Behaviour Interactive has shed some light on what's ahead for its massively popular horror franchise Dead by Daylight. One of the more surprising announcements was for a spinoff game that will take the horror-heavy series in a completely new direction — it's a dating sim.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! developer Psyop is working on the visual novel, which is called Hooked on You: A Dead by Daylight Dating Sim. Instead of desperately trying to avoid killers like The Trapper and The Spirit, you'll be able to flirt with them on Murderer's Island. Just don't expect to hook up with licensed characters like Pyramid Head or Sadako from The Ring.

Behaviour says the stories you'll discover in Hooked on You won't be canon, though they'll offer a blend of humor, romance and — since this is a DBD game after all — horror. The studio notes that many DBD fans have been asking for a dating sim set in that universe. They won't have to wait too long to play it, either. Hooked on You will arrive on Steam this summer.

A ton of other DBD news has emerged ahead of the game's sixth anniversary, including details about the next chapter, called Roots of Dread. It includes a new map called Garden of Joy, which is not quite as euphoric as its name suggests.

The latest terrifying killer, The Dredge, is an amorphous mass of limbs that can teleport between lockers to catch survivors unaware. Roots of Dread also introduces a new survivor named Haddie Kaur. PC players can try the chapter on the Public Test Build (PTB) today. It'll arrive on all platforms on June 7th.

Looking slightly further ahead, Behaviour announced a couple more upcoming crossovers, including an unexpected one with Attack on Titan. The studio says fans have been asking for content based on anime and manga. The first partnership of its kind will soon introduce 10 Attack on Titan-inspired outfits for DBD killers and survivors. Among them are an Eren Yeager skin for Dwight, a Hange-inspired look for Zarina and an Armored Titan outfit for The Oni.

Behaviour Interactive

In addition, DBD is delving back into the world of Resident Evil with another chapter based on that classic franchise. Nemesis, Jill Valentine and Leon S. Kennedy arrived last June, and more characters from the series will join them later this year as part of the Resident Evil: Project W chapter.

Elsewhere, Dead by Daylight Mobile is getting a major update that will include changes to leaderboards, social systems, the control layout and visual performance. The activities and rewards systems are being revamped too. The update recently debuted in Japan. It will hit the US in a closed beta in the next few weeks before a broader rollout.

Some changes are on the way to the core PC and console game as well. Behavior says it will soon rework around 40 killer and survivor perks to freshen things up. A new system to get folks into games faster will reward those who queue up for whichever role (survivor or killer) has a smaller player count.

Meanwhile, starting today on the PTB, players can try a useful new preset feature. You can create custom loadouts with preferred perks and outfits for killers and survivors. That could help speed things up before you start a match.

Never mind reading generic guides or practicing with friends — Google is betting that algorithms can get you ready for a job interview. The company has launched an Interview Warmup tool that uses AI to help you prepare for interviews across various roles. The site asks typical questions (such as the classic "tell me a bit about yourself") and analyzes your voiced or typed responses for areas of improvement. You'll know when you overuse certain words, for instance, or if you need to spend more time talking about a given subject.

Interview Warmup is aimed at Google Career Certificates users hoping to land work, and most of its role-specific questions reflect this. There are general interview questions, though, and Google plans to expand the tool to help more candidates. The feature is currently only available in the US.

AI has increasingly been used in recruitment. To date, though, it has mainly served companies during their selection process, not the potential new hires. This isn't going to level the playing field, but it might help you brush up on your interview skills.

Apple Music will start livestreaming some concerts from major artists this week as part of a new series. Apple Music Live kicks off with a Harry Styles show that subscribers in 167 countries will able to watch live and at no extra cost on May 20th. The company says Apple Music Live is a way to "give the biggest stars in music the biggest possible platform to flaunt how they connect with audiences and how their songs translate to live performance." 

The concert takes place at UBS Arena in Long Island, New York. It's effectively a record release party for Styles, whose third album, Harry's House, comes out on the same day. Apple Music's landing page for the event includes an interview with Styles about the making of the album, a link for users to pre-add Harry's House to their library and a bunch of playlists focused on the performer.

This seems like a smart way for artists to both promote new releases and give people a sense of what their live shows are like to perhaps sell some more tickets. It could also help Apple Music persuade fans of artists whose shows it streams to sign up for the service.

Styles' gig, titled "One Night Only in New York," will be available to stream at 9PM ET on Friday. So that folks in other parts of the world can catch the show at a more reasonable time, there will be encore streams on May 22nd at noon ET and May 26th at 5AM. That suggests the concert won't be available on demand after the fact. Engadget has asked Apple for clarification.

Several other platforms have streamed live shows to viewers. YouTube has broadcast performances from Coachella over the last several years. As it happens, Styles was one of the festival's headliners this year. Hulu just inked a deal to stream the Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits music festivals this year and next. Amazon Music has baked in artists' Twitch streams, while Amazon has streamed live shows on a ticketed basis and offered them to Prime Video subscribers afterward.

Apple has some experience in livestreaming concerts too. In 2007, it started running the iTunes Festival (later known as the Apple Music Festival) in the UK before expanding it to the US in 2014. Apple announced in 2017 that the festival had come to an end.

Netflix is turning to a conventional strategy to improve its originals: the focus group. Variety has learned Netflix has been screening movies and TV shows in advance to obtain feedback from subscribers invited to participate. Customers reportedly watch several titles over the course of six months and fill out a survey to indicate what they liked, hated or would change.

The company confirmed that it's running focus groups, but only in the US. The panels have reportedly been active for roughly a year.

These screenings have been mainstays in Hollywood for decades, and are used to make edits when producers want a title to reach the broadest possible audience. Terminator 2's ending was changed after a focus group rejected the initial version, for instance. As in those cases, Netflix is using the groups to make sure its originals are received well and keep viewers coming back.

The company is very familiar with experimentation. It has tested everything from random show selection through to mobile games. However, testing show content is relatively new. While it's not clear what prompted the new approach, Netflix is facing mounting pressure from rivals who are chasing awards and the customers that sometimes follow.

In addition to their latest tracks and playlists, musicians can use Spotify’s artist profile pages to promote merchandise and concert dates. Soon, they may be able to use those pages to promote NFTs as well. As first reported by Music Ally, Spotify has begun testing NFT galleries. The feature is available to a select group of US users on Android and includes Web3 enthusiasts like Steve Aoki.

If you have access to the test, you can view the galleries by visiting one of the included artist pages and scrolling past the song list. Tapping on an NFT allows you to see a larger version of it, in addition to a short description. Per The Verge, a “See More” option redirects you to the NFT’s OpenSea listing page where you can purchase the token. According to Music Ally, Spotify isn’t collecting a commission on sales it helps facilitate during the test.

“Spotify is running a test in which it will help a small group of artists promote their existing third-party NFT offerings via their artist profiles,” Spotify told the outlet. “We routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve artist and fan experiences. Some of those tests end up paving the way for a broader experience and others serve only as an important learning.”

We’ve reached out to Spotify for more information.

The test comes as other major platforms like Instagram incorporate their own NFT features even as the market cools down. Citing data from NonFungible, The Wall Street Journal recently found that daily NFT sales are down 92 percent from their peak in September. The number of active wallets is also down by about 88 percent. 

It seems Black Mirror is making a comeback. Three years after the fifth season of the sci-fi anthology series arrived, Variety reports that Netflix has greenlit a sixth season.

Details are scant for now, though it seems casting is in progress for a season that's expected to have more episodes than season five's three instalments. The new episodes are said to be even more cinematic in scope than previous ones as well.

Critics have suggested Black Mirror was running out of steam in later seasons, with its previously incisive criticism of where technology was headed perhaps waning. The long gap between seasons might have helped the creative team develop more impactful ideas and scripts.

The lengthy delay between seasons isn't only because of creative reasons, though (if that has indeed been a problem). Black Mirror has been held up due to a rights issue. In January 2020, creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones left their production company House of Tomorrow, which had backing from Endemol.

The duo set up a new production company, Broke and Bones, which quickly struck a long-term deal with Netflix. However, Endemol retained the rights to Black Mirror, meaning Brooker and Jones were unable to produce more episodes until they or Netflix struck a deal with Endemol's new owner, Banijay Group.

In the meantime, Brooker and Jones have developed other projects for Netflix. They created a year-in-review special called Death to 2020 (a spin on Brooker's previous Wipe series), which had a sequel last year. Brooker was also behind an interactive animated project called Cat Burglar, which required players to get trivia questions correct to advance the story.

Netflix will surely be glad Brooker and Jones are working on Black Mirror again, however. The company scooped up the series, which debuted on the UK's Channel 4, in 2015. Since then, Black Mirror has won eight Emmys and a host of other awards, including for Bandersnatch, one of Netflix's first forays into interactive programming.

Following Saturday’s horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, online platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Twitter are seemingly struggling to prevent various versions of the gunman’s livestream from proliferating on their platforms. The shooter, an 18-year-old white male, attempted to broadcast the entire attack on Twitch using a GoPro Hero 7 Black. The company told Engadget it took his channel down within two minutes of the violence starting.

“Twitch has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents,” a Twitch spokesperson said. “The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.”

Despite Twitch’s response, that hasn’t stopped the video from proliferating online. According to New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, one link to a version of the livestream someone used a screen recorder to preserve saw 43,000 interactions. Another Twitter user said they found a Facebook post linking to the video that had been viewed more than 1.8 million times, with an accompanying screenshot suggesting the post did not trigger Facebook’s automated safeguards. A Meta spokesperson told Mac the video violates Facebook’s Community Standards.

Responding to Mac’s Twitter thread, Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz said she found TikTok videos that share accounts and terms Twitter users can search for to view the full video. “Clear the vid is all over Twitter,” she said. We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

Preventing terrorists and violent extremists from disseminating their content online is one of the things Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other tech companies said they would do following the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the first 24 hours after that attack, Meta said it removed 1.5 million videos, but clips of the shooting continued to circulate on the platform for more than a month after the event. The company blamed its automated moderation tools for the failure, noting they had a hard time detecting the footage because of the way in which it was filmed. "This was a first-person shooter video, one where we have someone using a GoPro helmet with a camera focused from their perspective of shooting," Neil Potts, Facebook’s public policy director, told British lawmakers at the time.

Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse is working on a new project. On Friday, the studio shared the first trailer for Zenless Zone Zero, an action RPG set in a modern urban setting. Reminiscent of titles like The World Ends With You and Scarlett Nexus, the game pits players against Ethereal, monstrous creatures borne from another dimension. In a nod to Neon Genesis Evangelion, the action takes place in New Eridu, one of the few cities to survive the devastation wrought by the Ethereal.

As a “Proxy,” you’ll need to organize a disparate party of characters to battle the monsters. Hoyoverse hasn’t explicitly said how it plans to monetize Zenless Zone Zero, but it sounds like the game will employ a similar system to the one found in Genshin Impact. In other words, expect to use real-world money to improve your chances at obtaining some of the game’s most powerful party members. Zenless Zone Zero does not have a release date yet, but you can sign up to take part in the game’s closed iOS and PC beta by visiting its official website.

If your childhood gaming was defined more by Kirby than Mario, don't worry — Nintendo has you covered. As VGCreports, Nintendo is making Kirby 64: The Crystal Shardsavailable through the Switch Online Expansion Pack on May 20th. The Nintendo 64 title was the first 3D Kirby game, although it was really more of a "2.5D" platformer — you set out to reassemble a shattered crystal by copying and combining your enemies' powers.

The Switch experience is effectively what you would remember playing circa 2000, complete with low-polygon 3D visuals. As you might guess, though, the multiplayer mini-games are now available online in addition to at home.

This is the 15th N64 game to come to the Switch Online Expansion Pack, which costs $50 per year or $80 for families. While Kirby 64 might not be as immediately appealing to veteran gamers as the likes of Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time, it's still a notable addition that may be great for introducing kids to the games of your youth.

Fans of Alan Wake aren’t getting an update on the sequel this summer — but can look forward to a new TV series and a remastered version of the original game for the Switch. Remedy Entertainment’s creative director Sam Lake today revealed what’s in store for the franchise during the game’s 12th-anniversary celebration video. Switch owners can anticipate Alan Wake Remastered to be available on Nintendo’s eShop sometime this fall. The remastered original title is already available on the PS5, Xbox and PC.

The original 2010 Alan Wake game — which features a thriller novelist who tries to solve the mystery of his wife’s disappearance — has become a cult classic in recent years. Remedy and Microsoft Studios then released Alan Wake's American Nightmare in 2012. Since then, the franchise has mostly been dormant, but that’s about to change.

Lake revealed that AMC bought the rights to the Alan Wake franchise and will be adapting it into a TV series. “We have been collaborating on making a TV show happen. Nothing more to share at the moment, but we will certainly let you know when there is something to announce,” said Lake.

Alan Wake 2, which many expected to preview this summer, is currently deep in the development stages. Unfortunately, Lake confirmed that the studio won’t be releasing any further updates on the game. It did release a number of stills from the upcoming sequel. As we’ve known for a while, the game is slated to arrive in 2023 for PS5 and other platforms.

“Everything [with Alan Wake 2] is going really well, and a great deal of the game is playable,” Lake said. “But we’ve been talking for the past couple of months and have come to a decision that we will not be showing anything big this summer,” said Lake.

Alan Wake devotees should watch the anniversary video in full, which also includes interesting behind-the-scene details about the remastered original and upcoming sequel. You can watch it below: