Month: May 2020

Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop series hit an unfortunate snag last year when star John Cho was injured on set. Now executive producer Marty Adelstein (TNT’s Snowpiercer) has provided an update on how many episodes were filmed before the series went on hiatus.

In an interview with Syfy Wire, Adelstein revealed the series was deep into production by the time Cho injured his knee, triggering what was expected to be a seven-to-nine-month shutdown while Cho recovers. According to Adelstein, the first three Cowboy Bebop episodes have been completed, while Episodes 4 and 5 are in post-production and filming had begun on Episode 6 before the hiatus. This contradicts earlier reports indicating production had only been underway for a week before Cho’s injury.

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“So, we have finished three episodes. I think we’re into [shooting] six; then John Cho tore his ACL, unfortunately. But I have to tell you I really like the show. It’s really fun,” Adelstein told Syfy Wire. “And we have gone out of our way, because of all these anime movies that have come out and been accused of being whitewashed, we have really gone out of our way. The characters are all sort of multiethnic, and it’s a great cast. And the two episodes I have seen are so much fun. It’s really fun.”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any update on when production on Cowboy Bebop will resume. Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic creates additional problems for the series on top of Cho’s lengthy recovery process.

Adelstein also had new updates to share on Netflix’s live-action One Piece series. While COVID-19 will likely delay the start of filming until at least September, the first season of One Piece has been written, and Adelstein is hopeful casting will begin in June (possibly as soon as next week, in fact).

“We were supposed to start filming in August in Cape Town, South Africa. We anticipate the date being able to film [now is] September, at the latest,” Adelstein said. “We have basically all 10 scripts written. We will start casting when we go back. My suspicion is June 1, but we will start doing our casting. We have a lot of names that we’re talking about, and we should be in production in September. We have been working very closely with Sensei Oda. So, we’re going to get started, and this one is very big. I mean, Snowpiercer was a big production; this is even bigger.”

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Speaking to IGN in January 2020, Cho said he hasn’t yet been in contact with original Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe, and noted one of the main challenges with the series has been maintaining the “unique” and “weird” tone of the anime. “I think that was the big thing I was focusing on all the time was…we got to keep it strange and that’s hard to do, but I watched some of the stuff and I’m really happy with it,” Cho said.

While we wait for more news on both shows, check out our breakdown of all the live-action anime remakes currently in development.

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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.

Riot is holding a set of Valorant tournaments to celebrate its June 2 launch. The tournaments, which will be streamed and hosted by Twitch Rivals, will feature a $200,000 prize pool with creators and teams from North America, Brazil, Europe, Korea, Japan, and other parts of Latin America participating.

Few details have been announced yet, but Twitch Rival tournaments usually feature a combination of professional players and streamers. Specific tournament times during the launch weekend have also not been announced.

Valorant left beta on Thursday, becoming unavailable to players until the free-to-play shooter fully launches on June 2. Riot plans to reset player accounts and patch in fixes and new content during the down period. The studio will also be adding new servers–located in Atlanta, Dallas, London, Madrid, and Warsaw–to help lower Valorant’s latency so that the player experience is as smooth as possible.

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Escape From Tarkov went down for a few hours on Thursday to deploy patch 12.6 (0.12.6.7456), a major update to the early access shooter that included a global wipe of character data among several other changes, additions, and bug fixes. The massive reset erased all player progress, including level, trader rep, and any items stored in your stash, keeping only weapon presets and examined items saved in the handbook.

While the routine wipe was one of the major highlights of the latest Tarkov update, it’s not the only thing that patch 12.6 brings with it. A captcha has been added to the flea market as an extra measure against bots, all stashes (no matter which Escape From Tarkov edition you have) have been increased by an additional 20 cells, and players now have the ability to lean while prone. Five new parts for the AR-15/M4 are also available to scavenge, but cannot be purchased from traders. The update also modifies a few quests and brings a number of optimizations, AI improvements, and bug fixes.

Leading up to the most recent wipe, Battlestate Games also temporarily reduced shop prices and unlocked all trader levels, allowing every player to access high-level weapons and gear before the wipe took place, in a kind of “post-wipe event.” Patch 12.6 marks the first Escape From Tarkov wipe since October 2019.

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Keyboards are an unavoidable part of the 21st century. We hammer out texts on our phones, mash the WASD keys while testing out a new keymapping for Escape From Tarkov, and type out personal details to fill out forms on our laptops. And if you do a lot of typing, you may as well buy a great keyboard that can make it fun to write the next great novel and make you a better gamer, however slightly. With so many great games available on PC–and major hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Avengers, and more on the way–it’s worth investing in a good keyboard for gaming.

When it comes to finding the right keyboard and mouse setup, you have to know what you want. Some like their keyboards small, flat, and quiet, while others prefer the tactile key switches, larger profile, and satisfying sounds of a mechanical gaming keyboard. High-end keyboards get more elaborate every year, too, which means there are more factors, like keyboard backlighting, ergonomic design, N-key rollover, and response time to think about.

If you’re serious about your gaming experience on PC, especially for action-heavy games like shooters or real-time strategy games, then a dedicated, mechanical gaming keyboard can come with a host of advantages. Mechanical keys can provide better ergonomics for increased comfort over a membrane keyboard, making them a better purchase in the long run; every key switch can provide a more defined (and potentially faster) response time due their better key switches, to make sure you know you did the thing; with a good backlight, they can potentially play host to an extravagant light show that might let you know when something bad (or good!) is happening in your game.

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Robert Pattinson had just started working on Christopher Nolan’s time-bending espionage thriller Tenet when he learned he had been cast as The Batman.

In a new interview with Total Film (via Batman-News), Pattinson recalls the “insane” and “very, very intense weekend” when he won the role of Batman just as he was starting a new movie from the director of the Dark Knight trilogy.

Pattinson said he learned he’d been cast as Batman on “(the) morning of the first day” of filming Tenet. “That was a crazy way to start Chris’ film,” Pattinson said. “I think I was doing the screen test, as well, on the Saturday before I started.”

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Pattinson then went straight from shooting Tenet to working on The Batman, a transition the actor says left him feeling “loopy.” But then just seven weeks into filming, production on The Batman was shut down indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’d really gotten into a really good rhythm as well, so it’s kind of strange to be pausing,” Pattinson said. “But, again, it’s a hard movie. I mean, obviously it’s Batman, so it’s kind of nice.”

Pattinson said “having some time off is not the worst thing in the world” given the whirlwind of going straight from one major production into another. “But hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later that everything is hopefully in a better place.”

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For more on The Batman, learn what Jeffrey Wright had to say about Jim Gordon and the “badass” new Batmobile, what Robert Pattinson had to say about his Bat-fitness regiment and Andy Serkis’ revelations about Alfred and the film’s tone.

And for more on Tenet, discover why Christopher Nolan broke his big tradition for the film, find out why Nolan decided to blow up a real 747 rather than use visual effects, and learn what John David Washington said about the plot.

Following a State of Play livestream that focused on Ghost of Tsushima, Sony content communications manager Justin Massongill followed up with Sucker Punch creative directors Nate Fox and Jason Connell with fan questions and posted the answers on PlayStation Blog. In the interview, Fox and Connell reveal that Jin is the only playable character in Ghost of Tsushima and–though you will have a choice in how he fights–there are aspects of his story that cannot be influenced.

“Jin is the hero of this story,” Fox said. “Players are there, each step of the way, guiding Jin as he transforms from the honorable Samurai he was brought up to be, into the Ghost that Tsushima needs him to become.”

Though you can customize Jin’s armor and fight as either a confrontational samurai or stealthy ghost, Jin’s weapon of choice won’t change. “Jin’s katana is incredibly important to him,” Connell said. “It’s also his main weapon of choice from beginning to the end of the game. There are ways to improve this weapon, both the stats and the appearance.”

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Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is set to become the first fighting game to support cross-play across five major gaming platforms.

The game launches on Google Stadia as part of June’s collection of free games for Stadia Pro subscribers and will feature cross-play with the other platforms the game is already available on. That includes PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.

The news was revealed via Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid’s Twitter account, which noted that Battle for the Grid was the first fighting game to be platform-agnostic in the current generation.

We are the Power Rangers!

Expect the Ranger Nation to grow as PRBFTG will be available for Stadia Pro subscribers starting June

That’ll make us the first fighting game with full crossplay for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Stadia.

Tag your Stadia friends below! https://t.co/jT5YldUa5i

— Power Rangers: Battle For The Grid (@Battle4TheGrid) May 28, 2020

With fighting games necessitating extremely strong netcode for workable online play, cross-play is something of a rarity in the genre, so Battle for the Grid’s move is an admirable one – especially for a game with a smaller playerbase than the traditional big hitters in the fighting game sphere, hopefully allowing fans to find a game more easily.

As well as Battle for the Grid, Stadia Pro subscribers can also pick up Little Nightmares, Get Packed, Panzer Dragoon and Superhot as part of the package of free games for the month of June.

We reviewed Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid back in March of 2019, calling the game a “mechanically sound 2D fighter.”

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

Crystal Dynamics, the developer behind Marvel’s Avengers, and publisher Square Enix have revealed a new wheelchair-using superpowered NPC, which is one of the studio’s many efforts to increase its representation of disability.

In a blog dedicated to accessibility, staff from Crystal Dynamics explained how accessibility has increased in importance to the studio since efforts first began in 2013. Last year, the studio earned APXP (Accessible Player Experience Practitioner) certification, signalling that it has staff members that are able to understand the experiences of players who have different needs.

This has influenced several elements in Marvel’s Avengers, including an NPC called Cerise. She is part of the Inhumans, a group of superpowered people who are one of the core teams in Marvel’s comic canon. Her idle animations have been motion captured by Cherry Thompson, an accessibility specialist who has also been providing feedback on the game.

Cerise provides representation for disabled people, but the game’s design also helps cater to disabled players. “One of the examples I am most excited about is a high contrast user interface (UI),” said Meagan Marie, the senior community and social media manager for Marvel’s Avengers. “The high contrast UI feature makes it easier to navigate for low-vision users or people who find some interfaces distracting and difficult to use. The UI team really did a great job on that one.”

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The game will also feature fully remappable controls, character-associated subtitles, campaign-relevant closed captions, and HARM Training Rooms, each of which is helpful for different types of players.

Marvel’s Avengers is due to release this September, after being delayed from a May launch. You’ll be able to see more of the game during IGN’s Summer of Gaming event, where we’ll see the Avengers’ War Table feature and co-op gameplay.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.