Sucker Punch hasn’t announced what it’s working on, but has confirmed what it isn’t working on.Image: Sucker Punch Productions
Sony’s San Diego Studio is a multiplatform studio now that MLB The Show is available on Xbox and Nintendo platforms. So while it won’t be a PlayStation exclusive, expect an MLB The Show 23 later this year. God of War Ragnarök was one of the biggest games of last year, and was also one of the last big games in 2022, having only launched about two months ago. Sony Santa Monica also doesn’t seem to have plans to make DLC for Ragnarök, so it’s probable the team goes mostly silent in 2023.
Sucker Punch could be a wildcard in 2023, as it’s been about three years since Ghost of Tsushima, but the studio also seems to be working on a sequel to its open-world samurai game rather than a new IP or a sequel to its previous series Infamous and Sly Cooper. The gap between Infamous: Second Son and Ghost of Tsushima was about six years, but if the studio is iterating on old systems, we may hear about the new samurai sequel sooner rather than later. Finally, Valkyrie Entertainment was a more low-key acquisition for Sony, and the team has acted primarily as a support studio as recently as God of War Ragnarök. That being so, the team is likely helping out with other projects that launch in 2023.
Whew, I think that’s everything on the PlayStation radar so far. Has anything got your interest piqued, or are you hoping Sony will announce some more enticing projects in the coming year?
Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin talks about moving the series to a city setting. Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckman talks about a big change to The Last of Us’ virus for the TV show. Plus, new images from the set of The Flash movie, and what’s next on Mayfair Witches. Spoilers now!
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
A new synopsis for Quantumania (via ComicBook) reveals Bill Murray plays Lord Krylar, a character who appeared in one issue of The Incredible Hulk in 1972, while David Dastmalchian plays an all-new inhabitant of the Quantum Realm named Veb.
Super-Hero partners Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) return tocontinue their adventures as Ant-Man and the Wasp. Together, with Hope’s parents Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Scott’s daughter Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), the family finds themselves exploring the Quantum Realm, interacting with strange new creatures and embarking on an adventure that will push them beyond the limits of what they thought possible. Directed by Peyton Reed and produced by Kevin Feige and Stephen Broussard, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” also stars Jonathan Majors as Kang, David Dastmalchian as Veb, Katy O’Brian as Jentorra, William Jackson Harper as Quaz and Bill Murray as Lord Krylar.
Renfield
During a recent interview with Collider, Nicolas Cage confirmed his Dracula doesn’t “have a lot of screen time” in Renfield.
The movie’s really not about me, Dracula rather, I don’t have a lot of screen time. It’s really Nick Hoult’s movie, and it’s about Renfield. I didn’t have the time, like the two-hour narrative to really dig deep into Dracula’s pathos per se. It’s not that. But I did have enough screen time to be able to try to develop a pop-art style to the character that hopefully will be a nice contribution to the other performers that have done it, that have had their take on this legendary character in both literature and cinema.
Evil Dead Rise
In conversation withEmpire Magazine, director Lee Cronin stated he didn’t “need” to set Evil Dead Rise in a city, he simply “wanted” to.
To me it felt very natural to make that move. It wasn’t forced in some way of like, ‘We need Evil Dead in the city!’ It was, ‘I want a family, and I want it to be urban’. I still treated it very much the same way. I view the apartment as the cabin, and the hallways and the other aspects of the building as the forest.
The Flash
The Flash director Andy Muschietti shared a new photo of the Central City set on Instagram.
Disquiet
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is trapped inside a spooky hospital crawling with supernatural, faceless orderlies and sexy, gauze-wrapped women in the trailer for Disquiet, co-starring Rachelle Goulding, Elyse Levesque, Lochlyn Munro, Garry Chalk, Trezzo Mahoro, Anita Brown, and Bradley Stryker.
DISQUIET | Official Trailer | Paramount Movies
Sorry About the Demon
Meanwhile, bloodthirsty ghouls infiltrate an otherwise unassuming rom-com in the trailer for Sorry About the Demon, available to stream on Shudder this January 19.
Sorry About The Demon | Official Trailer | Horror Brains
The Last of Us
Entertainment Weekly reports Rutina Wesley has been cast as Maria, “the leader of a settlement of survivors in Jackson, Wyoming” in The Last of Us series at HBO.
Relatedly, co-showrunner Neil Druckman revealed that because the series didn’t want its actors wearing face masks, the show’s cordyceps fungus propagates itself through underground “tendrils” instead of airborne spores.
Eventually, those conversations [about not using gas masks] led us to these tendrils. And then, just thinking about how there’s a passage that happens from one infected to another, and like fungus does, it could become a network that is interconnected. It became very scary to think that they’re all working against us in this unified way, which was a concept that I really liked, that got developed in the show.
[Collider]
Inside Job
According to TV Line, Netflix has canceled Inside Job after one season.
Velma
Elsewhere, Mindy Kaling’s adult-oriented Scooby-Doo spinoff has a new poster.
School Spirits
Peyton List must solve her own murder in the trailer for School Spirits, premiering March 9 on Paramount+.
School Spirits | Official Teaser | Paramount+
Mayfair Witches
Finally, Rowan continues to give bad men brain embolisms in the trailer for next week’s episode of The Mayfair Witches.
Next Time: The Dark Place | Mayfair Witches | AMC+
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Some developers on the space horror blockbuster Callisto Protocol say they were omitted from the end credits sequence despite extensive work on the game and key contributions to the finished product. The claims come amid a renewed push throughout the video game industry to fix a broken crediting system that often punishes lower-ranking employees and those who leave prior to the final release date.
In a new report by GamesIndustry.biz, former employees at Striking Distance Studios say they believe around 20 developers were left off Callisto Protocol’s long end-of-game credits roll. Many were surprised by the omission, and say the studio never formally communicated a policy of leaving developers off the credits if they left before the game shipped. A few regard it as punishment for taking a job somewhere else.
“[The credits omission] felt like an obvious F-U to those who were left out,” one source tells GamesIndustry.biz. “Somebody wanted to send a message, and the message was, ‘Next time have a bit more loyalty to us.’”
Striking Distance was formed by former Dead Space director Glen Schofield in 2019 after leaving Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games. Late last year as its debut game was finishing development, Schofield was criticized for a tweet that endorsed crunch culture, celebrating sacrifice and long overtime hours.
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While he later deleted the tweet and apologized, Bloomberg subsequently confirmed that at least some developers at the studio had crunched during production. Schofield told Bloomberg that some staff were “working hard for a few weeks” but that no overtime was mandatory.
Some former developers now tell GamesIndustry.biz that studio management would make promises to address crunch culture in the very same meetings where it would praise the long hours people had put in. “My issue is those of us who took part in that culture, who put in that time, and worked intensely to help craft this product, were punished with a credit omission for not going the extra mile…to stay until it shipped.”
The International Game Developers Association announced a plan last August to try and standardize how developers are credited for their work, and foster the spread of tools that can make it easier to update end credits scrolls when they are missing someone or contain other inaccuracies. “Game credits are hard, particularly in AAA,” former Naughty Dog communications manager, Scott Lowe, tweeted in reaction to today’s GamesIndustry.biz report. “But the answer is easy: credit everyone. Gating by time and subjective assessments of value/impact is messy and cruel.”
Striking Distance Studios did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
2022 was truly the year of Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s latest game exploding into the mainstream unlike anything it had previously created. As such, a lot of people played and finished Elden Ring. In fact, according to one set of data, Elden Ring was the most completed game of 2022. But funnily enough, the same source also pegs it as the game players were most likely to abandon before reaching the end.
If you’ve read Kotaku (or any other gaming website) in 2022, you are likely already familiar with Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators FromSoftware. And like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring is a tough-as-nails action-RPG with a heavy focus on mystery, world-building, and boss fights. However, this time around FromSoftware added a true open world to its popular “Soulslike” formula. The end result? One of 2022’s most acclaimed, best-selling games. The open world in particular helped sway many to try Elden Ring for the first time, letting players avoid harder areas until later and ostensibly making it easier to finish than past FromSoftware adventures. And it seems that design choice paid off.
According to data on HowLongToBeat.com, Elden Ring is 2022’s most completed game, with nearly 6,000 users of the site reporting they have played and finished the massive open-world RPG. That’s an impressive number when you look at the runner-up games on the list. Stray, that adorable futuristic cat game, was completed by nearly 4,000 users. Meanwhile, in third with 2,500 completions, was Game Freak and Nintendo’s Switch hit, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To see such a big and difficult game top the list is both a sign that Elden Ring is very good and also a hint at the kind of audience that is primarily using HowLongToBeat.com.
Screenshot: Howlongtobeat.com / Kotaku
But perhaps more interesting is that Elden Ring is also the most “retired” game. When users “retire” from a game on Howlongtobeat.com it means they have given up on it, either permanently or temporarily. Now, even though only 261 players officially retired from Elden Ring on the site, that’s still more than double any other game in 2022. Even if the dataset is a bit small and weird (how many people are logging into this site to admit defeat?) it’s still an interesting data point.
This all makes sense to me. Elden Ring was the most talked-about game of 2022, and with that many people playing, it makes sense that a good chunk of them might give up on it. Other data seems to suggest around half the people playing Elden Ring never reached the end. So I buy that Elden Ring could be the most completed game of 2022 while also being the game more people gave up on than anything else.
Some other interesting 2022 data from the site: Turns out Elden Ring is also on the most backlogs, has the most reviews, and is the longest game of 2022. However, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part 1 is the most positively reviewed game, and Diablo Immortal is the worst-reviewed.
Today, September 26, is the awkwardly titled “The Last Of Us Day.” As part of this annual international day of celebration, developer Naughty Dog has released 10 new animated gifs featuring characters from the game, like Joel and Ellie.
In the universe of The Last Of Us, September 26 is the day when the in-game virus reached a critical mass. What a fun anniversary to celebrate!The Last Of Us Day started back in 2013, and was originally titled Outbreak Day, which is definitely a better, less clunky name. However, this yearly celebration of all things Last of Us had to change its name in 2020 due to the real-world, ongoing, and deadly covid-19 pandemic. And today, in honor of the celebration, Naughty Dog has released 10 new animated gifs featuring characters from the series, inspired by popular online memes. It’s time to get yourself in the TheLast Of Us Day day spirit.
Did you ever want to see Joel recreate the famous Robert Redford smiling gif? Well, here you go!
Perhaps you’ve long wanted a Last of Us-themed gif based on the internet classic “Dramatic Hamster?” Good news, your oddly specific dream has been fulfilled.
According to Naughty Dog, with every game release its animators pick some of their favorite memes and recreate them using characters and assets from their own games. Earlier this month, the team released some gifs in honor of The Last Of Us: Part 1’s launch. But the team had even more gifs to share and that’s what’s been released today on Giphy. Such joy.
“The opportunity to laugh, pay homage to some of our favorite TV shows and movies, and collaborate with artists of different disciplines to make these GIFs has truly been a delight,” explained Naughty Dog. “Thank you to everyone who contributed your talent and sense of humor to create these! Our feeds will never be the same again.”
You can find more of Naughty Dog’s meme recreations here on its official Giphy page. For those who like this kind of thing, there’s a treasure trove of content to be found. For others, like me, who find all this stuff terrible and off-putting, well, why are you even reading this…
Also, as part of today’s celebrations, Naughty Dog and HBO released a new trailer for the upcoming live-action show based on the first game. It’s set to release sometime next year.
At this rate, we’ll never see the last of The Last of Us. Ahead of a high-profile HBO adaptation, Naughty Dog released a top-to-bottom remake, called The Last of Us Part I, for PlayStation 5.
Make no mistake: The Last of Us Part I is fundamentally the same exact game as its 2013 original (and subsequent 2014 remaster, for PlayStation 4). In my testing, guides that already exist for the original apply here—right down to the combinations for safes and other locked doors. If you’re seeking hyper-specific advice, you’re better off checking out Kirk’s initial tips from [website crumbles into dust].
Still, Part I is the most mechanically superior version of the game, no question about it, and with the enhancements come some changes. Like its immediate predecessor, 2020’s The Last of Us Part II on PlayStation 4, Naughty Dog included an impressive array of settings and accessibility options. You’ll find well over 60 sliders and settings you can tweak. Most are dependent on preference, the sort of thing you’ll want to adjust as you play, but there are a handful that are worth turning on from the jump.
Vibrating Speech
Speech to vibrations, found under the DualSense menu, is one of the few parts of The Last of Us Part I that makes it feel like a legitimate PS5 game (rather than an extremely pretty PS4 one). The setting makes the PS5 controller vibrate when a character is talking, and it does so at the same cadence as their speech. It’s pretty cool! It’s also a little intense by default. For me, I’ve found the speech to vibrations intensity sweet spot at 5—just enough to “hear” characters talk but not so much that it’s distracting.
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Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Custom difficulty
The Last of Us Part I is playable on six difficulty settings, ranging: very light, light, moderate, hard, survivor, and, once you beat the game, grounded. But the challenge isn’t so linear. You can adjust the difficulty for five different aspects of the game:
Player: Dictates how much damage you take from attacks, and how frequently or infrequently you clock checkpoints in the middle of a fight.
Enemies: Basically dictates how savvy (or not-savvy) your foes are.
Allies: Determines how often your allies assist you in combat.
Stealth: Controls a number of variables related to sneaking, including how long it takes for enemies to alert their comrades after spotting you.
Resources: Regulates how often resources, like food, ammo, and crafting supplies, appear.
So if you’re great at staying out of sight but struggle with the all-out action segments, you can reflect that in a custom difficulty setting. There’s also a perk here for masochists. Though you can’t start a new game from the highest possible difficulty level—even if you’ve played it a thousand times during its prior iterations—you can manually set all five of those to grounded for a de facto hardest-possible run.
Photo Mode Shortcut
The Last of Us Part I is debatably one of the prettiest games on console right now. In other words: You’re gonna wanna take a lot of screenshots. Typically, popping into photo mode requires opening the menu, which slows down the pace of the game—unless you turn on photo mode shortcut, in the controls menu. When activated, you can hop right into photo mode by pressing both thumbsticks in at the same time. Just make sure to get the timing right, else you’ll turn on Joel’s flashlight and ruin your shot!
Hints
Hints, at the very bottom of the HUD menu, are set to sometimes by default. But they’re far more cumbersome than they are helpful. For one thing, they only offer advice as to the critical path. Sometimes you know exactly what to do to proceed in the story but, because it’s a Naughty Dog game (dense levels worth exploring), you want to poke around for a bit, see if you can turn up any collectibles or key resources. And that brings me to the most annoying part of Part I’s hints: Once a tip pops up, it doesn’t go away until you finish the task it tells you to do. Here’s where I remind you that all of the already-written guides for this game are just as effective now as they were a decade ago.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Bow Reticle Style
For the most part, yes, The Last of Us Part I is the same game as The Last of Us. One subtle change: There’s a new aiming system for the bow. And it kinda sucks. By default, it comes with just a standard dot as a reticle—not great for gauging distances when aiming with a bow. But if you change the bow reticle style setting, found under the HUD menu, to classic, you’ll be able to see the arrow’s path as intended: with a clear trajectory showing where it’ll land. Not only is this helpful AF, it’s also a reminder that, yeah, some things are better left untouched.
For those who play video games, 2007 is often considered one of the best years of the medium. It was a year of bangers: Microsoft had Crackdown and Halo 3, Nintendo took Super Mario to the Galaxy, Call of Duty blew the world open by going modern, and so on. It cannot be understated how much that year just kicked ass for games, and in the upper echelon at the time was 2K Games’ Bioshock, which is now 15 years old as of today.
Developed by 2K Boston (later Irrational Games) and the now defunct 2K Australia, and directed and written by Boston’s Ken Levine, BioShock is a first-person shooter set in the 1960s. After surviving a plane crash, the protagonist Jack discovers the underwater city of Rapture, built as a haven for the elites of society by its creator, business magnate Andrew Ryan. The city was the perfect utopia, but everything eventually went to hell once a gene-altering substance called ADAM was discovered.
Through the use of serums known as “Plasmids,” everyone in the city got superpowers. Thus, a class war ensued: on one side, Ryan commanded his superhuman, diving suit-wearing Big Daddies to protect young girls called Little Sisters as they harvested ADAM from dead bodies. And on the opposing side was Atlas, a man who convinced the now poor citizens of Rapture to rise up against Ryan, with both sides using Plasmid-wielding citizens dubbed Splicers to wage skirmishes across the city.
Image: Irrational Games/2K
Originally an Xbox 360 and Windows exclusive, BioShock released to critical acclaim, with particular praise for its atmosphere and narrative, which incorporated ideas from author George Orwell and most notably philosopher Ayn Rand. By the end of its debut month, it sold 490,000 copies, and by March 2010, it’d had sold 4 million across all systems. (In 2008 and 2009, it was ported respectively to the PlayStation 3 and Mac.)
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For a time, BioShock fever swept across the industry. It was inducted into the Smithsonian’s exhibit devoted to the art of video games, and has been hailed as one of the best games of all time. Along with the original Mass Effect and 2008’s Braid, the game’s been used as examples when arguing the merit of video games as an art form. And it spawned two sequels: 2010’s BioShock 2 from 2K Marin was a direct sequel wherein players controlled a Big Daddy named Sigma a decade after the original game, granted the ability to use Plasmids and search for his missing Little Sister. Conversely, Infinite by the returning Irrational starred private eye Booker DeWitt endeavored to ferry the reality-warping Elizabeth Comstock out of the sky city of Columbia in 1912. Both games would receive narrative DLC, but it was the “Burial at Sea” expansion for Infinite that definitively linked it with the story of the original game.
In the years since BioShock went quiet, there’ve been efforts outside of 2K and Levine to try and go for the same narrative highs of that first game. You can see its bones in other games like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, Machine Games’ Wolfenstein reboot, and Arkane’s Prey or Dishonored without much effort. (Infinite is technically the first Dad Game, as it released only a handful of months before the original Last of Us.) Cyberpunk 2077, which arguably features better combat and immersive sim elements than BioShock, has a slice of the period piece shooter inside of it. You could probably even argue that something like Disco Elysium or Citizen Sleeper has also been influenced by it.
Image: 2K Games
But for the franchise itself, it currently just…exists. Part of the issue is a lack of a follow up: a fourth entry is said to be in the works, but due to development issues that just plague the entire franchise, it feels more of an idea than reality. And though he left the series behind after 2013, Ken Levine hasn’t been able to release a game within the past nine years. All fans have been left to do is replay the old games, maybe discuss how time has treated the sequels in particular. Netflix has plans on making the first game into a film, something originally in the cards back in 2008, but it remains to be seen if the streamer will actually be able to make that a reality. But the real question about BioShock’s future, if it even has one, is what can it still bring to the table that the original trilogy didn’t already cover?
Let us know your thoughts on the BioShock franchise in the comments below. Think we could do with another entry, or should we kindly let it be harvested?
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Just WTF is going on with The Last of Us: Part I on PS5? Gameplay footage from the Naughty Dog remake leaked earlier today, raising significant questions about the comments the developer has made about the game. From what we’ve seen so far, the action looks almost identical to the original PS3 release – it certainly doesn’t look like The Last of Us 2, as the developer had previously suggested.
That’s prompting some to ponder whether the studio’s being truthful about modernising the combat. Writing on Twitter, senior editor Samuel Prince didn’t comment directly, but retweeted an old Naughty Dog post in which it said “gameplay mechanics” have been “rebuilt”. He then went on to elaborate in a second message.
“I just want to say that leaks suck,” he sighed. “They’re extremely hurtful to the devs who work tirelessly to bring you these wonderful games. Public-facing assets take a long time to create, revise, approve, localise, clear legal, ESRB, etc. Be kind!” This appears to suggest that the developer has new footage to show, but it’s tied up with red tape.
As we mentioned earlier, we’re willing to give the Californian company the benefit of the doubt, but it’s going to need to take back control of the marketing here, because there’s a good chance the entire game could leak over the next few weeks. Considering the remake isn’t even out until 2nd September, this isn’t exactly ideal.
We suppose the gags will write themselves with this headline, but restrain yourself before you get reductive in the comments and belittle a bunch of hard work. Naughty Dog, notorious for its crunch culture, appears not to have overworked on The Last of Us: Part I. The studio – which is renowned for its obsessive attention to detail and overly long hours – finished up work on its PS5 remake today, and Principal Environment Artist Anthony Vaccaro says for the first time in his 13 year career, he didn’t crunch.
“This is the first time in my 13 year career, across multiple studios, that I didn’t need to crunch to finish a game,” he wrote on Twitter. “Feels good, really good. Especially hitting the same quality bar as The Last of Us 2. More work to keep doing but proud of the big changes so far to make the studio healthier.”
Of course, there are a few obvious caveats that we could point to here – even as mere external observers. For example, no matter how much work has gone into the remake, it is still building upon the framework of a game that already exists. It stands to reason, then, that this would have been a more straightforward project than a wholly original release. Furthermore, it’s also expanding on work recently completed with The Last of Us 2, so it’s probably safe to assume the studio has got a pretty slick production pipeline in place for this series right now.
Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that Naughty Dog has at least three other projects in development, so this has never been an “all hands on deck” scenario. In that sense, it’s good to hear that working conditions have been less intense lately, and hopefully it’s something the studio can continue to build on as it turns its attention to its other upcoming titles.
Over the past few years we’ve started seeing something beautiful happen: fans of classic console games are taking old code and creating native PC versions of games that never saw an official release. We’ve seen it with some Nintendo games, but now we’re seeing it with a PlayStation platformer as well.
This isn’t porting in the multiplatform sense that we’re used to, nor is it emulation. This is recompiling the game’s entire codebase so that Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, which was released on the PS2 on 2001, now runs as a native application on the PC.
The project, which is now at around 80% done, is some incredible shit, because it turns out Jak And Daxter was “written in GOAL, a custom Lisp language developed by Naughty Dog”, which means the small team working on it have to “decompile the original game code into human-readable GOAL code” and then “develop our own compiler for GOAL and recompile game code for x86-64″.
Interestingly, it’s not a straight port either, as some small changes have mostly been made to the game, mostly in terms of the options available to players:
We have added a plethora of options to the game settings (and removed some that didn’t make sense) so that you can have a more up to date experience, or a more PS2-like experience if you decide. It is up to you! There are also a bunch of extra goodies and added secrets to find out. We are aiming to keep the core gameplay (controls, physics, behaviors, etc.) identical however, so if you find any issues or differences with this then do not hesitate to tell us about it.
Some of those “more up to date” options include better subtitle controls, custom resolutions and camera controls, but in terms of general gameplay they’ve also made the orbs “easier to see”.
While the project isn’t fully 100% completed, it is downloadable (and beatable, it’s just that there might be bugs) from the project’s github site. Here’s some footage of the project running in 4K at 60FPS: