Booster Gold (Hi-Fi/DC Comics), Superman (Jim Lee/DC Comics), Damian Wayne (Frank Quitely/DC Comics)Graphic: The A.V. Club
When Warner Bros. tapped James Gunn and Peter Safran to run DC Studios, we expected they’d draw a new roadmap for the turbulent comics-to-film universe. Now that they’ve revealed plans for their upcoming projects, we have our first sense of what the map looks like, at least for the near future. This first chapter, which Gunn and Safran are calling “Gods and Monsters,” will include 10 new film and TV projects. Gunn and Safran have said they intend to focus on screenwriting and allowing other creators to put their stamp on familiar characters as well as more obscure ones from the comics.
These titles will exist in their own corner of the DC universe, distinct from upcoming releases that predate Gunn and Safran’s tenure. Still to come this year are Shazam! Fury Of The Gods on March 17, The Flash on June 16, Blue Beetle on Aug. 18, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom on Dec. 25. Once those are cleared from the slate, the pair expect to launch two films and two series per year from 2024 on. The only DC projects that have broad release dates so far are Superman: Legacy and The Batman: Part II, both due in 2025. Read on for a complete list of all the newly announced titles.
Over the Winter holiday, someone filled all Mortal Kombat appreciators’ Christmas stockings up with something a lil’ extra: Mortal Kombat II’s source code on GitHub. The lawyers at Warner Bros. took exception to this by issuing a swift DMCA takedown notice that Github adhered to by disabling public access—but don’t fret, as there are other ways to check out the content dump.
Initially reported by Exputer, the Github post was uploaded to the internet hosting service on December 27 before getting reshared on the r/MortalKombat subreddit. While MK II’s entire source code is no longer available thanks to that DMCA takedown, that hasn’t stopped MK fans from reuploading sprites and artwork on social media.
The most notable elements of content that the MK II source code dump unearthed was unused animations, artwork, and moves that didn’t make the cut for the game’s release in ‘93. One piece of artwork was an alternate attract mode screen featuring an oiled-up Shao Khan. Although the alternate panel of Sindel’s spurned lover looks the same as MK II’s final Shao Khan attract mode screen, the unused artwork has a bunch of cloaked wizards on floating platforms in the background instead of a roaring fire. According to Polygon, the original artwork is more imposing because it illustrates how stacked the odds are against Earth Realm. Honestly, yeah, a bunch of platforming wizards is leagues scarier than a generic flame, especially if you’ve had the misfortune of playing the ‘97 beat ‘em up spin-off, Mortal Kombat Mythologies.
Read More:WWE Superstar The Miz Should Play Johnny Cage In Mortal Kombat II, And You Know It
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The MK II leak also showcased some previously unused sprite animation and moves. If you don’t have time to parse through a nearly-three-hour YouTube video of some dude scrubbing through the GitHub files, here’s a detailed Twitter thread compiling all of the most notable findings, Twitter user Pegasus Kid combed through the leak and uploaded a comprehensive thread of cut moves, stage art, and fatalities. My favorite sprite, since everyone was wondering, is Kintaro walk cycle animation because it’s timed perfectly to the music in the Metal Gear Solid but its the Dr. Livesey Meme video.
Kotaku reached out to Warner Bros. and Nether Realm studios for comment.
Update (14/12/22): Following the below announcement regarding the PS4 version of Hogwarts Legacy, developer Avalanche has provided an update on the PS5 release. The current-gen version of the game, which is on track to launch in February, has officially gone gold, meaning the game is essentially finished. We imagine the time between now and release day will be spent squashing bugs for a day one patch.
Yes, Hogwarts Legacy has been hit with another delay — the difference this time is that it only affects the last-gen versions of the game. The PS5 release is still planned to arrive on 10th February 2023, but the PS4 edition has now been pushed back to 4th April.
The news was confirmed recently on social media:
This staggered release schedule seems to be in place in order to “deliver the best possible game experience across all platforms”. In other words, the PS4 version is probably super rough right now, and wouldn’t have been ready in time for February. If that build of the game needs a little more time in the oven, it makes sense to push it back, and those on PS5 aren’t affected by the delay.
Tomorrow — 14th December — the developer is planning a new gameplay presentation, giving us our latest look at the anticipated game. Hogwarts Legacy puts you in the shoes of a fifth-year student, attending the hallowed school in the 1800s long before the events of Harry Potter. With the entire castle and surrounding grounds open to explore, it sounds like a dream game for many — hopefully it can stick the landing in February. And then again in April.
Are you planning to get the PS4 version of Hogwarts Legacy? Tell us in the comments section below.
Image: DC / Warner Bros. / Kotaku / Willrow Hood (Shutterstock)
Gotham Knights got its first significant post-launch patch on PC yesterday. The update was aimed at fixing online multiplayer errors and squashing some bugs. Unfortunately, it also temporarily squashed the Batman game’s Denuvo DRM protections, seemingly leaving it vulnerable to pirates. That’s one way to take them by surprise.
The PC patch for the struggling co-op adventure was pushed out last night, and it didn’t take long for game crackers to realize that the new build released on Steam was missing Denuvo. The news began circulating on sites like the CrackWatch subreddit, and even led some to believe that Warner Bros. had removed the DRM on purpose. It had not.
SteamDB records show that a new build that had the Denuvo anti-tamper protection back in place was released about 14 hours later, but obviously the damage was done. It’s unlikely people playing the newly piratable version of Gotham Knights can participate in the game’s multiplayer, a focal point of the loot-based brawler, and pirates won’t be able to enjoy future patch fixes or content updates. They’ll probably have free run of the single-player campaign now, though.
Kotaku reached out to Warner Bros. for comment.
Read More: 11 Gotham Knights Tips To Kick Criminal Ass And Clean The Streets In Style
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Denuvo protection is controversial among some PC users in part because it limits how they can store and play a game. It’s also largely believed to negatively affect the performance of PC games that use it. Often, the DRM is removed by the game publishers weeks or months after launch, especially if and when it’s eventually “cracked” by hackers. Rarely does it get dropped by accident and then restored.
Of course, the bigger issue for Gotham Knights is that it’s simply not that good, especially for a game that’s been in development for many years, is one of the first $70 new-gen-exclusive titles, and is clearly inspired by the much better Arkham trilogy of Batman games. While it’s not clear what new content Warner Bros. Montréal might have in store down the line, it is promising a much bigger performance update in the near future.
That patch will be aimed at consoles as well, and fix some of the framerate drops on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. While Gotham Knights is controversially locked at 30fps on the consoles, it often dips below that during certain scenes and when patrolling Gotham while large mobs of enemies are present. As Digital Foundry has reported, there are plenty of performance issues on PC as well, however. Hopefully, they’ll get addressed as well.
WB Games president David Haddad announced on Rocksteady’s website today that the video game developer’s co-founders, Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, are leaving the studio at the end of 2022. Rocksteady, which created the Batman: Arkham series, is set to release its anticipated pseudo-spin-off, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, in 2023.
“With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League nearly finished, they have both decided to leave Rocksteady at the end of 2022 and will begin a new adventure in gaming,” Haddad writes in the announcement. “We have the utmost respect and gratitude for Jamie and Sefton and wish them all the best in their new endeavor, and like many fans, we look forward to what they do next.”
Haddad did not share details of “what they do next,” but Hill and Walker—who founded Rocksteady in 2004—could well be looking to do it all over again. They were still an active part of the studio, with Hill most recently acted as Suicide Squad’s game director. Stepping up in their place are director of production Nathan Burlow, who Haddad calls an “original founding member,” promoted to studio director, and Darius Sadeghian, who will become studio product director.
“Nathan and Darius are extremely talented executives and they are passionate about continuing the high-quality game development of Rocksteady for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and all future games,” Haddad wrote.
Read More:Gotham Knights Sounds Like A Big Disappointment
About their sudden departure, Hill and Walker wrote in the announcement that, “From the day we founded the company in 2004 all the way to today, Rocksteady has been our life and soul. It has given us the opportunity to do what we love most: make great games with exceptionally talented people.”
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Hill and Walker emphasized the community at Rocksteady, saying that “there is something extra special about Rocksteady that goes beyond the games we make, and everyone who works here feels it.”
“We want to thank the team for their hard work and everything they bring to make this such a great place to be,” the pair continued. “Now with Suicide Squad in safe hands, and the team here stronger than ever, it’s time to hand over the reins, and for us to start a new adventure together in games.”
Earlier this fall, Suicide Squad writer Kim MacAskill passed on a lifetime achievement award from from nonprofit Women in Games, saying that event sponsors Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Interactive need to “take accountability.”
“You can throw your name on every diversity event going,” she said, “but unless you take accountability, it means nothing and I see you.”
In 2020, Rocksteady responded to a report by The Guardian detailing sexual harassment in its workplace, saying, “All formal complaints were thoroughly investigated, addressed appropriately and a number of serious measures were taken in response to the issues that were surfaced, including discipline or termination of staff.”
Gotham Knights has turned out to be a surprisingly divisive title, with sentiment seemingly shifting ever since we learned that, despite ditching a PS4 version, the game would only run at 30fps on PS5. This would, in turn, become a more prominent topic within the PlayStation community once we learned that A Plague Tale: Requiem, too, would cap out at 30fps. But framerate isn’t everything, and Gotham Knights is more than just its technical performance.
Well, the reviews are in, and opinions on this one are all over the shop, surprisingly so for a AAA game. The PS5 version of Gotham Knights is currently sitting on a critic score of 69 on the review aggregate site Metacritic. With outlying scores ranging from a high of 95 and a low of 40, something is going on here that bears dissecting deeper.
Push Square’s own Liam Croft enjoyed the game, awarding it a 7/10 in his review, which you can read or watch for our full thoughts on the matter. He writes that Gotham Knights features “an excellent story with top-notch cutscene direction and a fun combat system, with too many needless and confusing mechanics bolted on top. If you can look past them, there’s a genuinely great game here”.
Game Informer’s Matt Miller felt similarly, scoring the game a 7.25, and noting that “Gotham Knights didn’t wow me with its overly familiar objectives, combat, and activities, but it didn’t leave me sour. It’s fun to control some new heroes as they brood over Gotham from its building overhangs and uncover hidden plots against its people.”
On the lower end, giving it a 5/10, IGN’s Travis Northup wrote that “Gotham Knights is a consistently disappointing return to Batman’s troubled city and a distinct step backwards from the past decade-plus of Batman games,” and that “from the inconsistent frame rates, to the weak story, to one-note combat that rarely feels good, there was virtually always something going wrong to make sure I wasn’t experiencing the triumphant return with my friends at my side I had envisioned”.
VGC’s Jordan Middler applauded the game, giving it a 4/5, writing: “Gotham Knights provides a blueprint for a world of great Batman-verse games outside of Arkham. While it may not hit the highs of Rocksteady’s series in some aspects, the ways it excels in narrative and character development match, or in some cases supplant the Arkham series, proving themselves, appropriately, as more than worthy of wearing the cowl.”
Finally, GamesRadar+’s Josh West also scored it 5/10, noting that “there’s a compelling game in Gotham Knights, but it’s hidden away behind a messy UX, needless crafting and customization systems, and combat mechanics that have been stretched paper thin to accommodate four heroes”.
What we take away from these differing opinions is that there is something undeniable at the core of Gotham Knights that is perhaps obfuscated by technical hiccups. At the end of the day, only you can know whether or not that will be a dealbreaker in terms of your own enjoyment. But for what it’s worth, we think there is enough good stuff here to justify rolling the dice.
Will you be picking up Gotham Knights? Can you think of another game that has run the gamut so wildly in terms of review scores? Let us know in the comments section below.
Good luck on the minefield of social media today as the post-credits scene of DC’s Black Adamhas leaked, over a week before the film’s October 21 release. As Warner Bros. gets to work scrubbing posts, we imagine the Rock is gearing up to take back his thunder.
If you haven’t yet seen the clip in question already, you may not get a chance: posts have begun to be blocked with takedowns from Warner Bros that read, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.” They’re on the case! (io9 has reached out to the studio for comment, and will update this post if we hear back.)
If you want to be kept in the dark about what goes down, do not read ahead and be sure to block and filter all Black Adam, DC Comics, and the Rock/Dwayne Johnson-adjacent keywords on all your devices.
And here’s your second warning: if you don’t want to be spoiled for Black Adam’s post-credit scene, don’t read ahead!
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Honestly it’s the worst-kept secret; the leaked scene just confirms what we already suspected since it was heavily hinted at by Johnson himself at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con.
And lest we forget, the post-credits scene of DC’s League of Super-Pets featured the Rock as Cosmo meeting another dog (also voiced by the Rock) owned by Black Adam (voiced by, you guessed it, the Rock).
So truly, it’s been telegraphed that Superman would return and he does at the end of Black Adam. And yes, he’s played by Henry Cavill, confirming the DCEU’s Man of Steel is officially back. In the scene, he appears before Black Adam in a more saturated color suit invoking the hero’s classic look in red, blue, and prominent yellow. The vibe is combative as Supes comes out of a veil of smoke and tells Black Adam, “It’s been a while since anyone’s made the world this nervous,” setting up their eventual confrontation on the big screen.
We’re just wondering if it will be called BAvS: The Fight for the Hierarchy of Power. Expect a lot of debate and speculation over DC’s cinematic future once movie audiences at large check out Black Adam starting October 21.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Aiming to eke every last drop of lore from Warner Bros Montreal’s upcoming superhero outing, Gotham Knights? You’ll need to strap yourself in for several playthroughs if that’s your aim! Effectively, because there are four characters to take control of, each run will provide you with a slightly different take on events. To be clear, the overarching story will remain the same, it’s just your perspective of it will change.
“You will not see all of it in a single playthrough,” game director Geoff Ellenor told PLAY magazine. “[That’s] just because there’s so much content that is unique to the hero’s perception of what’s going on and what’s happened.”
Cinematics director Wilson Mui added: “From the cinematic standpoint, it’s very, very, very challenging. Structurally, we’re gonna have a very similar scene that overall falls in the flow for each character, but each character has their own version of that. So, because they move differently, speak differently, they have different histories with all the different characters, it allows us to make a scene that would be their version of that. Some of them are very similar in how they do it, but they’re gonna have little subtle differences.”
Diehard fans will probably want to experience all the possible permutations, then, which will likely add extensively to the replay value. Let’s hope the core campaign is compelling enough to encourage all of those playthroughs, eh?
Florence Pugh, Olivia Wilde Photo: John Phillips (Getty Images), Dia Dipasupil (Getty Images)
After long-swirling rumors about the conflict between Florence Pugh and Olivia Wilde on the set of Don’t Worry Darling, one messy anonymous source from the film’s production has come forward to confirm that the two did in fact engage in a “screaming match” during filming.
Speaking to Vulture, the source says the altercation occurred in January 2021, when filming was close to wrapping up. Fed up with Wilde’s tendency to disappear with fellow DWD star Harry Styles, the 26-year-old actor and the 38-year-old director broke into a very public “screaming match” on set.
From there, it’s reported that top studio executives such as Toby Emmerich had to intervene, refereeing in a “long negotiation process” to keep Pugh willing to minimally promote the film. In the months leading up to the film’s release, she’s done just that, with a singular, brief appearance at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. Aside from attending the film’s world premiere, Pugh has stayed out of sight and away from recording devices.
Sometimes nothing works better for promotion than eye-catching headlines (like this one) featuring one of the most high-profile actors in Hollywood and one of the world’s biggest pop stars. However, it seems Warner Bros. would have rather had a drama-free rollout for the film, as an anonymous executive says the company is “ultimately unhappy” with Wilde’s promotion (particularly with the director’s handling of the Shia LaBeouf news).
“Olivia is either a mad genius who figured out a way to make people more aware of the movie in a way that just drives up the box office,” says one source, “or she doesn’t have any self-awareness that she is fucking up her movie.”
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With Don’t Worry Darling making its nationwide theatrical debut today, the drama surrounding the film will soon enter the rearview—that is, until Miss Flo decides to put it to paper in her memoir.
No one likes seeing Ezra Miller’s name in a headline these days. The beleaguered star of the Fantastic Beasts franchise and DC’s upcoming The Flash, Miller has been the subject of intense confusion, scorn, and worry in recent years, beginning with the 2020 allegation and accompanying video that he choked a woman at a bar in Iceland. However, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair exposé, the story only gets darker from there.
The allegations against Miller (who uses they/them pronouns) include emotional and physical abuse, child endangerment, the grooming of a teen Native American activist, and what Vanity Fair calls a “Messiah delusion,” referring to themself as Jesus and the devil. Last month, Miller gave their only comment on the growing list of indiscretions and allegations, saying they were “suffering from complex mental health issues and have begun ongoing treatment.” But, according to one of Miller’s reps, “the notion that The Flash was at risk” served as a “wake-up call.”
However, while the actor is reportedly working with Warner Bros. on additional scenes for the long-delayed DC franchise lynchpin, others in Miller’s orbit don’t sound satisfied. The parents of Takoa Iron Eyes, a nonbinary teenage environmental activist that met Miller when they were 12, have filed one of two protection orders against Miller, accusing him of “grooming, brainwashing, and emotionally abusing the teenager.” A Massachusetts mother requested the other, “claiming that Miller’s interest in her own nonbinary 12-year-old made her and the child uncomfortable in incidents between February and June of this year.”
Miller’s relationship with Iron Eyes escalated concerns when they left for Hawaii, where Miller was arrested in March. Vanity Fair reports:
“There was this intensely controlling behavior of Tokata which, at first, I thought was for Tokata’s own good because they were unstable,” says someone who witnessed it. But their perspective changed when Iron Eyes’s parents petitioned for the protective order, claiming that Miller used “violence, intimidation, threat of violence, fear, paranoia, delusions, and drugs to hold sway over a young adolescent Tokata.
Then there’s “The Farm.” According to previous reports, Miller stole away to a “gun-ridden” Vermont farm with Iron Eyes and a 25-year-old mother named Ana and her three kids. The mother was part of another Miller controversy as she was a member of a polygamous family that Miller and Iron Eyes met and stayed with in Hawaii. Two weeks after Miller and Iron Eyes were invited to live with the family, the pair absconded with Ana and the children for Vermont. Again, the farm was described as not a family-friendly location. According to two longtime friends of Miller, the property had “guns everywhere,” including “a flame thrower and all these huge AK-47s lying around.” Another friend said the youngest child on the property picked up a bullet and put it in her mouth.
It’s at the farm where allegations of Miller running a cult come from. Apparently, there’s an altar at the farm “home to bullets, weed, sage, and Flash figurines.” Miller “makes women put their cell phones on the altar when they come in, and other offerings,” said one source.
The full report goes into greater detail, delving into allegations of drug abuse, the weaponization of their gender identity, and what could come next for Ezra Miller.
