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Cryptocurrency investors in South Africa may have lost nearly $3.6 billion in Bitcoin following the disappearance of two brothers associated with one of the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

Antivirus software entrepreneur John McAfee has died at the age of 75.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods director David F. Sandberg has officially unveiled the new costumes worn by the heroes in the DC Comics sequel.

Taking to Twitter on Monday, Sandberg opted to get ahead of any potential leakers by offering fans a first look at the Shazam Family's new suits. The photo spotlights Zachary Levi's titular hero, together with Adam Brody's Freddy Freeman, Meagan Good's Darla Dudley, Ross Butler's Eugene Choi, Michelle Borth's Mary Bromfield, and D.J. Cotrona's Pedro Peña.

Don’t know how long we can keep the new suits from leaking so here’s a pic I took the other day pic.twitter.com/41wStJ6oe2

— David F. Sandberg (@ponysmasher) June 21, 2021

The latest reveal comes shortly after Sandberg shared a teaser of Levi's Shazam costume in a video he posted on social media. As glimpsed in the brief clip, the outfit features more gold accents and a sleeker look, particularly around the boots and wrists, with the rest of the suits also appearing more refined. The Shazam Family's lightning bolt chest logo is also slightly altered to match the overall ensemble.

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The Shazam sequel, officially titled Shazam! Fury of the Gods, will once again follow the adventures of teenager Billy Baston who is able to transform into Shazam by saying his name. While plot specifics are scarce, the title suggests we'll be learning much more about the six gods who bestowed their powers upon the youngster.

The post-credits scene for the first Shazam movie saw the villain Doctor Sivana meet an alien named Master Mind, but it's currently unknown whether this plotline will play into Fury of the Gods. Regardless of what happens with that, Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu have joined the cast as two new villains alongside Rachel Zegler who "may or may not be of ill intent," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

No doubt we'll find out more about their intentions when Fury of the Gods hits theaters in 2023. Before that, however, there'll be plenty of other DC films to temporarily distract us. We have James Gunn's Suicide Squad coming up on HBO Max this summer as part of the company's 2021 day-and-date plan, as well as The Batman, Black Adam, The Flash, and Aquaman 2 all in 2022.

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Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Loki Episode 2, The Variant, has arrived on Disney+ and is currently streaming.

This week on Loki, the trickster and Mobius went the buddy cop route as they worked together to solve the mystery of the Loki variant--and they actually made some fantastic progress. Episode 2 featured Loki and Mobius narrowing down the variant's location to doomsdays and apocalypses throughout time where the timelines can't branch because everyone in them is wiped out no matter what happens.

Unfortunately, tracking the variant down turned out to be the easy part--and was a trap all along. After cornering this alternate Loki in Alabama, 2050, the plan was set in motion and the Loki was revealed. Spoilers: It wasn't just Tom Hiddleston in different hair and make-up.

Now things are really taking a turn for the worst for the TVA and the sacred timeline, with this Loki variant in the wind and our Loki following close behind, which is to say nothing of the mess the TVA is going to have to clean up in the wake of the variant's plot.

Here are some Easter Eggs, references, and important moments to keep an eye out for in Episode 2.

Bonnie Tyler

It may be a Renaissance festival but it's also the '80s, and what better way to show that than by using Bonnie Tyler's 1984 hit, Holding Out For A Hero?

Alt-Lokis

We already saw a cartoon example of "variants" back in Episode 1 during Miss Minute's presentation, and in this episode we get the Loki version--everything from giant monsters to what looks like a full blooded frost giant. It's clearly some pointed foreshadowing to the reveal at the end of the episode. During Mobius's explanation, he points out that variant Lokis can have variations on their abilities as well, which could be important to remember.

Pompeii

One of the most famous natural disaster sites in history, the Roman town of Pompeii was buried under layers of volcanic ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.

Chekov's jet ski?

Mobius's love of jet skis could be a fun and totally non sequitur joke but that line about a "TVA agent showing up on the sacred timeline would create a variant for sure" seems like foreshadowing--here's hoping Owen Wilson gets to live this dream by the end of the show. Maybe he'll get to finally try riding a jet ski right before some apocalyptic natural disaster?

Loki's daggers

Mobius tries to give Loki his favored weapon--his twin daggers--but B-15 puts a stop to that before he can actually take them on the mission.

Roxxcart

In 2050, the TVA finds themselves at a big box store called Roxxcart in the middle of a massive hurricane. The name here is a nod to Roxxon Energy Corporation, a massive conglomerate from the comics that has existed in the background of the MCU for years now. They're basically a massive, evil-doing monopoly and it looks like, by 2050, they've gained such a chokehold on the economy that they're even providing disaster shelters for people.

Lady Loki

The Loki variant behind the attacks on the timeline is none other than--well, Loki, but as a woman this time. Known as Lady Loki, Loki's female form became a popular incarnation in the comics when Loki was resurrected into a female body, but as a shapeshifter, Loki has taken plenty of forms over the course of comics history. Notably, this version of Lady Loki bears no resemblance to her comics counterpart with short blond hair--so we might be in for a bigger reveal some time down the line, if the show dips into her backstory.

Multiverse incoming

Lady Loki's reset charges were used to "bomb" the sacred timeline, giving us a quick glimpse of multiple branches forming all at once and sending the TVA into a panic. This is the nightmare scenario Ms. Minutes warned about--the creation of a multiverse.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Loki: Episode 2! Be sure to check out IGN's review of the new episode.

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The second episode of Marvel’s Loki just introduced a major new character to the MCU. In the process, the show has just confirmed a popular casting theory. Sophia Di Martino is indeed playing a female version of Loki, and she’s hatching a scheme designed to upend time as we know it.

How can there be a female version of Loki? What does this mean for the trickster god's ongoing MCU story? Let’s break down how Lady Loki has factored into Marvel’s Thor comics and how this unpredictable character may fit into the future of the Disney+ series.

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Lady Loki: A Comic Book History

In traditional Norse mythology, Loki is portrayed as a shape-shifter and a trickster who can take many forms. Needless to say, he’s not limited to manifesting as a man, or even as a human. In one of the more famous Loki myths, the trickster god takes the form of a mare and is impregnated by a stallion named Svaðilfari, which results in Loki giving birth to an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir that becomes Odin’s prize steed. As one does.

In Marvel’s comics, however, the concept of Lady Loki didn’t really arise until the 2007 Thor comic. That series is set in the aftermath of Ragnarök, a cataclysmic battle only Thor himself survives. Now reigning over the empty kingdom of Asgard, Thor sets out to locate all his fellow Asgardians, who have reincarnated in new, human bodies without their memories, to restore them to full power. That includes Loki.

[caption]Art by Olivier Coipel. (Image Credit: Marvel)[/caption]

Thor is surprised to find his brother now taking the form of a woman. But though Loki professes to have left her evil ways in the past, this is actually the start of her latest scheme. Colluding with Doctor Doom, Loki hijacks the body of Lady Sif and sets about a chain of events that results in Thor being banished and the Asgardians taking up a new home in Latveria.

Loki eventually reverts to his traditional, male form, but only after sowing seeds of chaos across the Marvel Universe. And that only lays the groundwork for more transformations. Loki soon dies again, returns as a child and becomes Asgard’s most unlikely hero. It’s all part of the character’s shift from overt villain to a more morally neutral agent of chaos. Because what good is a god of chaos if they’re predictable?

Does Loki Have a Gender?

While the original Lady Loki storyline dealt with Loki stealing Sif’s body, Marvel has gradually shifted away from portraying Loki as strictly male or female. Loki is now officially recognized as being both genderfluid and pansexual.

That detail was cemented in 2014’s Original Sin: Thor & Loki - The Tenth Realm. After discovering the existence of the Tenth Realm of Heven and his long-lost sister Angela, Loki takes a female form in order to blend in with these angelic warriors. Odin himself recognizes Loki’s nonbinary status at the end of this story, remarking, “My children. My son and my daughter and my child who is both.”

[caption]Lady Loki, we presume?[/caption]

Loki also spends several issues of his own comic series, Loki: Agent of Asgard, taking the form of a woman as he reunites with his friend and ally Verity. Verity is the one person to whom Loki is physically incapable of lying, and this new form is a rare sign of trust and vulnerability from the erstwhile Marvel villain.

[caption]Art by Lee Garbett. (Image Credit: Marvel)[/caption]

Again, Marvel is simply reflecting an aspect of Loki that’s existed in Norse mythology for centuries. Loki is a trickster who can adopt many different forms, male, female and otherwise. Far from needing to steal another Asgardian’s body, Loki can change his physical form at will.

This detail appears to be reflected in the MCU as well. The official Loki Twitter account released a promo image indicating Loki’s gender as “fluid.” Head writer Michael Waldron confirmed this is something the series will explore over the course of Season 1.

"I know how many people identify with Loki in particular and are eager for that representation, especially with this character," Waldron told Inverse. "We worked really hard."

Is Lady Loki the Enchantress?

[caption]Sylvie Lushton (Enchantress) and Wiccan[/caption]

There seems to be some debate as to whether Di Martino 's Loki is also the Enchantress, another major Thor villain. For one thing, Di Martino's Loki has blond hair, like Enchantress, rather than Loki's traditionally dark hair. For another, at least one foreign language dub of Episode 2 lists Di Martino's character not as "The Variant" but "Sylvie." Sylvie Lushton is name of the second character to use the Enchantress name in the comics.

This suggests some elements of the Enchantress are being carried over for the MCU's portrayal of Lady Loki. While the original Enchantress is an Asgardian who yearns for Thor's affections, the second Enchantress is a human given magical powers by Loki himself.

How Lady Loki Fits Into the MCU

While we finally have confirmation Di Martino is playing Lady Loki in the Disney+ series, there are plenty more questions surrounding this new incarnation of the character. Has she taken this new form as part of her mysterious plan, or is this Loki from an alternate timeline where the character has always manifested as a woman?

For all we know, Di Martino’s Loki is the same character as Hiddleston’s Loki, just from a later point in the MCU timeline. Perhaps everything Loki is now enduring as a captive of the TVA is an ordeal she’s already experienced. Based on an Easter egg in Episode 1, some have speculated Lady Loki may be in league with Kang the Conqueror, with both characters attempting to weaponize time itself and destroy the TVA.

One thing does seem clear, at least. It doesn’t appear the MCU is adapting the original Lady Loki storyline and depicting Di Martino’s character as a Loki who has hijacked another person’s body. As influential as the 2007 Thor comic is, that element is generally regarded as transphobic by today’s standards.

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Marvel’s recent Loki-centric comics may give us an idea of the core conflict between Loki and Lady Loki. No longer a clear-cut villain, Loki often wrestles with the idea that he’s destined to become Asgard’s destroyer. In Loki: Agent of Asgard, that fear is embodied in another alternate version of the character called King Loki. Loki’s struggle in that series boils down to a desire to rewrite his story and become who he wants, not what fate would have him become. He’s not the Prince of Lies, but the God of Stories.

Just as Di Martino was heavily rumored to be playing Lady Loki, a great many Marvel fans have speculated that Richard E. Grant’s mystery role is actually King Loki (or a similarly older and more evil version of Hiddleston’s Loki). If this theory pans out, we can probably expect Loki to face a similar dilemma in the Disney+ series. Grant’s Loki may represent Loki’s apparent fate as a cosmic destroyer, whereas Di Martino’s Loki could embody the freedom and possibilities of a story yet unwritten. Either character may represent a possible future for the Loki we know and love.

Like so many great time travel tales, Loki may ultimately be a story about the clash between free will and destiny.

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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

Spoilers follow for Loki episodes 1 and 2.

Loki on Disney Plus isn’t hanging around with its big character reveals. 

Episode 2 of Marvel’s latest TV show has only just been released but, unlike WandaVision or Falcon and the Winter Soldier, we aren’t being made to wait for surprise character introductions. 

• Loki's place on the MCU timeline has seemingly been revealed
• Here's when you can catch episodes of Loki on Disney Plus
• Loki's TV show has revealed how the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse will work

We already knew that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) would run into another Loki ‘time variant’. Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) stated as much in episode 1’s final scene – but we didn’t expect the identity of this other Loki ‘time variant’ to be revealed so soon.

We imagine you have questions about this character, so we’re here to help. Below, we’ll dive into their comic book history and which actor portrays them in the series. We also look at what their introduction may mean for the show moving forward and why this character may not actually be who we think it is.

We’re entering major spoiler territory for Loki episode 2 from this point on. If you haven’t watched it all the way through yet, turn back now. 

Lady Loki explained: how does Loki episode 2 end? 

After tracking down the ‘variant’ to a world-ending event in 2050, Loki, Mobius and a TVA squad split up to cover more ground and locate them.

Loki pairs up with Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and the duo soon encounter a single male, who is inexplicably shopping for plants as a massive storm rages outside.

When Hunter B-15 moves closer to interrogate him further, however, the male grabs B-15’s arm and seemingly transfers his consciousness into her.

Yep, the person hiding inside the man (who transfers themselves into Hunter B-15) is none other than the Loki ‘variant’.

The two versions of Loki verbally lock horns (all the while the Loki ‘variant’ continues to transfer themselves into other human vessels, to keep things interesting) before their plan is revealed.

After stealing enough of the TVA’s time reset charges – the devices that destroy offshoot branches from the sacred timeline – the Loki ‘variant’ plans to activate them all at once. Creating a massive surge in Nexus events, multiple timelines will branch off from the sacred timeline, cause reality to break down and presumably lead to a new multiversal war, as alluded to in episode 1.

Before setting their scheme in motion, though, the Loki ‘variant’ finally reveals who they are – Lady Loki. Yes, you read that right: a female version of Loki.

Lady Loki’s reset charges activate, they travel to different dimensions in time and cause multiple branches to branch off from the sacred timeline. Lady Loki leaves through her own time travel doorway and, despite Mobius’ last-ditch attempts to stop him, Loki follows his namesake through the portal, presumably to get to the bottom of who they really are.

Which actress plays Lady Loki? 

Sophia Di Martino. The British actress, who has appeared in TV shows including Silent Witness, was rumored to be playing Lady Loki in Marvel’s latest series, and now we have confirmation that she is.

As Loki’s TV show was being filmed, leaked on-set images appeared to show Di Martino in a very Loki-like costume. At the time, we speculated that this was who Di Martino would be in the series, and we’re glad to see we were right. 

Lady Loki explained: female Loki’s comic book history 

Lady Loki is a fairly new addition to Marvel Comics. Created for a 2008 Thor comic issue run by J. Michael Stracynski, Lady Loki is, well, Loki reborn in female form.

Lady Loki emerged following Marvel Comics’ version of Ragnarok, and went on to be the primary version of Loki through several other comic storylines including Dark Reign, New Avengers and Original Sin.

As it turns out, Lady Loki hadn’t replaced the male Loki that comic readers had known since his first appearance in October 1962’s Journey into Mystery #85 comic. Lady Loki is Loki and, instead of being one of his many tricks, Lady Loki is one of many of the character’s personae.

This, in turn, led to the revelation that Loki is genderfluid. Lady Loki, then, retains the personality, mischievous ways, abilities and other traits that Loki has – the only difference is that this iteration of the character is female instead of male.

It’s a part of the character that has been adopted in the MCU, too. As episode 1’s end titles sequence (and the official Loki Twitter account) revealed, the TVA has a file on Loki that confirms the character is genderfluid.

Lady Loki explained: how episode 2 may set up the rest of Loki’s plot 

Given episode 2’s events, we can safely assume that Loki will follow Lady Loki across multiple realities (as we’ve seen in the trailers) to discover the reason behind their universe-ending plan.

Our guess is that the TVA betrayed Lady Loki and she’s exacting revenge by destroying the so-called sacred timeline.

After all, there’s something shady about the TVA. Maybe they offered Lady Loki a similar deal to the one that Mobius gave Loki (an audience with the Time Keepers) and then reneged on that agreement once they had used Lady Loki for whatever they needed.

If that is the case – and this is purely speculation on our part – we could see a tug of war, between Lady Loki and the TVA, play out for Loki’s loyalty.

Loki will be aware that, if he crosses the TVA, he’ll lose the opportunity to potentially speak with the Time Keepers. There’s also the fact that the TVA will delete him from existence so, theoretically, it’s in his best interests to remain loyal to them.

However, Loki is a schemer – so Lady Loki, by definition, should be, too. The latter could conceivably persuade Hiddleston’s Loki to join her cause instead, enlist his help in causing multiversal mayhem and they could rule the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse (MCM) together in some way.

Loki’s trailer appeared to show the pair having a (potentially pleasant) chat on an unknown planet. Of course, we don’t know when this conversation will take place in Loki’s TV show but, for all intents and purposes, it seems to be pretty civil. If it is, this could be when Loki joins forces with Lady Loki to take on the TVA.

Lady Loki explained: is Di Martino playing a different character?

Alternatively, it may be that Di Martino's character isn't, in fact, Lady Loki at all.

According to episode 2's end credits, Di Martino is playing a character called Sylvie – and this individual is completely different from Lady Loki in Marvel comics.

How do we know Di Martino's character is called Sylvie? Take a look at the Castellana dubbed voice actors' roster right at the end of episode 2. You'll see someone else (Elisa Beuter) voicing Di Martino's character, who is referred to as Sylvie:

Hang on, how do we know Beuter is the voice actor dub for Di Martino? Take a look at the German language dub image below, and you'll see Sonja Spuhl voices a character called 'the variant'. This has to be the same character as Sylvie, as both characters are second only to Loki in their cast order importance:

If Di Martino's character is called Sylvie, there's only one Marvel comic character that this can be referencing: Sylvie Lushton, aka Enchantress.

In the comics, Sylvie is an average teenage girl living in Oklahoma until the Asgardians move their Asgard home to the same state. Not long after, Sylvie wakes up with magical powers and adopts the pseudonym Enchantress – a character who is as much of an anti-hero/villain as Loki.

As it turns out, Sylvie obtains her powers from Loki, including sorcery, teleportation and telekinesis. Judging by the first two episodes of Loki, we've seen Di Martino's character use similar abilities to possess people and, well make her hands glow green.

It's highly plausible, then, that this is Enchantress and not Lady Loki as we first suspected. As far as we're aware, Enchantress doesn't wear a crown with two horns (a la Loki) in the comics, but Di Martino is sporting such a head accessory in Loki episode 2. 

This certainly muddies the waters as to who Di Martino is actually playing. Whatever happens, or whoever Di Martino is portraying, it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of Loki’s TV series plays out. There are bound to be more twists along the way and we can’t wait to see what occurs.

• Everything you need to know about Marvel's Black Widow

DC has a lot of thoughts on Batman's sex life, most surprising among them being that the Caped Crusader doesn't perform oral sex on Catwoman, or apparently, any other partner in his history.

This news comes by way of Variety, which reports that one of the executive producers on HBO Max's Harley Quinn series said DC asked the team to delete a scene in the show where Batman performed oral sex on Catwoman.

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"It's incredibly gratifying and free to be using characters that are considered villains because you just have so much more leeway," Harley Quinn executive producer and co-creator, Justin Halpern, told Variety. "A perfect example of that is in this third season of Harley when we had a moment where Batman was going down on Catwoman."

Halpern said DC told them that they couldn't have that scene and the reason why is somewhat suprising: heroes don't do that.

"And DC was like, 'you can't do that. You absolutely cannot do that,'" Halpern continued. "They're like, 'heroes don't do that,' so we said, 'are you saying heroes are just selfish lovers?' They were like, 'No, it's that we sell consumer toys for heroes. It's hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone.'"

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Variety's report says Halpern and and another producer the publication spoke to went on to praise the company's support of Harley Quinn and its ability to push the envelope, but it seems that the line is drawn at oral sex.

It's an odd line to draw: is there substantive evidence that when superheroes have oral sex, their toy sales go down? According to DC, the answer to that question is yes. Maybe in another DC universe, things are better for Catwoman.

While pondering the morality of oral sex in the DC universe, check out this story about how Harley Quinn has been greenlit for a third season on HBO Max and then read our thoughts on the show's first season in IGN's Harley Quinn Season 1 review. Check out this story about how DC altered art in a Batman comic to remove imagery of the Dark Knight's penis after that.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. He's disappointed in Batman, but not surprised. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

The US Justice Department has recovered part of the ransom Colonial Pipeline paid last month to regain access to its computer systems after it was locked out of them by “apolitical” ransomware gang Darkside.

While we still don't have a release date, the drought of Vikings content is officially over. The series finale of History's Vikings streamed at the end of 2020 on Amazon Prime Video. However, the first footage of a prequel series, Netflix's Vikings: Valhalla, has been revealed during Geeked Week.

The behind-the-scenes footage shows the epic scale of the upcoming series, with massive Viking boats, castles, armies marching to war, battle scenes, and plenty of farm animals to get fans primed. What we don't get, however, is an in-depth look at the show's plot.

However, we do know quite a bit about the series thus far. It's actually set around a couple hundred years before Vikings. While the original series primarily followed Ragnar Lothbrok and his family, Vikings: Valhalla stars Sam Corlett (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) as Leif Eriksson, who is thought to have been the first European to set foot in the Americas.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

An 8-year-old boy was devastated to learn that his 4-month-old puppy needed an expensive medical treatment to survive, so he sold his Pokemon cards on his front lawn to help pay for the procedure. But as the Washington Post reported, Bryson Kliemann's neighbors and friends were so moved by his concern for his dog Bruce that they donated more than $400 to the effort, sometimes without even buying the cards.

Bruce was diagnosed with a contagious virus known as parvo, which can be lethal. The Kliemann family knew that the procedure would be a minimum of $655, plus additional expenses for future treatment. When Bryson overheard his two parents discussing how they could not afford to pay the cost of the procedure, he decided to sell his Pokemon cards to help fund it, a decision that caused his mother Kimberly Woodruff to cry.

Thanks to people in his community of Lebanon, VA, as well as online donors to the family's GoFundMe, Bryson ended up raising a lot more money than was needed for Bruce's procedure. As such, the family donated the rest of the funds to support other sick pets in their area. Additionally, an employee at The Pokemon Company sent Bryson a package of rare cards after hearing about his selflessness. Currently, Bruce is recovering from the procedure, but all signs are positive.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Amazon Prime Video has shared a first-look image of Jensen Ackles in the Soldier Boy Super Suit ahead of his official reveal in season three of The Boys.

Soldier Boy's Super Suit was designed by Laura Jean Shannon and concept artist Greg Hopwood and is meant to "highlight a bygone era of overt masculinity and grit."

“Soldier Boy is the original bad ass," Shannon said. "Our goal was to highlight a bygone era of overt masculinity and grit. With that pedigree we dove headfirst into baking in an all-American quality grounded in a military soldier’s practicality with a heavy dose of old school cowboy swagger. We knew that the actor had to have Steve McQueen looks and chops with a John Wayne attitude, luckily Jensen Ackles embodies all of that.”

According to The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke, the suit took six months to perfect and is "a work of art that tips its hat to the WWII Soldier Boy from the comics, while taking it in a sleek new direction."

Ackles shared an image of Soldier Boy's shield on Instagram, saying, "Every dent, every scratch, every mark tells a story. A story that ends with me, winning."

While the third season of The Boys has no premiere date, we know Ackles will be playing "Soldier Boy - the original Superhero. After Soldier Boy fought in World War II, he became the first super celebrity, and a mainstay of America culture for decades." To learn more about Soldier Boy, check out our explainer of this character who introduces a f##ked up take on Avengers.

For more, check out our review of The Boys' second season and the cast members' first look set photos from the upcoming season.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Star Wars and Ex Machina actor Oscar Isaac will star in the Disney+ and Marvel streaming series "Moon Knight."

An indie game developer has created a 10-million polygon photoscan of his dog having a nap in the new early access version of Unreal Engine 5. Importantly, they were able to load 1,000 instances of the scan and maintain a frame rate of 60fps.

I was able to load a 10 million polygon photoscan of Ziggy in the @UnrealEngine. Using #UE5's Nanite meshes I was able to load 1000 instances of it at 60fps before I got bored. That's 10 billion polygons and it didn't even blink. It could have handled a lot more than this. pic.twitter.com/IMRnQIjFSx

— Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC (@IonizedGames) May 26, 2021

Taylor Loper, the one-man team that makes up CAT Interstellar developer Ionized Games, posted a short video clip to Twitter showing the 1,000 instances of his dog, Ziggy, rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Each one of those meshes were created using a 10-million polygon photoscan, meaning the whole scene contains 10 billion polygons. This was achieved using the new Nanite meshes, which allow developers to import film-industry quality art into the engine to be used in the creation of assets.

The hardware Loper used to render this is good, but not particularly space age; a Ryzen 7 5800x, a RTX 3070 XC graphics card, and 32 GB of RAM. "This didn’t even begin to max out my system," Loper tweeted. "Any 10 series card or newer is gonna see some mind blowing enhancements."

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The process also took a surprisingly short amount of time. Loper says it took 10 minutes to take the required 122 pictures of his dog, and 21 minuities to import them into a piece of software to clean the images up. It cost $1.68 to export the model with a 4K texture. This kind of ease and cost, as well as the lack of strain on PC hardware, points to Unreal Engine 5's huge potential among small developers as well as AAA studios.

Unreal Engine 5 was announced back in May 2020, with particular emphasis on the Nanite technology that helped create its 'virtualised geometry', demonstrated in Unreal's first demo through realistically rocky caves. While that demo - Lumen in the Land of Nanite - wasn't a real game, it was playable. Rather than a pre-render, the video was played in real time on a PS5.

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Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The next release of Edge will be the "best-performing" browser available on Windows 10 when it arrives later this week, Microsoft claimed at its Build 2021 event.

The news came as a shock, but it also wasn’t exactly a surprise.

One month ago, Jeff Kaplan announced that he would be leaving Blizzard. His departure ended a 19 year career at Blizzard in which he helped develop two of the most important games ever made — World of Warcraft and Overwatch. A beloved figure at Blizzard, Kaplan’s departure sparked an outpouring of emotion from fans and developers alike.

"He was sincere when he bid the team farewell and let them know how proud he was of everything that we were all able to accomplish together and how confident he was in what a lot of us consider to be one of the greatest development teams in the industry," said Aaron Keller – who succeeded Kaplan as Overwatch 2 director — in an interview with IGN. "It was an emotional moment to hear that from someone who you knew meant it and believed it."

But underneath the emotion of Kaplan’s departure was a more troubling narrative that had been brewing since at least 2018. If you’ve been following Blizzard for any amount of time, it’s hard not to notice the outflow of talent from every part of the business. While Blizzard says its voluntary turnover is significantly under industry average and that departures among developers who have been with the company for longer than 10 years are in fact decreasing, several high-profile departures have contributed to the sense among fans, media, and many within the company that Blizzard is experiencing an exodus.

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“[Kaplan] was the last person that we would have conversations about, ‘How long is he gonna last?’ Because he's the last big blow,” says a source within Blizzard who agreed to speak at length with IGN about the state of the company (and asked to be kept anonymous for this report). “So to some degree, now that he's gone, I don't even know who else could make that big of a wave. I don't even think you'll hear about anybody else of that magnitude.”

In an effort to understand what’s been happening at Blizzard, I spoke to multiple current and former Blizzard employees, some on the condition of anonymity. I was also able to speak on the record with three veteran Blizzard directors, all of whom have been with the company for more than 10 years now, as well as analysts and investors familiar with the company’s current circumstances. The picture that emerges is complicated. Many of the developers I spoke to are still loyal to what Blizzard represents in their mind, even if they are more mixed on some of the changes to it over the past few years.

But even if they are fond of Blizzard’s history and culture, many are still choosing to leave. Some of the departures are a natural consequence of the burnout that comes with working on the same game for more than a decade, others are because they sense an opportunity to chase their dream project in an industry currently awash in venture capital. And some are because they feel Blizzard has been on the decline over the past three or four years amid layoffs, budget cuts, and a lack of major releases, and that it’s time to move on.

This has left Blizzard at a crossroads, and it’s unclear what this will mean for the beloved publisher as it tries to chart a return to the glory that defined its best years.

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The Dry Period

Five years ago this month, Blizzard released Overwatch. It was hailed as a redemption story after the struggles of Project Titan, which had languished in development for years. Keller, who worked on both Titan and Overwatch, remembers the “elevating” feeling the team had as the company celebrated Overwatch’s success. “You almost feel like you're really not broken anymore in a certain sense,” Keller says, laughing. “It's always amazing to ship a project that people love. But to do it right after Titan, I think that made it even more special.”

Blizzard collectively exhaled when Overwatch was released. It was a badly-needed win after a period in which major releases including Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, and Heroes of the Storm all struggled to one degree or another between 2012 and 2016. After struggling so hard for so long to figure out what was “next” after World of Warcraft, Blizzard finally seemed to have an answer.

One source described what followed as “a little renaissance.” With Overwatch becoming the company’s fastest game to reach 25 million registered players, and Hearthstone defining a billion-dollar game category virtually overnight, Blizzard reportedly doubled its number of internal teams from six to around 13 while building up an incubation initiative intended to experiment with new game concepts. The Overwatch League was founded in 2017 and kicked off its inaugural season in 2018. New initiatives were spinning up “left and right,” a source says, with money seemingly no object.

By games industry standards, Blizzard has always led a charmed existence. Its history has encompassed a string of genre-defining hits beginning with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and continuing on through Diablo, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft. Its success created a unique culture in which employees would routinely stay for years or decades — a rarity in the fast-moving, unpredictable games industry.

In a 2016 documentary, veteran developer Chris Metzen, fresh off the launch of Overwatch, articulated Blizzard’s worldview. “What are we really doing? Are we just selling product for a corporation? I guess that’s a part of it, but we’re artists and craftsmen and technologists and writers and poets and all these other things coming together to build something greater than any of us could have ever achieved on our own. That has always been the story of Blizzard. [...] What are we prepared to spend the next five years of our lives on, together?”

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This strong sense of pride informs a lot of the culture at Blizzard, and its development teams have tended to be tight-knit and very stable over the years. Many of its employees are also fans. World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas was a self-described hardcore World of WarCraft guild leader who ran a community site and corresponded with Blizzard developers. Diablo Immortal director Wyatt Cheng grew up playing Lost Vikings, and tells IGN he applied to Blizzard four times in six years before finally being accepted to Blizzard North. Its history gives it a pull equaled by few other companies.

“It was a dream come true when I was able to walk through the gates of Blizzard and turn my hobby into a career, into a vocation,” Hazzikostas says.

It can indeed be a very fun place to work. For holiday parties, Blizzard will rent out Disney California Adventure for an evening for its employees. Walk around the campus, and there are reminders everywhere of Blizzard’s history, from statues of its best-known characters to the commemorative swords and shields issued to employees who spend five and 10 years at the company. When things are going well, working on a Blizzard game can be both challenging and satisfying, with developers constantly pushing one another to meet the company’s high bar for quality. Blizzard veterans in particular are very protective of this culture.

It has done its share to keep Blizzard employees rooted in place for years, making it a comparative bastion of stability in the often turbulent games industry. But events in recent years have eroded that culture, pushing many within Blizzard to begin looking for jobs elsewhere.

By 2018, the “little renaissance” was giving way to the growing understanding that Blizzard was a long way from releasing any new games. Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 weren’t ready to be announced, and the incubation initiative had yet to bear any fruit. It was this realization that sent Blizzard scrambling when it came time to make its customary round of announcements at  BlizzCon 2018. It cobbled together a slate featuring WarCraft 3 Reforged and updates to its established games, and it was left to Cheng to lead BlizzCon with Diablo Immortal, a mobile game that famously prompted one fan to ask, “Is this a joke?”

Looking back on BlizzCon 2018, Cheng says “hindsight is 20/20” when it comes to the decision to open BlizzCon with Diablo Immortal. “[W]e all thought that no one was really making mobile games at the quality that we wanted to see. I think that we had not yet announced Diablo 4. We had not yet announced Diablo 2: Resurrected from our vantage point,” Cheng told IGN.

Diablo Immortal sparked controversy not just because fans were disappointed by the lack of Diablo 4, but because it was developed primarily by NetEase, a Chinese mobile developer, with support from Blizzard. Privately, some within Blizzard refer to it as “the outsourced game.” Cheng argues that his team wants to “elevate standards” on mobile, but concedes that Blizzard didn’t do a good job of communicating that.

“In retrospect, that is not a perspective that was easily seen, nor did we do a good job communicating. It's not the audience's job to take all that in, it's our job to communicate that better and to bring them along with us,” Cheng said. “And we didn't do a good job of that. I think fast-forward three years and people do know about Diablo 2 and it clearly was in development for quite some time. People do see Diablo 2: Resurrected, again, clearly in development for quite some time.” Diablo 2: Resurrected was reportedly set to release in June 2020, but was pushed back for more development time as WarCraft 3: Reforged's development team was dissolved and Vicarious Visions was merged into Blizzard.

Chastened, Blizzard sought to reverse the narrative by going big on BlizzCon 2019 and announcing Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. Blizzard was indeed able to give its fans reasons to be excited again, lifting spirits within the company in turn, but their release was still years away. While Blizzard hosted a major Overwatch 2 livestream just yesterday, it won’t be out until 2022 at the earliest. Speaking with IGN over the phone, analyst Andrew Uerkwitz, a managing director at the financial services firm Jefferies, speculated that it could be as late as 2023 before Blizzard releases Overwatch 2, possibly to align with the fifth anniversary of the Overwatch League.

Outwardly, Blizzard is still mostly doing fine. World of Warcraft: Shadowlands was a comparatively successful expansion, helping lead to an overall revenue boost of around 7 percent according to its most recent earnings report. But Blizzard also shed another 2 million Monthly Active Users [MAU], which Uerkwitz partly attributes to the decline of Overwatch. “Blizzard’s been going through a pretty long, I think, internal transition, obviously changing over some management across the board and repositioning their IP. We're towards the tail end of that transition, I think, and next year will be the first kind of launch of what the revamped Blizzard will look like. So typically when you're at the tail end of a transition, you're losing a lot of players,” Uerkwitz says, noting that Jefferies isn’t “too concerned” about the MAU drop.

But meanwhile, employees within Blizzard have felt the impact of diminished profit-sharing, a twice annual payout tied to Blizzard’s profit targets and individual employee performance. “Every year they'd be like, ‘Oh, you know, it's just a down time. We're not shipping anything. But like, it'll probably get better next year.’ And I was like, uh ... but I can do the math. Like, we were years away from shipping anything [in 2018],” a source within Blizzard says.

Keller acknowledges the large gaps between releases. “I understand that it's hard for players to wait. I get that, and I think it's really important for Overwatch 2 to come out as soon as it can. But when we launch the next installment of our games, people come back to it, and I think the reason why they do is because they know that we're taking the time to make the game as good as it can possibly be,” he says. “You can view it as pressure, but internally our team doesn't view the pressure of making Overwatch 2 so much as how do we bring all these players back to our game, or how do we grow the audience?”

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The incubation project was supposed to help in this regard. Conceived as a sort of safe haven for experimentation on new ideas that could become full-blown games, incubation is described as a “black box” by a separate source within Blizzard. Comparatively little has emerged from the process to this point, though IGN is aware of at least two games that have been canceled. One was a StarCraft FPS, as first reported by Kotaku and corroborated by the sources we spoke to within Blizzard. The other was a more experimental mobile game.

Varying reports, including sources within Blizzard who spoke with IGN, suggest that the StarCraft FPS team was surprised by this decision. Many, including longtime Blizzard designer and director Dustin Browder, subsequently departed to start Moonshot Games under the umbrella of Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime’s new venture, Dreamhaven. It’s one of several independent studios now stocked with Blizzard veterans. We reached out to Dreamhaven, but it declined to participate in this story.

Ultimately, Blizzard isn’t the only prestige developer to face multi-year gaps between releases. Many big-budget studios put out at most one tentpole release every couple years. To put it more simply: game development is difficult, and that’s before taking into account the havoc wreaked by COVID, which has hit Blizzard as hard as anyone.

Nevertheless, Blizzard devs are aware that their company makes the least money out of the three parts of Activision Blizzard’s business. For all its success with Hearthstone and Overwatch, Blizzard was never really able to find The Next Big Thing after World of Warcraft, and its next round of major releases could be more than a year away.

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The Indie Effect

Not long after Blizzard’s triumphant Overwatch documentary, Chris Metzen resigned. He had been with the company since the early 90s, working on WarCraft II, serving as lead designer on StarCraft, and taking the reins as creative director on Warcraft 3. A couple of months later, he went on The Instance podcast to talk about his reasons for leaving. He said it was genuinely hard to leave, but that the demands of game development had taken their toll on him. "I think during those years I burned out really hard," Metzen said at the time. "I think in my heart, I needed a change in my life. I wanted to slow down, I wanted to just not carry the weight of it all.”

Burnout is common in tech, particularly in games, which is a notorious grind even when not taking into account practices like crunch. At Blizzard, where it’s possible to spend a decade or more working on one game, it’s natural to want a change of scenery. That’s what happened with Cheng, who spent 10 years on Diablo 3 before moving over to Diablo Immortal. “I missed the feeling of being on a smaller project. And I knew Diablo Immortal could not be small forever, but I love being there at the birth of a project and riding out that small team feel for as long as you can. We're not small anymore, but it's a nice cultural thing. I think I just needed a break after 10 years from the big team stuff.”

Metzen remained close to Blizzard, reprising his role as Thrall in WoW’s Battle for Azeroth expansion along with other cameos. He co-founded Warchief Gaming in 2018, a studio dedicated to tabletop role-playing that launched a Kickstarter last month. The Kickstarter was funded in 11 minutes, currently sitting at more than $1 million. We asked Metzen if he wanted to talk about his experiences, but he did not return our email.

More and more Blizzard employees are following in Metzen’s footsteps. Whether because of burnout or because of a general sense that the company is trending in the wrong direction, many longtime employees are moving into the indie space. At least five studios stocked with former Blizzard developers have launched within the past couple of years. They include Second Dinner, which was founded by Ben Brode following his departure in 2018; Frost Giant, a studio made up of ex-StarCraft 2 developers seeking to launch the next great RTS; Lightforge Games, which was opened by former Blizzard and Epic engineer Matt Schembari; Secret Door, led by Chris Sigaty, Alan Dabiri, and Eric Dodds, and the aforementioned Moonshot.

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"I feel like I get a going away email every day from people I know. Like, it feels like people are leaving constantly now," a source says. "A lot of my friends have left, you know? And there have been team closures over time."

Blizzard downplays these departures, arguing that a development team is more than just a Ben Brode or a Jeff Kaplan, and of course they’re right in that regard. But sources within Blizzard say that the departures have had a ripple effect on teams used to long-term stability. Aaron Keller talks about how Kaplan was a mentor figure and a friend for him over the course of almost 14 years. “I feel like I've learned so much about game design, about project management, about how to communicate with the team, and how to direct people from him. Not just that but [Kaplan] looks out for everybody, not just on his own team, but even other people at Blizzard. [...] I can't really  express that gratitude fully in words. It's a terrible loss for me to not be able to work with him anymore.”

In the meantime, the sudden proliferation of independent studios filled with Blizzard veterans has drawn attention from fans and media alike. Like Metzen, many appear to still be close to their former company. The ex-Blizzard devs we spoke to who went independent were reluctant to damage their relationships with their former comrades.

It helps that the games industry is currently awash in venture capital. Within just the last couple years, the number of game-oriented venture funds has grown from around “maybe 10 or 20” to “about 80,” says Ed Fries. Fries is a partner at 1up Ventures, an investment firm that describes itself as “a community of independent game developers.” 1up’s portfolio includes both Frost Giant and Lightforge, among several other studios. Fries attributes the increased interest to the growth of the games industry both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increased willingness to invest in content developers over technology.

Fries’ recollection is that Frost Giant CEO Tim Morten, a former StarCraft 2 production director, decided to start a new company around the same time that Blizzard put StarCraft 2 in maintenance mode. "Tim and several other of the key people on that franchise decided to leave and start a new company to move forward with sort of the spiritual successor to that game. And my understanding is they really did it with the blessing of the company," Fries says. "In fact, if you look, the day that they announced the studio was actually the same day that Blizzard announced they weren't going to do a sequel. And so I believe that was a coordinated effort between Blizzard and Tim's team to kind of say, you know, yep, these are the guys who are gonna take this forward."

Blizzard responded in a statement, "Tim Morten kept Blizzard leadership informed of his plans to open his own studio and we parted on good terms. We wish him and his team the best, and are looking forward to playing what they create, while we at Blizzard continue thinking about what’s next for StarCraft." The spokesperson also pointed toward a blog post explaining the company's future plans for StarCraft.

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Lead designer Kevin Dong is among the developers who departed Blizzard to form Frost Giant. He talks about the differences between his new indie studio and Blizzard, such as the lack of a dedicated social media department. Instead of handing off responsibilities, he does his best to help run Frost Giant’s social media channels while also focusing on his core design duties. “[O]ne benefit of being in a smaller company is that there’s a limited number of people involved in any decision being made, and all of these people are easily reachable. No longer do we have long email chains that involve ten people from five different departments, so decision-making is a lot more streamlined.”

Dong says Frost Giant is currently composed of around 80 percent Blizzard veterans. One challenge is finding experienced RTS developers. “It just so happens that Blizzard has one of the largest concentrations of those in the country, so it follows that we would have a higher percentage of ex-Blizzard employees.”

While Dong says he was aware that support for StarCraft 2 was waning, not the least because his team was getting progressively smaller, he says he wasn’t aware of the October announcement that StarCraft 2 would enter maintenance mode when he departed the company in September 2020. He is complimentary of Blizzard. “I know everyone at Frost Giant struggled with his or her personal decision to leave Blizzard, and at least for me, only a special project with a special team could have pulled me away.”

As with anything, the decision to go independent varies from developer to developer. Plenty leave because their game has been canceled or put into maintenance mode. One common factor seems to be a desire to return to a smaller, more intimate environment. A separate source within Blizzard observed that former Blizzard developers typically haven’t left to lead big-budget games like Assassin’s Creed — they’ve gone to smaller studios, perhaps to search for what one current Blizzard source terms “that ‘family’ feeling” again. While that feeling is purportedly still present at Blizzard, shifting team sizes can cause a developer to go looking for that feeling elsewhere.

Investors, meanwhile, are looking for experienced developers who can quickly start up a successful studio, and Blizzard developers are more available than they used to be, says a source. “I almost think a lot of the things that made it harder to poach Blizzard people stopped. So it's become very easy to poach, and a lot of the senior people can just take people with them. Because it doesn't matter what the actual situation is, people believe in narrative. And when the narrative is like, this place is going downhill, it's really easy to talk people into leaving it.”

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The Pressure Grows

In the meantime, Blizzard has been going through a host of internal changes. In 2018, co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime announced his departure from the company, making way for then-World of Warcraft director J. Allen Brack, who stepped in as the studio’s new president. Ray Gresko, who had been with Blizzard since 2004, was elevated to Chief Development Officer, but departed barely a year into his new job. Co-founder Frank Pearce left Blizzard in 2019. Major leaders like Chris Metzen, Chris Sigaty, and Ben Brode all stepped away in the period between 2016 and 2020.

In late 2018, Blizzard announced that it was spinning down Heroes of the Storm, its erstwhile competitor to League of Legends and Dota 2, moving developers to other projects and canceling its Heroes of the Dorm tournament and the Heroes Global Championship. It was around this time, our source tells us, that Blizzard also became much more conscious about spending. This is corroborated by similar reports from Kotaku. “The company went from, ‘No, don't even think about money. Spend whatever you want,’ to, ‘Oh, shit. We need to cut costs.’ And that happened around the time of [Mike Morhaime] leaving and [J. Allen Brack] taking over.”

Matters didn’t improve in 2019. Activision Blizzard was roiled by more than 800 layoffs in February, with the explanation that “staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate," according to a leaked memo to staff from Brack. Many of those layoffs came from the esports and community sections of the business. Controversy also erupted when a professional Hearthstone player named Blitzchung was punished for speaking out on behalf of Hong Kong on an official stream, the backlash growing in scope until Brack was eventually forced to apologize on stage. Toward the end of the year, Blizzard realized that Warcraft 3 Reforged — which had been hastily announced the year before to cover the gap in its release schedule — was in deep trouble. Developers across multiple teams were pulled in to try and save it, crunching to try and get the remaster at least into a condition where it could be shipped, multiple sources say. The backlash that followed was severe, and the team responsible for its development was reportedly dismantled later that year.

A narrative emerged around this time among fans and media that Activision was clamping down and exerting more and more influence over Blizzard — a narrative that many within Blizzard believe. But Blizzard also continues to cherish what could be called its editorial independence, to the point that even talking about money is actively discouraged in some areas. A firewall of sorts has been constructed around the core game development teams, with every effort being made to protect Blizzard’s internal development culture. When the layoffs hit in 2019, game development escaped relatively unscathed.

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The reported firewall around game dev may be one reason that Keller is so vehement in pushing against this narrative when speaking with IGN. “I can't think of one time where Activision has… or sorry, like management, has come in and asked us to change a creative decision about any of our games. They have so much faith and trust that these talented developers that they've hired are making the right choices for their games. They give us free rein to do that.”

The flipside of this wall of protection for core game development is that pressure has fallen more on other parts of Blizzard, particularly the support services, as Activision Blizzard has steadily consolidated the larger business. It was around 2018 that Blizzard’s internal review process was fully revamped, sources say, adopting a stricter, one-size-fits-all approach that put the company on the path toward being beholden to stricter performance curves as Blizzard HR was consolidated into the company at large. Blizzard responded in a statement, "We are constantly exploring ways to better serve the needs of our player community while simultaneously supporting our people. Right now, we’re intensely focused on developing and releasing more games and content and hiring more than 500 developers across announced, and unannounced, projects. In a rapidly changing and competitive industry, this requires a shared commitment and requires us to make decisions that enable us to be effective and adapt while preserving the quality expected of us from our player community."

Esports continue to take the brunt of the impact of Blizzard’s budget cuts and layoffs as the COVID-19 pandemic bites deep into live events. A separate source we spoke with opted to leave in 2020 when Blizzard refused to upgrade them from contract to full-time, realizing that they were apt to be swept up in the next round of layoffs. Sure enough, Blizzard laid off around 50 employees from its esports division in March 2021, citing difficulties from the pandemic.

Despite the attempts to shelter core game development, developers have felt the impact. With less support from Blizzard’s esports and community sections, IGN has heard stories of Blizzard devs having to pick up the slack by helping out with events or writing patch notes. One way or another, everyone has felt the cuts around Blizzard.

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Then there’s the schism with Activision’s corporate side, which has left some within Blizzard feeling powerless and out of control of their own destiny. In March, Activision Blizzard’s announced that it was hiring Brian Bulatao as its Chief Administrative Officer. In an internal memo sent to Activision Blizzard employees that was obtained by IGN, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick praised Bulatao for his experience in government and his military service, saying he represented Activision Blizzard’s commitment to hiring veterans. But conversations on Blizzard’s internal Slack channel and elsewhere reveal that Bulatao’s hiring generated considerable controversy, as employees questioned the wisdom of hiring a former Trump administration official once described as a bully.

Some employees were feeling “speechless” and wondering how he represented the values of Activision Blizzard. A few suggested sending a “Hey J” — an internal message system designed to connect employees with president J Allen Brack — to raise their concerns. Blizzard responded to IGN in a statement, "Like every new leader at Activision Blizzard, Brian is continuing to meet with our employees and engage in listening sessions across the organization. He is looking forward to meeting with more Blizzard employees and is invested in them, and all of [Activision Blizzard's] employees’ success."

Ultimately, the furious internal debate carried with it the tacit acknowledgment that Blizzard didn’t have much say over who the company hired to run Corporate Social Responsibility, which is part of Bulatao's portfolio. As the company that makes the least amount of money alongside King and Activision, more than one employee expressed that Blizzard was basically along for the ride.

“Realistically, the way big companies work is ‘if you make them money, you set the culture.’ And Blizzard doesn't make them money. Call of Duty does, and they set the culture,” a source within Blizzard says. “So, if anything, unless Blizzard actually starts delivering more money, I think it will continue to trend in that direction.”

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Just Around the Corner

When 2021 began, the mood around Blizzard lifted somewhat. The end of 2020 had been difficult, with Blizzard forced to shift developers from Overwatch 2 in order to get Shadowlands out the door. But despite the last-minute scramble, World of Warcraft’s latest expansion had been successful. Employees were hopeful its success would be reflected in Blizzard’s profit-sharing program, which was due to pay out in March.

When March 5 rolled around, though, Blizzard announced that employees would be receiving about 50 percent of their expected target depending on their performance. In an email to employees obtained by IGN, Brack attributed the number to reduced second-half profits for 2020. Brack promised that better times were ahead, pointing to Diablo 4, Overwatch 2, and additional, unannounced projects as reasons to be optimistic.

“If we deliver on our slate of plans, we expect 2021 and 2022 to be great years for Blizzard,” Brack wrote a month and a half before Kaplan’s departure.

Blizzard responded with the following statement: "We believe in a pay-for-performance philosophy that encourages us to make content that resonates with our players. Like many other compensation programs, Blizzard’s profit-sharing program is directly tied to our business performance — the details have not changed for a number of years. Last year, we had successful releases, but we also heavily invested in our future. We’re looking forward to sharing what we’re working on with players, and ultimately rewarding our teams for their contributions."

A Blizzard spokesperson told IGN that it "recently awarded equity to almost every single employee, adding over $100 million to the Blizzard equity grant pool." A source within Blizzard says that "recently awarded" is a strong term since almost all employees don't know what they're getting yet, but that employees have been told "you are getting something."

Salaries and bonuses have been a sensitive subject at Blizzard of late. In December 2018, Blizzard ended its holiday bonus program, integrating the payouts into salaries instead. Last August, Bloomberg reported that Blizzard employees began sharing salary information, with many reportedly frustrated by what they perceived to be low pay. One source within Blizzard was sanguine about it, saying that there was only so much slack that World of Warcraft and Hearthstone could pick up. Others expressed frustration during conversations in Blizzard’s internal Slack channel and elsewhere.

Add in the steady drumbeat of high-level departures, layoffs, the large gap between major releases, and the opportunity to go independent, and it’s no wonder that many longstanding Blizzard employees are starting to think about what’s next. After all, five years is a long time to be at any company in the modern age, let alone 15 or 20, and outside of the surprise success of WoW Classic, there’s been precious little in the way of wholeheartedly good news for the company of late.

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“It feels like the company is just bleeding and taking punches, and realistically, the only thing that is gonna stop that is shipping Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2,” says a Blizzard source. “We talk all the time about like, ‘We really kinda messed up long-term planning, you know? Our release slates and things like that.’ If you look at how long the games take to make, and Diablo 4 and Overwatch are probably shaping up to ship roughly around the same time or in successive years, it is hard to imagine this not happening again to Blizzard.”

For now, at least, better times may indeed be ahead. Analyst Andrew Uerkwitz is bullish on Diablo Immortal, and thinks that Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 will give Blizzard the success it craves within the next couple years. He goes as far as to argue that Diablo Immortal has the chance to be bigger than Call of Duty Mobile, pointing to its earnings potential in Asia, where games like Diablo tend to be more popular than shooters and Blizzard has an established foothold.

“Most of the top titles in that space were natively built in Asia, either by NetEase or Tencent. And none of them have the IP cachet that Diablo has,” Uerkwitz says of Blizzard’s upcoming free-to-play mobile game, which is still set to go into full release in 2021. “I think Diablo has been a sneaky success on PC for years in Asia, and so I think putting them together with NetEase – with their expertise of this style of game – positions it well to kind of be the leader of that space similar to how [PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds] became the leader of the shooter genre on mobile over there.”

Over the past five years, Blizzard has been stuck in a holding pattern as it has juggled setbacks, key departures, and internal reorganization. Jeff Kaplan’s departure was in some ways the culmination of this grinding transition period. The past three years have taken their toll on Blizzard, and it’s unclear what long-term effects Activision’s reorganization will have on its internal culture, or whether it will be able to avoid another dry period like the one it is currently suffering. In the near-term, Blizzard is doubling down on its established characters, hopeful that the likes of Thrall, Tracer, and Lilith (but not Kerrigan) will be enough to carry it forward.

“We are about to turn the corner into a really exciting time,”  Ion Hazzikostas says optimistically. “I think Blizzard has long development cycles. The games that we make are not games that are produced and turned around quickly in a year or two. People have seen what's in the works with Diablo 4, with Overwatch 2, and are incredibly excited about both of those games. [...] [W]e have other projects that are in the works, and I think, you know, folks across the world will be seeing before too long what we're up to, and I can't wait to share that with them.”

For Blizzard, better times are perpetually just around the corner. It’s just a question of how many existing staff will wait for them.

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Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN. Got a news tip? Send her a DM on Twitter or Signal.

Additional reporting by Taylor Lyles.

NBC has announced that the eighth and final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine will premiere on August 12 at 8 PM and 8:30 PM ET/PT. As stated in the release, that means the long-running, hit police sitcom will begin its last, abbreviated season by airing two episodes--and the remaining eight will air on subsequent Thursdays in those time slots.

Until as recently as last week, it was only known that Brooklyn Nine-Nine would be back sometime in August. Considering the series was once extremely close to never getting past Season 5, following Fox's cancellation in May 2018, the show has enjoyed an unexpected renewal and rejuvenation on the new network. In a new trailer released by the show, the series insists it's "going out in a blaze of glory." Check it out below.

Plotwise, not much is known about this final batch of episodes. Last year, it was announced that the season may feature a storyline about the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-creator Dan Goor had mentioned in interviews last year that he and the show's writing team "value[s] escapism, but at the same time, we don't want to be ignorant… there is a debate about what next year will look like." Most likely, Goor says, the show will explore more subtle ways of acknowledging the crisis rather than "toiling away in the depths."

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Amazon has ordered a second season of The Wheel of Time before the first season has premiered. The early season renewal from Amazon Studios coincides with the end of production on Season 1 of the fantasy series, which has just finished filming in the Czech Republic. Both seasons, co-produced by Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television, will exclusively stream on Amazon Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide. "The belief Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television have shown in The Wheel of Time has been incredible to see throughout the entire process of making this show," said showrunner and executive producer Rafe Judkins. "Getting a second season order before the first season has even premiered is such a vote of confidence in the work we are doing and the property itself. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2017/04/20/wheel-of-time-in-60-seconds-what-you-need-to-know"] "We couldn't be happier to be able to continue to live and work in the world Robert Jordan created," he added. "This property is one I've loved since I was a teenager, and seeing it brought to life with the resources to make it truly worthy of what's on the page is something I can't wait for the other fans of the books to see. And Season 2 just keeps expanding the world we built in Season 1." Judkins served as executive producer and showrunner on the series, which is based on Robert Jordan's bestselling fantasy novels. Other executive producers include Larry Mondragon and Rick Selvage of Red Eagle Entertainment, Ted Field and Mike Weber of Radar Pictures, as well as Darren Lemke, Marigo Kehoe, and Uta Briesewitz. Briesewitz is also said to have directed the first two episodes. "The approach Rafe and his team have taken with this project is a testament to Amazon Studios commitment to deliver something special for the devoted fans around the world," said Amazon Studios TV co-head Vernon Sanders. "We wanted our Prime Video customers to be delighted that a second season is already in the works so that they would know that the journey would continue." [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=amazons-wheel-of-time-cast&captions=true"] The series is co-produced by Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television, with both companies continuing their partnership for the second season. Amazon's decision to move forward with the show before the first season has even debuted "exemplifies their dedication to and belief in this series," said Sony Pictures Television President Jeff Frost. According to the official synopsis, the story will follow "Moiraine, a member of the incredibly powerful all-female organization called the Aes Sedai, as she arrives in the small town of Two Rivers. There, she embarks on a dangerous, world-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of whom is prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn, who will either save or destroy humanity." For more, check out our guide to everything you need to know about The Wheel of Time. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

Following the death of acclaimed manga author and Berserk creator Kentaro Miura, players in the Square Enix MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 paid tribute in a virtual vigil. Miura is best known as the author and artist of the manga Berserk, a seminal dark fantasy series critically acclaimed for its storytelling, art, and world-building. Works that have been inspired by Berserk are numerous including games like Dark Souls as well as Final Fantasy. One of the hallmarks of Berserk is the absurdly large sword carried by its hero Guts. In Final Fantasy, plenty of characters wield similarly large weapons including Cloud in Final Fantasy 7 and the Dark Knight class in Final Fantasy 14. And it's the latter who showed up to pay respects to Miura virtually.

Balmung/Crystal in #FFXIV showing their respects for this man by lining up their Dark Knight jobs. https://t.co/xbcpLmKmRY pic.twitter.com/aTvYQMfP6i

— Pimpy Shortstocking (@PimpyLala) May 20, 2021

Videos began to emerge online of players lining up in main cities around Final Fantasy 14 dressed in Dark Knight gear as an homage to Miura's Berserk inspirations. The Dark Knight class uses the large sword as its primary weapon and many of its story-related armor sets are dark fantasy-inspired. In the main city of Ul'dah, the line of players dressed in Dark Knight gear was so long that the MMO struggled to load properly. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2015/04/13/final-fantasy-14-heavensward-opening-cinematic"] Miura died at the age of 54 of acute aortic dissection. Young Animal Comics, which publishes Berserk, issued a statement writing, "We would like to express our utmost respect and gratitude to Dr. Miura's painting work and pray for his soul." [poilib element="accentDivider"] Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor.

Going back to the days of President Jimmy Carter, who vowed to ask about UFOs when he got into office, people have imagined becoming President of the United States just so they could ask about aliens, Area 51, and all the other mysteries that defined shows like X-Files in the 90s. President Barack Obama is one of the handful of people in American to have actually had the opportunity to make good on that dream, and he says he didn't waste it. In an appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden, Obama says he asked whether the U.S. government actually has alien specimens. The answer, alas, was no. "The truth is that when I came into office, I asked, 'Is there a lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens in stasis.' They did a little bit of research and the answer was no," Obama says. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/04/27/pentagon-officially-declassifies-and-releases-3-navy-videos-purportedly-showing-ufos"] He does, however, acknowledge that there have been some strange events that cannot easily be explained. "But what is true, and I'm actually being serious here, there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are," Obama says. We can't explain how they move, their trajectory... they do not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is." Obama went on to joke that Corden's bandleader Reggie Watts was perhaps an alien himself. UFOs, of course, are a bigger and bigger part of the discourse these days. Just last month, the Defense Department confirmed that footage of shared photos and videos of U.A.P.s (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) had indeed been taken by Navy personnel, and that they were investigating. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-best-space-opera-movies-that-arent-star-wars-or-star-trek&captions=true"] U.S. intelligence agencies are expected to deliver a report on U.A.P.s next month. It is intended to make public what the Pentagon knows about encounters with UFO, NBC News reports. While you wait, find out why scientists are calling for evidence of potential UFOs. And if you want a chaser, here are the best sci-fi movies on Netflix right now. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN.

Following the announcement of its 2021-2022 primetime schedule this morning, CBS has now released trailers for its new shows. NCIS: HAWAI ‘ I (Monday, 10:00 p.m.) This new spin-off of the NCIS franchise focuses on the first female Special Agent in Charge of NCIS Pearl Harbor, Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey), who has thrived and risen […]

The post CBS Releases Trailers for New Shows: GOOD SAM, GHOSTS, CSI: VEGAS and More first appeared on the TV addict.

How does one earn the nickname “Dr. Death”? By being a neurosurgeon whose gross malpractice resulted in the deaths of two patients and the maiming of over 30 over the course of two years. In the upcoming limited series Dr. Death, Peacock will tell the horrifying real story of Christopher Dunstch, who earned the nickname after being convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a history of willful malpractice. Joshua Jackson takes on the role as the “sociopathic” surgeon in the limited series. Watch the Dr. Death trailer below.

Dr. Death Trailer

Dr. Death isn’t a horror series, but it might as well be – the gore may be minimal, but the real-life consequences of Dr. Christopher Duntsch’s history of malpractice is even more horrifying than most fictional  horror stories.

Joshua Jackson, Grace Gummer, AnnaSophia Robb, Christian Slater, and Alec Baldwin star in Dr. Death, which adapts Wondery’s podcast about the true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch, who routinely left patients permanently maimed or dead, and was able to work for years thanks to gaps in the system that still exist. It’s as sobering a story as it is horrifying, and Jackson does an excellent job tip toeing between the “sociopath or incompetent” question that many have asked of Duntsch.

Dr. Death is helmed by an all-female directing team including Maggie Kiley (Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, who will also executive produce the first two episodes, Jennifer Morrison (Euphoria) and So Yong Kim (Lovesong). The series is executive produced and showrun by Patrick Macmanus (The Girl from Plainville) via his Littleton Road Productions banner, and under his overall deal with UCP. Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch and Taylor Latham also executive produce via Escape Artists, as well as Hernan Lopez and Marshall Lewy of Wondery.

Here’s the synopsis for Dr. Death:

Based on Wondery’s hit podcast, DR. DEATH is inspired by the terrifying true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson), a rising star in the Dallas medical community. Young, charismatic and ostensibly brilliant, Dr. Duntsch was building a flourishing neurosurgery practice when everything suddenly changed. Patients entered his operating room for complex but routine spinal surgeries and left permanently maimed or dead. As victims piled up, two fellow physicians, neurosurgeon Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) and vascular surgeon Randall Kirby (Christian Slater), as well as Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb), set out to stop him. DR. DEATH explores the twisted mind of Dr. Duntsch and the failures of the system designed to protect the most defenseless among us.

Dr. Death premieres on Peacock this summer 2021.

The post ‘Dr. Death’ Trailer: Joshua Jackson is a Killer Surgeon in Peacock Limited Series appeared first on /Film.

There’s some new monsters in charge. Mike and Sulley are taking over Monsters Inc. and turning it into a laugh factory, but that changes things up enormously for some of the recent Scarer grads who find themselves without a job. While Billy Crystal and John Goodman make a brief appearance as their beloved Monsters Inc. characters, the new Disney+ series Monsters at Work is all about the people below them, who have to keep the lights on at the company. Watch the Monsters at Work teaser below.

Monsters at Work Trailer

When Monsters, Inc. suddenly changes priorities to become about jokes instead of scares, what’s a top Scarer to do? That’s what Tylor Tuskmon (Ben Feldman, Superstore), an eager young monster who graduated top of his class at Monsters University, has to figure out in Monsters at Work, a new Disney+ comedy series that puts a Pixar spin on everyone’s worst nightmare: corporate reshuffling. Left without a job, Tylor is sent to work as a mechanic, and must navigate a job he has no idea how to do, as well as figure out his kooky co-workers.

Pixar’s take on the workplace comedy looks like an absolute blast, with a fun premise and a colorful cast that includes Mindy Kaling, Henry Winkler, Bonnie Hunt,  Lucas Neff, Alanna Ubach, John Ratzenberger, Jennifer Tilly, Bob Peterson, Stephen Stanton, and Aisha Tyler.

Monsters at Work is executive produced by Disney animation veteran Bobs Gannaway (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) and produced by Sean Lurie (Inner Workings). Kat Good (Big Hero 6: The Series) and Steve Anderson (Meet the Robinsons) serve as supervising directors, and the late Rob Gibbs served as director on some of the earlier episodes in the series.

Here is the synopsis for Monsters at Work:

“Monsters At Work” takes place the day after the Monsters, Incorporated power plant started harvesting the laughter of children to fuel the city of Monstropolis, thanks to Mike and Sulley’s discovery that laughter generates ten times more energy than screams. It follows the story of Tylor Tuskmon, an eager young monster who graduated top of his class at Monsters University and always dreamed of becoming a Scarer until he lands a job at Monsters, Incorporated, and discovers that scaring is out and laughter is in. After Tylor is temporarily reassigned to the Monsters, Inc. Facilities Team(MIFT), he must work alongside a misfit bunch of mechanics while setting his sights on becoming a Jokester.

Monsters at Work premieres on Disney+ starting on July 2, 2021.

The post ‘Monsters at Work’ Trailer: Pixar’s Disney+ Series Reveals What Happened After ‘Monsters, Inc.’ appeared first on /Film.

All eight new installments of Love, Death, and Robots are available on Netflix. [poilib element="accentDivider"]

David Fincher and Deadpool director Tim Miller's Love, Death, and Robots is back with a new batch of animated shorts that delve into the diabolical dystopias, cosmic combat, and - er - a cenobite Santa Claus? And while we may not be getting as many episodes this time around, the series continues to be a fun and engaging cabinet of curiosities.

Season 2 of Love, Death, and Robots only offers up eight episodes, which may feel slight compared to the first season's eighteen installments, but there's still a lot to mine here, and having fewer episodes actually cuts down on the overall bloat that the debut season dished out.

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This round of episodes -- featuring morsels of mayhem, roughly 12 to 18 minutes each, that tackle monsters, malfunctioning robots, dastardly bounty hunters, and a dead giant's massive member. Once again it carries the offbeat sci-fi anthology torch that was lit by the likes of Liquid Television in the '90s and 1981's Heavy Metal. It's a viable variety act capable of both flashing its fangs and showing its belly, coming to us from an international array of animation and visual effects studios.

With stories emerging from Miller's own LA-based Blur Studio (Far Cry 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider), Scotland's Axis Studios, France's Unit Image (God of War, Beyond Good and Evil 2), and the addition of England's Blink Industries and Passion Animation Studios, the series once again delivers a fierce fanning of animation that ranges from 2D to 3D to photo-real CGI. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=love-death-and-robots-volume-2-gallery&captions=true"]

Two of this year's entries involve the fear of a robot uprising: One played for satire and the other as a claustrophobic thriller reminiscent of 1990's Hardware. "Automated Customer Service," based on a story by John Scalzi, drops us in an automaton-run Palm Springs-type town where the elder residents seem to enjoy a Buy n Large-adjacent existence... until a robot vacuum cleaner turns on its owner. On the more scarred side of the evil robot coin, "Life Hutch" is a short-fused survivor story, based on a Harlan Ellison tale. It stars Michael B. Jordan as a marooned space marine who must duke it out with a mad maintenance droid. Neither of these episodes are exactly fresh concepts, but one of Love, Death and Robots’ strengths resides in a freedom that nurtures an ability to show us similar stories with different tones, textures, and animation.

"Automated Customer Service" is also a good episode to watch first, since kicking things off with a tongue-in-cheek robot apocalypse loosens one's psyche enough to absorb heavier fare later on. For instance, there’s the gruesome "Pop Squad," from Season 2’s supervising director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, which features Nolan North as a future cop who hunts down and kills illegal offspring, and "Snow in the Desert," which is a carnage-filled caper that fills the Space Western act on the bill. Those two both deal with humanity's cold and cruel quest for immortality: "Pop Squad" plays this out more like 2013's Elysium, or even Netflix's own Altered Carbon, with the elite enjoying a life in the sky and the opportunity to live forever but experiencing the unrewarding emptiness of being a god. "Snow in the Desert" is the other side of that, with a bullets and bounties-based story that treats immortality as a plague of aloneness. That theme is a solid go-to for sci-fi, and breaking it up into gorgeous nibbles allows us to cut right to the core. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=If%20you%E2%80%99re%20looking%20for%20more%20diverse%20animation%20'The%20Tall%20Grass'%20unfolds%20like%20a%20moving%20painting"] Next up, Robert Valley's "Ice," tells a simple but warm sibling tale amidst a swirl of shadows and neon blues. "The Tall Grass" and "All Through the House" dabble in ghoulish ghastlies as humble horror offerings. Though “Ice” and “The Tall Grass” are visually unique compared to the other chapters, and “All Through the House” is a pretty good gag, these three are the weakest of the lot. While not entirely empty, they just don’t quite measure up to the thoughtfulness of the rest. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/05/01/new-to-netflix-for-may-2021"]

If you take these in the suggested order, the final chapter is an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novella called "The Drowned Giant." While "Life Hutch" is a mostly dialogue-free escape room, "The Drowned Giant," from Tim Miller, is narrated all the way through, running the gamut of existential questions and observations as a small town discovers a dead and naked giant man on their shore. It's excellent. An outlier of an endcap -- made to feel even more so, by the shorter episode count -- "The Drowned Giant" is a poetic triumph, bubbling up chaotic feelings through calm repose. It’s the best of the batch, with “Pop Squad,” “Life Hutch,” and “Snow in the Desert” following up. If you’re looking for more diverse animation “The Tall Grass” unfolds like a moving painting while “Ice” has a flatter, more traditional 2D look, though those two episodes won’t sit with you like the melancholy of the others.

Ireland's Health Service Executive has been hit with a ransomware attack causing it to shut down its IT network and resort to pen and paper records.

Actor Ryan Reynolds has shared a decidedly NSFW new trailer for The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, the upcoming sequel to the 2017 action-comedy The Hitman's Bodyguard. Per the title, the new movie--which is hitting theaters on June 16--stars Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, and Salma Hayek.

The comedic twist is, of course, in the casting. Reynolds will be returning as the unlikely but highly accomplished bodyguard Michael Bryce, who now wants to change careers. That all changes when he encounters Sonia (Salma Hayek), an infamous international con artist and wife of assassin Darius Kincaid (Jackson), who Bryce had to protect in the first movie. Some very shady and dangerous folks want Sonia and Darius dead, and Bryce--just when he thought he was out--has to come back for one last job. Another trailer was released back in April, but be sure to check out what Reynolds has shared online, below.

The movie also stars Antonio Banderas, Morgan Freeman, and Frank Grillo, and it's directed by Patrick Hughes, who also helmed the first film. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard was originally slated to come out in August, but now will be released on June 16.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill are returning for another Enola Holmes Netflix film, Variety reports.

Brown will reprise her role as the teenage detective, the younger sister of Henry Cavill’s Sherlock. If you dug the original, director Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag) and writer Jack Thorne are also returning for the film, which is based on the Nancy Springer book series which ran from 2006 to 2010.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/02/26/10-best-sherlock-holmes-portrayals"]

“I can’t wait to collaborate again with my ‘Enola Holmes’ family,” Brown said in a statement. “Enola holds a special place in my heart -- she’s strong, fearless, intelligent, and brave. I look forward to fans seeing how her journey continues!.

The 17-year-old Brown produced the first Enola Holmes film, and is producing the sequel alongside her sister Paige Brown with their PCMA Productions company.

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IGN gave the original Enola Holmes a six out of 10, calling it a “sprightly but slight YA adventure” that should please younger viewers.

Netflix has previously stated that 76 million “households” watched Enola Holmes.

If you’re curious where Enola and Sherlock’s next adventure might go, check out our theories on how Enola Holmes sets up a sequel with multiple plot threads.

[poilib element="accentDivider"] Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/Baker Street Irregular for IGN.

Google has chosen World Password Day to announce it is turning on two-step verification (2SV) for all account holders by default. The move will require Google users to confirm logins using their mobile devices.

In a blog post Google says, from today, the accounts already enrolled in the two-factor protection will be asked to verify their identity to tapping a prompt on their mobile devices.

Google says that soon it will automatically enrol Google account holders in 2SV provided their accounts are set up in the right way. Google is offering users a Security Checkup to endure their accounts are in order.

Tapping the phone prompts is certainly a little easier than having to input a code sent to users as a text message.

Google is also taking the opportunity to tout its security keys, which are built into Android devices, while there’s a Google Smart Lock app for iOS. Both of which enable people to use the phones on their person as a way to prove their identity.

The company says: “For as long as passwords remain a part of your digital life, through the apps you use and the websites you access, we will continue to innovate and develop new products and technologies that make managing them easy, and most importantly secure by default.”

Google emphasises its Password Manager is now built directly into Chrome, Android and iOS and can help users create complex and unique passwords enabling them to avoid reusing their passwords and forgetting all the complex ones.

The company is also drawing attention to its new Password Import feature, which makes it possible to upload 1,000 of your passwords from third-party sites into Google’s own Password Manager.

Despite protecting your passwords for the time being, Google wants you to know that ultimately, they’re a thing of the past. For now, you’re still going to need one of the best password managers, Google or otherwise.

The post Google is turning on two-step verification by default appeared first on Trusted Reviews.

Hanna John-Kamen has been cast as Red Sonja in the upcoming sword-and-sorcery feature film. This news comes by way of The Hollywood Reporter, which reports that John-Kamen, who played the villainous Ghost in Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp, will star in the forthcoming spinoff of Conan the Barbarian. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/02/11/red-sonja-production-on-hold-following-bryan-singer-controversy"] Joey Soloway is directing the movie and and co-writing the script alongside Tasha Huo, who is the screenwriter that's executive producing and serving as the showrunner for Netflix's upcoming animated Tomb Raider series, as noted by THR. "Hannah is a very talented actress who we've been following for years and she IS Red Sonja," Soloway told THR in a statement. "Her range, sensibilities, and strength are all qualities we have been looking for and we couldn't be more excited to embark on this journey together." Anyone following Red Sonja knows that's it's been through quite a ride getting to the point of casting. It was originally announced in 2008 as a remake starring Rose McGowan and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Then, in 2015, it was revealed that Christopher Cosmos had been hired to develop a script for it and then The Expendables producer, Millennium Media, joined to produce the film in 2017. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2008/07/29/red-sonja-movies-rose-mcgowan-robert-rodriguez-sdcc-08"] X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer was confirmed as the director a year later. The entire film's production was put on hold in February of 2019 due to the controversy surrounding Singer, and just over a month later, it was announced that he was no longer be directing Red Sonja. That was one of the last time's anyone had publicly heard about this film before today's news that John-Kamen had been tapped to play Red Sonja. While waiting to hear more about Red Sonja, check out this story about 33 movies that were supposed to come out last decade but didn't, including Red Sonja, and then check out IGN's list of the top 25 fantasy films after that. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.