found in its final stage of quality assurance verification.
According to a post on Chivalry 2’s site, the problems in question are directly related to the game’s matchmaking systems. While the patch would have fixed a number of issues with Chivalry 2’s multiplayer for most players, issues are present that “would have broken the matchmaking process for a portion of the population.” To spare that group of players from a below-standard experience, Chivalry 2’s 2.0.1 patch was delayed.
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Torn Banner Studios also addressed why it wouldn’t simply release a hotfix for Chivalry 2 that would fix the game’s party system issues on PC. According to the developer, “a hotfix cannot be prepared due to the complex nature of how these patches are worked on internally (also known as branches that separate builds live on).”
Despite its issues, Torn Banner Studios is still set on releasing the 2.0.1 patch for Chivalry 2 this month.
Along with the upcoming patch, more content is also coming to Chivalry 2 soon. A new map, titled Galencourt, was revealed last month and will have players fight through the immaculate halls of an Agathian castle. A release date for the new map has not been revealed yet.
