Zack Snyder has never watched the version of Justice League released in 2017, despite being credited as its director. And for his re-cut of the film, he’s not being paid anything.
In a new feature from Vanity Fair, Zack Snyder reveals that his wife, Deborah Snyder, recommended that he not watch the final version of Justice League. That version had been partially re-shot and edited by Joss Whedon, who took over directorial duties when Snyder left the project following the death of his daughter.
“They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Snyder said, referring to a time when his wife, along with executive producer Christopher Nolan, had just seen the Whedon’s final cut of Justice League. Deborah Snyder said that she knew the version would “break his heart”.
Now, just weeks away from Snyder releasing his own version of Justice League, it has been revealed that Warner Bros. are not paying the director for his work. “I’m not getting paid,” Snyder told Vanity Fair. He claims that going without a wage has meant he has held onto creative control of the project. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”
Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida appeared this week on the Tokyo FM radio show One Morning, where he briefly talked about the development of the upcoming game. Much like Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy VII Remake, the latest chapter in Square Enix’s long-running RPG series will be more “action-oriented,” but not at the expense of its story.
“Final Fantasy XVI is quite action-oriented. It’s a Final Fantasy featuring story and action,” Yoshida said during the radio show as translated by Gematsu. “We really want players to enjoy the story, so we’re preparing a mode for players who want to focus on story. Since we have quite the substantial support actions, we’re of course preparing something easy to operate and smooth to play.”
As for the actual storyline, Yoshida hinted at a tale of hardship that adults could relate to, as he felt that certain challenges could only be understood by an older generation that had experienced “the good and bad of reality.”
“I’m from the generation that has been playing the Final Fantasy series from the first game in real-time. I’m almost in my 50s,” Yoshida said. “I believe there are certain hardships that are experienced when becoming an adult, so I want to make the main theme of this game something that those who grew up playing Final Fantasy and understand reality can still enjoy, get something out of, and think about.”
Development on Final Fantasy XVI appears to be going smoothly, as its reveal at last year’s PlayStation 5 showcase had plenty of gameplay footage to show off. In a new recruitment page for Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix mentioned that basic development and scenario production had already wrapped up, with the team seeking new recruits to work on specific set-pieces using large-scale resources.
Final Fantasy XVI will once again launch exclusively on PS5 thanks to a timed-exclusivity deal between Sony and Square Enix. A PC release was briefly listed during the reveal trailer but it was removed shortly after.
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The open-world multiplayer survival RPG Valheim is tearing up the charts right now, both in terms of players and sales, and now the developer has said the early results for the game are “mind-blowing” and have far exceeded the studio’s expectations.
Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Törnqvist told PC Gamer that Valheim’s success is “mind-blowing” and “really awesome.” He also thanked fans for their support so far.
Törnqvist told the site that his team believed that Valheim would sell enough copies to “sustain” the studio, but it has far exceeded that. At the time the interview was conducted, Valheim reached 2 million copies sold, a figure that Törnqvist said he “could never have guessed.” The game is now up to 3 million copies sold, and with its peak concurrent user figure recently passing 500,000, another sales milestone might not be far off.
Valheim is published by Goat Simulator studio Coffee Stain’s new publishing group, which is headed up by Sebastian Eriksson. He told the site that the sales results for Valheim so far are “quite incredible” and “very humbling.”
“We were also fairly optimistic, or I would say very optimistic, in terms of how the game would perform. But this is above and beyond all of our wildest imaginations,” Eriksson said.
Valheim was developed by a team of just five people, but Törnqvist confirmed in the interview that Iron Gate plans to expand. “We will hire some people, absolutely,” he said. The developer said the team has reached its limit of what it can do as a five-person studio.
To help you get started in Valheim, we’ve rounded up someValheim beginner tips. These include the tips you need to build, repair, improve your skills, and acquire more resources. You might also be interested in ourValheim armor guideto help you outfit your character to survive.
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A fan project that reverse-engineered the source code of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City has been taken down, seemingly by Rockstar’s parent company.
You can see the project in action in this YouTube showcase video, which shows all of the improvements brought to the game due to the team’s reverse-engineering efforts over many years, such as fully-featured debug menus and modernized video settings. As reported by Eurogamer, accessing the repository for Re3 or ReVC on GitHub will now lead users to a “Repository unavailable for DMCA takedown” page.
The DMCA itself is available to read here, which appears to come from the copyright holder Take-Two Interactive Software, the parent company of Rockstar Games. The project would have allowed fans to thoroughly mod the game and port it to various platforms, now that the game was fully decompiled and understood.
The project lead told Eurogamer that the DMCA could be from a troll, but it was “better to assume it was real” going forward. Asked about the move by IGN, Rockstar declined to comment.
Legendary French DJ duo, Daft Punk – who created four hit studio albums, wrote the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy, and appeared in DJ Hero – have announced that they have broken up.
The duo, made up of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced the news in a video called Epilogue (in which one of the pair quite literally self-destructs), and confirmed the news to Pitchfork, giving no reason for the split. The duo have almost always worn robot-like headgear in public appearances
The duo, who spanned pop, dance, house and more, released the likes of ‘Da Funk’, ‘Robot Rock’, ‘Around the World’, ‘One More Time’, and ‘Get Lucky’, and release four studio albums. 2001 album Discovery was accompanied by an anime movie, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, which used the entirety of the album as a soundtrack.
Daft Punk went onto write the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy, which we awarded a 9/10 review, saying it did “an excellent job crafting a triumphant yet measured score that captures the spirit of the Tron world exceptionally well.” Fortnite just released a number of crossover items based on Tron.
In the world of video games, Daft Punk appeared in 2009’s DJ Hero, and offered up 11 original mixes featuring their music. I also can’t help but think that Insomniac might have been a little bit inspired by Daft Punk’s image when making the coolest costume in Spider-Man: Miles Morales:
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
The latest gaming sensation, the multiplayer survival game Valheim, continues to grow in popularity. The game just recently surpassed 500,000 concurrent players on Steam, which makes it among the platform’s most popular games ever.
Only Dota 2 (619,000) and CS: GO (1 million) had higher peak concurrent player numbers for February 22, but those games are free-to-play whereas Valheim is a paid game. These numbers came directly from Steam’s own public data and statistics page.
According to IGN, Valheim now holds the record for most concurrent players on Steam for a survival game and the fifth-most concurrent players for any game on the platform of all time. Only CS: GO, PUBG, Dota 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 have reportedly had more concurrent players.
Developer Iron Gate–a team of five people–announced just recently that Valheim had reached 3 million copies sold, up from 2 million just days earlier. Signs like extremely high concurrent player numbers point to even greater sales success in the future.
If you’re struggling early on trying to survive in Valheim, we’ve rounded up some Valheim beginner tips that should help you out. These include the tips you need to build, repair, improve your skills, and acquire more resources. You might also be interested in our Valheim armor guide to help you outfit your character to survive.
The Netflix release date for Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead has been revealed in a new zombie-infected poster.
The official Army of the Dead poster, shared by Snyder on Twitter, confirmed that the zombie heist movie will breakout onto Netflix on May 21. For now, though, the poster keeps the living dead crushed behind a vault door. We’re expecting to get a peek behind that door later this week, as the director announced that the movie will be getting its first teaser on February 25.
Image credit: Netflix
Set in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Army of the Dead gives rise to a group of mercenaries who infiltrate a quarantine zone to raid a casino during a zombie outbreak. The movie stars Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Garret Dillahunt, Raúl Castillo, Omari Hardwick, Tig Notaro, Nora Arnezeder, Matthias Schweighöfer, Samantha Win, Theo Rossi, Huma Qureshi, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Richard Cetrone.
The Snyder-directed flick appeared in Netflix’s sizzle reel for 2021 at the start of the year, with the streaming giant promising to release at least one new movie a week throughout 2021 for a total of at least 70. The titles on the forthcoming slate featured an impressive roster of A-list actors including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Gal Gadot, Leonardo DiCaprio, Amy Adams, Ryan Reynolds, and more.
Army of the Dead is also getting a prequel movie and an anime series at Netflix, with Shay Hatten onboard to write the scripts for both. Matthias Schweighöfer is attached to helm and star in the international prequel movie, which is said to follow his Army of the Dead character Ludwig Dieter, while the anime series, Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas, will chronicle the origins of Dave Bautista’s Scott Ward.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
Marvel has released a new video for its next big TV show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The 30-second spot shows off Anthony Mackie as Falcon and Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier as the two of them team up to fight off bad guys in what looks to be an action-packed series.
Mackie’s Falcon says in a voiceover, “A good friend of mine once said, ‘The price of freedom is high. It always will be.’ It’s time–where do we start.”
That “price of freedom” line was originally spoken by Captain America. As the video alludes to, the shield has a new owner.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premieres on Disney+ on March 19, which is just about a week after WandaVision Season 1 comes to a close (and hopefully gives us some answers about what the heck is going on!).
A six-episode mini-series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier tells the story of Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson post-Endgame. According to the official synopsis, the pair “team up on a global adventure that tests their abilities–and their patience.” In addition to main stars Anthony Mackie as Wilson and Sebastian Stan as Barnes, the series also stars Daniel Brühl as Zemo, Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter, and Wyatt Russell as John Walker.
MSI has been on a run with its Gaming X Trio line-up. I’ve looked at every version so far, from the behemoth RTX 3090 to the more mainstream RTX 3070, and today the even more accessible RTX 3060 Ti. Coming to market at $499, does it continue the trend of improving upon the Founders Edition to earn its higher MSRP?
MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio – Design and Features
Visually, the Gaming X Trio line-up has a specific look and the RTX 3060 Ti version falls right in line with what we’ve seen before. The graphics card features the same triple-fan design (hence the “Trio” branding) and 2.5 slot cooler. Likewise, it features the same prominent RGB lighting: three strips crossing the center fan, as well as a backlit logo and bright diffuser strip along the side. The diffuser strip shows some hotspots, but otherwise looks good if you’re a fan of RGB. The lighting effects can also be customized within the Dragon Center software, which is great for matching it to the rest of your PC, or turned off if you find the extra lights distracting.
Since the RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio uses the same Tri Frozr 2 cooling system we’ve seen across each entry in its line-up. The system is topped with its three Torx 4.0 fans which use MSI’s novel combined blade system that increases static pressure and forces more air between the fins. The heatsink underneath is long and wide at a 2.5 slot thickness and is composed of specially waved fins to disrupt airflow and dissipate more heat. The surfaces making contact with heat-generating components have also been custom-made to increase contact area for better thermal transfer. It’s a multi-part system that works just as well here as in prior cards in this line-up.
In my testing, the Tri Frozr 2 system proved to be a solid upgrade from Nvidia’s own dual-axial cooler found on the Founders Edition. Across my testing, I recorded a peak temperature of 68C in my Lian Li LanCool II mid-tower PC case. Under the same testing circumstances, the Founders Edition peaked at 75C. That extra cooling capacity doesn’t come at the expense of extra noise either. Using a decibel meter, the Gaming X Trio didn’t raise the noise floor at all from the Founders. It didn’t improve it either, but given the extra fan and lower temps, I consider that an impressive result.
Like all RTX 30-Series cards, the RTX 3060 Ti is built on the latest generation of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. Since this is a topic I’ve covered extensively in previous reviews, I won’t rehash everything here and will refer you to my review of the RTX 3080 for a more thorough breakdown. Buying into Nvidia’s latest series of cards gets you a number of benefits, however. Dedicated cores for ray tracing and AI open the door to real time ray tracing in games, as well as other features like Nvidia Broadcast which leverages those cores for background noise and environment removal.
Likewise, RTX GPUs can utilize Deep Learning Super Sampling to intelligently upscale games to higher resolutions. This is shaping up to be one of the defining features of this generation as it allows gamers to play at higher resolutions than they otherwise would be able to with only minor performance and visual drawbacks. With DLSS, it’s entirely possible to play ray traced games at ultra settings at 1440p with this card when a similarly priced AMD GPU would require you to step down to 1080p to achieve the same frame rate.
The Gaming X Trio is identical to the Founders Edition RTX 3060 Ti in overall specs but benefits from a fast factory overclock. Like the FE, it features 4864 cores, which is more than double last generations RTX 2060 Super. It also comes equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, which is more than enough to play games maxed out at its intended resolutions. It steps things up when it comes to clock speed, however, with a factory Boost Clock of 1830 MHz.
That’s +165 MHz over reference, but also means the starting point for manual overclocks can begin and, with luck, end at higher overall speeds. I also found that the Gaming X Trio clocked itself higher than the Founders Edition with GPU Boost, too, which is Nvidia’s automatic overclocking tool. In my playtesting, the FE peaked at ~1875 MHz; the Gaming X Trio stopped just short of 2 GHz.
Finally, when it comes to video outputs, the card features three DisplayPort 1.4a connections and a single HDMI 2.1. It can support up to four simultaneous displays with a maximum resolution of 7680×4320 (or 8K).
MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio – Performance
To test graphics cards, I run each through a series of synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. This allows me to gauge each card’s relative performance against one another and to determine actual frame rates you can expect in an array of representative games. Since this generation has focused heavily on hardware-based ray tracing, each card is also tested in a mix of ray traced games and synthetics. All games are tested at Ultra settings (or the highest preset) unless otherwise noted. DLSS is enabled wherever possible and set to the Quality preset.
Note that due to a recent performance anomaly sub-4K, Wolfenstein: Youngbloods has been removed from these results. I have reached out to Nvidia for support and will re-test each card once a solution has been found to include that title in future benchmark round-ups.
MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio – Synthetic Benchmarks
Kicking things off, I ran the card through 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra and Unigine’s Heaven benchmark. The Gaming X Trio performed very well, outperforming the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition in both tests. Both versions fall significantly below AMD’s RX 6000 series, however, which is to be expected given the different performance category and positioning of those cards.
Moving onto ray tracing, I used a trio of tests to gauge performance. The first, 3DMark’s Port Royal renders a score similar to the previous two tests. Again, the MSI tops out the FE and falls behind the AMD Radeon RX 6800. Things begin to switch in the FPS tests, however. Since Surgical Scalpels’ Boundary benchmark supports DLSS, the Gaming X Trio comes close to doubling the frame rate of even the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT in Rage Mode. In 3DMark’s Ray Tracing Test, which navigates a still image without DLSS, the MSI RTX 3060 Ti outperforms the RX 6800 and falls less than half a frame behind the RX 6800 XT.
With synthetic tests out of the way, I turned my attention toward real world gaming benchmarks. Even though the card targets 1440p, I was curious how it would compare across all three major resolutions. For readability, I limited my expanded testing to the most relevant cards for comparison given that this is a third-party version purporting to improve upon the OG 3060 Ti.
Beginning with 1080p, the Gaming X Trio performs extremely close to the Founders Edition with frame rates ranging from 2% slower to 4% faster, leading to an overall average difference that is less than half a percent. In real world terms, I couldn’t notice much difference at all when playing at this resolution.
At 1440p, things widen a little bit with ranges from 0% to 6% faster, leading to an average improvement of 3% over the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition. Thanks to DLSS, it comes in a full 20% faster than the RX 6800 but when limited to rasterized games that flips entirely and it comes in 18% slower. Compared against the 2080 Super, as Nvidia did in its marketing of this GPU, it comes in a full 8% faster.
Finally, at 4K the Gaming X Trio delivers its most impressive leads over the Founders Edition yet, running an average of 4% faster overall. Compared against the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, it ran 7% faster. Across all games, RTX and DLSS included, it outperformed the RX 6800 by a whopping 43%, highlighting the impact of DLSS. In sheer raster, it lagged the RX 6800 by 18%.
But is it playable at 4K? When it comes to actual FPS, the Gaming X Trio outperformed the Founders Edition but still struggled to hit 60 FPS in the majority of games at Ultra settings. Minecraft RTX and Doom Eternal were each able to exceed this marker, but the remaining nine games fell short. That said, each was able to play at 30 FPS or above with all of the bells and whistles enabled, which is equivalent to many current gen console games in Quality mode, while simultaneously offering improved graphics.
EA has patented technology that seeks to let players stream and play full games before they’ve been downloaded.
As spotted by GameRant, the patent can be found on the United States Patent and Trademark Office here, where you can see a diagram of the system in action. The plan involves the creation of a “dynamic video game client” that provides a stream of the game to players from a remote simulation engine, upon request.
“The dynamic video game client can utilize a state stream game engine in combination with a game application streaming service to provide users with the ability to begin playing games quickly on a huge range of devices,” the patent reads. What this means is that you could request to play a video game you own without it being downloaded on your local system, propped up by a remote online stream akin to Google Stadia or other cloud-based services. It’s not quite clear whether you will be downloading the game in the background during this process, but it is implied that this is the problem EA is trying to solve.
The patent copy can be found here, where it explains how this technology seeks to solve the “time consuming” installation process, sidestepping the wait to let players jump into the action. EA’s patent observes the growing issue of games getting larger and taking longer to install. “Due to the large size of games, it can take a significant amount of time of a user to begin playing a game after it has been purchased,” the patent reads. “This download process can be quite frustrating if a user is interested in playing a new game with friends or has a limited amount of time to play the game.”
Players will likely still need to have a decent internet connection in order to manage the simulated game stream, but it means that players could jump into a game as soon as they buy it, rather than waiting for it to install or download first.
In other EA news, the company recently completed a $1.2 billion acquisition of Codemasters, which it will be treating as an “independent group,” going forward. During an earnings call, it was revealed that the company had made $3 Billion from its Star Wars games and that it has no plans to slow down future development efforts with the licence.
