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Kong: Skull Island debuted in first place at the domestic box office, earning an estimated $61 million.

As noted by Variety, Warner Bros. and Legendary's new film performed well above expectations, which had Skull Island's weekend earnings pegged somewhere between $45 million and $50 million.

That said, the Jordan Vogt-Roberts-directed movie has a long way to go before recouping its hefty $185 million production budget, and will have to rely on international success if it's to reach levels of profitability.

Factoring in both production and marketing costs, Kong: Skull Island needs to make approximately $500 million worldwide to be considered a success for Warner Bros. and Legendary. The film won't debut in China for another two weeks but so far has made $81.6 million in international markets.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will have a surprise for those who wait until all of the end credits have finished rolling, director James Gunn has confirmed.

When asked on Twitter if there would be mid and post-credit scenes in the upcoming sequel, Gunn replied, "all I'll say is, unless you have to rush out because your mother is dying, stay through the entire end credits."

Chris Pratt is back as Peter Quill/Star Lord in the sequel, who's once again joined by Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), Rocket Racoon (Bradley Cooper), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) and many more.

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Games of Thrones' final eighth season will indeed be the shortest one yet.

Per Entertainment Weekly, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss revealed that Season 8 will only be six episodes long during a panel at SXSW.

Though HBO hasn't confirmed the episode count, Benioff and Weiss are certain about the length and are already preparing for pre-production by deciding who gets to write which episode.

“We argued over who got to kill Sansa,” Benioff jokingly said.

Season 7, which will premiere a little bit later than usual for Game of Thrones on July 16, has also been shortened to only seven episodes. However, despite the shorter episode order, the "size and scale" of the show is increasing, resulting in  even bigger and more epic episodes. Sir Davos Seaworth actor Liam Cunningham revealed to IGN that the new season will also see a lot of the show's expansive ensemble cast coming together.

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After announcing their new AI-powered chat platforms Allo and Duo last September, Google seems to be sunsetting the old and busted Hangouts in favor of their new hotness. Several other announcements seemed to confirm that strategy, including a Hangou...

This week's poorly conceived distraction from Trump and Putin sittin' in a tree was brought to us by WikiLeaks, which dumped 8,761 documents of the CIA's hacking arsenal online for all to see. The leak factory didn't even bother trying to play coy --...

Google has split up its Hangouts messaging platform into two services, targeted primarily at business users. Called Meet and Chat, the two services will aim to offer video conferencing and group messaging for businesses and take on rival services from Slack and Microsoft. Both apps have the advantage of plugging into Google's G Suite of services or businesses. Hangouts Meet is a video conferencing service that would let businesses have full screen video calls between employees around the world. You can have as many as 30 people in a single video call called Meetings and you can...

Security researcher says breach is a 'tangible threat to online privacy'

The next time you place an order at a fast food joint, you could see a robot behind the counter. Flippy is an AI-driven kitchen assistant that can flip burgers and place them on buns, and it debuted today at a CaliBurger restaurant in Pasadena, Calif...

Modern 3D video games require a ton of processing power to look good and respond to player input quickly. That's why most of the web-based games you see today are at best stripped down versions of their PC or console counterparts. The team behind the...

After taking heat for months in the run up to the presidential elections, Facebook has been cracking down on fake news spreading through its social network. The company recently began using third-party fact-checkers and gave its users the ability to...

SpatialOS is the technical foundation that makes massive, persistent, online world-building possible, even for small video game studios. Think of large, mainstream games like Destiny or Elder Scrolls Online: These are huge universes that support thou...

Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and director James Mangold discuss how Logan tells a different, more realistic story.

It’s here! The jaw dropping world of Horizon Zero Dawn awaits on PS4 – and while developer Guerrilla Games is no stranger to stunning visuals, this leafy yet deadly domain comes is an intricate piece of open world design, packed with a huge array of story threads to follow and unpick. Ahead of launch, we sat down with Guerrilla’s writing team to find out how they crafted the game’s ambitious narrative.

1. Guerrilla takes story seriously

Creating a memorable tale was paramount for the development team. In fact, there were four major drafts of the overarching story before they started working on the actual script.

“Story development took place over a number of months, so by the time we had it designed, it was fully achievable with the time and resources we had,” explains Lead Narrative Designer, John Gonzales.

“Usually at other studios you create the story and two days before ‘script lock’ they tell you they have to cut the game in half, asking if you can ‘just go ahead and adjust the story,'” he laughs.

“That’s not what it was like here. It was a studio wide commitment from the very beginning to raising the bar on narrative achievement.”

2. Pacing the unpredictable

Creating a sprawling saga while keeping a sense of freedom was also hugely important. And despite Horizon being the company’s first open world title, the team knew exactly how to approach this tricky balance.

“Quests had to be responsive to players just walking away at a certain point, or leaving to come back,” explains David Ford, Lead Quest Designer. “What if they come over a certain hill rather than the one you expected, or they have a different set of items or power levels?

“Narrative pacing was also vital, so we were constantly working out when we need to have the character comment on something, when we need to have an interaction point, or where you need to be to move the story on if you go off a certain path. No matter what the player does, it has to be fun and feel smooth.”

3. Interaction starts with the player

Despite this dedication to plot and story, Guerrilla still knew what was most important to Horizon Zero Dawn’s experience – you. So you’re crafting your own narrative through a wonderful blend of procedural events and your own actions… especially when it comes to conflict.

“I’m proud that our combat has such a depth and variety to it,” says Combat Designer Troy Mashburn. “During testing, someone said they took down one of the bosses with a couple of shots, which didn’t seem right. They explained that they upgraded one of their weapons to max, then uncovered the boss’ weak spot, and froze it. They then shot a three-in-one arrow into that weak spot and that did it!

“I laughed and said: ‘That’s amazing, that’s not a balancing issue, it’s just pulling all these gameplay components together,” and that’s very cool to have in the game.”

4. You’re always in character

With many open world adventures, you’ll be tasked to do random things to help prolong the game – but Guerrilla wanted to make sure nothing like that broke the immersion of the story.

“We focused on creating objectives that made sense for the narrative,” explains David. “We didn’t want minor extra mission objectives like ‘first go and kill six of these things before you can do X’.

“We preferred to look at relevant goals, like finding someone, or engaging in a specific battle, which we thought would be more interesting.”

“One of the hardest things in the beginning was to figure out how much content there should be, and the density of the open world,” says Game Director Mathijs De Jonge.

“That was challenging and fun. We built prototypes, shifted a lot of stuff around, checking travel times on foot and using a mount, and experimented with what felt right before we built out the full world.”

5. It’s not all story, quest, fight

While Guerrilla has packed Horizon’s world with content, the team has also created many spots to encourage you to just stop and admire the beauty – like President of Sony Worldwide Studio, Shuhei Yoshida, did.

“I had a chat with Yoshida-san when he was playing through the game,” says Managing Director Hermen Hulst. “And to him it was like being in a vast park… he just wanted to explore and go for a walk!

“As it turns out, afterwards he wanted to go after all the wildlife and do everything that there could be in the game – he’s a big completionist!”

6. Enjoy the little things

The impressive Machines may be the show stealer of Horizon, but the deft touches tell a tale, too. From a narrative standpoint, certain details had to be thought through before they were woven into the story.

“So much had to be developed from scratch, so we had to ask ourselves what are the rules of this world in every aspect,” says Hermen. “For example, there’s no photographic material left in their world, so we looked and took inspiration from older, tribal activities and references.”

And then there are the minute visuals details to keep an eye out for.

“Look out for the little ants, crawling up trees,” reveals Art Director Jan-Bart van Beek. “One of our effects artists put that together for assets that are used in the jungle environment, and our artist loved it so much that there’s actually one at the very start of the game. It’s a very cool detail.”

Bonus round:

True, creating this vast narrative has been a massive task for Guerrilla (which has paid off), but that doesn’t mean the team are afraid from having a little fun, especially when talking about Aloy outside of Horizon Zero Dawn’s story. When asked whether PlayStation’s newest icon could hold her own against Colonel Radec from the Killzone series, the question is met with good humour.

“Radec has that teleport ability, true, but Aloy is smarter,” laughs Troy. “That’s what so cool about Aloy, she’s smart and curious about her world, so she’s going to use everything to her ability to overcome her enemy.

“She doesn’t necessarily believe in the superstitions of other tribes she encounters, who believe that some of the Machines are demons, but she knows that they’re things that have a function and purpose. So Aloy would outsmart Radec and have him teleport into one of her traps and then it’d be game over,” says Troy.

Get involved – share all your amazing Photo Mode moments using #HorizonZeroDawn in your tweets and Instagram pics.

The post 6 storytelling tricks that sets Horizon Zero Dawn’s ambitious narrative apart appeared first on PlayStation.Blog.Europe.

The Not-So-Surprising Survival of Foursquare Aaron Gell, The New Yorker When Foursquare split its app in two with a second dedicated to check-ins, the move was questionable to say the least. The company eventually brought its popular mayorships ba...

The Great Amazon Web Services Outage of 2017 is behind us. Now, Jeff Bezos' golden child is ready to explain what happened. Turns out, what took Giphy, Medium, Slack, Quora and a ton of other websites and services down was a typo. As Amazon explains...

There's a whole world of bad security advice going around about traveling in and out of the United States. It's largely because under the Trump Administration there has been an uptick in Customs and Border Protection agents searching the phones and d...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has yet another tool from Palantir to track and identify immigrants, according to The Intercept. Dubbed "Investigative Case Management" (ICM), it's a system that aggregates information from the Drug Enforceme...

Meizu unveiled a new fast-charging technology—called Super mCharge—at MWC 2017 that’s capable of fully charging a 3000 mAh battery in just 20 minutes. Rapid charging has grown from novelty to highly desirable feature in a short period of time, with it being particularly popular in China, Meizu’s home market.

Great Scott!

While not powerful enough to send a DeLorean back to the future, the 55W rating for Super mCharge (11V, 5A) is significantly higher than anything we’ve yet seen. For comparison, Motorola’s TurboPower is rated for 28.5W, and Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 hits 18W.

Meizu is using a charge pump, a type of DC to DC converter that uses an external circuit to control the connection of capacitors to the input voltage. By disconnecting the capacitor from the source via a switch and reconfiguring the circuit with additional switches, the charge pump’s output voltage can be raised or lowered relative to the input. Keeping the capacitors small and the switching frequency high improves efficiency. Meizu is claiming 98% efficiency for its design, and while charge pumps are known for high efficiency, this seems a little high at first glance.

For Super mCharge, Meizu is dividing the input voltage in half, which doubles the output current. To accommodate the current increase, Meizu is pairing its new fast-charging circuit with a new lithium-based 3000 mAh battery made with “advanced manufacturing processes” that can handle 4x the current of previous batteries. This new battery is said to retain 80% of its original charge capacity after 800 complete charge cycles, where a charge cycle is defined as any possible sequence that ultimately goes from 100% to 0% to 100%. This rating is actually at the high end of the scale, with most fast-charging methods rated for 500 cycles or a little more. Battery life is likely improved by keeping temperature in check; Meizu claims that battery temperature does not exceed 38 °C (100 °F), a full 6 °C less than a competing solution in its testing.

Super mCharge includes voltage, current, and temperature monitoring for battery health and safety. Because the USB Type-C cable conducts more than 3A of current, it includes an E-mark IC (electronically marked safety chip) on one connector.

Meizu did not say when we’ll see Super mCharge in a shipping device, but I would not be surprised to see it later this year.

Bad news for the tens of thousands of newly minted lawyers who pass the bar every year and hope to get associate positions at big law firms sorting through documents for corporate clients: Robots are taking your jobs. Bloomberg reports:

At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.

The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation.

For the past few years, most of the commentary about technological innovation has focused on the way it has eliminated working and middle-class jobs like manufacturing. But the next round of the information revolution may put pressure on “symbolic analyst” jobs that are mostly coded as upper-middle or professional class. Lawyers are one example, but new medical technologies could make some tasks that doctors do obsolete and trading algorithms could shake up the financial industry in unpredictable ways.

The new technologies aimed at automating the discovery process don’t mean that high-flying lawyers will be put out of business. In fact, it’s possible that the firms that own these technologies could get more wealthy than ever before. But they do probably mean that the huge flow of cash into the legal sector every year will be somewhat reduced, and middling firms and lawyers will be in trouble.

In the long run, however, this will be good for everyone. Firms can redirect funds that would otherwise be spent on legal fees into research and development, leading to better products. And a loosening of the legal labor market will mean lower rates, and more access to legal services for people who need them but haven’t been able to afford them in the past.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is adding several new characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but none bigger than Star-Lord's estranged father, Ego. Literally. There's a reason they call him "The Living Planet."

But who is the Marvel character Kurt Russell is playing, and how can a planet have a human son? Scroll down to learn more about Ego the Living Planet, how his powers operate and what role he might be playing in the next MCU epic.

Kurt Russell is Ego in Guardians Vol. 2.

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If it wasn't already evident that Silicon Valley's issues with sexist culture extend beyond Uber, it is now. Tesla engineer AJ Vandermeyden has revealed that she's suing her employer over allegations that the electric car maker ignored complaints of...

If your favorite website or internet service isn't accessible today, it's probably not just you. Amazon Web Services' S3 cloud storage is experiencing "high error rates" that have caused chaos among many of the sites that depend on AWS to work. Our o...

To prepare for future restoration projects, the Sistine Chapel's world-famous frescoes and mosaic floor have gotten the up-close-and-personal treatment by way of an army of DSLRs. The last time the Sistine's masterworks were documented photographical...

Last year we called NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 "the upgrade you've been waiting for," and now PC gamers have another high-end graphics card to drool over. At GDC 2017, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang presented its successor, the GTX 1080 Ti, which promises "35 per...

The original MythBusters show ended with a bang, but Discovery was quick to plan a reboot and launch a reality show competition (Science Channel's MythBusters: The Search) to find replacements for lead presenters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. And at...

More than one save-it-for-later service is finding a new owner these days -- Mozilla has acquired Read It Later, the developer behind Pocket. The service will be treated as a product separate from (but of course, complementary to) Firefox, and will f...

With a host of regulation changes and driver movements, 2017 is set to be one of the most exciting seasons for the sport in recent years. With the whole series under the guidance of a new leader,...

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This is the hair-raising moment a teenager calmly wrestles a two-metre carpet python out from underneath a Toyota in Australia. Spine-tingling footage shows Oli Wardrope, 14, from Seventeen...

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Why would Netflix pay $90 million for a single film? Two words: Will Smith. The blockbuster star is teaming back up with David Ayer, the director of Suicide Squad, for Bright, a new fantasy action film. Tonight at the Academy Awards we caught our fir...