Month: January 2018

Daniel Craig is signed up to play James Bond at least one more time in the upcoming 25th 007 movie that is due for release in November 2019. But who might play the super-spy after Craig retires from the role? That remains to be seen, but now series producer Barbara Broccoli has suggested that aren’t ruling anyone out. Speaking to The Daily Mail, Broccoli said “anything is possible” when it comes to who might play 007 next. She said this in response to a question about if the next 007 actor could be a woman or black.

“These films tend to reflect the times so we always try to push the envelope a little bit,” she said. ‘Anything is possible. Right now it’s Daniel Craig, and I’m very happy with Daniel Craig, but who knows what the future will bring?”

The 25th Bond movie already has a release date of November 8, 2019, but an official title or director remains unknown. In October 2015, Craig said if he were to play Bond again, it would “only be for the money.” A year later, a report claimed that Craig was offered $150 million to star in the next two Bond movies.

Craig has played the British super-spy four times already, in the movies Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre. Bond 25, or whatever the movie ends up being called, could be Craig’s last time playing 007. “I think this is it. I just want to go out on a high note,” Craig said last year. “I can’t wait.”

Uncover Link’s missing past with the locations for every memory in Breath of the Wild.

PUBG is one of the biggest games on the planet and it continues to grow. On December 30, the Hunger Games-like shooter passed 3 million concurrent players on Steam. That’s up from 2 million at the start of October and 1 million peak concurrent users in September.

Playerunknown himself, Brendan Greene, has said he thinks the game could reach 100 million players to achieve League of Legends-like success. Three million is more than four times the number of the second-most popular game on Steam, Dota 2, which had around 705,000 concurrent users on December 30. It’s down today, January 2, as the game had around 2.79 million concurrent players, according to Steam’s own public stats.

The new player milestone comes on the heels of PUBG’s 1.0 release in December. Some might have been waiting for PUBG to leave Early Access before jumping in.

PUBG came to Xbox One through the Game Preview program on December 12. It was a quick hit there, selling 1 million copies in its first 48 hours. The game has sold an astonishing 30 million copies; it sells for $30, so that’s around $900 million in revenue.

In other PUBG news, developer PUBG Corp. recently said it wants to bring the game to “every platform” so a PlayStation 4 release could be in the cards. Additionally, the developer said it has spoken with Netflix and people in Hollywood about extending the game to new mediums.

The new Netflix show Dark, which is the network’s first German-language original production, includes a scene that features the game The Surge where two people are playing split-screen co-op. The problem? The game doesn’t actually have co-op. Deck13 has now officially responded, explaining that the studio allowed the show’s producers to take some creative liberties to fit the story they were trying to tell.

A Deck13 representative said on Reddit that the Dark producers contacted Deck13 “months” before the show premiered on December 1 about their eagerness to feature The Surge in the show. This was principally because The Surge was developed in Germany. “We agreed and allowed them to even fake a splitscreen if it fitted better for their idea. Some kind of creative rework one could say,” the Deck13 representative said.

The split-screen support for The Surge shown in Dark is fiction, but could it one day become reality for the game with a patch? Don’t get your hopes up. “Technically it’d wreck the console though,” Deck13 said about splitscreen support. Announcing a new feature like split-screen co-op by way of a Netflix show would have been a pretty interesting way to go about it, but if it does ever happen, it sounds like it’ll be through a more traditional manner.

“We’d chose a different way to announce such a feature,” Deck13 said.

The Surge launched in May 2017 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. GameSpot’s The Surge review scored it a 7/10. Reviewer Daniel Starkey said, “The Surge is far from perfect, but none of its problems are deal breakers.”

Welcome to Hero Makeover, our new video series where professional costume designers and makeup artists transform real-world heroes into their favorite characters.

In Episode 1, a 16-year old with cerebral palsy named Kirsten undergoes a cosplay transformation into Davros, the iconic villain from Doctor Who. Kirsten has been an inspiration to others through CosAbility, a group that seeks to empower others with disabilities through cosplay. Check out her amazing Davros transformation in the video player above.

Be sure to follow Hero Makeover on Facebook if you want to catch each episode before it airs in the weeks following on IGN, our apps, and places like YouTube. The series is voiced by Jennifer Hale, the prolific voice actress who’s worked on a number of different video game series, including Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, Metroid Prime, Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and many more.

Continue reading…

PUBG was one of the biggest success stories of 2017 and no one is expecting the game to slow down or fall off the radar in 2018. The CEO of PUBG developer PUBG Corp, Chang Han Kim, said in a new interview that he hopes the game will one day be available on “every platform.” Not only that, but he also spoke about how his aim is for PUBG to become a “universal media franchise” that could extend beyond games to TV and movies.

PUBG is now available on PC and on console through a timed-exclusivity partnership with Microsoft for the Xbox One edition. The game will stay exclusive to Xbox One “for some time,” Kim told InvenGlobal, though it sounds like you can expect it on PlayStation 4 and other systems later. “If we have the opportunity, the final goal would be to launch the title on every platform,” he said.

The PC edition of PUBG recently officially launched its 1.0 version while the Xbox One version remains unfinished in the Game Preview program. Despite being unfinished, the Xbox One version has been a huge hit already, selling 1 million copies in its first 48 hours. Kim added that the game has been “selling considerably” since then, and overall he described the game’s commercial success on Xbox One as being “much better” than anticipated.

Kim went on to explain that part of what is keeping PUBG off PS4 for now (outside of Microsoft’s timed-exclusive agreement) is that Sony’s system doesn’t have an Early Access/Game Preview program. This was also an issue for Ark: Survival Evolved, which launched on Xbox One much earlier than it did on PS4.

“Early Access on Steam and Game Preview on Xbox One are like pre-release, so they don’t have a restriction on quality. However, PlayStation is very strict about this,” Kim said. “There were cases where a game took 6 months more to launch even when it was already completed. We are still in the stage of learning the console development environment and console gamers’ taste. We need to think about other platforms after evaluating and completing the Xbox One version first.”

Also in the interview, Kim spoke about his ambition for PUBG to become much more than just a game. “I’d like PUBG to become a universal media franchise based on the game,” he said. “We want to take part in diverse industries including Esports, movies, drama, cartoons, animation, and more. In fact, we received a couple of love calls from a number of developers in Hollywood and Netflix.

“Our dream is to build a new game-based culture through various ways like this, and have the lead of that culture.”

You can read the full, wide-ranging interview here at InvenGlobal. The site went inside the company’s South Korean office and has pictures of the working space.

Last year featured quite a few titles with strong, moving stories. Find out which game IGN selected as the best of the best.