Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot sent a memo to employees detailing how the company plans to rework its “solutions and tools [that] detect, report, and resolve any incident or serious problem” after numerous allegations against Ubisoft workers have come to light.
“I have gathered all of my direct reports to address this subject and your feedback,” Guillemot wrote in a memo originally reported on by Business Insider. “I would like us to thoroughly review all of our systems so that these types of situations cannot happen again.”
Guillemot didn’t specifically mention sexual harassment in the memo despite Ubisoft being at the center of many allegations over the last week. The company suspended vice presidents Tommy François and Maxime Béland after an internal investigation into several claims of misconduct according to a Bloomberg report. The two were responsible for overseeing worldwide development of the studio’s games.
Ubisoft has been under heavy fire following a number of victims who have reported misconduct by the studio’s employees. Product and brand marketing manager Andrien Gbinigie was accused of sexual assault on June 22, which Gbinigie denied in a now-removed Medium post. This was followed by Assassin’s Creed Valhalla creative director Ashraf Ismail leaving Ubisoft on June 24 in the wake of accusations of infidelity.
“We have started by launching investigations into the allegations with the support of specialized external consultants,” the studio said in a statement on June 25. “Based on the outcomes, we are fully committed to taking any and all appropriate disciplinary action. As these investigations are ongoing, we can’t comment further. We are also auditing our existing policies, processes, and systems to understand where these have broken down, and to ensure we can better prevent, detect, and punish inappropriate behavior.”
Guillemot said that he will “personally follow each of the situations that have been reported” and that he “won’t accept anything less” than a welcoming and respectful company culture and environment.
The Mad Max films are available for digital rental.
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Motivated by reality feeling like a Mad Max opening monologue, I yearned to experience a deeper sense of madness. Like listening to a sad song when you’re down, I turned to a key piece of fiction in this arena: Mad Max.
Discussions of the Mad Max saga tend to focus on the brilliance of the first sequel, Mad Max 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior). Or they hone in on the absurdity and lunacy of the first half of the third film in the series, Beyond Thunderdome. And even more commonplace in contemporary film discourse is a reveling in the brilliance of Fury Road, director George Miller’s magnum opus. But what about the original film that drove our titular Max to become “Mad”?
Tracing the post-apocalypse back to the original Mad Max sees the audience transported to the near-apocalypse. The Australian outback, the perfect backdrop for the turbulent state of humanity, hangs in peril as the thin line of society comes closer and closer to collapse thanks in part to two warring factions: the police and the Zed Runners, the latter of which are led by one Toecutter (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne who’d later go on to play Immortan Joe in Fury Road).
What ensues is the descent into sorrow and madness of Max Rockatansky, who loses everything he holds dear at the hands of Toecutter and his band of flamboyant theatre rejects that makeup the Zed Runners. In his plunge into madness, Max becomes that which he seeks to protect society against. Not because Toecutter won, and the police force “lost,” but because Max realizes he has nothing left. In a world where creature comforts run extinct, the only thing that makes sense is madness. But what sets Max apart from the wastrels wandering the wasteland is his shame for what he’s become.
But in understanding what he’s lost, Max finds his gift. Like the dying cry of War Boys in Fury Road, Max understands (usually after some convincing) that it is his duty to bear witness to the marginalized, forgotten, and weak. Max weaponizes the skill set he developed as part of the Main Force Patrol unit to help elevate the voice of The Other in a world actively seeking to snuff it out. And therein lies the timelessness of science fiction. It offers us an opportunity to explore the present through the safe lens of over-the-top set dressing and, in the case of the Mad Max saga, tons of sick car destruction and flames.
Outside the first film, Max isn’t the main character of the Mad Max saga. He’s the vehicle by which the audience perceives the story. In a future where humanity runs scarce, Max serves to chronicle the waning voice of it. In The Road Warrior, a reluctant Max elevates and protects the livelihood of a small colony of settlers who’ve taken refuge in an oil refinery against the wishes of The Marauders, led by Lord Humungus. In Beyond Thunderdome, Max leads a Planet Erf community of children to liberate a local trading outpost known as Bartertown — and to freedom and safety. Max’s utilizes his skillset to serve others. Fury Road? Same thing. Through sheer happenstance and a little reluctance, Max ultimately helps Imperator Furiosa overtake The Citadel from the tyrant Immortan Joe. Again, he’s bearing witness and serving a community composed of the downtrodden. Because sometimes all it takes is the action of one good person to make a difference. And that’s the core of the Mad Max franchise: the humanity.
In the real world, where Black voices are being oppressed and silenced, I can’t think of a better message. It is the duty of everyone who is able to protect and strengthen those voices. That simple act is the benchmark of humanity and our saving grace.
Binge It! is IGN’s recommendation series. Movies, TV shows, books, comics, music… if you can binge it, we’re here to talk about it. In each installment of Binge It!, we’ll discuss a piece of content we’re passionate about — and why you should check it out.
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Nick Limon (@AdventNick) is a Shows Producer for IGN Entertainment. When he’s not doing work stuff, he’s often found watching tons of films, playing old video games for the umpteenth time, and cooking.
There are a lot of reasons to take a look at West of Dead. Cowboys and Wild West aesthetics are hot in games right now, in the wake of Red Dead Redemption 2. Run-based games are, likewise, very much a structure du jour. It’s dusted with voiceover narration from Ron Perlman, who you might know from Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy films or the FX TV Show Sons of Anarchy. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that its core mechanical conceit, as a cover-based twin-stick shooter, helps Frankenstein it to original and, dare I say, innovative gameplay. Unfortunately, West of Dead is a textbook case of a half-baked concept: Though its big sweeping ideas work well, the minutiae, from scaling the difficulty of encounters to unrefined enemies and plain old technical issues, threaten to undo the experience at any time.
West of Dead’s conceit builds up a simple but interesting little tale. In Purgatory–which is apparently in Wyoming–the dead have stopped filtering “east” to heaven or “west” to hell. You play an undead cowboy called the Marshall who’s lost his memory, save for his mission to kill the evil preacher holding up the afterlife. Though it’s more narrative glue than captivating storytelling, the Marshall’s inner monologue, in subdued performance from Perlman, keeps the story in mind, evoking a world that you might not see in its generic, monotonous Wild West-themed levels.
Like so many of today’s Rogue-inspired games, the story naturally falls away at a certain point, as you play and replay the game over and over, attempting to reach your goal. West of Dead retains many of the tropes established by the many, many rogue-lites that have launched in the last few years, and it cribs its structure specifically from 2018’s wildly successful version, Dead Cells. West of Dead procedurally generates long levels, which are punctuated with a store where you must spend Sin points to permanently expand your arsenal of weapons. In each run, you find upgrades to your specs and more powerful gear–two weapons, two accessories, and a passive charm. By defeating optional bosses, you gain access to branching paths with harder levels. You carry an upgradable healing flask, which you refill between levels. There’s even a hall at the start of each run where you can see all the weapons and upgrades you’ve bought. Though it comes dangerously close to getting branded as a “Dead Cells clone,” using familiar structure makes it easy to focus on West of Dead’s combat, where its real innovations lie.
Not everything works as well, though. The game’s procedural generation feels uneven. There are clear phases in every version of every level–rooms to introduce new enemies, or where you’re supposed to find an upgrade–that appear identical (or close to it) in every run. For example, the first fight in each level has the same enemies every time. At the same time, certain elements, like enemy placement, feel completely random, to the point where you may die at the hands of bad luck instead of poor play.
West of Dead builds a novel run-based experience from the bones of two less commonly used structures, twin-stick and cover-based shooters. The twin-stick element is purely mechanical–you use the left on your controller to move and the right stick to shoot. Like many twin-stick games, enemies will look to spread out and flank you, so it’s important to keep your head and your sights on a swivel.
How you shoot is dictated, in part, by what kinds of guns you use. There are four types–pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and rifles–which have different ranges and do different amounts of damage. In addition, each individual gun has its own quirk: Some make enemies take damage over time, for example. The differences among the guns and secondary weapons, which include explosives, throwing knives, and a few defensive items, don’t make a huge impact on their own, but they can make a difference if you choose gear to fit a specific strategy.
The cover shooter component is more pervasive. Each level is actually a series of combat arenas, conjoined by long hallway safe rooms. The arenas are spartan, but always feature a few boxes, bales of hay, or other places for you to take cover. Using cover puts you at a strong advantage–enemies cannot hit you while you’re even partially behind it, and you reload faster. By contrast, you’re extremely vulnerable when moving around in the open. Gun-toting enemies will hit their marks unless you dodge them, and it only takes a few shots to bring you down.
Given that cover is so important, though, there are many, many things designed to keep you from setting up in one spot and picking off enemies at your leisure. All cover is destructible, and most fights feature at least one enemy that will try to keep you moving. Making cover so desirable, but hard to hold onto creates urgency in every moment. Learning how to efficiently stop, dodge, or delay each enemy’s attack while making openings for yourself requires an understanding and level of skill that grows as you run and re-run the levels again and again. Even more so when you take into the account that you’ll have a different set of weapons, with their own strategic quirks, every time.
In a vacuum, these are the makings of a great rogue-lite, but the experience often fails to reach its potential because of design decisions, large and small, that make it hard to appreciate the dynamic between tactical thinking and quick, accurate shooting.
Though there are many problems, most of which seem small and specific, they’re compounded by the procedural generation issues so that playing well can only get you so far. A number of enemies that have wind-up attacks, where an indicator shows where they’ll hit, can change the direction of their attack after telegraphing it (which defeats the purpose of showing the indicator). The aim-assist mechanic, which targets enemies when they’re in a well-lit part of the room and ignores them when they’re in the dark, will target random spots on a wall rather than allowing you to free aim at targets in the dark. There’s nothing more annoying than lining up a shot, then seeing it go in another direction. Diverted shots, cheap hits, a bad roll of the procedural design dice–too often, it feels like the universe is working against you.
These problems hurt even more in the second half of the game, when the difficulty ramps up. Late-game enemies have more health than the enemies that came before, making it nearly impossible to dispatch even one without multiple scrambles for precious little cover. It’s especially annoying when fighting enemies who can teleport, making cover completely useless and destroying the dynamics of the cover system itself. Depending on the map, there were runs where it was easier (and less painful) to run past all the enemies than play through a series of long, drawn-out firefights.
…the experience often fails to reach its potential because of design decisions, large and small, that make it hard to appreciate the dynamic between tactical thinking and quick, accurate shooting.
Not all of these problems are intentional. Even after multiple patches, there are loads of repeating bugs. I’ve seen bullets pass through suicide-bombing enemies, demon dogs bite through walls, and any number of frustrating, often run-ending glitches. Given how fragile the Marshall is, any glitch that leads to damage, especially in the later levels, can spoil a run. When it happens once, it’s a disappointment. When it seems to happen every few runs, it’s a significant problem.
All of these things together turn a game that feels like it’s meant to take 10 to 15 hours to master into a much longer slog. After playing the game for more than twice that amount of time, I never achieved a winning run, but there’s not much left to see or conquer. The game’s NPCs say the same exact lines at the start of every run. It becomes a drag to re-run facsimiles of the same levels again and again: They’re similar enough that it feels like you have them memorized, even if the details change. When you spend too long in Purgatory, it starts to look a lot like hell.
The XIII remake is set to release for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC on November 10. A souped-up version of the 2003 original, this new XIII will maintain the comic book-inspired art style, but present it in HD. The soundtrack and audio work, including voice acting by the likes of David Duchovny, will also be remastered.
Something of a cult classic, XIII tells the tale of an amnesiac military operative who wakes up to discover he’s being hunted by a pair of villainous organizations. Thankfully, he’s a weapons expert, so let the shooting begin. This 2020 version is being released in two editions and comes with a preorder bonus. Read on for details about all that good stuff, as well as where you can lock in your preorder now.
Cyborg actor Ray Fisher was onstage alongside his fellow Justice League cast members at San Diego Comic-Con 2017 to promote Joss Whedon’s reshot, reedited version of the DC movie that Zack Snyder had originally been hired to make. Fisher said at the time, “Joss is a great guy and Zack picked a good person to come in and clean up, finish up for him.”
That was then.
On Monday, Fisher tweeted a video of him saying those very words at SDCC 2017 with this caption: “I’d like to take a moment to forcefully retract every bit of this statement.”
Fisher, a theater actor who made his big-screen debut in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice before segueing to Justice League, did not provide any further context for retracting his past praise of Whedon. It’s unclear whether Fisher’s slam is a personal beef with Whedon or simply about not liking the theatrical version of Justice League that Whedon shepherded.
It’s also worth noting Jason Momoa’s stone-faced expression and seemingly half-hearted nod reacting to Fisher’s praise.
Fisher has long been a supporter of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut on his social media. Given that Snyder gave Fisher, whose sole credit since 2017’s Justice League was a recurring role in Season 3 on HBO’s True Detective, his start as a screen actor perhaps it’s a matter of loyalty for him.
“Well, the stuff that I had to do were just really small little bits and pieces, nothing necessarily having to do with tone. I know that with Ray [Fisher], the young man who plays Victor, there were some adjustments that they made in terms of the tone of that character,” according to Morton.
“I think what I heard was that there was a need from the studio to lighten up the film in a way, that the film felt too dark. I don’t know what that meant in terms of how it actually got translated in terms of the reshoots but that’s what I heard. That’s what I thought some of the reshoots were about.”
When Disney+ launched on November 12, 2019, many fans noticed content missing from the service. Some Marvel and Star Wars movies weren’t included, and even though Disney purchased many of Fox’s assets, those highly-beloved films like the X-Men franchise haven’t been included either. However, this summer, Disney+ has announced some of those films are about to arrive to the streaming service.
Alongside a promotional video, Disney released information about some of the high-profile movie releases on Disney+ between July and September. It all kicks off on Friday, July 3 with the release of Hamilton, which was originally going to release in theaters in October 2021, but because of the pandemic, Disney has decided to push it to the streaming service more than a year early. Check out the sizzle reel of the upcoming movies below.
The most notable of the releases are three X-Men movies–four if you count 2013’s The Wolverine. Sadly, we’re not getting all three of the original X-Men movies from the early 2000s. On July 10, X-Men: Days of Future Past arrives; on July 17, X-Men: Apocalypse; and on August 7, the first X-Men film. To date, there have been no X-Men movies on the streaming service, and the only Fox Marvel movie is 2015’s Fantastic Four.
Additionally, Solo: A Star Wars Story hits the service on July 10, and finally, all of the Star Wars movies will be on Disney+. Another notable arrival is on July 31, when Pixar’s Incredibles 2, as it’s one of the few Pixar movies not on the streaming service. For more upcoming streaming info, make sure to check out what’s coming to Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, and Disney+ for July.
World of Warcraft Classic is bringing back another old-school event next month. The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj will unlock on July 28 when the weekly raid reset occurs, opening a new quest chain.
The date comes from a community mangaer on the Blizzard forums. The note said that version 1.13.5 will go live in July, which will unlock a quest to craft the Scepter of Shifting Sands. Players will also be able to contribute resources to the Ahn’Qiraj war, and once both activities have been completed on a realm, it will open the gates.
The original event took place in 2006, and opened raids in the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj. It also consisted of elite quest chains and a lengthy war sequence. The gates were permanently opened in a subsequent update in 2009, but then the quests were closed in the Cataclysm expansion.
World of Warcraft Classic is kept separate from the main ongoing World of Warcraft game, letting players experience (or re-experience) the MMO as it used to be. That means a lot of the streamlining and quality-of-life changes that took root in later updates are missing, but it’s also not as complex in other ways. We found it an engaging throwback that’s more than mere nostalgia.
Warning! We’re going to be talking about some late-game developments in The Last of Us Part 2, as well as an element that’s only revealed once you’ve finished the game. Read on at your own risk!
When you finally finish the game and the meaning of the boat becomes clear, something changes. Save a completed game file so you can start a New Game Plus playthrough or use the chapter selection menu, and you’ll find a new image adorning the main menu screen. This one doesn’t show the boat shrouded in fog; instead, it shows the same boat on a brighter beach, with sunlight breaking through stormclouds dissipating in the distance.
The metaphorical implications of the switch are pretty obvious; The Last of Us Part 2 is about a dark journey for Ellie and Abby, especially as Ellie finds herself doing awful things in pursuit of her vengeance for Joel. The boat sits in a foggy darkness, with the horizon obscured, and that’s a pretty good comparison to what’s going on internally with the characters, too. After finishing the game, when Ellie and Abby have come out the other side of that inner storm, the menu switches to a brighter, more hopeful image.
The menu screen shown after you complete The Last of Us Part 2 shows the boat from Ellie and Abby’s final confrontation, and a Catalina landmark in the distance.
But that last image is also a very literal indication that things might be better, at least for Abby and Lev. The menu screen shows Catalina Island, a real place off the coast of southern California, with the boat on its shore. The big round building in the image is a real place: Catalina Casino. The shot suggests that after the fight with Ellie, Abby and Lev reached their goal of making it to Catalina Island to find the Fireflies there.
So that makes the menu screen something of a post-credits scene, indicating both a thematic shift for the characters, and hinting at the outcome of the game’s story. What happens to Abby and Lev after their arrival on Catalina is something we don’t know–but judging from that image, we can at least intuit something of a happy ending for The Last of Us Part 2.
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IGN Prime has partnered with Nimble Giant Entertainment to bring you early access to Quantum League.
Quantum League is a revolutionary time-paradox shooter, a competitive online FPS. In Quantum League, you battle within a time loop and tactically team up with your past and future selves in mind-blowing 1v1 and 2v2 matches.
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It’s an alternate universe where time travel has changed the face of professional sports as we know it. Quantum League, a heavily weaponized, team-based shooting sport, dominates the globe. As a Quantum athlete, compete in specially designed arenas where agility, speed, and skill are not enough to rise to the top; the ability to tactically play with your past and future selves is also a must.
Click here to redeem your early access key to Quantum League on PC. Keys are available on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Every month, IGN provides members an opportunity to grab great games and goodies picked by the Prime team.
In a recently published interview with Discussing Film, Chad Stahelski–director of the John Wick films–added his voice to those who demand the Academy Awards add a category for stunt work.
“If wardrobe, hair, and makeup, certainly all the creative departments here are considered for Oscars, then yes, it makes perfect sense that the stunt department would be considered for an Oscar,” Stahelski said in the interview, which also touched on productivity during the shut down and whether he wants to work on more superhero films.
The award issue is important to Stahelski, not only due to the impressive stunt feats of his John Wick films, but likely because stunt work was how Stahelski established himself in the film industry and subsequently moved into directing. He was Keanu Reeves’ stunt double in the Matrix films and later coordinated stunts for the Matrix franchise before co-directing the first John Wick movie with fellow stunt coordinator David Leitch.
Stahelski also designed action sequences for DC’s Birds of Prey, so if the Academy Awards announced a change soon, it would potentially put him up as a contender.
Stunt coordinators have long called for a stunt work Oscar category. In 2016, 100 stunt performers demonstrated in front of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ offices in Beverly Hills and collected a petition with more than 50,000 signatures. At the time, the number of stunt performers active in the industry fell beneath 100 members, and the Academy said that was a prerequisite for consideration.
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