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If you’ve been enjoying Season 4 of Apex Legends, chances are you’ve had some time playing around with the latest roster addition, Revenant. And if you have, you might be thinking about grabbing some new skins to stand out. But maybe you just want to scare other players, which is exactly what the dead eyes of the Gilded Rose Revenant skin will do.

You can grab the skin through Twitch Prime from now until March 7, but you need to think long and hard about the implications if you do. Sure, the red and gold color scheme is really attractive, as are the floral accents down Revenant’s arms. But it’s those eyes that are just a deal-breaking.

Cold, static and constantly gazing at you down the sights. Even the description for the Gilded Rose knows how horrifying it will be to have this version of Revenant after you.

“Roses are red, Revenant’s skin is too, and he’ll never, ever stop hunting you!” Well thanks for that terrifying image to fall asleep to, Respawn.

When Revenant is not haunting your dreams, he’s likely tearing things up in Season 4 of Apex Legends, which will be getting Duos back for a limited-time Valentines event. If you want to be a better death-dealer as Revenant, check out our starters guide for Apex’s latest legend.

Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer on the first three Gears of Wars games, revealed that he almost made an Aliens first-person shooter a couple of years ago that would have had a grown-up Newt as the main character.

Bleszinski shared the news on Twitter, saying that he was in talks to make an Aliens FPS with Fox, who own the Aliens franchise, but when the film company and game publisher was bought by Disney the game was “lost in the shuffle.”

Ripley would be alive and be your “Cortana/Anya.” You’d play as grown Newt. On Earth. Weyland-Yutani are weaponizing the aliens in a Black Mesa style facility and, of course, all hell breaks loose.

Your robotic pal i.e. Bishop? A new one named “Casey” after her doll in Aliens.

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) February 10, 2020

 

You would have played as Newt, the young girl from the 1986 film, on Earth after xenomorphs break out of Weyland-Yutani facility that was trying to weaponize the deadly aliens.

To make this happen, all of the canon after the second Aliens film would have been ignored, as Newt dies in transit between the second and third film. Ellen Ripley would have been alive and acted as your Cortana-style guide throughout the game.

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Newt would also have had a robotic pal, similar to Bishop from the film, but would have been called Casey after the doll Newt has in Aliens.

This Aliens game would have been made by the studio that Bleszinski founded in 2014, Boss Key Productions, which closed down in 2018 due to poor sales of its games. Boss Key only made two games, LawBreakers and Radical Heights, both of which were online shooters.

Bleszinski’s Aliens game isn’t the only one that’s known to have been lost. Last year, Chris Avellone talked about Aliens: Crucible, an RPG that was prototyped by The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian before being cancelled.

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In better news, the Aliens shooter that’s being made by Cold Iron Studios, is still thought to be in active development. Fingers crossed it comes out one day.

There’s also Alien: Isolation, which has recently come to Nintendo Switch, and Alien: Blackout, which launched for smartphones in 2019, so you can play those if you need an Aliens game fix.

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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Battle Pass Edition will remain available for the launch of Season 2 this week. The Battle Pass Edition, which is aimed at people who haven’t bought the game yet, includes the full game and a series of extras, including Call of Duty Points and weapons. The Battle Pass Edition was also available for the Season 1 launch in 2019.

The Battle Pass Edition includes 3000 Call of Duty Points, which is enough to buy the Season 2 Battle Pass and still have an allotment of points leftover. Also included in the bundle is a combat knife featuring a custom skin, as well as the XRK weapons pack. Additionally, the pack includes the “All Ghillied Up,” “Crew Expendable,” and “War Pig” operator packs.

The Modern Warfare Battle Pass Edition costs $100 USD, and it’s available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Modern Warfare is already a sales juggernaut, beating out Black Ops 4, and this new version will likely help sales grow even further. Microtransaction sales in Modern Warfare have also been performing well, Activision Blizzard recently announced.

Modern Warfare’s Season 2 includes a lot of free content, perhaps the most notable of which is a new version of the Rust multiplayer map from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Check out GameSpot’s breakdown of everything new in Season 2.

In GameSpot’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare review, Kallie Plagge wrote, “The pitfalls of Spec Ops don’t detract from what Modern Warfare does well, though. Realism mode is an excellent addition to the slate, and although not all the new multiplayer modes are great, Gunfight and the Night Vision playlist are refreshing standouts. And while the campaign ends up playing it safe in the end, it’s still a memorable one, and it lays a strong foundation for where the Modern Warfare series could go from here.”

Activision Blizzard has also confirmed that a new Call of Duty game is in development and scheduled to release later this year. Interestingly, Activision Blizzard did not announce which studio is working on the game.

Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski nearly made a new Aliens first-person shooter featuring a new version Ripley and set in a Black Mesa-style facility. You would play as a grown-up version of Rebecca “Newt” Jorden, who was among the only survivors of a Xenomorph infestation during the Aliens timeline.

The developer revealed this on Twitter, saying his studio, Boss Key, was in talks with Aliens rights-owners Fox to make a new Aliens game, but it fell apart after Disney acquired Fox.

“Ripley would be alive and be your ‘Cortana/Anya,'” Bleszinski said, referencing the two support characters from Halo and Gears of War, respectively. “You’d play as grown Newt. On Earth. Weyland-Yutani are weaponizing the aliens in a Black Mesa-style facility, and, of course, all hell breaks loose,” Bleszinski added.

The game was also going to feature a new robot-friend named Casey after Newt’s doll in Aliens. Bleszinski added that he was never personally interested on working on someone else’s IP … unless that IP was Aliens or Transformers. (The code-name for LawBreakers was Bluestreak, which is a reference to the Transformers franchise)

In response to Bleszinski’s tweet about making a new Aliens FPS, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford replied, “Careful” with a winky-face emoji. This could be in reference to any number of things. Gearbox developed the maligned Alien game Aliens: Colonial Marines, but whether or not the studio makes any more Aliens game is unknown.

What is known is that Cold Iron Studios is currently working on a new Aliens FPS, made by some of the people who also developed BioShock, Borderlands, and Star Trek Online.

After Disney bought Fox, it acquired the company’s games label, FoxNext, which was going to publish this new Aliens game. However, Disney sold FoxNext to Scopely. The saga doesn’t end there, however, as Scopely said it plans to sell Cold Iron to another company in the future.

Going back to Bleszinski, he left Epic Games in 2012 (before Fortnite) and later started his own studio, Boss Key. The company would release two titles–LawBreakers and Radical Heights–but they both failed to find and audience and the studio closed down. Bleszinski recently said that part of the reason why LawBreakers failed was because he pushed his own “woke” politics.

Cliff Bleszinski Comments On Aliens Game

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) delivers the next chapter of the DCEU, which may come as a surprise to those who heard director Cathy Yan say that the movie “exists in a parallel timeline.” Now that we’ve seen the movie, it seems as though Yan was more speaking metaphorically about how that was her mindset going into the film — she wanted it to stand on its own rather than be reliant on other films. But now that we know Birds of Prey is indeed a part of the shared DC movie tapestry, here’s a rundown on how Birds of Prey links to DC’s other movies with a handful of cool Easter eggs and how Harley’s antics impact the Gotham City landscape and the larger DC movie universe.

Note: just for clarification, the DC movie universe aka the DCEU includes Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Justice League, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Shazam!, and now Birds of Prey, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker film stands by itself unconnected to these other films.

Warning: full spoilers for Birds of Prey ahead!

You can view a visual version of this feature by flipping through the slideshow below or keep scrolling to read it as an article.

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The Joker Is MIA

Birds of Prey picks up with Harley trying to get over being dumped by her ex, the Joker. We see Harley getting tossed out by one of the Joker’s goons, and you’ll notice that the setting isn’t in Gotham City. In Suicide Squad, we saw the Joker operating out of a lavish mansion, but now he appears to be residing a cabin out in a rural area, which implies that the Joker isn’t in Gotham and is likely laying low, probably to avoid getting caught by Batman.

The Joker’s absence in Gotham has a profound effect on Harley and the city at large. Harley essentially broadcasts her breakup with Joker when she destroys Ace Chemicals, the place where she was reborn as Harley Quinn and cemented her perverse bond with her Puddin’. So without the Joker’s protection, it’s open season on Harley Quinn, meaning everyone with a grudge against her — and it turns out that’s an awful lot of people — are emboldened to seek her out and attack her in a bid for revenge, all because they know that the Joker isn’t around to retaliate. Black Mask takes this as an opportunity to finally claim Harley as his own and punish her for the long, long list of things she’s done to anger and otherwise annoy him.

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The Rise of Black Mask

While Black Mask trying to get his gloved hands on Harley is at the forefront of the film, we couldn’t help but notice that there also seems to be a power vacuum in Gotham City thanks to the Joker not being around, and Roman Sionis is trying to take advantage of it. We see Black Mask making moves to expand his criminal operations as he makes offers to fellow crime lords… and has them executed by Mr. Zsas when they don’t play along.

Birds of Prey

Of course, the Birds of Prey assemble to stop Black Mask and bring him to a rather, er, explosive end. Members Renee Montoya, Huntress, and Black Canary decide to stay together to keep cleaning up Gotham. Now, in addition to the Justice League and the Shazam Family, the DC movie universe has another superhero team protecting innocents and beating up baddies.

It’s also worth pointing out that during Renee’s emotional talk with Black Canary aka Dinah Laurel Lance, we learned that Canary’s mother was a super-powered hero who protected Gotham City before her untimely demise. In the comics, the character of Black Canary has gone through many retcons over the years, but the movie seems to be implying that Dinah Laurel Lance’s mother is none other than Dinah Drake, who eventually marries detective Larry Lance and has a child that carries on her metahuman gene. At one point Drake was a member of the Justice Society of America, a superhero team that operated a generation before the Justice League, and we know that the JSA will be featured in Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam movie, so it could be possible that we meet Dinah’s mom in that movie.

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Gotham City Sirens?

Of course, when a team of heroes appears, it’s inevitable that a team of villains will form to oppose them. The most obvious choice to fight the Birds of Prey is none other than the Gotham City Sirens. In the comics, they’re a group of female characters from Batman’s rogues gallery — Harley Quinn, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy — who dish out their own twisted brand of justice across Cotham City.

In fact, after Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn proved to be the breakout character from Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. got to work on developing four potential followup movies for her. One of those ideas was Gotham City Sirens, which we last heard had David Ayer tentatively attached to direct, but the film was put on hold when Warners decided to move ahead with Birds of Prey. Birds of Prey got the green light in large part due to Robbie championing it because she wanted to introduce the lesser-known Birds of Prey characters to the masses, knowing that many fans are already familiar with the popular Poison Ivy and Catwoman.

But now that the Birds of Prey have been established on the big screen, it’s possible that a potential sequel could introduce Harley’s other comic book team. We can just imagine the sort of chaos that would unfold if Harley was a member of both teams as they’re fighting each other.

The plant-controlling Poison Ivy is a longtime Batman villain who has a close, sometimes-romantic relationship with Harley Quinn. The jewel thief known as Catwoman, on the other hand, is set to appear in Matt Reeves’ upcoming film The Batman, with Selina Kyle being played by Zoe Kravitz. It’s currently unclear whether The Batman will be connected to the DC movie universe or if it’ll be standalone like Joker (one rumor says The Batman will be set in the past during the ‘90s), but if it does end up connecting, then Kravitz could reprise the role to join the Gotham City Sirens.

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Harley Quinn Will Rejoin the Suicide Squad

That’s a lot of speculation, but here’s what we do know about Harley Quinn’s next cinematic appearance. It’ll be in James Gunn’s upcoming sequel-or-is-it-a-reboot, The Suicide Squad (release date August 6, 2021), which was teased in Birds of Prey. When Harley passes by a wanted poster in the Gotham City police station, she says, “I know that guy!” And lo and behold, it features Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, who was one of Harley’s teammates on Task Force X.

Given that Birds of Prey ends with Harley hightailing it with her new sidekick Cassandra Cain, that means “Cass” could also make an appearance in the film. Cass was an assassin in the comics before she went on to become Batgirl, so maybe the Squad will be where the movie version picks up those skills.

But this also means some bad news for Harley: for her to be once again enlisted in Task Force X, she has to be incarcerated by Amanda Waller, so she’s probably going to get caught again between the events of Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad. Sorry, Harley!

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Birds of Prey may be intimately focused on Harley’s quest for emancipation, but it also shook up the status quo of the DCEU quite a bit by eliminating a major crime lord, creating a new superhero team, and leaving the door open for a new DC property to take shape on the big screen.

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Joshua is Senior Features Editor at IGN. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN.