The Eternals: Marvel Comics to Launch New Series in November
Just in time for the debut of the new movie, the Eternals will be back at the forefront of Marvel’s comic book universe. The publisher has just revealed a new ongoing Eternals series set to kick off in November 2020.
Eternals boasts quite an impressive creative team. Writer Kieron Gillen (Star Wars: Darth Vader, Journey Into Mystery) is returning to Marvel to helm the series alongside Secret Wars and King Thor artist Esad Ribic and The Mighty Thor colorist Matthew Wilson.
Marvel hasn’t revealed much about the plot of the new series beyond the tagline “Never Die. Never Win.” That may be a reference to both the Eternals’ immortality and their seemingly never-ending conflict with the Deviants. Most likely the series will deal with the fallout of 2018’s The Avengers #4, which showed Ikaris and his people seemingly killing themselves after learning the truth about their own origins.
Ribic’s cover to Eternals #1 depicts the evolution of man culminating with the birth of Ikaris. Interestingly, the Eternals and Deviants have always been depicted as separate races from humanity, but this image could imply the Eternals are more fundamentally linked to mankind than they ever realized.
“I said if I was ever to do a book again at Marvel, it would have to be something I’ve never done before. This is exactly that,” said Gillen in Marvel’s press release. “This is me teaming up with literally my favourite artist of the epic, taking one of those lightning-storm Kirby visions and re-making it to be as new as the day it was forged.”
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Gillen continued, “While Esad makes whole worlds on the page, I’m applying all the skills I’ve developed when I was away. It’s a lot. It’s everything. There’s enough scale packed in here that I believe that when you look at the comic, you’ll see the pages slightly bulge. Essentially ‘Eternal’ has to mean ‘never going out of style’ which means we’re aiming for ‘Instant classic.’ Also – fight scenes, horror, human drama, emotions, explosions. Comics!”
Eternals #1 will be released in November 2020, while the movie Marvel’s The Eternals is currently scheduled for release on February 12, 2021. You can head over to Marvel.com to check out a new video teaser for the comic that shows off more of Ribic’s art and character designs.
For now, be sure to check out our Eternals Explained and Deviants Explained features, as well as our breakdown of the movie’s two villains, Kro and Arishem the Judge. Then learn how the movie could potentially set the stage for the X-Men in the MCU.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
Halo Infinite Denies Claims That Halo TV Show Impacted Development
Halo Infinite’s developer 343 Industries has shot down some of the claims of a report that surfaced earlier alleging development woes for the now-delayed next Halo entry.
In a statement provided to IGN by a 343 Industries spokesperson, the Halo Infinite developer refuted the claim in a report that the Halo TV show in the works at Showtime distracted the developer’s leadership and had a major impact on Infinite’s development.
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The spokesperson labeled Infinite and the TV show as “completely independent projects” whose development did not impact one another or prove a “distraction,” as the original reports sources claimed.
“343 Industries has a devoted transmedia team that is working with Showtime on the creation and production of the Halo TV show. This group is separate from the Halo Infinite development team. These are two completely independent projects with dedicated teams and leadership that do not impact one another,” the spokesperson said in a statement to IGN.
A source speaking anonymously to Thurott for the original report claimed the show was “taking their priority instead of focusing on making sure development progress is on the right path to reaching its targeted deadline.”
While 343’s response rebukes this claim, the spokesperson did not speak to the report’s claim that “a significant portion of the game is being outsourced to third-party contractors,” which the report described as a source of some of Halo Infinite’s alleged development problems.
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Halo Infinite had its first proper unveiling at E3 2019, with an extended cutscene teasing Master Chief’s next adventure. But after a recent gameplay showcase that was met with some blowback by viewers for perceived technical limitations, 343 and Xbox announced Halo Infinite would be delayed into 2021 and miss the Xbox Series X launch.
For more on Halo Infinite, check out this episode of Next-Gen Console Watch 2020 where the team dig into the Halo Infinite delay, wondering how the Xbox Series X can compete without its flagship launch exclusive.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor and host of Podcast Beyond!.
Final Fantasy 14 Will, Unlike Many Real-World Governments, Address Its Housing Shortage
In many parts of the world, new home ownership has turned from an expected rite of passage into a distant dream for young people, as the number of renters increases and house values increase at a much faster rate than wages are. Final Fantasy XIV, too, is facing a house shortage crisis–but developer Square Enix actually has a plan to deal with it within the MMO.
In a new post on the game’s website, producer and director Naoki Yoshida has discussed how an influx of new players following the release of a huge free trial has led to housing issues–and the solution isn’t, as it turns out, to suggest that a bunch of players should migrate over to a different MMO.
As of Patch 5.3 the game’s population has expanded massively, and because automatic housing demolition has been suspended, housing has “become increasingly scarce” in the game, Yoshida notes. “To all of our players, especially those who have newly begun their adventures in FFXIV, I apologize for the present lack of housing,” he says.
The plan is to improve data centers so that the game can introduce more housing plots, he says, although this work will take time due to the current COVID-19 restrictions that make shipments difficult. However, before this happens, the developer is “doing what it can to further optimize the servers” to allow for more plots.
Yoshida says that as of Patch 5.4, there will be more plots available for purchase. “We will make a follow-up announcement when we’ve finalized the time table for these additions, and have determined how many can be added,” he said, before apologizing again.
Meanwhile, in the US, real-life homelessness is on the rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic. You can donate to the National Alliance to End Homelessness here.
If you’re keen on Final Fantasy XVI but haven’t dived deep yet, check out these two pieces from GameSpot’s biggest advocate for the game, Michael Higham:
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Surgeon Simulator Dev Now Letting Employees Work From Home Permanently If They Want
Bossa Studios, the UK developer behind Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, has made a significant adjustment to its workplace policies regarding remote work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to GI.biz, developers now have the option to permanently work from home, come into the London office, or move between home and the office “as best suits their working preferences and personal needs.”
Bossa conducted an employee survey, and it found that 43 percent of developers said they were more productive working from home. Respondents also said they enjoyed the flexible hours, more time with family, and no commute.
In total, 78 percent of respondents said they either preferred working from home or were impartial about going to the office.
Those who do elect to return to the office will encounter changes to the physical space to make sure work stations properly adhere to social distancing guidelines. Personal protective equipment items are also available to staffers who work in the office.
Bossa Studios is a relatively small developer, and it will be interesting to see how other studios of a similar scale as well as bigger teams adjust their workplace policies going forward.
Adjusting to the new work-from-home setup for studios hasn’t been without its issues in some cases. For example, Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries recently announced that issues related to working from home was one of the reasons for the game’s delay.
For more on how coronavirus is impacting games, check out GameSpot’s roundup of all the video games that were delayed due to the pandemic.
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Apple Is Now The First $2 Trillion Tech Company
Apple has just hit a ridiculous milestone, becoming the first tech company–and the second company overall–to achieve a total value of $2 trillion. Our sister site CNET is reporting that Apple’s stock price has hit $467.55 million per share, which adds up to about $2 trillion when you account for the 4.3 million outstanding shares.
This comes ahead of a stock split that will “make it easier for more people to buy shares,” CNET reports. As they note, this is a “largely symbolic” figure–and a company’s true value is measured by many different metrics–but the bottom line is that Apple is doing very, very well.
This makes Apple far and away the biggest tech company, and puts it behind only Saudi Aramco (a petrol and gas company) in terms of share value.
Apple, which was nearly declared bankrupt in 1997, is now huge–there are only eight countries with a higher value than the company.
While COVID-19 has been awful for many businesses, the tech giants are thriving–Microsoft, which reached a $1 trillion valuation in 2019, just saw a huge bump in stock prices after it became clear that they were considering buying TikTok.
Whether the release of Apple’s next iPhone range, expected to launch later this year, will impact this figure remains to be seen. The company is currently locked in a legal battle with Fortnite developer Epic which could have wider ramifications for game development on Apple products.
In Fall Guys, Nothing Matters, And That’s Glorious
When I played Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout a year ago at E3, in an air conditioned trailer parked in the sunny parking lot occupied by Devolver Digital, I had a pretty good time with it. I’d always liked Takeshi’s Castle, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Double Dare, and Wipeout–the kind of dumb TV game shows about people getting smacked in the face, from which Fall Guys obviously drew inspiration. I thought it’d be a fun game, but I wondered if it’d make much impact when it was eventually released.
Obviously, I underestimated the die-hard spirit of a group of cute, bean-shaped competitors all trying desperately to climb a pastel Aggro Crag covered in spinning torture implements and spewing giant, crushing pieces of fruit. Fall Guys has managed to crash through the wall of the gaming zeitgeist where so many others smacked face-first into a false wall, only to fall behind and be forgotten. The goofy little party game where you can barely control your character well enough to be competitive has become the game of the summer.
Given the state of the summer of 2020, honestly, it might be more surprising if Fall Guys didn’t resonate with just about everyone. It’s the perfect game for the moment.
Fall Guys provides some much-needed relief in a world where battle royale games are still some of the biggest names in multiplayer and provide stressful and sweaty “there can be only one”-style competition. Sure, Fall Guys borrows aspects of Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone–only one person wins its competition in the end, after all–but adds to them a notable caveat: winning doesn’t actually matter.
I mean, yes, at its most basic level, the point of Fall Guys is to win. You and 59 other wobbly, squishy competitors race to be first in five different rounds of competition in a typical match (or, harkening back to the TV show inspirations, in a typical “episode”), and only one of you can win. But Fall Guys is intentionally designed not just to be hard to win, but to be hard to play, in the same way as comedic party games like Gang Beasts. Some of the game types, like the one where you crash through doorways in a series of walls, with some doors being real and others just being walls you slam your face into like Wile E. Coyote, are dopey on purpose. There’s no skill to figuring out which doors are real and which are fake. There’s just luck, speed, and clamoring over or bouncing off the competition, hoping that smashing your body through the gap will get you over the finish line in time to qualify.
In that way, Fall Guys is akin to something like Mario Party, where a huge amount of the experience of winning or losing comes down to the outcome of a coin flip, a lucky jump or grab, or showing up at a convenient time. The game is designed to make it easy to lose in stupid ways, because Fall Guys’ goal isn’t to make an intense competition, but a comfortable one. The game is an engine for hilarious, goofy moments. The competition is just the fuel that drives that engine.
And that’s what makes Fall Guys feel like a much-needed gasp of fresh air at this particular moment. It’s not a game where you need to buckle down with two friends, hone your skills, practice your callouts, and get mad when things don’t go your way. It’s a game where you sometimes get walloped by a spinning whirligig that catapults your character off the map, where you can get absolutely bodied by a 25-foot banana, where you and 30 of your opponents can all trip over each other as you try to get through a door, and where watching your friends try and fail is just as fun as trying and failing yourself. That’s the whole point.
I can’t overstate how great it is to have something that’s just funny, inviting, social, and doesn’t actually matter
The summer of 2020 is not the greatest of times to be living through, as it happens. In the US, in-person social interactions have come to a near-standstill, and optimism for the future as the country I live in struggles and, largely, fails to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic is hard to come by. We can’t see our friends, we can’t really go out, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon.
Then here comes Fall Guys, tripping over itself onto the stage. It helped vastly that developer Mediatonic gave the game away for free on PlayStation Plus, but that’s only part of what helped drive it. Fall Guys is a low-stress, low-stakes excuse to laugh, preferably with friends. You can play it for hours, lose every match, and not feel worse for the time you sank into it. It’s just as easy and enjoyable to watch as to play, and the simplicity of Fall Guys means it doesn’t require any esoteric knowledge about game systems to understand. In many ways, it’s a perfect quarantine game, in the same easygoing and social way that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, appearing at the right moment to lighten things up for players who are trapped inside and not feeling especially great about the world.
I’m having a blast playing Fall Guys with friends–or even just watching them play. Because when I play Fall Guys, whether I go careening off the side of a seesaw or I manage to slip and slide my way to the top of the Slime Climb doesn’t matter. Nothing about this game matters. And right now, I can’t overstate how great it is to have something that’s just funny, inviting, social, and doesn’t actually matter–because with everything else in the world at the moment, the stakes feel way too high.
The Tiger King Zoo Has Closed Permanently After Report Of Animal Welfare Violations
The animal park featured on the Netflix show Tiger King is closing. The park’s owner, Jeff Lowe, announced on Facebook that the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma will close “effectively immediately.”
There will be a “new park,” but it will be a closed set for new content based on Tiger King for TV and streaming services, Lowe said. The Facebook post has since been removed, but the details were reported on by Entertainment Weekly.
Lowe took over control of the park after the original owner, Joe Exotic, went to prison in a murder-for-hire plot. In May, the court ordered that ownership of the park would go to the rival park owner Carole Baskin. This decision came down after the judge ruled that Joe Exotic improperly transferred ownership of the zoo to Lowe, giving Lowe 120 days to leave.
More recently, the US Department of Agriculture suspended the zoo’s license, citing multiple animal welfare violations, according to CNN.
“The Tiger King phenomenon has definitely changed our lives in many ways,” Lowe said in the post. “It has brought us more attention than any human deserves, good and bad. It has, and probably will continue to, make us a target of every nutjob and animal rights loon in the world, but we are prepared.”
The success of Tiger King has spawned multiple spin-off shows and new TV series is also in the works. The last we heard, Nicolas Cage will portray Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joe Maldonado-Passage–in an eight-episode TV series.
For more, check out GameSpot’s guide to every character in Tiger King, ranked in order of how generally terrible they are.
Mega Man Movie Writer Says He’s Trying To Find The Character’s “Real Soul”
The Mega Man movie has been in pre-production for a while, but is yet to start filming. The film’s directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, have just released Project Power on Netflix, which was written by Mattson Tomlin, who is also writing Mega Man’s script. Now, the writer has spoken on what to expect from the film.
Talking to Polygon, Tomlin has said that in the planning of Mega Man, he feels that he needs to “treat him like he’s a real person.” He says that he was brought in by Joost and Schulman because of how well they worked together on Project Power, and now he finds himself pondering how to best make Mega Man work on screen.
“My way into it was always, what is a compelling story,” Tomlin says. “And what is the real soul of that character? We all kind of know him as this cartoonish Blue Bomber who jumps and shoots, and to kind of go beyond that and knowing that, OK, visually it’s going to be a certain thing that is going to please the video game fan, but you know what is the story at the center? They’re like, what is it that this character can really go through?”
He says that the film will be “universal and primal and emotional,” and thus relatable. Asked if it will be a film for kids, he said that while it is “something that the kids will like,” it’s also “not squarely in the kid territory,” although we shouldn’t expect an R-rated take on Mega Man or anything like that.
If Mattson Tomlin’s name sounds familiar, it could be because he’s also a co-writer on The Batman. He recently spoke on that film, and said it will deal with Batman’s trauma–which is not exactly the most original take, but we’ll see.
The latest new Mega Man game was 2018’s Mega Man 11, and it was pretty good.
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Fall Guys Team Yellow Drama, New Prince Of Persia Listing, & Vampire: The Masquerade’s Fired Writer | Save State
In this video, Persia talks about the recent Team Yellow drama that has gone viral with Fall Guys and how the whole team was almost deleted in exchange for retweets. Mediatonic did release stats that proved Team Yellow wins just as much as the other teams but players are still skeptical. The ongoing joke that is Team Yellow may not have been strong enough to get all the retweets needed to get deleted, but the Fall Guys follower count did hit one million in the process. She also talks about a mysterious Prince Of Persia Remake that was listed on a Guatemalan Retail site. The listing has since been removed but the internet was quick to get all the screenshots. The listing didn’t give too many details on the game itself but did say it was planned for release in November of 2020 on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. Ubisoft has not made any official announcement but with a second Ubisoft Forward stream coming up, it’s possible we could hear more about this title. Lastly, Persia talks about how Brian Mitsoda, narrative lead on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, has been suddenly let go from the project. In a press statement, publisher Paradox Interactive confirmed that Mitsoda and creative director Ka’ai Cluney were no longer employed at Hardsuit Labs, the studio handling development on Bloodlines 2. Mitsoda said he was not a part of any conversations that led to the game’s delay and had never been led to believe that he hadn’t succeeded in delivering a successor to Bloodlines. Our Play For All donation drive will still be open until the end of August! There’s still time to get some cool merch and donate to Black Lives Matter and COVID 19 relief efforts. This is your Save State for August 19th.