After years of post-launch DLC and support, Forza Horizon 4 is getting its final batch of new content in its next update, at least for a while.
Senior producer Tom Butcher discussed plans for Forza Horizon 4 in the latest Forza Monthly show (first spotted by Video Game Chronicle), detailing how the development team is shifting focus to Forza Horizon 5.
“With Forza Horizon 5’s release being our priority over the next few months, we’ve made some changes to Forza Horizon 4’s monthly series update,” Butcher said. “So starting with Series update 38, players who know the game well will start to see the return of content from Series 7 to 32. Think of it a bit like a mixtape, featuring the return of some of your favorite content combined with recently added new features”.
Butcher added that developer Playground isn’t planning on adding any new cars or features over “the next few months.”
“You should have a lot of fun revisiting these moments and seeing how you handle them the second time around,” Butcher said. “And obviously with all of our recent Series updates, you’ll have photo challenges, rewards, Forzathon Shop, and backstage voting all going on as well as usual.”
Forza Horizon 4 will still receive updates in the future, with Butcher stating they’ll be focused on making sure the game “continues to be a fun experience,” but said Playground isn’t ready to discuss details.
Forza Horizon 4 received an upgrade for Xbox Series X and S back during console launch, allowing players to hit 4K 60 FPS on Series X and 1080p 60 FPS on Series S.
Actor Shamier Anderson and the official John Wick Twitter account revealed that John Wick 4 has started filming, a little less than a year from when the movie releases. The fourth John Wick film featuring Keanu Reeves as an extremely competent assassin hits theaters on May 24, 2022.
Anderson was confirmed for John Wick 4 on June 4, but his role has been kept a secret. Rina Sawayama–British pop star–and Donnie Yen are part of the cast as well, with similar mystery around what characters they’ll assume in the movie.
John Wick 3 featured the series’ eponymous hero dealing with the consequences of murdering the High Table crime lord Santino D’Antonio at the New York Continental Hotel, neutral territory where fellow assassins are supposed to not kill each other. The film ends with Wick agreeing with the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) that the High Table is, to put it lightly, highly annoying. While John Wick 4’s plot has been kept under lock and key, it’s likely that the fourth installment will deal with the third movie’s loose ends, namely the conflict between Wick and the High Table.
John Wick 4 features new writers–Michael Finch and Shay Hatten–making it the first John Wick movie not to include writer and creator Derek Kolstad.
According to an interview with Collider, Kolstad wasn’t asked to return to the John Wick franchise. “No, it wasn’t my decision. When you think of the, contractually, of these things, the third one I shared the credit with any number of people, they didn’t have to come back to me, and so they didn’t,” Kolstad said.
Hatten was a writer for John Wick 3, while Finch’s past projects include Predators, American Assassin, and Hitman: Agent 47.
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Valve’s multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2, hit PC 14 years ago and despite its age, it just broke its own all-time concurrent players record on Steam.
This news comes by way of Eurogamer, which caught that over the weekend the game had reached a new concurrent players high of 151,253 players. The previous record was held by the 147,360 players that played the game last December.
Eurogamer published its piece on this new record over the weekend where it saw a concurrent player count of 141,741. At the time of this writing, that number is 118,626 and it’s easy to imagine that the number might be lower at the moment due to it being a Monday.
As for why Team Fortress 2 is bigger than ever, the answer likely stems from a recent update that brought a brand new Summer 2021 Cosmetic Case to the game. This case is Crate Series #132 and it includes 18 community-contributed items and six community-made Unusual effects, according to Eurogamer.
Team Fortress 2’s Snakewater map also received some tweaks recently that improved general movement on the map and prevented clipping from happening. Eurogamer suspects these improvements came at the cost of the map’s Kitchen area, as it’s no longer there. They report this update should “make bot behavior slightly less annoying,” too.
There are plenty of games out there that eclipse Team Fortress 2’s new personal record of 151,253 such as Valve’s own Dota 2 (1,291,328), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1,305,714), or even Left 4 Dead 2 (161,590), but for a game that came out in 2007, it’s doing quite well. Bravo, Team Fortress 2.
The Stanley Cup Finals are set to begin this evening, June 28, with the Montreal Canadiens taking on the Tampa Bay Lightning. EA Sports has now released the results of its simulation of the final series, choosing Montreal to win in seven games.
According to the simulation, which was conducted using NHL 21, the Canadiens will take Game 1 by a close score of 1-0 before dropping Game 2 by getting blown out 1-5. The Canadiens will then win two in a row before dropping the next two as the Lightning force a Game 7. With the series tied three games to three, the Finals heads to a decisive Game 7 where the Canadiens topple the Lightning by a score of 4-2 to hoist Lord Stanley’s trophy.
The Canadiens already have the most Stanley Cup wins in NHL history, and their legendary status will only grow further this year if EA’s simulation is correct.
NHL 22 hasn’t been announced yet, but EA Sports normally reveals the new game in June or July before releasing it later in the year. If that pattern holds, we should hear about the game anytime now, or perhaps at EA Play Live in July.
Fans are buzzing after the season post-credit scene for Marvel’s WandaVision appears to have been altered. But did Marvel sneak in an extra teaser for future Marvel projects?
Eagle-eyed fans noticed that certain details about the WandaVision post-credit scene where after Wanda leaves Westview and goes to a secluded cabin in the woods — looks a bit different.
There are more trees, and a duck that has been edited out digitally, but some fans were convinced that there was actually a Doctor Strange easter egg added in as well.
The post-credit scene begins with a shot of the secluded forest Wanda has hidden away in. But in the left corner of the screen is a weird invisible blob that kind of looks like a human figure descending towards Wanda’s cabin.
Some fans have taken this to be a secret Doctor Strange appearance that was edited in months after the WandaVision season finale. As you may recall, the non-appearance of Doctor Strange was one of the biggest disappointments for fans, even after WandaVision star Paul Bettany teased a big cameo.
Was this new addition to the post-credit scene a make-good from Marvel to disappointed fans? Not so fast. One filmmaker on Reddit has seemingly found a more benign explanation for the human-shaped blob.
An Editing Mistake
User u/Cinephobe has published a short video on Reddit that suggests that Marvel did appear to add more trees and remove some other bits of scenery to the post-credit scene, but the mysterious Doctor Strange-shaped blob is in fact another scenery edit gone awry.
Cinephobe says that there is a light in the original scene that is distracting. Marvel’s editors seemed to notice this light as well and digitally removed it as part of the wider scenery changes made to the environment.
However, this edit was not removed from the whole scene, so it created this tracking mirage that is easily mistaken for an invisible cloaked figure descending to Wanda’s cabin.
What About the New Credit?
Another change that convinced fans there is a new Doctor Strange cameo is actually in the credits themselves. Doctor Strange composer Michael Giacchino has been added to the list of composers for the series, and his name was not there during the original airing of WandaVision.
But IGN’s Joshua Yehl spoke with WandaVision director Matt Shakman and received confirmation that the Doctor Strange theme was used in the post-credits scene. Giacchino was uncredited during the original airing, presumably to prevent spoilers while the show was live. It seems now that the series has wrapped Marvel has added the proper composer credit.
After the backlash against extreme fan theories that suggested characters like Magneto and Doctor Strange would make cameos, it would be weird for Disney to stoke those flames further with newly altered post-credit scenes.
And while creators like George Lucas have tinkered extensively with their movies after the release, it seems the post-credit changes for WandaVision are more innocuous.
One of the big surprises of E3 2021 was Microsoft’s announcement of Forza Horizon 5. Ahead of that game’s release, it appears that new development for Forza Horizon 4 is being wound down: there won’t be any more new cars or features coming to it.
In Playground Games’ Forza Monthly livestream for this month, the studio announced that it will no longer be adding vehicles or features to Forza Horizon 4 after several years of consistent live-game support for it. Due to most of the employees shifting their full attention over to Forza Horizon 5, seasonal updates will transition to feature remixed sets of past seasons’ content.
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“So starting with Series update 38, players who know the game well will start to see the return of content from Series 7 to 32,” senior producer Tom Butcher explained. “Think of it a bit like a mix tape, featuring the return of some of your favorite content combined with recently added new features.”
In addition to sharing this development update on Forza Horizon 4, the studio also revealed some info on what to expect for Forza Horizon 5’s performance on the current generation. The default on Xbox Series X is 4K resolution at 30fps, while the Xbox Series S will run at 1080p 60fps. Both versions will have a performance mode option to turn up the framerate to 60fps, although this mode comes with a reduction in certain graphics features.
Forza Horizon 5 will be released on November 9 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and it’ll take place in Mexico. The developer has stated that it will be the biggest and most diverse game in the series, and preorders are up now. As with all Microsoft first-party games, it’ll also be available for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. If you’re not already signed up for Game Pass, be sure to take advantage of a limited-time offer that gets you your first three months for $1.
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Even years after George Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, new changes continue to be made to the original trilogy. The latest tweak? Boba Fett’s ship is apparently no longer called Slave 1.
Star Wars fans noticed the change thanks to the announcement of a new Mandalorian-themed LEGO set featuring the iconic vehicle. Rather than calling it Slave 1, the set is simply named “Boba Fett’s Starship.”
“Everybody is,” said Frederiksen. “It’s probably not something which has been announced publicly but it is just something that Disney doesn’t want to use any more.”
Based on his comments, it would seem Disney is uncomfortable with the term “slave” being associated with one of the most popular Star Wars characters. Though Boba Fett has traditionally been portrayed as a villain in the franchise, his more heroic turn in The Mandalorian: Season 2 may have something to do with this change. We’ll have to see whether or not the ship’s name comes up in the spinoff series The Book of Boba Fett.
It’s also worth remembering that this doesn’t necessarily mean the ship’s name has changed in the Star Wars universe. Disney could be keeping the Slave 1 title as part of the official canon, but will refrain from using the branding on any all-ages merchandise. That would be similar to Marvel’s approach to the X-Men villain Holocaust, who is normally renamed “Nemesis” whenever an action figure is released.
Nor would this be the first case of Disney removing a controversial Star Wars element from its merchandising empire. In 2015, we learned Disney was phasing out the use of the “Slave Leia” costume from Return of the Jedi.
Do you think Disney made the right call here? Do you have any ideas for a new permanent name for the Slave 1? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is getting free Xbox Series X|S and PS5 enhancements on July 6. The trailer for the upgrade revealed that it will enhance the game’s visuals, playing in 4K resolution at 60fps. According to publisher Focus Home Interactive, the upgrade goes beyond visual enhancements–it takes advantage of current gen tech, including the PS5’s DualSense controller.
“We can say that [A Plague Tale: Innocence] will feature faster load times, audio enhancement, DualSense features (i.e. haptic rumble sync with 3D sound and adaptive triggers), and cross progression,” Focus Home Interactive PR strategist Julie Carneiro told GameSpot via email.
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Given that A Plague Tale: Innocence sees you fleeing from, skirting around, and confronting huge waves of rats, I’m most curious (and terrified) to experience how developer Asobo Studio has used the DualSense’s haptic rumble and 3D sound.
Alongside the upgrade, A Plague Tale: Innocence is finally coming to Switch, though only through cloud streaming. Carneiro said that A Plague Tale: Innocence will run at 30fps on Switch and “if you have a good connection,” the resolution can reach 1080p while docked.
A Plague Tale: Innocence was one of GameSpot’s Best Games of 2019. The game captures sibling love remarkably well, putting you in the shoes of Amicia, a noble girl who must take care of her younger brother Hugo as the two try to survive 1348 France. On their journey, the two will come face-to-face with a country ravaged by the Hundreds Years’ War, the French Inquisition, and the bubonic plague, the latter of which has been personified into a literal horde of ravenous rats.
A sequel for A Plague Tale: Innocence is coming in 2022. Called A Plague Tale: Requiem, it will launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, and Switch (via cloud-streaming).
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Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Amazon Studios are teaming up for a new holiday movie that could incorporate some kind of new way to reach “multiple industries and businesses.” The film is called Red One, and it’s written by Fast and Furious writer Chris Morgan.
Amazon said in an announcement that Red One is a “globe-trotting, four-quadrant action-adventure comedy, imagining a whole new universe to explore within the holiday genre.”
Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Red One is “Santa-centric,” even though Amazon’s own announcement did not mention Santa Claus by name. No director has become attached to the movie at this stage.
Perhaps what’s most notable and unique about Red One is how it’s apparently trying to be more than a movie. Amazon and production company Seven Bucks said in a statement that that Red One represents a “unique concept” for a movie that could make it not only a “tentpole film” but also a project that “could reach beyond entertainment across multiple industries and businesses.”
What that means, exactly, remains to be seen. But THR’s sources said “the businesses could include the gift-giving enterprises that thrive during the holiday season (and that of course, includes Amazon and Amazon Prime).”
Red One is expected to film in 2022 before debuting on Amazon Prime during holiday 2023.
The Rock has a number of upcoming projects for 2021, including the Disney movie Jungle Cruise with Emily Blunt and the Netflix action movie Red Notice. In 2022, he’ll appear in the lead role of the DC movie Black Adam.
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Sea of Thieves is often at its best when it devolves into chaos. After raiding a skeleton ship and loading up your brig with loot, suddenly, a player galleon appears from behind an island, turning its broadside cannons in your direction for a sneak attack. Returning fire, repairing your ship, and desperately turning your sails to make an escape–or firing a crewmate over to the enemy to lay waste to them and steal their stuff–are the moments that make Rare’s pirate adventure live game so memorable.
But don’t discount Rare’s ability to make deep, brainy story content, either. Since its launch, Sea of Thieves has come to encompass Tall Tales, lengthy voyages centered on solving riddles and learning about non-player characters that make up the game’s lore. It’s in this more directed, narrative-driven realm that the game’s latest expansion, A Pirate’s Life, lies as well. Tying in with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise, the expansion provides new stories to uncover that are both fairly delightful for fans of the films and the theme park attraction that spawned them, as well as big, involved new Sea of Thieves locations to explore.
A Pirate’s Life adds a lot to Sea of Thieves, expanding on its sandbox with new enemies and a new weapon, while providing several hours of story content that’s deep enough for experienced players to enjoy and approachable enough for newbies excited to sail the seas with Jack Sparrow. Though it’s held back occasionally by bugs and relies on some of Sea of Thieves’ weaker elements, like hitchy platforming, the expansion is a great excuse to man the helm of a pirate vessel.
Core to A Pirate’s Life are five new Tall Tales stories, which follow Pirates of the Caribbean mainstay Jack Sparrow and his crew. Through some adventuring, the movie characters have found their way into the weird and mystical video game world, but they’ve been chased there by Davy Jones, the magical Pirates of the Caribbean villain. Jones wants to take control of the Sea of Thieves, so you need to save Jack from the realm of the dead (called the Sea of the Damned), figure out Jones’ plans, and ultimately send the squid-faced villain back to where he belongs to preserve the ultimate freedom of the pirate life.
Playing through those five stories takes you to the Sea of the Damned itself, a new location full of puzzles and secrets, and the Sunken Kingdom, a colorful underwater realm. The Tall Tales themselves are generally pretty linear story levels, but like Sea of Thieves’ other Tall Tales, they do a great job of challenging you to explore the environment, solve puzzles, and navigate imaginative areas. In the first, for instance, you’ll need to rescue the head of an undead, skeletal pirate captain, and you can uncover secrets throughout the area by placing his head on skeleton bodies so he can take control of them.
Of course, this is a Pirates of the Caribbean story, so you’ll spend a lot of the duration encountering various movie characters. Jack Sparrow is around the most, and he’s actually a pretty fun addition to the game, bringing a lot of humor and occasionally even helping you out in fights against the various enemies and creatures Davy Jones sends to stop you.
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Sparrow’s presence helps meld A Pirate’s Life’s Disney inspirations with Sea of Thieves’ foundation, which helps to make sure the content doesn’t feel like an unwarranted digression into another franchise. He’s the same funny, quirky character from the movies, but he’s also pretty useful at some key moments, even joining your crew for a while toward the end of the Tall Tales series. He’s around just enough to make this feel like a Pirates of the Caribbean story, while also working as a fitting Sea of Thieves story. That’s a balance that could have been tough to find, but Rare does a great job of mixing the two properties together to make for a fun diversion from your usual pirate escapades.
A Pirate’s Life is also a great entry point for new players. Because the Tall Tales mostly take place off the beaten path or in their own instances, you’re unlikely to run into other players who might try to steal your stuff, sink your boat, or otherwise hassle you. The stakes are also pretty low–any time you die, you just respawn again in the same place in the Tall Tales story (an appreciated change from how the rest of the game handles dying, which either puts you on your ship or, if it sinks, in a nearby outpost). That makes this content pretty great for just getting started in Sea of Thieves, or for lone players who want to venture into the game without a crew, but don’t like the risk of losing a ton of progress to other players.
The drawback is that A Pirate’s Life doesn’t really feel like the rest of Sea of Thieves; it’s more of its own separate thing. In the rest of Rare’s game, sailing around requires constant vigilance as you scope for other pirates who could potentially decide to engage you in battle (or, in somewhat rarer cases, prove friendly). The openness of the game and randomness afforded by other players are what make Sea of Thieves so fun and unique. A Pirate’s Life doesn’t really include that aspect; while there are side puzzles to solve and secrets to uncover, the stories are more straightforward and traditional video game fare. You’ll move through distinct levels on a specific path, and while there are no waypoints leading you, there’s still only one real way forward.
So entering Sea of Thieves for the first time through A Pirate’s Life isn’t quite giving you a taste of the core experience, or the taste it’s giving you is incomplete without other players. That can be good and bad, since A Pirate’s Life eases you into the water rather than shoving you off the plank, but it can also give a skewed perception of what the game is. And if you’re looking for more Tall Tales that have you sailing all over the Sea of Thieves, driven by obscure clues and exploring the world you already know, you’re going to be disappointed; these levels are large and complete in their own right, but they’re decidedly more self-contained.
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The Tall Tales for A Pirate’s Life are also a bit on the buggy side at launch, although Rare has already released a patch to deal with some of those issues. It’s also easy to get lost and confused in the big levels, or to experience game-affecting oddities like falling from high places and finding yourself stuck behind locked doors you already opened. During a boss fight in the second Tall Tale, I used a pulley system to lift a shipwreck high in the air to level its cannons against my foe–but mid-fight, I got knocked off the deck and killed. When I loaded back in, the boat was out of position and couldn’t be moved, but the fight continued, with cannonballs now shooting straight up in the air and passing through the boss’s body. The glitch subsided a few deaths later, but for a while there, the fight was a mess that couldn’t be finished.
I played through all five Tall Tales alone and didn’t encounter any game-breaking issues, although the experience was somewhat marred by the aforementioned troubles and checkpoints not loading correctly. It’s also easy to get lost thanks to Sea of Thieves’ lack of guidance–something that makes the game compelling when you’re out in its full world, but which can be annoying when you’re stuck in a room trying to figure out where the game expects you to go next.
Some glitchy issues aside, A Pirate’s Life’s Tall Tales are pretty fun to play, even alone. They do feel a bit easy and low-stakes at times, which undercuts the story Rare is trying to tell of a world-threatening villain. But it’s nice to have something you can jump into that’s fun to play but doesn’t involve the potential stresses of Sea of Thieves’ usual risk-reward nature.
Apart from the new stories, the other upshot of A Pirate’s Life is the way it reinvigorates the rest of the game. The Tall Tales you’ll play introduce a bunch of new enemies. On land, there are the three kinds of creatures called ocean crawlers–a giant armored crab, a poisonous clam monster, and an electric eel enemy. All three require distinct strategies to defeat, and they can synergize their abilities to add additional challenge. There are also new phantom pirates that can disappear and reappear to deal massive damage, and undersea sirens who make jumping off your boat all the more treacherous. To help you deal with these threats, you can find a new item called the Trident of Dark Tides, which charges up to fire a bubble of energy that can be devastating to AI enemies and other players alike.
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These additions are all part of the stories of the expansion’s Tall Tales, but you don’t need to play the stories to experience them–they’re also out in the rest of Sea of Thieves as well, and they inject some welcome variety into the sandbox. For most of the game’s life, players have been fighting different kinds of skeleton pirates, all of which do battle in more or less the same way, so throwing in some new creatures livens things up quite a bit. And if you can find it in the world, the Trident of Dark Tides also puts a new weapon in your arsenal, creating new strategies in combat. It all adds a little more depth to Sea of Thieves to help make the game continue to feel like it’s evolving all the time.
A Pirate’s Life is a big, fun addition to Sea of Thieves that brings a lot of new content, is full of fun elements for Disney Pirates fans, and refreshes the rest of the game with smart additions. It doesn’t quite represent the best of what Sea of Thieves is or has to offer, but this is still a great excuse to hoist the pirate flag for the first time, and offers a new horizon to explore for long-time scalawags.
