Tesla is recalling 2,791 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles over concerns that their front suspension lateral link fasteners may loosen, potentially shifting the wheel alignment and increasing the risk of a crash. The affected vehicles are 2019, 2020 and 2021 versions of the Model 3, and 2020 and 2021 editions of the Model Y.

Tesla has notified the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the recall and plans to mail notification letters to affected owners on December 24th. The company will tighten or replace the fasteners free of charge. The number for this recall is SB-21-31-003.

This is far from the first recall on Tesla's books, and in the grand scheme of things, it's a small one. Tesla has issued a handful of recalls this year alone, including one in February that affected 135,000 vehicles in the US and another in June affecting 6,000 US vehicles. German regulators issued an additional recall of 12,300 Model X EVs in February of this year, citing trim-adhesive concerns. That issue sounded eerily similar to one that led to a US recall of more than 9,000 cars in November 2020.

Countess Alcina Dimitrescu isn't technically a vampire, but she's definitely an icon.

From the moment she appeared in an early trailer for Resident Evil: Village, Lady Dimitrescu captured the attention of the internet: her towering, sultry frame; her sickly-sweet smile; her massive hat; her proper yet authoritative tone. Viewers were instantly obsessed, labeling her "tall vampire lady" and demanding to know everything about her, which prompted Capcom to reveal her exact height — 9'6" including her hat and heels — months before Village launched in May.

In-game, Lady Dimitrescu commands three fly-infested, murderous daughters, and hunts the main character, Ethan Winters, across the opulent rooms of her castle. She crouches through doorways and slices at Ethan with long, blade-like fingernails, hurling insults like "rat" and "man-thing" at him the entire time, a mutant dominatrix in a flowing white dress.

Twilight Sparkle

The intrigue surrounding Lady Dimitrescu has persisted since Village's launch, and fans are betting (or maybe just hoping really hard) that the game's first bit of DLC will focus on her specifically.

Until then, and in the spirit of Spooky Season, we have insight into Lady Dimitrescu's creation from Village presentation director Masato Miyazaki, the person in charge of the game's motion-capture process. Earlier this year, Miyazaki shared details with Engadget about how Lady Dimitrescu came to be, from concept to mocap, including the ways actress Maggie Robertson brought her to legendary life.

Engadget: Did Lady Dimitrescu's design change throughout development?

Masato Miyazaki: Alcina Dimitrescu’s incredible height was conceived from the beginning and was not changed during development. The same goes for her wide brim hat and her white dress as well. However, the characteristic of her long protruding nails was something added part way through the development process. It was an idea that was implemented later as a means of adding physical elements that would make her more terrifying when you encounter her.

Lady Dimitrescu is alluring and seductive — was she always meant to be a sultry character, or did that emerge during mocap?

In the early stages of development, she was described as a bewitching character who would capture and toy with her victims. She was designed to embody equal parts beauty and horror. Based on this, the scenario writer fleshed her characterization out even further with dialogue, but she wasn’t fully realized just yet. It was through Maggie’s performance that the character was finally given life.

As with any character, I believe that the moment the script is handed over to the actor, the character becomes theirs. The character's personality and intentions are very much refined by the actor. The character Lady Dimitrescu was truly realized and came to fruition with each of Maggie’s performances.

Capcom

What tricks did you use to make Maggie Robertson as tall as possible during mocap sessions?

Although Maggie Robertson is quite tall herself, she still cannot reach the height that we envisioned for Lady Dimitrescu. Utilizing some means of extending out her height would jeopardize her performance, so it wasn’t something we could consider. We asked Maggie to act naturally. However, that still left us with the height difference between Maggie and Lady Dimitrescu that had to be addressed. We devised a few methods to counteract this issue.

First off, we shot with a mixture of backgrounds according to two standards: human scale and Lady Dimitrescu scale. While other characters performed with surroundings that fit human scale, Lady Dimitrescu’s acting was done in front of a background that fit her scale. Everyone performed with one another, but with this mixture of environments. We figured this would be the best means of allowing the actors to give their best performances without any kind of impediment. We made sure the furniture was laid out in a way so that the actors would be facing each other.

The other aspect that we made sure to stay conscious of was making sure the actors’ lines of sight were in the right positions. We set up markers so that the actors could imagine the correct height. These markers show the correct position of the eye lines and where the limbs actually are. It's a simple adjustment, but it makes a big difference in the actors' performances.

The third adjustment was the rig itself. We carefully set up the rigs of the CG characters to gracefully handle as much of the physical differences between the character and actor as possible. We wanted to make sure that we set things up so that the animators would have a relatively easier time handling any kind of miscalculations that happened along the way.

What was the strangest prop you used throughout the mocap process?

There are several, but there are two that I would like to mention. The first is the cane carried by the old woman we meet at the beginning of the village. When you see it in the game, it’s a strange artifact with a lot of components jingling about. The studio crew crafted a prop that resembles the design.

The second is the goggles that our actor Todd wore as he played the role of Ethan Winters. Since the game is from a first-person perspective through the eyes of Ethan Winters, the camera movements are based on the movements of Todd's head. Todd reprises his role as Ethan from the previous game and his performances are absolutely excellent, but there were moments where the camera would go wild during more heated scenarios. In order to suppress this from happening, the studio engineer created a pair of special goggles by hand. 

They actually turned out to look very similar to swimming goggles. The assumption was that the narrower field of vision would result in less head movement. I’m still not entirely sure how effective they ended up being, but the engineer’s enthusiasm and Todd having fun wearing the goggles are one of the many wonderful memories I have from the whole experience.

PlayStation exclusive Bugsnax is getting a lot bigger in a few different ways next year with the Isle of BIGsnax update. Heading to PlayStation 4 and PS5 in early 2022, The Isle of BIGsnax unlocks a new landscape filled with oversized Bugsnax, plus it adds challenges to complete and hut-decorating options back on Snaktooth Island. And of course, the cutest part of the update is the ability to dress up your Bugsnax in various hats. 

The Isle of BIGsnax update will be free for all Bugsnax owners (try saying that ten times fast).

Bugsnax was a PS5 launch title, dropping alongside a tight roster of big names like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the Demon's Souls remake. It comes from independent studio Young Horses, which was previously known for making Octodad, a surprisingly heartwarming physics game about an octopus pretending to be a normal father.

Recently, Young Horses has made headlines for establishing a permanent four-day work week, in the interest of cultivating a healthy work-life balance for employees. This is a big deal in the video game industry, where crunch — implementing 100-hour weeks and otherwise overwhelming employees' lives — is a common business practice.

“While I enjoy making weirdo games, it's also just very important that I'm making responsible decisions to take care of the people I work with, stuff like that,” Young Horses co-founder Philip Tibitoski told Engadget in January. “That's become much more of a thing than it used to be, or at least I've moved further into a business-y, boss role, I guess. Weird, but feels right.”

Call of Duty: Vanguard won't eat up as much console disk space as previous games in the series, but you still might need to delete some downloads to make room for all this WWII frenzy. Here's how much space you'll need on each console to install Vanguard at launch, including the pre-load:

• Xbox One: 56.6GB

• Xbox Series X/S: 61GB

• PS4: 93.12GB (54.65GB download)

• PS5: 89.84GB (64.13GB download)

This marks a significant decrease from last year's Call of Duty installment, Black Ops Cold War, which hit 200GB of required space on PS5 and 250GB on PC, with similar numbers on other platforms. Meanwhile, 2019's Modern Warfare launched at 175GB and grew as the updates rolled out, while Warzone added an additional 15GB - 22GB, or 80GB - 100GB on its own. Activision rolled out a big update in March to reduce the footprint of Modern Warfare and Warzone, and Call of Duty developers have long been aware that file sizes are an issue for many players.

Activision has yet to release details on the size of the PC install for Vanguard, but pre-loading on PC begins November 2nd.

Pre-loading for PS4 and PS5 versions of the game begins on October 28th at 9PM PT in North and South America, and midnight local time on October 29th in other countries. Xbox One and Series X/S pre-loading starts at the same time across the board: October 28th at 9PM PT. Anyone who pre-ordered the game digitally can pre-load it so it's ready to rock at launch on November 5th.

In the summer and fall of 2020, smoke filled the skies above San Francisco, hanging heavy over the coast and bathing the city in an eerie orange glow. Massive wildfires were tearing across California, eating up piles of dead trees on the mountains and razing nearby housing developments. By the end of the year, 33 people would be killed in fires across California and 2020 would go down as the largest wildfire season in the state’s modern history.

Cecil Powell was living and working in the area at the time, helping develop Call of Duty: Vanguard as a senior lighting artist at Sledgehammer Games. For days on end, he and his teammates would wake up to a red-tinged world filled with ash, and then they’d sit in front of their computers and attempt to recreate the ravaged landscapes of World War II. As a lighting specialist, one of Powell’s jobs was to build the skies above Stalingrad, a bloody city scene marked by bombed buildings and raging fires.

Fires — just like the ones burning across California, painting the Bay Area a Martian red.

“It was a pretty weird feeling,” Powell told Engadget. “But I remember talking to the team about it, and we were actually thinking, man, it kind of feels like war time. Like destruction.”

Call of Duty as a series has found years of success turning tragedy into entertainment, using the real-world horrors of war to build lifelike digital playgrounds for soldiers, snipers and spawn campers alike. To Powell and the Sledgehammer crew, the orange skies caused by the fires in California made for natural, serendipitous source material, especially since color photography wasn’t ubiquitous during WWII. Powell’s Vanguard reference photos were all in black and white.

The Sledgehammer team agreed that it’d be a good idea for Powell to capture images and light readings of the fiery California skies to use in the Stalingrad level, but they were concerned about his health. After all, the air looked radioactive. So, Powell bought an air-quality monitor, tested it outside and got the green light. He did some quick research and discovered that marine wind patterns in the Bay were pushing the smoke up and circulating fresh air on the ground, and the all-consuming toxic glow was simply due to light refracting through the clouds.

“As soon as I found that out, I grabbed all the camera gear that I had from work and ran out, and decided I was just going to capture this because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Powell said. “I've never seen anything like this before and I hope I never see anything like that again, to be honest. Because, you know, it's pretty sad to think about what is causing it. And I remember while I was out there, no one was really outside walking around.”

Cecil Powell

Powell made this trek in September 2020, at the height of California’s wildfire season and in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The city was largely shut down, streets abandoned, hot smoke collecting above empty buildings. He headed toward the coast.

Powell set up his camera and captured a panorama of the sky, and also took some light readings. His girlfriend at the time came along and he asked her to document the process, for history’s sake.

When he brought the photos and readings back to Sledgehammer, “everyone was shocked at actually what it did to the lighting in the level,” Powell said. “The sky’s the most important thing lighting-wise, because for exterior lighting, it really sets the mood and the tone for levels. And when we brought it in, we're like wow, this actually looks pretty good for coming from such destruction.”

Powell’s wildfire captures are used in the Stalingrad level, one of the only theaters in the game to feature a full city destroyed by bombs and flames. The light throughout the level glows a hellish orange, just like the coasts and valleys of California last year.

“Nature to me is the best artist, you know?” Powell said. “If you can replicate that, you're pretty much winning.”

The Stalingrad level may be an automatic win for Powell, but everyone else is still going to have to shoot their way through it when Vanguard comes out on November 5th.

Epic Games Publishing is throwing its full weight behind two more indie studios, and really, they couldn't be more different — which is precisely the point. Epic has signed Eyes Out, the brand-spanking-new studio founded by Spec Ops: The Line director Cory Davis and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, and also Spry Fox, a veteran, award-winning indie developer known for heartwarming games such as Cozy Grove, Alphabear and Road Not Taken. 

As a publisher, Epic offers to cover 100 percent of all development costs, and once a game comes out and breaks even in sales, the signed studio receives at least 50 percent of all profits. Epic doesn't exert creative control over its partnered games, and the developers retain the intellectual property rights to their work. Epic signed Remedy Entertainment, Playdead and genDESIGN in March 2020, and today's announcement marks the second batch of contracted studios.

"We’re open to publishing many types of games from the most talented developers, and the studios we’re partnering with are making some of the coolest, experimental and ambitious stuff out there," head of Epic Games Publishing Hector Sanchez told Engadget. "They have our full support – including Epic’s publishing and promotional services, resources, and experience – which means they can focus solely on making the best games possible."

Eyes Out is staffed with enormous creative energy, but it's unproven as a team. Davis, Finck and their collaborators are working on their debut title, a mysterious arthouse horror game with an emphasis on experimental audio and cosmic terror. The studio's teasers are filled with moody desert landscapes and unsettling layers of sound. In a chat with Engadget in September, Davis said he wants to "create mind-bending experiences that cause you to question reality."

The publisher relationship goes even deeper for Eyes Out, too — the studio received an Epic MegaGrant in 2019, which gave them the runway to build their first proof-of-concept. Epic further funded the studio's prototype, allowing them to expand their team in the process. And now, Eyes Out is officially part of Epic Games Publishing.

"From the very beginning, Robin and I knew that Eyes Out was going to require a unique publishing partner willing to empower our vision of the strange, ambitious worlds we would create together, and one capable of fueling it," Davis said about today's news. He continued, "Our collaboration with Epic continued to bear fruit. Working with Epic is really the first time I’ve felt entirely unleashed as a director, both technically and creatively. Together we’re aimed to create the thing that’s closest to my heart."

Spry Fox, meanwhile, is working on its most ambitious project to date, which it describes as a "non-violent multiplayer game designed to encourage friendship and reduce loneliness in the world." It'll come to multiple platforms, and support cross-play and cross-progression. The first bit of concept art from Spry Fox's new game depicts a pastel, Atlantis-esque world with a massive yellow whale floating across the sky.

"This is the first time in our history that we at Spry Fox have chosen to work with a publisher in this manner," studio co-founder and CEO David Edery said. "Up until now, we have only worked with publishers for much more limited regional publishing and porting arrangements. But we felt for a project as ambitious as this one, we needed more support than usual, and Epic seemed like the right company to provide that support."

Epic has positioned itself as the developer's publisher, with a goal of having "the most developer-friendly terms in the industry," emphasizing creative control and financial support for its studios. Epic also offers free access to Unreal Engine, a powerful game-development toolset, and it throws money at artists through programs like Epic MegaGrants, a $100 million fund for burgeoning creatives. The Epic Games Store went live in 2018 as a direct competitor to Steam, offering better financial terms for developers and challenging Valve to implement the same deal (spoiler: Valve didn't). 

More recently, Epic waged a very public legal battle against Apple, arguing the iPhone-maker enjoyed monopolistic control over the App Store and offered unfair terms to developers. In the end, the lawsuit played out like any other fight between multibillion-dollar corporations, resulting in little change and lots of press.

Throughout the lawsuit, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney attacked Apple for engaging in greedy, anti-consumer and anti-developer practices. This is kind of his thing — since founding Epic more than 30 years ago, Sweeney has been consistent in his mantra that game development should be accessible to as many people as possible. Even his first game, ZZT, included an editor so everyone who played it could build their own levels.

"It was in those early days that Epic's kind of core philosophy was set," Sweeney told Engadget in 2019. "We both build games ourselves and we share all the results of our work with the world to build their own games. We're the both a game developer and a service company that works with partners throughout the whole industry. Everything we're doing now is this much larger version of that."

Including, it seems, Epic Games Publishing.

At Google I/O in May, Android VP Sameer Samat announced an initiative to build a more racially inclusive camera for the company's Pixel devices, with better support for non-white hairstyles and darker skin tones. Today, Google confirmed the cameras on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will support this technology, and gave it a name — Real Tone.

Google partnered with "a diverse set of expert image makers and photographers" to tune its new camera algorithms, including adjustments to automatic white balance, automatic exposure and stray light settings. The goal, in the company's words, is to "ensure that Google’s camera and imagery products work for everyone, of every skin tone." Considering Google's consumer base has always included humans of every skin tone, and this is the sixth iteration of the Pixel, it's about time these considerations were made.

Real Tone is built into the cameras of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, and there's no way to disable it. While the software is going live in Pixel devices first, Samat said in May that Google was committed to sharing its inclusivity solutions with the wider Android ecosystem.

Google said it hopes the Pixel 6 cameras will better represent "the nuances of different skin tones for all people beautifully and authentically." The updates are designed to make all photos look better in all instances, which is something everybody should be able to get behind.

Catch up on all the latest news from Google's Pixel 6 event!

Netflix has fired an employee, alleging they shared confidential, commercially sensitive information about Dave Chappelle's new standup special, The Closer, with media outlets, Variety reported. 

The employee is accused of leaking data that appeared in Bloomberg about how much Netflix paid for a handful of shows and standup specials, including The Closer and previous Chappelle contracts. According to Bloomberg, Netflix spent $24.1 million on The Closer, compared with $23.6 million for his 2019 show, and just $3.9 million for Bo Burnham's Emmy-winning special Inside. Squid Game, the biggest series debut in Netflix history, cost the company $21.4 million, the report said.

“We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company," the company said in a statement to Variety.

Netflix employees and external equality groups — including GLADD and the National Black Justice Coalition — have called for The Closer to be removed from the streaming service, arguing it contains hateful transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. In the special, Chappelle doubles down on his previous transphobic comments and defends the bigotry of anti-trans feminist JK Rowling. As of now, the special is still available on Netflix.

"With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States — the majority of whom are Black transgender people — Netflix should know better," David Johns, executive director of the NBJC, said to CNN. "Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence. Netflix should immediately pull The Closer from its platform and directly apologize to the transgender community."

Netflix executives have said little publicly about the controversy, though CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly said in an internal memo that The Closer was too popular to remove.

The fired employee was a leader of the company's internal trans resource group, and was helping to organize a walkout in protest of Netflix's handling of the Chappelle special, The Verge reported. The walkout is planned for October 20th. The former employee is Black and pregnant, and actually spoke out against leaks with colleagues, arguing that they could hurt the walkout, according to The Verge.

Earlier this month, Netflix suspended a trans software engineer who tweeted her disapproval of the Chappelle special. The employee was reinstated a day later and Netflix said the suspension was due to an unrelated matter.

Former Raiders coach Jon Gruden will be removed from Madden NFL 22 and replaced with a generic character, EA Sports confirmed today on Twitter. The change will occur within the next few weeks and will roll out automatically in a title update. 

Gruden resigned from his position as Raiders head coach on October 11th amid reports that he routinely and for years sent racist, misogynistic and homophobic emails to colleagues.

Regarding the removal, EA Sports said, "Due to the circumstances of Jon Gruden's resignation, we are taking steps to remove him from Madden NFL 22. We will replace him with a generic likeness via a title update in the coming weeks."

Madden NFL 22 is the latest iteration of the legendary American football series, and it came out on August 20th for PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Stadia.

Activision has unveiled its big, new approach to squashing hackers in Call of Duty: Warzone and Vanguard, and it's a two-pronged system called RICOCHET Anti-Cheat. The first stage is a series of server-side enhancements that will better identify and remove cheaters from games, and this is scheduled to hit Warzone with the Pacific update later this year. These new server tools will be live in Vanguard when it comes out on November 5th.

The second prong is a PC kernel-level driver designed to monitor the deepest level of every player's rig while they're in-game, in an effort to stop outside software from sneaking in through this back door. The kernel, or ring 0, is the most privileged level of any PC, granting access to every layer of hardware, and generally reserved for things like graphics card drivers and trusted bits of the operating system. The RICOCHET Anti-Cheat kernel-level driver will only turn on when Warzone or Vanguard is active; it's not an always-on situation.

While operating in the kernel isn't uncommon for anti-cheat software, this is likely the most concerning part of Activision's new plans for many players. Riot Games faced scrutiny in 2020 for implementing a similar kernel-level driver in Valorant, though the main issue was that it was always on, operating even when the game wasn't active. (Confusingly, the Valorant anti-cheat system is called Vanguard).

This isn't a new worry, either — in 2013, the always-on ring 0 anti-cheat system employed by ESEA was commandeered to turn unsuspecting players' PCs into a secret bitcoin mining farm.

With these lessons in mind, Activision has stressed that RICOCHET will only be active when the associated game is live, saying specifically, "the driver shuts down when you exit the game and turns on when you start a new game."

The kernel-level driver will hit Warzone alongside the Pacific update this year, and it'll come to Vanguard at a later date.

Cheating has been a significant problem in Call of Duty: Warzonefor a long while now. Activision has banned more than 500,000 accounts since the game's launch, though it's not uncommon for matches to be riddled with aimbots and cheap hacks to this day. Players have been screaming for a robust anti-cheat system in Warzone and other Call of Duty titles, and RICOCHET is Activision's kernel-level, not-always-on answer.