Following a sneak peek and a teaser, Apple TV+ has finally released the official trailer for season two of Foundation — set 100 years ahead of season one's finale. The show, based on Isaac Asimov's book series, will introduce viewers to a second crisis: war with the Empire. Season two also follows the Cleons unraveling, "a vengeful Queen" plotting to destroy the Empire and the Foundation in its religious phase. As Dr. Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) reveals in the trailer, it will bring "Despair, death, destruction. This is even bigger than the last crisis." Whatever happens will decide the fate of all humanity — no big deal.

The ten new episodes come almost two years after season one first premiered and keep some of the original cast, including Lee Pace and Jared Harris. Its new season debuts Friday, July 14, on Apple TV+, with new episodes premiering weekly. In the meantime, enjoy the official trailer and have solace in knowing that filming for season three is already underway. 

AI-assisted vocals aren't just for bootleg songs. Paul McCartney has revealed to BBC Radio 4 that he's using AI to turn a John Lennon demo into one last song for The Beatles. The technology helped extract Lennon's voice to get a "pure" version that could be mixed into a finished composition. The piece will be released later this year, McCartney says.

McCartney didn't name the song, but it's believed to be "Now and Then," a 1978 love song Lennon put on cassettes meant for the other former Beatle. The Guardian notes the tune was considered for release as a reunion song alongside tracks that did make the cut, such as "Free As A Bird," but there wasn't much to it — just a chorus, a crude backing track and the lightest of verses. The Beatles rejected it after George Harrison thought it was bad, and the electrical buzz from Lennon's apartment didn't help matters.

The inspiration for the revival came from dialog editor Emile de la Rey's work on the Peter Jackson documentary Get Back, where AI separated the Beatles' voices from instruments and other sounds. The tech provides "some sort of leeway" for producing songs, McCartney adds.

To date, music labels typically haven't been fond of AI due to copyright clashes. Creators have used algorithms to have famous artists "sing" songs they never actually produced, such as a recently pulled fantasy collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd. This, however, is different — McCartney is using AI to salvage a track that otherwise wouldn't have reached the public. It won't be surprising if other artists use the technique to recover work that would otherwise sit in an archive.

After introducing mini-games and allowing access to younger teens, Meta is trying to make its VR-based Horizon Worlds more social. In its latest update, the company released a new feature called world chat that lets users send messages to anyone else in the same world session. At the same time, it's promising strict security controls for the new feature. 

A voice chat feature is already available, but this works much like a regular text messaging app. A screen shot (below) shows a classic group texting interface, with multiple users participating. Messages directed at specific people appear in their own view as a floating bubble, and when clicked, open up a new chat. 

People can connect with or follow others participating in a chat by clicking the individual's name to view their profile and inviting them to connect, Meta said. You'll be able to @mention others in world chat, provided they're in the same world. It offers ease-of-use tools like quick replies so you can connect without the need to type long messages. 

Meta

Along with world chat, Facebook introduced tools to "help create a positive community experience," it said. To start with, it automatically scans and deletes messages that go against its code of conduct. It allows users to blur chats so that messages from people they don't know will be blurred, and their own chats will appear blurred to others. Users can report, block or mute anyone, and minimize or hide the chat window.

The blur setting is automatically enabled for teens aged 13-17. Meta is also expanding parental supervision tools to allow users to ensure that their kids "have an age-appropriate chat experience by changing or locking the blurred chat settings," it wrote.

Earlier this year, US senators urged Meta not to open Horizon Worlds up to younger teens, citing the company's record of failure to protect them. That concern appeared to be justified following recent report of widespread CSAM on Instagram. Meta did it anyway, though, promising to put in place age-appropriate tools and protections. "We have to build experiences which are tailored to the unique vulnerabilities of teens," the company said at the time. Meta recently unveiled the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset, just a week before Apple launch its own much-anticipated model, the Vision Pro. 

There's a good chance that you've forgotten all about Pragmata, Capcom's eerie, dystopian sci-fi adventure game. Now, Capcom is giving you a chance to forget about it all over again: a new teaser for the game has revealed that the title will miss its 2023 release window.

"It is with a heavy heart that we must further postpone the release of Pragmata," the development team wrote at the end of the game's new trailer. "Our team is currently hard at work making the best game that we possibly can, but we need more time."

As the message implies, this is actually the second time that Pragmata's release has been postponed. First announced in 2020, Pragmata was teased with a cinematic trailer showing a soldier and a young girl exploring an abandoned city before winding up on the surface of the moon. The original teaser hinted at a dystopian future and a close relationship between the lead characters, but little else. About a year later, Capcom released a video of the young girl apologizing for the game's delay. This year's trailer is similar, but at least it shows off some gameplay.

We now know that the young girl is named Diana, and she seems to be under the protection of her heavily armored friend. Together, we see them fighting robot-like creatures, exploring futuristic environments and teaming up for high-speed piggy-back rides. While the soldier does most of the pair's fighting in the trailer, it also reveals that Diana has special abilities.

Capcom

What are those powers? What are these two characters doing on the moon? What happened to the rest of humanity? Those questions will have to wait. The Pragmata team did not set a new release window for the game, promising instead that it was doing its best to "ensure that the final product is one that is worthy of your patience."

Pragmata is planned to release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and PC gaming platforms.

Ubisoft revealed a teaser trailer today for Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix. The upcoming Netflix anime is based on the 2013 Blood Dragon expansion for Far Cry 3 — but it appears to be at least as much of a tongue-in-cheek remix of Ubisoft IP and early 90s nostalgia.

Series creator Adi Shankar (producer of Netflix’s Castlevania series) introduced the trailer in a campy cyborg getup befitting the source material. “Seven years ago, I got a call from Ubisoft, offering me the opportunity to adapt one of their very, very, very serious franchises into an anime,” Shankar deadpanned. “But instead, I came back to them with a crazy concept inspired by the mood of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. This concept used Ubisoft’s vast library of characters, and remixed them into one delirious anime series that would become this love letter to the 90s… or at least how I remembered the 90s.”

Shankar describes the series as a violent, dystopian fiction in the spirit of the works of Aldous Huxley, as well as a spoof, satire, dark comedy, love story and “the most philosophically conscious show you’ve watched in a long time.” Bobbypills Studio handles the animation.

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix is scheduled to premiere worldwide on Netflix this fall. You can watch the “Easter-egg-filled” teaser trailer below.

Ubisoft’s open-world Avatar game is almost here. At the company’s Summer Game Fest preview event, we got a substantial look at the story and gameplay of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. James Cameron introduced the game in a prerecorded segment, teasing “new environments new flora and fauna and characters”.

A cinematic trailer lays out how this tale will fit in with the Avatar movies. In short, it’ll cover the events of both games, with the protagonist being kidnapped during the events of the first film and schooled by the human invaders. After the events at the end of Avatar, you are cryogenically frozen… then unfrozen 15 years later in time to fight the RDA’s continued invasion.

The game itself is an open-world first-person action-adventure game, where you'll be able to combine Na'vi skills and weapons with human assault weapons and a casual rocket launcher or two. It wouldn't be an Avatar thing without the ability to bond with sentient animals you can ride. The trailer teases the ability to ride direhorses as well as your very own ikran. You'll be able to feed and customize your partner when not flying down waterfalls. Frontiers of Pandora will include a new western expanse not seen in the movies, where you'll meet as-yet unseen Na'vi clans, including a secretive healer clan. 

You'll be able to equip and grow your character to fit your own playstyle, crafting weaponry and items from resources and upgrading your own skills as you see fit. 

Frontiers of Pandora launches on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC and, oddly, Luna. (Yes, Luna!) on December 7th 2023.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

Meta's Audiocraft research team has just released MusicGen, an open source deep learning language model that can generate new music based on text prompts and even be aligned to an existing song, The Decoder reported. It's much like ChatGPT for audio, letting you describe the style of music you want, drop in an existing tune (optionally) and then clicking "Generate." After a good chunk of time (around 160 seconds in my case), it spits out a short piece of all-new music based on your text prompts and melody. 

The demo on Facebook's Hugging Face AI site lets you describe your music, providing a handful of examples like "an 80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background." You can then "condition" that on a given song up top 30 seconds long, with controls letting select a specific portion of that. Then, you just hit generate and it renders a high-quality sample up to 12 seconds long. 

The team used 20,000 hours of licensed music for training, including 10,000 high quality music tracks from an internal dataset, along with Shutterstock and Pond5 tracks. To make it faster, they used Meta's 32Khz EnCodec audio tokenizer to generate smaller chunks of music that can be processed in parallel. "Unlike existing methods like MusicLM, MusicGen doesn't not require a self-supervised semantic representation [and has] only 50 auto-regressive steps per second of audio," wrote Hugging Face ML Engineer Ahsen Khaliq in a tweet.

Last month, Google released a similar music generator called MusicLM, but MusicGen seems to generate slightly better results. On a sample page, the researchers compare MusicGen's output with MusicLM and two other models, Riffusion and Musai, to prove that point. It can be run locally (a GPU with at least 16GB of RAM is recommended) and available in four model sizes, from small (300 million parameters) to large (3.3 billion parameters) — with the latter having the greatest potential for producing complex music. 

As mentioned, MusicGen is open source and can even be used to generate commercial music (I tried it with "Ode to Joy" and several suggested genres and the results above were... mixed). Still, it's the latest example of the breathtaking speed of AI development over the past half year, with deep learning models threatening to make incursions into yet another genre. 

The Xbox Series S occupies an interesting space in Microsoft’s gaming lineup, given it can play every current-generation title available for the Series X. It may be significantly less powerful, but it’s also smaller and a lot cheaper, making it a “good enough” option for plenty of mainstream and casual gamers. Now, at 2023’s Summer Game Fest, Microsoft is addressing one of users’ biggest bugbears about the machine, which should make it a lot easier to live with.

At the event, the company showed off a new “carbon black” version of the console with 1TB storage, double what’s presently available. It’s a big deal for owners of the all-digital console since, with just 512GB, the current Series S users are often forced to delete downloaded games or buy a pricey expansion card to make room for whatever’s just landed on Game Pass. The new Series S will be available on September 1st, days before Microsoft’s latest blockbuster release, Starfield.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories so far from Summer Game Fest 2023

Watch the Summer Game Fest keynote in under 20 minutes

'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' will take you back to Night City on September 26th

'Metaphor: ReFantazio' is a fantasy RPG from the team behind 'Persona 5'

Roguelike ‘33 Immortals’ has 33-player co-op

'Final Fantasy VII Remake: Rebirth' is delayed until early 2024

'Cities Skylines II' will arrive on PC and consoles October 24th

Twitter has reportedly refused to pay its Google Cloud contract

It could have dire consequences for its automated moderation system.

Back in 2018, Twitter signed a billion-dollar deal with Google to host some of its platform on the latter’s cloud servers. Now, with a new owner trying to avoid paying for anything, ever at all, the company has decided to renege on that obligation. Reports say Twitter hasn’t paid Google the latest installment of what’s owed and is now racing to migrate key functionality away from Google Cloud before June 30th, but might not make that deadline. That could put some key Twitter functionality at risk, including the automated moderation platform which combats spam and CSAM.

Continue Reading.

Ubisoft's open-world Star Wars game is 'Outlaws'

The company promised to share gameplay footage later today.

Ubisoft / Lucasfilm

Ubisoft's long-awaited open-world Star Wars game will arrive in 2024. The publisher announced Star Wars Outlaws on Sunday during Microsoft's Xbox and Starfield Direct showcase with a cinematic trailer that introduces fans to the game's Han Solo-like protagonist, Key Vess. Ubisoft is billing Outlaws as the first-ever open-world Star Wars game — though it's worth noting many past games in the franchise, including the recently released Jedi: Survivor, feature open-world elements.

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‘Mortal Kombat 1’ made a great first impression at SGF 2023

Yes, that’s its name.

Warner Bros.

One of the biggest reveals from a generally muted Summer Game Fest showcase was footage from Mortal Kombat 1. The 12th mainline game in the series restarts the universe with a once-mortal Liu Kang, now a full-fledged god of fire. Alongside this new world, the title also adds Kameos, summonable allies to fights. Read on for our first impressions of playing the game.

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Netflix's password sharing crackdown seems to be working

An analytics company says nagging users into paying has paid dividends.

We won’t know how successful Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing has been until we’ve seen its next one or two financial releases. But a third-party analytics company believes Netflix’s policy of nagging users into paying up has started to bear fruit. Its data suggests the streamer saw a spike in sign-ups towards the end of May, far outstripping the number of cancelations.

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Microsoft Game Pass members will soon be able to stream PC games on NVIDIA's GeForce Now, following the announcement of a pact between the companies earlier this year. "This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce Now streams to, like low spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we’ll be rolling this out in the months ahead," Microsoft said in a blog post.

It doesn't appear to include the whole catalog, as GeForce Now members will be able to "stream select PC games" from the library, the company wrote. Still, it'll give PC Game Pass subscribers access to what we called "the enthusiast's choice for game streaming" thanks to the high performance offered by NVIDIA's latest RTX 4080 cards.

Previously, the companies announced that Microsoft Store would be coming to GeForce Now for purchases. In addition, Xbox games have already come to GeForce Now, starting with the arrival of Xbox exclusive Gears 5 last month. 

In February, Microsoft and NVIDIA struck a 10-year deal to bring games to the GeForce Now service, including Activision Blizzard titles like the Call of Duty series. Microsoft also signed an agreement with Spain-based cloud gaming provider Nware in April, and previously inked pacts with Nintendo, Steam, NVIDIA, Boosteroid, Ubitus and EE to make its games available on those companies' platforms. 

Many of those came about when Microsoft's potential acquisition of Activision Blizzard was being scrutinized by regulators in Europe, the US and elsewhere. Since then, however, UK regulators blocked the deal over cloud concerns, saying it would give Microsoft "incentive to withhold [Activision Blizzard] games from competitors and substantially weaken competition in this important growing market." With the news that it's offering its PC Game Pass subscription on GeForce Now, it may still think it can convince regulators to get on board. 

Stoic Studio, makers of the tactical-RPG Banner Saga franchise, announced a new game today at the Summer Game Fest Xbox Showcase. Towerborne is an action-RPG brawler that appears to be a contrast to the studio’s previous work.

The game’s fantasy world reveals humanity hiding out in The Belfry, a massive tower overlooking a world overrun by monsters and other strange enemies. Gameplay appears to blend classic co-op brawling with strategy and RPG elements — all with a family-friendly feel. “We really wanted to make a game that we could play with our families, play at conventions — make it a sit-down-and-have-fun kind of experience,” Principal Game Designer Alex Thomas said in a blog post. “We all love and are inspired by classic beat ’em up games and wanted to make one with persistence, where we can continue to expand the features and the gameplay modes for as long as possible.”

Thomas says death for the game’s heroes (known as Aces) is a key element in Towerborne. Instead of dying and respawning as if nothing happened, your hero’s death plays into the storyline. “As an Ace, you’re a special force for good because you’re able to go out and face the most dangerous stuff, die, and then come back,” Thomas said. “We didn’t want to just gloss over it like a normal gameplay thing, but instead ask what that would be like for a group of people experiencing it. You’re not just doing it because you’re some kind of superhero, you’re doing it because you’re supporting this whole civilization during something of a cataclysm.”

Stoic Studio / Xbox

Towerborne is a seasonal game, and the developers plan to add new content over time — while continuing to unfold the overarching narrative. “The premise that we’ve created revolves around how you can do a seasonal game that doesn’t feel artificial,” Thomas says. “How can you make a story where the content updates and the changes that happen to the gameplay feel like they’re intertwined with the world?”

Towerborne is an Xbox-published title that will arrive in 2024 on Xbox Series X / S, Xbox Game Pass and PC via Steam.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!