Following a racist joke that linked Hideo Kojima to the assassination of Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Kojima Productions has threatened legal action against those who contribute to the "spread of fake news and rumors that convey false information."
Kojima Productions tweeted out its statement earlier today, July 9, saying that it "strongly condemns the spread of fake news and rumors that convey false information. We do not tolerate such libel and will consider taking legal action in some cases."
In a now deleted tweet, French far-right politician Damien Rieu accused the far-left of murdering Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and used photos of game developer Hideo Kojima instead of pictures of the current suspect Tetsuya Yamagami pic.twitter.com/2zpmL5kVnD
Abe was shot twice and passed away at a hospital, and a suspect named Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested at the scene and admitted to being the one who shot the former Prime Minister.
This so-called joke was picked up by a French comedian in a Tweet mocking the situation and that was retweeted by a far-right French politician named Damien Rieu who is associated with the Génération Identitaire movement he co-founded. Rieu took the joke as an actual fact and began spreading it.
Greek news channel using pictures of Hideo Kojima wearing a Soviet ushanka, Joker t-shirt and standing next to a photo of Che Guevara – saying he’s Shinzo Abe’s assassin!? pic.twitter.com/JiwZKtA7pJ
Despite all of the signs of this obviously being some sick joke, images that falsely linked Kojima to the assassination appeared "in an Iranian press outlet and as part of a Greek news broadcast."
Rieu has since apologized, but the damage had already been done. Now, Kojima Productions is doubling down and letting those out there know that this is not something to joke about and that it will take legal action in certain cases if any of this libel against Hideo Kojima continues.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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Warning: The following contains full spoilers for The Boys' third season!
The Boys’ third season has come to an explosive end and the finale capped off a season we called one of the best we’ve seen in years. As the brutal wait for Season 4 begins, we thought it’d be the perfect time to sit down with The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke to talk about the biggest moments from this last episode and what they reveal about the future of the series.
From Homelander’s continuing rise to power to that smirk on Ryan’s face to Victoria Neuman becoming Vice President to the future of The Seven, Kripke was more than willing to talk about “The Instant White-Hot” and what’s to come for The Boys.
It’s Homelander’s World and We’re Just Living In It
The Boys’ Season 3 finale is perhaps the show at its most hopeful and its most dark, and what’s to come very well may be decided by Homelander and, perhaps even more so, his son, Ryan.
We see Ryan with a little smirk on his face when his father kills a protester in the finale, and that small smile has unimaginable potential consequences for not only our heroes, but the world as a whole. What happens if Homelander is allowed to continue to raise him? Will the best parts of him come out now that he is a parent to save Ryan from going down a dark road? Kripke, in no uncertain terms, doesn’t think so.
“No, Homelander's a piece of shit, even if he cares for his son,” Kripke said. “If allowed to raise Ryan, he will raise Ryan to be a second Homelander, which will have apocalyptic stakes. If he stays in that environment, he's on his way to becoming another Homelander. And so I think it's a hint at what one of the major conflicts in season four will be, which is Butcher and Homelander having this battle over Ryan.”
Speaking of Butcher, he has to deal with his terminal diagnosis due to his usage of V24 alongside using the time he has left to get Ryan away from Homelander.
“[Butcher] has a serious problem,” Kripke said. “He has a very loudly-ticking clock. He needs to get Ryan out of there, he's hoping to still be able to destroy Homelander, and they've got the Neuman problem. I mean, it's still early days in the Season 4 room, but so far what's just really been interesting is when you're really facing your own mortality and you're really on the way out the door, you start really thinking about what's important to you, and what do you want to do with the time you have left?
“So, he's going to have to prioritize. He's going to have to decide which of those goals are the most important to him and go after them, whether or not it's what the CIA wants him to do or the other Boys want him to do. He has to focus on what's important before he dies.”
The Reign of Victoria Neuman and the State of Vought International and The Seven
Victoria Neuman has been playing her own game throughout this story and her main focus this season has been looking out for herself and her daughter. Now, having set up her path to become the Vice President of the United States, she has more power than ever. How will this impact the USA and our protagonists?
“Look, she is Stan Edgar's daughter in many ways, and by that I mean she has a sort of raw, unchecked ambition,” Kripke said. “I think she tells herself she wants to make the world a better place for her daughter, I think she tells herself that she probably has a reasonably liberal agenda, but she's just ruthlessly climbing as high as she can, because I don't even know if she could totally define why to herself. It's just her nature and how she was raised.
“She's a character who is always trying to play all sides depending on the situation she's in. The problem is now she's sort of in league with Homelander, who is the opposite of trying to play all sides. He's becoming more and more radicalized actually. And so figuring out how she can manage his madness while still protecting her options to maneuver is going to be a challenge.
“She doesn't immediately come in as like a shill for Vought doing whatever Vought wants. She's trying to figure out all the angles, but it's hard with all the pressure that Homelander's continually putting on her.”
Speaking of Vought, the company is in quite a predicament as The Seven is in shambles and needs rebuilding. However, now that Homelander is more in control, a comeback may just be in order. Alongside Kripke joking that The Seven has never really been The Seven since Episode 2 of Season 1, the showrunner gave a tease of the fate of Vought International.
“[Vought] has a lot of rebuilding to do physically and literally with the tower itself, but also with bringing in new members of The Seven,” Kripke said. “Without spoiling anything, I'll say that Homelander was like a big kid smashing a toy once they let him be in control, or once he got to be in control of Vought, but he's a really smart character, and I think he's really smart about learning from his mistakes and figuring out how to redirection Vought into a way that will be advantageous to him. Focusing more on the kind of guys who wear giant buffalo hats, for instance. So he's got a lot more tricks up his sleeve.”
For more on The Boys, be sure to check out our review of “The Instant White-Hot Wild” and stay tuned to IGN for our explainer of the season’s ending and our full Season 3 review.
Francesca Rivera is Video Producer at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @fbrivera.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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Arkane’s games offer a special kind of tactical agency, and with Redfall, Arkane Austin’s Studio Director and Redfall Co-Creative Director Harvey Smith says that'll remain true. "Solo is very much a classic Arkane experience," he promised – but so is its four-player co-op multiplayer mode, which is faster paced and offers a different kind of challenge as the dangers escalate.
Redfall follows four characters as they fight for their lives after an experiment gone wrong results in a swarm of vampires in the eponymous Massachusetts town. The sun is blocked out and a water wall surrounds the island, seemingly preventing anyone from leaving. Of course, knowing the story is just the beginning. From confirming Redfall will only have one ending to detailing some important customization mechanics and its plan for a lasting endgame, Smith shared plenty of new information about Arkane's 2023 vampire game. You can also watch a select portion of this interview in the video below.
Shining a Light On Big Details
Does the story change based on who you play?
No, but the dialogue does. Ricardo Bare and the writing team, the narrative design team, have put a lot of work into dynamic systems. And I should give the programmers credit there since they wrote those systems. Ricardo and Andrew Brown, our lead programmer, have worked a lot on dynamic VO systems. They worked on Prey together. A lot of work has been put into the narrative layer, the readables, the briefings, the dynamic conversations, the AI barks, all of that stuff that you'd expect in an Arkane game. We've gone a little deeper on a couple of them, but the characters, they talk a lot alone to comment on the world or with each other, depending on who you're playing. [For example] if you and I are playing Devinder and Layla, they have a different relationship than, say, Remi and Jacob would.
We'll be talking more about those dynamic narrative systems later. One thing I do want to say is there was just an overwhelmingly positive response to the announcement trailer that we released a year ago – the cinematic. Then today, the response to the gameplay trailer has been very positive. In those comments, once in a while, I see somebody like, "I hope they don't talk this much during the game. They're very chatty." And that is true, they don't. For marketing purposes, we just double down on the amount of dialogue that's in that trailer otherwise there's long moments of silence.
Arkane games are usually big on player choice and consequences. In Redfall's announcement, it was said that our actions change Redfall's setting. Are there many branching paths or major choices with consequences?
Multiple endings and stuff like branching missions are less important to Redfall. Although in truth, I think we have more elective missions, actually. There is the campaign, but there are also some side mission spurs that you can do or not do in the campaign. What it really influences is how a certain character's outcome happens or how they feel about you. Then we have the Nest, and we have the Safe House missions, and then we just have the random exploration of the world and the spawns and vignettes out there. But the overall plot itself, we don't do a lot of branching stuff with that.
Are there multiple endings in Redfall?
No.
How will we get to learn more about each of the characters? Are there specific character missions, or do we learn about them primarily through banter and cutscenes?
It's mostly through the banter and through the cinematics – they're all character-based. So if I have a briefing for this one mission and I'm playing Layla, I get Layla's perspective on that mission. But if I play again through that same mission and I'm playing Jacob, I get his perspective on it and then all of his banter. If we're playing together and I'm playing Layla, you're playing Jacob, they have their own unique banter back and forth as two characters that get to know each other.
A big question: can we change characters after we've started the game?
No, you cannot. You start the campaign with Layla, for instance, you're bound to Layla through the campaign mission, side missions, the whole flow of the game, to the endgame. And then after that, you can play again with Layla and keep advancing her or you can start a new character, but you can't switch characters mid-track. Currently, we have no plans to re-spec either. You can start a new playthrough and try a different set of powers, a different set of weapons, et cetera, but currently, when you start the campaign with a character, you're committed all the way through.
How will progression work? Do I have to level each character individually, or will there be an overall account level with some resources allotted to use across characters?
[It's] all per-character. So as you level up your Layla – you might have three Laylas going because maybe you just love Layla or you love Devinder. You might have one Layla you play alone and one you play with some other friends because they're all level 20. Then you have a Jacob you play with somebody else. Early on, we had the decision to make like, "Can I play in one party, if the three of us or the four of us are playing, can we all be Devinder? Can we all be Remi?" At first, we were like, "No, let's lock out the roles so that there's always a Devinder, always a Layla, if you have four people."
Ultimately, we decided not to do that. If you really want to play Remi and I really want to play Remi, then we should both be able to play Remi. We have character costumes that change, so you can be Remi in her rescue outfit or her hiking and camping outfit or her default outfit. I can be in a black ops Remi version. And then the way you build out your skills, the way I build out my skills, which weapons you have, which weapons I have, which Remnants you found, which Remnants I've found, it will feel different even if we're both playing Remi.
How flexible are the character builds, speaking of not being able to re-spec? Is there a specific class type per character? The gameplay segment during the 2022 Xbox Showcase showed a weapon that mentioned "support value." What does that mean and how does that impact how we play?
Our characters are very baked in terms of their personalities and their voices. What you're talking about is a shot, which we knew people would stop, where as Devinder, you have his power tree up – it's an early alpha version of it. Every hero is made up of a bunch of choices you can make through the trees. They all have three primary active powers that you can upgrade in a bunch of different ways. Then they have some passive powers. And then there is a set of skills that are kind of common across all the characters. Like, can I carry more medical resources or more lock picks?
In Devinder's case, he has a power called Black Light which you saw, where he held it up and the UV light petrified all the vampires around, which is temporary. They start to thaw out, basically, but you can stake them while they're petrified. There are hazards in the world like where somebody sets up a tripod with some UV light and if a vampire moves through it dynamically, they get petrified. You can sneak up and turn it off. Let's say an enemy faction is walking around those petrified vampires – you can use that to your advantage. But he has a power actively where he goes, "You shall not pass." He flashes [the UV light] and they petrify. You can upgrade that in different ways; bigger radius, longer effect, etcetera.
No actual class types, then? It's just more so you choose how you want to play, build it, then you can run with it regardless of whether you're playing solo or with others?
Devinder has a set of skills, active and passive, and some that are kind of common with everybody. And then also the weapons you choose because you're constantly leveling and so your weapons are leveled, so you need a higher-level weapon. Then the weapons come with rarities, so they have all these different traits on them that affect gameplay. And then on top of that, you have a few other equipment items that affect gameplay.
We have the concept of these things called Remnants, which are like objects the vampires were around. When one of them becomes a vampire and the world warps around them psychically, it will imbue something, like the rabbit's foot on their keychain or some object they're carrying can be a Remnant, now psychically charged. You can find those and carry them and they modify gameplay in some way. They're basically magic items.
Can you tell us more about the Ward Remnants, the Blood Remnants, and the Soul Remnants shown briefly on the trailer's weapon screen?
Some types of those Remnants will be in the base game and then some will probably come out shortly thereafter. One is more defense-oriented, one is more health-oriented, one affects how your skills work or how your weapons work, things like that.
Do Remnants get weird with how they modify the game?
Some of them get weird. Yeah. Give me an example of “weird.” What do you mean?
Hm, like Big Head mode. Just like weird modifiers that change the game.
They don't get weird like that. (Laughs) We don't have Big Head mode.
Yeah, I don't want that, actually. That's just the first example, but I think if you have a modifier that makes better defense generally or just, is it more stats-based modifiers?
Some are. That's the easiest thing to do, obviously. And then some are a little more grandiose. It's also a system we'll be playing with over time.
What was the most challenging part of developing Redfall?
As a developer, I would say the multiplayer piece during the pandemic. It was a super-challenging game, our most challenging game ever. You always want to challenge yourself at some level or you're just painting by numbers or something. And so it's like, can we take these values that we love at Arkane and put them in an open-world, co-op environment? So the multiplayer has changed everything. It's changed the kinds of missions we can do. It's changed what kind of physics we can do. We're doing everything we can, we love our game, but it's a new challenge at every step. Technically and creatively, it's a new challenge. And then the pandemic hit and everything got even more challenging. So this project has been difficult in a lot of ways. It's been complex.
And what do you think will be the most challenging gameplay aspect for players in Redfall?
As a player, the hardest thing to do… I guess that depends on final tuning, things that are coming down the road. Ideally, the boss fights will be very hard – the vampire gods. You see a glimpse of one of them in the gameplay trailer if you slow it down. That would ideally be the tough situation. Maybe getting separated from the group, maybe playing on a higher difficulty. When the storms kick off and the Rook shows up, that should be very difficult as well. [The Rook] is one of our special vampires.
Jumping forward, what’s the endgame like? What are the player goals? Is it better stats for optimization, higher character levels, or something else entirely?
We have some stuff we're working on that's new for us, honestly, but we're not really ready to talk about it yet because it's underway. We support all of our games for a period of time after they come out with DLC or with enhancements. You can look at our past and see all of that, ranging from Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches [for Dishonored and Dishonored 2] to Mooncrash for Prey.
We'll talk more about the endgame stuff and the sort of, "I've already finished the campaign once. What can I do?" Play in a harder difficulty mode, keep leveling my character, additional ways to play, additional characters, etcetera. Our goal is, with all of our projects, to stay with them for a while, while we ramp up on something new in the background.
Co-op vs Solo
Will it be harder for players who choose to go it alone? Or is it balanced so that it's more challenging with more people?
All of our games make a Venn diagram. If you lay them on top of each other, they overlap heavily but, you know, Dishonored is still focused. Prey is a seamless contiguous environment with a continuous flow of time and it's physics-focused. Deathloop added multiplayer – that's done by the Lyon Studio. Mooncrash added roguelike elements. Redfall falls on that same Venn diagram. It'll have a lot of the same Arkane creative values; narrative-rich space, the location is a character – we put a lot into the history of the place – immersive movement through the body, through the action, through the climbing, the sliding, all of that stuff. And then of course, game mechanics that interact in interesting ways, ways that sometimes surprise us.
At its heart, one of our games is part shooter, part RPG, about exploration of a world and all of that. That's the important part, and Redfall is made so you can play through the campaign solo and you don't have bots with you for the other characters or whatever. You're just purely solo. You pick Layla, Jacob, Devinder or Remi. You're alone, you go through the world.
It's not a super-hardcore stealth game, but stealth is a factor. The AI is based on awareness with sight and sound. You can use stealth to get an advantage on people or to bypass the conflict or whatever to avoid fighting if you're wounded or weak. So that is the way the single player just goes through the campaign, and there's no special mode for multiplayer or any of that. If you play with other people, one other person, two other people, three other people for a total of four, it becomes more and more party-like, of course. It's probably our closest to being a "party game." But solo is very much a classic Arkane experience.
Is story progress in a co-op round saved for each individual player or is progress only kept for the party leader?
As soon as you add open-world, as soon as you add co-op, you have to re-ask a bunch of questions about things that we [normally] take for granted, that this is the way we do them, this is the way all of the Arkane games work. We're still going back and forth on a bunch of stuff – final tuning and all that. We're just about to hit content lock and then we've got nothing but enhancing, bug fixing, polishing, [and] tuning from that point forward. And that's often where games go from like, "God, I can't stand looking at our game," to like, "Oh my God, I kind of like it." Dishonored was like that.
Our current answer is whoever hosts the session – initiates the session – their progress is persistent for them, but [for] other people, it's not. Your character progress is, like any weapons you find, any levels you gain, all of that is persistent. But in terms of what missions you've unlocked and such, the host, their progression matters. If you sign on with your friend and they're halfway through the game and you play the second half of the game with them, and then you need to go back and you want to play on your own, you'll be starting at the beginning of the campaign with a character.
When we started talking about [campaign progression] and working on it, we imagined a scenario where every mission you played, we checked the box that you got credit for that. You've done that one. But then you end up with this weird problem where like, "Okay, I've been playing with you, but now I'm going to play on my own." So I start playing through the campaign, but then I start hitting missions that I've already done? For the flow of things, you want to have to redo those. The story would be very confusing if you got to mission eight and it said, "Skip this one because you've already done it." Your hero and your gear and your experience points, that stuff is always persistent but your mission flow is persistent if you're the host.
What's the benefit of co-op other than having a good time with a friend and getting extra character banter? Was there a particular reason Arkane wanted to make a co-op campaign story rather than another single-player adventure?
When we started Redfall, I had just done eight years of Dishonored. Ricardo had done four years of Dishonored, four years of Prey. We felt like we needed some kind of creative risk or some kind of change. We always wanted to work on an open-world [game]. We just talked about the narrative systems that would be involved with multiplayer, with co-op, with characters that would get to know each other over time. We'll talk more about those systems later. There are some very dynamic systems with that. But really, these four personalities who are having to work together, because our vampires are kind of metaphors. They kind of represent the like 0.01% of predatory people out there who already have everything by draining the life out of most of the people in the world, even as the world burns down around them. They kind of already were vampires. They're already soulless or lacking in human empathy.
So our bases, our missions, are launched from civic buildings, like a fire department or a maritime center, for instance. It's all about neighborhoods, capturing neighborhoods, and taking them back for the people. At first, the four heroes come together, if you're playing co-op and they don't know each other at all, but they build bonds. There are gameplay and narrative benefits to that. It's just a new space for us to explore and it was an interesting challenge; what would the Arkane DNA look like in the open world? The way we do resources, scrounging for ammo and medical stuff and lock picks, and the way we approach buildings, there are multiple entries and problems to gameplay encounters, there are multiple ways you can approach it.
And what would it be like to work together? Because if you play solo, it's a lot spookier, it's a lot more atmospheric, it's more slow-paced. As soon as you add another person, you're not really afraid anymore because you have a friend there, but there's got to be something to make up for that. So the social aspect, the narrative changing in terms of the banter between the characters, just the fun of playing with another person… Layla drops the elevator and everybody can get on the roof or get up to a higher vantage. There are lots of little synergies like that that are good.
Having an open world and optional co-op creates different narrative challenges from games Arkane has worked on in the past. What were some key development ideas you wanted to carry over from past projects into Redfall?
We still believe in the same things. Environmental storytelling so that players can make inferences. It's less driven to them, but they're inferring it. Whether it's graffiti or scene placement, or the way a body is [placed], some loot and blood marks on the ground, that sort of thing. Just the way a house was set up, you tell something about the people that live there. That's important in all of our games. The place – like Redfall as a community and the way that people talk, and the way the community was set up, and the way they're banding together is storytelling in and of itself. Our AI systems being sight-driven, sound-driven, coming to search for you, not giving up, and not having perfect information is very important to us. The sort of hybrid of first-person shooter and RPG, not quite either, but somewhere in the middle, with a lot of exploration is important to us. Advancing RPG powers, feeling immersive in the movement and the shooting and the sliding and the climbing, all that's important to us. So what we really tried to do with Redfall was take all the core pieces of Arkane games and just make it work in an open-world game.
Will players have the freedom to leave their group in co-op and explore on their own, encountering enemies and things to do on their own? Or is there something tying everyone together?
In different builds along the way, we've had different answers to that question. At one point, we just let you wander to the opposite sides of the world, but the game is tuned such that the game gets harder with more people. [Due to] your chances of survival, you're encouraged to come back together. We may ship with tethering, but it will be pretty generous. Maybe a few hundred yards or something, I hope. Most of the time you probably wouldn't notice it anyway but it becomes a different thing. The way our world is set up, it's better if you gravitate back to the group.
There's still a lot of exploration in the game the more you play. Then the more solo you are, obviously, the pace slows down, stealth is more of a factor. Exploration, inferring stuff from the environment, storytelling, all becomes more important. And the more people you add to your group of up to four, the more sort of fast-paced and zany it becomes, of course.
How open is the open world? What are our limitations? Is it more like a Breath of the Wild where you can go anywhere wherever, or do we have to stick to certain areas until we're ready for the next challenge?
It's very open. For what it's worth, it's made to be an on-foot game. [With] people talking about the square footage, what's appropriate is different based on whether you're just running and walking or whether you have vehicles or you fly on a dragon or whatever. Ours is an on-foot, urban-exploration game, so it's the right size for that, I think. It's mostly very open. In fact, at first it was too open. It was like there was not enough blocking you or channeling you, but it's very, very open rooftops and alleys and streets of this small town – Redfall, Massachusetts – which is like a fishing community, a tourist community. Quaint, historic New England stuff with this stealthy takeover by vampires.
The one thing that we do in terms of that gating pretty heavily is we divided the world into two districts. District one is the first half of the missions and it's the downtown part of Redfall, and District two is more rural. It's farms, lighthouses, churches, things like that.
What happens when I'm in a party and I find an audiolog or other collectible? Do we all instantly have it, or does everyone have to pick it up to add it to their collection?
It's different. If it's a plot thing that advances the [story] or you found a note or key or whatever, the group advances with that, but if it's loot it's individualized. If something dies and has some medical resources or lock picks or Remnant or some ammo or something like that, everybody's got to get their own.
Can I bring my endgame character into another person's game, regardless of how far along they are in their adventure?
You can. There were so many times we started getting into the weeds of deciding “how should this work,” or “what rules should we put on?” And more and more, we just came back to “let the players do what they want.” Like if you are hosting and your character is level 40, and my character's level 3 and I come into the game with you, I'm going to have a real hard time. You're going to be saving me a lot, but I'm going to level up faster because we're earning more experience. And counter to that, if we're all level 3 and I'm hosting and you've got a level 40 character, you're not going to have much fun, I think, because your character can just insta-kill everything, basically. But maybe that's cool. Maybe you want to guide us. Maybe you're not going to fight unless we get in trouble. People will do all kinds of things, so putting the power in the hands of the player, I think, is the right call.
Redfall's Vampires and Our Tools to Kill Them
We've had a neat variety of vampires in media, from What We Do In The Shadows to the recent resurgence of Twilight, plus the many beautiful gothic video game vampire designs. What was the design theory behind Redfall's more monstrous vampires?
Vampires are always good. They're always a metaphor. Monsters are a metaphor. As I've said, ours are a metaphor for predatory people, soulless people that prey on [others] to aggrandize themselves or make themselves richer or more comfortable. They put a large number of people in a very stressful, drained position. Our vampires are not aspirational – you don't want to be them. They're horrible. They're monsters. There's also a lot of rich vampire lore out there. It's funny – our vampires blotted out the sun. One of the main vampire gods is called the Black Sun, and she blocked the sun out and she rolled the tides back from the island so you're land-bound on the island, trapped there.
We did a lot of research into vampires and vampires in media – Nosferatu and Dracula and all that, but also Near Dark, Lost Boys, Interview With The Vampire, Twilight, What We Do In The Shadows, and all of that. For a while, the team was having a weekly pizza vampire watching party before the pandemic. We'd all gather in one of the conference rooms and we'd bring pizza in and turn out the lights and somebody would host, "I picked this one, we're going to watch it together." And, "Oh God, I forgot how cheesy this was," or, "I forgot how cool this was." 30 Days Of Night is a really good example of a good one.
In terms of the design, we started out saying they should look like idealized predators in some way. They're tall and athletic and powerful. The more they ascend in the vampire ecology, the more they become monstrous. The specials like the Rook or the Siphon or the Angler, they have bizarre properties. The vampire gods themselves have even weirder aspects. The design was just back and forth with our concept team and our art director, Karen [Segars]. We love the movie 30 Days Of Night. We love parts of the book called The Passage, which was about modern, science-based vampires. But we deviated, too, in a lot of ways. Our vampires aren't [harmed by] garlic and crosses and things like that. They're not bat-derived. At the end of the day, they need to be afraid of the sun, drink blood, and have fangs to be vampires, really.
There are parallels you discover here and there. We didn't intend it, but there are some myths that vampires can't cross running water. So, by virtue of the vampire gods pushing all the water away from the island, there's a water wall suspended around the entire island that's kind of creepy and psychic. If you get close to it, it makes odd noises and has things floating in it. It looms over you. We end up going like, "Oh yeah, vampires, can't cross running water." That kind of like is an almost parallel to the vampire mythology that we didn't plan, but it just ends up that way.
What's that door shown in the trailer? Is that the “psychic nests?” Are these replayable if you miss something in them, like a collectible? Are these required to complete or an optional challenge?
We have a lot of different ways to play the game. Like a campaign mission, or you can just wander the world and level up and look at environmental storytelling scenes and fight things and collect loot. We also have a bunch of very dynamic systems like where storms can happen. This one special type of vampire shows up. We have these vignette scenes, which we'll go into detail at some point, which are full-on scenes with characters and loot and you can approach them in different ways. We have Safe Houses for this neighborhood-capture system where you go neighborhood by neighborhood, capturing different parts of the town, taking them back, making them safe again. We'll go into that, too.
And then, as you guessed, we have a feature called Nests, which are kind of a shared psychic space where the vampires are basically sort of tripping together on what we call the Blood Trance. Different rules exist inside the Nest. That psychic space doesn't have to adhere to normal architectural boundaries. That's why, in the trailer, you see them go to a movie theater and instead of the screen, it transitions into this like wilderness-looking environment. But yes, that's a Nest.
They're not required, per se, but when you get to the center of the Nest there's a heart there that has a powerful psychic Remnant in it that you want, basically. They're replayable, they're fairly procedural. Those Nests are made room by room, different tiles that can be stitched together dynamically, and so it's one of the more procedural parts of the game.
Are there a lot of procedurally generated parts to the game?
Yeah, if you look at which Safe House missions are involved in capturing a given neighborhood, if you look at the vignettes across the world and the ambient spawn of enemies, the sun rises and sets the moon, day and night follow – there are different gameplay rules that happen by day and by night – vampires are more often dormant during the day, etcetera. The storms build up and happen, and then the Nests are procedurally generated room to room, like I said. So there's quite a bit.
On top of that, Arkane is known for AI that is sight- and hearing-based. Even if your game is not a hardcore stealth game, having an AI that's like that just generates gameplay. Like, you're moving across the world and you're moving into an area, you don't realize that you made a sound back there and somebody's following you now. Or you accidentally lead one group of enemies into another group of enemies and they fight. That kind of AI is what we do, whether it's Prey or Deathloop or Dishonored or Redfall. No matter what the rest of the structure of the game is, that gives you a lot of dynamic gameplay right there. It's procedural in nature.
Can you tell me about your favorite weapon?
That probably depends on which character I'm playing at any given time, and the traits and the leveling of the weapons work such that you pretty much have as many weapons as you want to carry, but typically you're switching between three. The way the system works is it's beneficial to have one of the dedicated vampire-hunting weapons, like a flare gun, UV beam, or stake launcher, and then a shotgun, sniper rifle, or machine pistol. There's a lot of different stuff in there. And then it's augmented with your character’s powers, of course.
So depending on the situation, depending on the character, depending on which weapon you find, you find one of a certain level with certain traits, a certain rarity. It depends on how you play as well. If you have a good UV beam and you couple that with something that has a stake on the end or like a flare gun – that's a very powerful combination because you can petrify vampires and then destroy them from a distance.
How does loot work for enemy drops? It'd maybe be a little weird if vampires dropped guns or ammo considering that they don't use those in their attacks.
We've put a lot of thought into that. Most of ours are like environmental storytelling scenes where you come upon a scene and you might see a body on the street and then you look up at the roof and there's a blood streak. It looks like this guy was dragged down the roof and dropped. So if you make your way up to that roof, you find he was hiding up there before someone caught him and threw him off the roof. Therefore, there's a beer bottle and a sleeping bag and some stuff up there, and you loot it. The loot typically feels appropriate to the faction. If you stake a vampire and dig through the ashes, you might find a Remnant or something to that effect – a psychically imbued magic item, basically. Bellwether soldiers will have more likelihood to have military gear. If you lockpick a trunk and open it, it might have a civilian shotgun in it or some flare ammunition or something like that. But as often as possible, we make them environmental storytelling scenes.
Is ammo rare? Or is it easy to find?
I would love to do a mode where it's super rare, but it's somewhere in the middle for this. It's not like you're ammo-starved all the time, but it's also not like you have infinite ammo. Typically, when you fight people, they'll drop some kind of ammo. The stake launcher has “found” ammo. It fires broken broom handles or pool cues or fireplace pokers or something. So there'll be a bundle of stuff like that on the ground that you can load into that. If you're exploring an old boat on the harbor, it might have a first aid kit and flares in it or something to that effect.
It's clear Arkane has a plan for how to keep us busy between its still-to-be-determined launch date and whatever post-release content it has in store. Once those details are announced, you'll find the news here on IGN.
Miranda Sanchez is the Executive Editor of Guides and is smitten with What We Do In the Shadows. She has high hopes for Guillermo in Season 4. You can chat with her about your favorite vampires, stationery, and beer on Twitter.
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Warning: Full spoilers follow for the MCU to date, including Thor: Love and Thunder.
Anyone feeling like there’s been a lot of Marvel Cinematic Universe storytelling but an overall pronounced lack of direction as to where it’s all going? We’re trying to follow the breadcrumbs, but we have to admit, it’s been tough.
As of July, Marvel Studios is 18 months into what it calls Phase 4 of its interconnected storytelling, which consists of six films: Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the most recent release, Thor: Love and Thunder. On the Disney+ streaming side, there have been seven original series: WandaVision, The Falcon & the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, and Ms. Marvel.
To put that in perspective, it took Marvel Studios eight years to release 13 movies across three Phases, with approximately 26 hours of total storytelling time. Phase 4 is already up to 55 hours of storytelling with four more films and at least four more MCU streaming shows yet to debut this year. So if you’re an MCU fan, it’s a great time to be alive. But from a storytelling perspective, we have to wonder: What’s it all heading towards?
The Thanos Blueprint
Whether you love or hate Marvel Studios, there’s no arguing that they had an overarching adversary threaded through the first three Phases, and his name was Thanos. The supervillain was first teased in 2012’s The Avengers, with his arc building to an epic conclusion in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. And the repercussions of his actions are still being dealt with in a good portion of Phase 4’s storytelling.
However, there’s no Thanos level of Big Bad in this current collection of storytelling. President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, who is the guiding hand behind all MCU creative decisions, has touted Phase 4 for the introduction of the multiverse, where alternate timelines would be revealed and have an impact on the ongoing stories and characters audiences are invested in.
What’s been surprising is how none of those narratives actually connect or have any lasting implications yet.
He didn’t fib because Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Loki and What If…? are entirely about the multiverse with sacred timelines vs. alternate timelines. But what’s been surprising is how none of those narratives actually connect or have any lasting implications yet. To summarize: Peter Parker took himself out of the superhero game to correct time; Doctor Strange basically did a standalone mess around with an alternate timeline but there were no repercussions to his time; and Loki introduced the TVA, who monitors timelines, and revealed a huge reality shift that hasn’t touched any other storytelling. It had no impact on No Way Home or Multiverse of Madness, and vice versa. And then What If…? technically just portrayed a standalone worst-case arc of multiverse destruction.
Outside of that, there’s been a lot of movies and series in Phase 4 relying on “It’s the end of the world!” events that get fixed in the final act. Shang-Chi stopped the Dweller-in-Darkness from wiping out humanity; the Eternals managed to give the Celestials some intense homework as a delay tactic to wiping out humanity; Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes prevented the Flag Smashers’ terrorist attack; Peter Parker (times three) stopped a rogues gallery of supervillains from destroying New York City, and so on. Each movie/show ends with everything mostly resolved, yet with a bigger cast of characters to service and some dangling story threads left to flap in the breeze until the story cycle can get back to them.
Put a Stake in It
In Phase 3, the MCU was far more committed to making death stick and there was a wealth of ugly-cry moments born of those tough decisions. Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Thanos, Killmonger, Hela, Yondu, Odin… all big players who have remained dead, and we thank the MCU for making those big, permanent swings.
Which is why it’s such a head-scratcher that Phase 4 has made a point of undermining the potency of death in the MCU. For one, it brought back Vision and Loki, two characters whose deaths literally devastated Thor and Wanda Maximoff (and us), in order to keep them in play. Now, we love Paul Bettany and Tom Hiddleston too, but reviving their characters frankly felt like trying to make a comic-book trope work in film, and it doesn’t.
This approach was exacerbated with a prequel solo adventure for Black Widow when we already knew how and when she dies, the stunt murder of Earth-838’s Illuminati, and, in Thor: Love and Thunder, tagging on the Valhalla reveal of both Jane and Heimdall, which means they’re just sorta dead. Why should we bother to weep into our popcorn if the characters who don’t make it can just be yoinked back whenever?
So. Many. Characters.
Which leads us to the other big problem of Phase 4: There’s just too many characters! In the first three Phases, Marvel Studios slowly built their roster of cinematic superheroes across 23 movies. Through standalone origin stories and the methodical introduction of new characters into cumulative Avengers films, the MCU grew a lot, but with a manageable bench of primary, secondary, and recurring support characters. Now it’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the sheer volume of OG characters and new characters in their sandbox. And every new film and series adds at least three to five more major characters that gain a fanbase who wants to see more of them.
But it’s impossible to actually tell the stories of even a fraction of them because the scope of the MCU has gotten so expansive. For example, Sam Wilson was introduced as the new Captain America in April 2021. He won’t even get his own movie until 2023 or beyond. In comparison, at worst, the longest span where we didn’t see Steve Rogers was the two years between The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And that’s just one Avenger!
Phase 4 has been more than two Infinity Sagas combined, but it’d be pretty tough to say what the over-arching story is.
And it’s only getting worse with the MCU’s new normal of stunt cast introductions in the mid-credit or end-credit scenes. In Phase 4, there’s Harry Styles as Eros and Patton Oswalt as Pip, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Charlize Theron as Clea, and Brett Goldstein as Hercules, with surely more surprises to come. It used to be a thrill when a major actor was announced in an upcoming MCU movie, but lately we’re wondering if there are any A-listers left to choose from. And if they get cast, when will we actually see them play the character?
Which brings us back to the why of it all. We respect the MCU not trying to immediately repeat itself with a new Thanos because that’s like capturing lightning in a bottle twice. But we’re really feeling the lack of clarity, or an identifiable throughline, to at least the cinematic narratives. Yes, we see the piecemeal assemblage of potentially the MCU’s spin on a Young Avengers lineup or a New Avengers roster. And we know the upcoming streaming series Secret Invasion is threading the Skrulls from Captain Marvel into the next massive threat to the planet. But even that potential reveal feels like too little too late in establishing an overall focus and sense of narrative purpose when the majority of Phase 4 storytelling has just felt scattershot and disjointed.
After 55 hours of Phase 4, where exactly are we? That’s more than two Infinity Sagas combined, but it’d be pretty tough to say what the over-arching story is in this new era of Marvel. Have there been good and even great moments to be found in those 55 hours? Sure! But the MCU has long been about the bigger story of this universe, and it sure is starting to feel like there isn’t one at the moment.
Tony Sirico, the actor best-known for playing Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos, has died. He was 79.
Sopranos co-star Michael Imperioli confirmed the news in an Instagram post, saying, "I did a lot of my best and most fun work with my dear pal Tony."
It pains me to say that my dear friend, colleague and partner in crime, the great TONY SIRICO has passed away today. Tony was like no one else: he was as tough, as loyal and as big hearted as anyone i’ve ever known. I was at his side through so much: through good times and bad. But mostly good. And we had a lot of laughs. We found a groove as Christopher and Paulie and I am proud to say I did a lot of my best and most fun work with my dear pal Tony. I will miss him forever. He is truly irreplaceable. I send love to his family, friends and his many many fans. He was beloved and will never be forgotten. Heartbroken today.
Imperioli played Christopher Moltisanti, Tony Sopranos' protege, while Sirico played one of the group's chief henchmen to "violent, paranoid perfection." In The Many Saints of Newark, the role of Paulie Walnuts was portrayed by Billy Magnussen.
While Sirico was most famous for his role in The Sopranos, it was far from his only role as a gangster. His tough guy persona and Brooklyn accent made him a natural for roles in movies including Goodfellas, Cop Land, and Gotti.
He remained active in film and television long after the conclusion of The Sopranos, most recently appearing in American Dad, where he naturally played a mobster.
