‘Diablo IV’ developers work long hours, bracing for impending release

Shannon Liao, The Washington Post

Crunch has become a common issue at game development studios, especially as high-profile titles near launch. The release date for Diablo IV isn't until June, but people working on the Activision Blizzard game are already saying it will be difficult to meet the deadline even with employees working 12-hour days, late into evening and on the weekend. 

Tony Fadell is trying to build the iPod of crypto

Steven Levy, Wired

The Nest co-founder once worked on a team at Apple that created the iPod. Now he's making a hardware wallet for crypto to give the digital currency its own iPod moment with the Paris-based company Ledger. Levy chronicles the period leading up to launch of the Ledger Stax this week. 

The 50 best albums of 2022

Pitchfork

An activity I look forward to every year is listening through Pitchfork's year-end lists. There are several, but I always start with albums — the long game. It's a fun annual chore, discovering new acts I've never heard of and listening back to some I'm already familiar with. 

Have you ever thought up an idea for a movie or play that you just know will be a smash hit, but haven't gotten around to writing the script? Alphabet's DeepMind has built an AI tool that can help get you started. Dramatron is a so-called "co-writing" tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script.

To get started, you'll need an OpenAI API key and, if you want to reduce the risk of Dramatron outputting "offensive text," a Perspective API key. To test out Dramatron, I fed in the log line for a movie idea I had when I was around 15 that definitely would have been a hit if Kick-Ass didn't beat me to the punch. Dramatron quickly whipped up a title that made sense, and character, scene and setting descriptions. The dialogue that the AI generated was logical but trite and on the nose. Otherwise, it was almost as if Dramatron pulled the descriptions straight out of my head, including one for a scene that I didn't touch on in the log line.

Playwrights seemed to agree, according to a paper that the team behind Dramatron presented today. To test the tool, the researchers brought in 15 playwrights and screenwriters to co-write scripts. According to the paper, playwrights said they wouldn't use the tool to craft a complete play and found that the AI's output can be formulaic. However, they suggested Dramatron would be useful for world building or to help them explore other approaches in terms of changing plot elements or characters. They noted that the AI could be handy for "creative idea generation" too.

That said, a playwright staged four plays that used "heavily edited and rewritten scripts" they wrote with the help of Dramatron. DeepMind said that in the performance, experienced actors with improv skills "gave meaning to Dramatron scripts through acting and interpretation."

Use of the AI tool may raise questions about authorship and who (or what) should get the credit for a script. Last year, a UK appeals court ruled that artificial intelligence can’t be legally credited as an inventor on a patent. DeepMind notes that Dramatron can output fragments of text that were used to train the language model, which, if used in a script that was produced, could lead to accusations of plagiarism. "One possible mitigation is for the human co-writer to search for substrings from outputs to help to identify plagiarism," DeepMind said.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has picked his companions for SpaceX's first all-civilian mission to the Moon over a year after he put out a call for potential private astronauts. He chose eight crew members and two backups from various backgrounds to be part of the mission called "dearMoon," and while application was open to everyone, some of the names will likely stand out when you review the list. One of the people flying with Maezawa on SpaceX's Starship spacecraft is Choi Seung Hyun, better known as T.O.P. from the Korean boy band BIGBANG. 

DJ Steve Aoki is also part of the crew, as well as Tim Dodd, who's known for creating space-themed content as a photographer and host of YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut. The other crew members include Rhiannon Adam, a photographic artist from Ireland who now works in London and the US, and Yemi A.D., a designer, director, choreographer and non-profit org founder from the Czech Republic. Brendan Hall, a filmmaker who directed projects for National Geographic, Karim Iliya, a filmmaker who documents whales, birds and other threatened species, and Dev D. Joshi, an actor from India, round up the main crew list. Meanwhile, snowboarding Olympic gold medalist Kaitlyn Farrington and Japanese dancer Miyu were named as backup crew. 

Maezawa said the project received about a million applications from interested individuals around the world who went through a strict selection process. The inclusion of musicians and other creatives doesn't come as a surprise, since the billionaire originally intended to bring artists with him on the trip in hopes that it would inspire them to create something that promotes world peace. He didn't say why he chose T.O.P. specifically, but the rapper did don a spacesuit for one of BIGBANG's music videos.

The dearMoon project was launched in 2018 after Maezawa purchased all the seats for a six-day trip to the Moon from SpaceX. It will fly a single circumlunar trajectory around Earth's faithful companion and is expected to take place sometime next year, though the actual date depends on Starship's development. To prepare for the dearMoon mission, Maezawa flew to the ISS last year and spent 12 days on the flying lab shooting videos about life in space. 

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is currently working on a software update that will give you access to a tool that can clearly show whether you've been shadowbanned. The term means different things for different platforms, but being shadowbanned typically makes your posts invisible to other users or makes your profile hard to find without your knowledge. Musk says the upcoming tool will also explain the reason why you've been shadowbanned and will give you instructions on how to submit an appeal. 

Instagram has just launched a similar feature with its latest update, letting you know whether you're currently blocked from recommendations. At the moment, it can only show if you've been blocked from recommendations in Explore, Feed and Reels, but Instagram is working on expanding the tool so that you can see if you're also blocked from showing up in "suggested accounts." 

Musk didn't talk about how Twitter will be implementing the feature, but he made the announcement shortly after Bari Weiss released part two of The Twitter Files. In the thread, Weiss said that Twitter used "Visibility Filtering," which is apparently just another term for shadowbanning, on some conservative personalities. Musk once called himself a "free speech absolutist." After taking control of Twitter, he started lifting the bans on several controversial users, including former President Donald Trump, The Daily Stormer'sinfamous neo-Nazi creator Andrew Anglin and other white nationalists. 

Advertisers have been fleeing the platform since Musk took over due to concerns about policy changes and the reinstatement of banned accounts. In a blog post late last month, Twitter assured advertisers that "none of [its] policies have changed." And according to a new report by Reuters, Twitter is gearing up to release a set of ad controls in an effort to lure advertisers back to the website. The controls, which could launch as soon as next week, will reportedly allow advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing above or below tweets with the specific keywords they choose.

The first major bit of DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 — unless you count a buttload of patches — is due out in 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. Phantom Liberty is a spy thriller, and it introduces a new character, FIA agent Solomon Reed, who's played by Idris Elba. The DLC also includes new missions and a new district in Night City, all of it culminating in "an impossible mission of espionage and survival," according to developer CD Projekt Red.

Phantom Liberty will be the first batch of paid DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, though there's no word on exactly how much it will cost.

Cyberpunk 2077 came out in December 2020 and was immediately lambasted as a glitchy, unpolished mess by many players and reviewers. CD Projekt Red released a series of fixes for the game and, over time, it's stabilized and players have found the fun that was hiding there all along.

Elba joins fellow mainstream actor Keanu Reeves in the Cyberpunk universe, and this won't be the last we'll hear of the franchise. There's a fabulous Netflix anime based on the game and CD Projekt Red is already building a full-on sequel, codenamed "Orion."

Hideo Kojima's next project is Death Stranding 2. The reveal trailer for the sequel shows Fragile, played by Léa Seydoux, and Sam, played by Norman Reedus, in a world still infested with lethal BTs. There's no word on a release date, but according to the trailer's YouTube description, it's heading to PlayStation 5. 

Kojima took the stage during The Game Awards to introduce Death Stranding 2. Its cast is just as star-studded as the original, featuring Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna and Troy Baker alongside Reedus and Seydoux.

Death Stranding came out in 2019 and it steadily became the industry's favorite walking simulator (despite the fact that it may have been a better movie than a video game). By the end of 2022, more than 10 million people had played Death Stranding. Its primary gameplay innovation was an online system that allowed players to communicate with each other, even though it was a single-player experience. Death Stranding was the first title out of Kojima Productions, the studio Kojima himself founded after parting ways with his longtime employer, Konami. 

Ahead of The Game Awards on December 8th, Kojima tweeted some teases for the show, including an image that seemed to be Fragile from Death Stranding. The tweet included the text, "How come?" and Kojima added, "'WHO' 'WHERE' 'HOW' and now 'WHY'."

We now know what Kojima was talking about — not that he asked.

Footage of what appeared to be Kojima's next project leaked online in early November in the form of a super strange video. It showed a character resembling Mama from Death Stranding traversing creepy corridors with a dark presence at her back, and ended with a title screen reading, "Overdose." It also included the reflection of a lounging shirtless man recording the footage off-screen, but that's likely unrelated to any gameplay mechanics. Today at The Game Awards, Kojima said his studio is also working on a second, completely new project with an experimental edge, so there's still some hope for whatever this was.

The Last of Us Part I will officially hit PC on March 3rd, 2023. This follows the game's launch on PlayStation 5 earlier in 2022. 

Part I is a modern remake of the original The Last of Us, Naughty Dog's dramatic zombie-adjacent game that came out in 2013 and quickly became an industry darling. There's since been a sequel, an upgraded version of that game, a remastered version of the original title for PS4, and probably a few other iterations we're forgetting, plus an HBO series coming out in January. 

We found The Last of Us Part I on PS5 to be gorgeous yet achingly faithful to its source material. For fans of the series, that's not a terrible outcome, and soon PC players will have the chance to judge for themselves.

Rocksteady's long-in-the-makingSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League game finally has a firm release date. The studio has revealed that its villains-doing-good title will be available on May 26th, 2023. And, as the trailer below shows, it will be memorable for more than just gameplay. This is the curtain call for one of voice acting's best-known stars.

The upcoming game will have the Suicide Squad take on Batman, voiced by none other than the late Kevin Conroy. This is his last turn as the iconic hero, and it's an interesting twist at that. Like Superman and other major DC Comics champions, Batman has gone bad — enough so that he's breaking one of his cardinal rules. Naturally, it's up to Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark and Captain Boomerang to deal with the Dark Knight.

The game is headed to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It's too early to say if this will live up to the reputation Rocksteady made for itself with the Arkham Batman games. However, Suicide Squad will have been delayed three years by the time it (presumably) arrives. The developers are clearly willing to take their time, and this hopefully won't represent a repeat of the so-so Gotham Knights.

Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon has premiered at The Game Awards, where a trailer also debuted for the franchise's upcoming spinoff. Like its name implies, Bayonetta Origins tells the story of Bayonetta when she was Cereza and has only just summoned her first demon Cheshire. The trailer gives us a glimpse at the story and about how Cereza explores a forest despite her mother's warnings. It also shows the game's storybook elements, as well as some bits of gameplay with and without Cheshire. 

Bayonetta Origins will be available on March 17th, 2023 for the Nintendo Switch only. You can pre-order a digital copy of the game from the eShop right after The Game Awards wraps up, but you can also purchase a physical copy when the title launches.

Ghost Story Games has revealed its first title nearly six years after BioShock creator Ken Levine founded the studio. A trailer for Judas debuted at The Game Awards and while it's not an actual BioShock game, it draws from that series' art style. It's also a first-person shooter in which it looks like you can wield elemental powers.

You play as the titular Judas, a "mysterious and troubled" character who is stuck on a starship that's falling apart. According to a description on the game's Steam page, "your only hope for survival is to make or break alliances with your worst enemies." 

Bloomberg reported earlier this year that the game had been stuck in development hell for several years amid multiple reboots and Levine changing the direction of the project multiple times. But Levine suggested back in 2015 that his next game would be a sci-fi first-person shooter, and Judas at least fits that bill. There's no release window as yet.

Meanwhile, there is a BioShock game in development at a separate Take-Two studio. But this is not that. Judas is definitely not a BioShock game.