Immortals of Aveum Writer Talks about the Game’s Lore and Protagonist; New Trailer Showed Off

The Pokémon Company has released a new trailer for Detective Pikachu Returns.

The AI world is in turmoil again. Iran has proposed a harsh hijab law along with a long jail term and AI surveillance; 22-year-old claims AI caused 90% income drop, stole her job; study suggests AI could predict future pandemics - this and more in our daily AI roundup. Let us take a look.

Fortnite is most definitely a videogame, but the incomparable success of Epic's battle royale has led to it becoming something of (sorry) a platform too. It wasn't necessarily built for this in the same way that something like Roblox was, so there's a seat-of-the-pants element to much of what Epic does with it, and one recurring and surprising theme is education. Fortnite has a huge audience, mostly young, and Epic clearly feels they could stand some fibre in their diet alongside the Ariana Grande concerts and Marvel jamborees. 

By Umar Shakir, a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge.

A terrible thing about the modern era of television isn’t just the sheer number of great shows that frequently fall through the cracks on services like Netflix, but great shows that are overlooked because people simply don’t know where to find them. Manhattan was one of those shows, a gem of the mid-2010s twilight of TV’s second so-called golden age. It was a time when streaming TV was just getting started and there already seemed to be too many shows, many of them great. Breaking Bad had ended and Mad Men was winding down, people still liked Game of Thrones, and exciting, buzzy shows like Mr. Robot and The Americans were premiering all the time.

Destiny 2 players, it's time to polish your reading glasses. Bungie's putting the finishing touches on a 6,473-word, 15-page State of the Game post as we speak, and it's going to drop later today, August 3.

Throwing an hour of light comedy into the middle of a 10-episode arc with galactic-level stakes could derail an entire season, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds dances gracefully from week to week between courtroom drama, time-travel romance, and its latest wild swing: a musical episode.

One of the most common criticisms of The Witcher on Netflix is that it strays too far from Andrzej Sapkowski's novels. It may have been a source of some tension behind the scenes, too: Former series star Henry Cavill made a point of saying he «pushed really, really hard» to stay true to the books, while also claiming that some of the writers on the show «actively disliked» them. There's no question that some aspects of the novel have been simplified for the TV show, and in an interview with Polish site Wyborcza (translated by Witcher fan site Redanian Intelligence), executive producer Tomek Baginski explained why some of those changes were made: "[A] higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range."

Tomek Baginski, executive producer on Netflix's The Witcher, has blamed American audiences and social media sites such as TikTok for the series' simplified take on the books' plots.

Whether or not the upcoming Alone in the Dark reboot will be able to kickstart the sort of resurgence that other beloved survival horror franchises like Resident Evil and Dead Space have enjoyed remains to be seen, but things are certainly looking good so far. That is, of course, thanks in no small part to the emphasis that the upcoming reimagining is placing on pure horror. Pretty soon, we’ll be getting a taste of just what that will entail.

You’ll have a hard time finding a movie sequel that doesn’t pale in comparison to the original. Sometimes, it’s just hard to come up with a story that beats the one we all already love. Games don’t have that problem as making a better game usually requires the developers to just read player feedback and improve upon the original’s gameplay shortcomings. That’s, however, not the case in every single video game sequel. There’s a surprisingly high number of once-promising sequels that fumble hilariously in places where the original triumphed.

The Embers Adrift team has released a new “State of the Game” update blog, with reflections on the switch to a buy to play model, recent updates, and new stuff, including updatesto the King’s Keep.