Blizzard Entertainment has released the trailer for the second season of Diablo IV along with the announcement that it's arriving on October 17th. According to IGN, Rod Fergusson, who oversees the development of the franchise, players will get vampire powers and will face against a vampire lord in the new questline during the opening night of Gamescom 2023. Season 2 of the online action role-playing game is called "Season of Blood," because yes, it does feature vampires. 

Gemma Chan, actor and producer who starred in Eternals and Crazy Rich Asians, voices the vampire hunter companion Erys, who leads the fight against the new threat in the game's universe. The new season will also feature five new and returning endgame bosses, as well as updates to renown rewards, gem and stash storage, making it so that gems no longer take up space, as well as to resistance and status effects. 

The main Diablo IV storyline that came out earlier this year featured a tale that takes place decades after the end of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. It puts the player in the shoes of a wanderer who, due to certain circumstances, must now go after Lilith. That's the daughter of Mephisto, who was prominently featured in Diablo II as one of the Prime Evils the player must defeat. Diablo IV became the best-selling game in June when it came out, and Fergusson said the game, with the first season that's still ongoing, boasts 12 million players. 

We'll have to wait and see if the second season will add more players to that number. For now, fans can watch the trailer for it below:

Basketball season is fast approaching, and so is a new opportunity to virtually get in on the action: NBA 2K24 New Gen. 2K shared preliminary information about the game in July but has just announced new details about September 8th's NBA 2K24, including adding a LeBron Era. This new mode follows LeBron James' 2010 journey of leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat and leads into the already existing Modern Era. NBA 2K23 also introduced the Magic vs. Bird Era, Jordan Era and Kobe Era to the game. 

Another potentially exciting eras update (if you like being reminded about the passage of time) is an aging feature, which shows the athletes growing older as you play across a person's career. Other new era additions include curated reactions from spectators and journalists, depending on the time period you're in. After a game, you'll also see an article sharing a summary of your match — initially as a newspaper and, as time passes, a social media webpage. 

NBA 2K24 should also reflect aspects of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) reached by the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association and currently in place through the 2029 to 2030 season. These include each NBA team being positionless and shifting the Restricted Free Agent Right of Refusal Period to 24 hours. 

MyNBA online has some updates as well, including a range of roles for you to take on: commissioner, admin, gameplay tuner, time manager, designer, appearance editor or attribute editor. Each position has specific tasks, such as the designer, who can make and change logos, arenas and jerseys. Plus, there's now MyNBA Lite which removes some of the steps typically required for gameplay, such as CBA restrictions and scouting. 

WNBA gameplay also has new features coming on NBA 2K24, such as the ability to start as either a college basketball star or an up-and-comer. There's also "In Pursuit of Greatness," which has you play against rival players to be the best. These games, and those against a veteran of your team or a historic all-star player, allow you to earn badge perks. You can use these rewards to get updated 2K Breakthrough Skins and MyTEAM Jersey Cards. 

The busy fall calendar of game releases remains in flux. Remedy Entertainment and publisher Epic Games have pushed back the Alan Wake II release date by 10 days to October 27th, and it seems the decision isn't specifically to do with giving the studio more time to polish the game. "October is an amazing month for game launches and we hope this date shift gives more space for everyone to enjoy their favorite games," a tweet on the Alan Wake Twitter (ugh, X) account reads.

Not only does that give Alan Wake II a bit more distance from some of the other major new games dropping around that time, it brings the survival horror title a bit closer to Halloween. In the meantime, you won't have to wait much longer to find out more about the game, which will be featured at Gamescom's Opening Night Live event next Tuesday. "We can't wait to show you what everyone's favorite novelist is up to in the Dark Place next week," the tweet states. "Thanks for your patience!"

October is an especially packed month for games. Alan Wake 2 is no longer arriving in the same week as Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Marvel's Spider-Man 2, but now it's arriving just a few days after Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection and a game that's in a similar wheelhouse in the form of Alone in the Dark.

There are many other notable games scheduled to land that month, including Detective Pikachu Returns, Forza Motorsport, Lords of the Fallen and Cities Skylines II. Earlier this week, Ubisoft sought to carve out a small window for itself by bringing the Assassin's Creed Mirage release date forward by a week to October 5th, while Batman: Arkham Trilogy will crash onto Nintendo Switch on October 13th. Phew. I hope you're already practicing your finger stretches ahead of that glut of games.

Who's ready for some (bad opinions from the internet while you watch) football? YouTube has revealed some more NFL Sunday Ticket features for the upcoming season. As you watch games, you'll be able to view a live chat and read what other people think about a certain play or call. Live chat and polls will be available on both mobile and TVs.

YouTube users will be able to watch real-time NFL highlights on Shorts. On Sunday afternoons, these highlights will include a red Live ring around the channel's avatar, and clicking on this will take users to the NFL channel's Live tab. There, Sunday Ticket subscribers can decide which game (or games, thanks to the multiview options) to start watching.

One other thing that could be helpful for viewers is key plays, a handy YouTube TV feature that the platform is bringing over to Sunday Ticket. You'll be able to catch up on a game that you couldn't watch or check out big plays before joining the live action. This feature will only be available on TVs this season, which is the first under a multibillion-dollar, seven-year pact that YouTube has with the NFL for Sunday Ticket rights.

Naturally, YouTube is looking to recoup its investment on Sunday Ticket and it's now offering fans more ways to sign up. Starting today, there will be a monthly payment plan option for Sunday Ticket in most states to help fans spread the cost of a subscription over a longer period. It may take a few days before the option is available on YouTube and YouTube TV in your area. 

However, the monthly plan won't be available to folks in Georgia, New York, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Tennessee or New Jersey. Residents of those states will need to pay for a season-long Sunday Ticket subscription (which now starts at $349) up front. Meanwhile, YouTube says student plans will be available sometime in the next week.

Lionel Messi has hit the ground running in Major League Soccer, and he's boosting Apple's bottom line in the process. Tickets for Inter Miami games have soared in price since Messi, the greatest soccer player of his generation and arguably the best of all time, joined the team several weeks ago. On top of that, subscriptions to Apple TV's MLS Season Pass have more than doubled since the former Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain star started plying his trade in the US in July.

That's according to Jorge Mas, one of Inter Miami's owners. Mas added that "Spanish language viewership on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV has surpassed over 50 percent for Messi matches and continues to rise," underscoring the player's popularity in the Spanish-speaking community. Apple CEO Tim Cook retweeted Mas' comments, indicating that Mas' claims are genuine (Apple's PR team has been drawing attention to the tweet as well).

The company hasn't disclosed how many subscribers the service has, though reports in July suggested the number was nearing 1 million before Messi's arrival. In any case, Apple is evidently pleased by Messi's impact on MLS Season Pass.

"For MLS, we could not be happier with how the partnership is going," Cook said on an Apple earnings call last week. "It's clearly in the early days, but we are beating our expectation in terms of subscribers, and the fact that Messi went to Inter Miami helped us out there a bit. And so we're very excited about it."

Apple, which dropped the price of the subscription from $99 to $49 for the second half of the season, is said to be paying $250 million a year for the MLS broadcast rights. Messi is reportedly taking a cut of revenue from new MLS Season Pass subscribers as part of his Inter Miami contract.

Messi has hit the ground running in Miami. He has scored seven goals and contributed three assists in four games, all of which Miami won. Before he joined the team, Miami was on an 11-game winless streak.

Although he's 36, an age when most soccer players are winding down their careers, Messi is still going strong. He led Argentina to the biggest prize in the game, the World Cup, last December and helped PSG win back-to-back French league championships before moving to the US. As a result, Messi is the overwhelming favorite to win the Ballon d'Or, arguably the most prestigious individual award in soccer, for a record-extending eighth time.

Activision is doing something different with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, this year's entry in the blockbuster military shooter series. Rather than starting from scratch and having to rebuild your collection of weapons and cosmetic items, Activision is letting players carry over nearly everything they unlock in Modern Warfare II.

This so-called Carry Forward initiative also applies to Call of Duty: Warzone, given that content is shared between the mainline games and the free-to-play battle royale. Warzone Mobile, which is slated to arrive later this year, will be integrated into all of this too.

For the most part, your unlocked operators, operator skins, bundles, all weapons, attachments and other rewards and cosmetic items will move forward from MW2 to MW3. What's more, if you continue to level up guns in MW2, that progress will be reflected in MW3.

This is a one-way street, though. Any MW3 progress or unlocks won't be replicated in MW2. There's no Carry Back feature.

The main things that won't progress from the 2022 game to this year's one are cosmetics for vehicles that aren't present in MW3. War Tracks, which are songs that can be played in vehicles, won't move over either. "Some Tactical and Lethal equipment may not be available depending on the removing of those items in MW3, to be replaced with MW3-only equipment," Activision noted in an extensive FAQ.

Even though MW2 and MW3 are handled by different internal studios (Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, respectively), you won't have to jump through any hoops to transfer your weapons and cosmetics either. Activision will handle everything, though of course you'll need to be using the same account or profile for both games.

Activision will release Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on November 10th. We'll learn much more about the upcoming game at a reveal event, which is set for August 17th.

Meanwhile, following the game's latest trailer, fans are speculating that MW3 will include an updated take on the hugely controversial No Russian mission from the original Modern Warfare II, which came out in 2009. That level wasn't in last year's rebooted version of MW2.

The battle of the bloviating billionaires could be on hold for the foreseeable future. Elon Musk says he may need surgery, casting more doubt on his proposed cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.

Musk noted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday evening that he's receiving an MRI on his neck and upper back today. He'll find out later this week whether he'll need surgery before going toe-to-toe with Zuckerberg, which is definitely not an attempt to get a doctor's note to weasel out of the duel.

Not only would surgery postpone that fight indefinitely, it could impact Musk's work at his various companies. As CNBC notes, Tesla's share price dropped by over two percent on Monday morning. Along with running the automaker, Musk is also the owner and chief technical officer of X and CEO of SpaceX.

There wasn't a confirmed date for the planned fight. Zuckerberg said he proposed an August 26 fight night, but claimed Musk hadn't responded. "Not holding my breath," the Meta CEO wrote on Threads.

Both men have been training for the potential showdown and publicly needling each other in the meantime. If and when it happens, Musk said the fight will be streamed on X, with all proceeds going to a veterans' charity. Zuckerberg couldn't resist poking fun at Musk over that too. "Shouldn't we use a more reliable platform that can actually raise money for charity?," he asked.

Call of Duty cheaters are now being named and shamed in real-time when they're kicked out of a game. The latest season of CoD: Modern Warfare II and CoD: Warzone season five went live this week, and the update includes an addition to the Ricochet anti-cheat system.

When Ricochet detects and removes a "problem player," the game will notify everyone in the match of such an occurrence right in the kill feed. That will let all players know for sure that they've been dealing with a cheater and also that Activision's systems were able to spot that person and boot them from the game.

It's not super novel for a game to tell players that someone has been kicked out for cheating. I recently played some BattleBit Remastered — a fun, low-poly riff on the Battlefield series — and the game notified me whenever a cheater was banned.

Still, this is a welcome update from Team Ricochet, which has been trying all kinds of tactics to mess with cheaters and to try and catch suspected hackers out. Over the last couple of years, Call of Duty has made cheaters unable to see enemies and taken their guns away. More recently, Team Ricochet has been deploying clones of real players against detected and suspected cheaters. If a potential hacker interacts with one of these clones, they'll make it obvious that they're cheating.

When Major League Soccer (MLS) announced plans to deploy AI-powered tools in its recruiting program starting at the tail end of this year, the eyebrows of skeptics were raised. The MLS will be working with London-based startup ai.io, and its ‘aiScout’ app to help the league discover amateur players around the world. This unprecedented collaboration is the first time the MLS will use artificial intelligence in its previously gatekept recruiting program, forcing many soccer enthusiasts and AI fans to reckon with the question: has artificial intelligence finally entered the mainstream in the professional soccer industry?

There is no doubt that professional sports have been primed for the potential impact of artificial intelligence. Innovations have the potential to transform the way we consume and analyze games from both an administrative and fan standpoint. For soccer specifically, there are opportunities for live game analytics, match outcome modeling, ball tracking, player recruitment, and even injury predicting — the opportunities are seemingly endless.

"I think that we're at the beginning of a tremendously sophisticated use of AI and advanced analytics to understand and predict human behaviors," Joel Shapiro, Northwestern University professor at the Kellogg School of Management said. Amid the wave, some experts believe the disruption of the professional soccer industry by AI is timely. It’s no secret that soccer is the most commonly played sport in the world. With 240 million registered players globally and billions of fans, FIFA is currently made up of 205 member associations with over 300,000 clubs, according to the Library of Congress. Just days into the 64-game tournament, FIFA officials said that the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand had already broken attendance records.

Visionhaus via Getty Images

The need for more players and more talent taking on the big stage has kept college recruiting organizations like Sports Recruiting USA (SRUSA) busy. "We've got staff all over the world, predominantly in the US …everyone is always looking for players," Chris Cousins, the founder and head of operations at SRUSA said. Cousins said he is personally excited about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on his company and, in fact, he is not threatened by the implementation of predictive analysis impacting SRUSA's bottom line. "It probably will replace scouts," Cousins said, but at the same time, he said he believes the deployment of AI will make things more efficient. "It will basically streamline resources … which will save organizations money." Cousins shared that SRUSA has already started dabbling with AI, even if only in a modest way. It collaborated with a company called Veo that deploys drones that follow players and collect video for scouts to analyze later. 

Luis Cortell, senior recruiting coach for men’s soccer for NCSA College Recruiting, is a little less bullish, but still believes AI can be an asset. “Right now, soccer involves more of a feel for the player, and an understanding of the game, and there aren't any success metrics for college performance. While AI won’t fully fill that gap, there is an opportunity to help provide additional context.”

At the same time, people in the industry should be wary of idealizing AI as a godsend. "People expect AI to be amazing, to not make errors or if it makes errors, it makes errors rarely," Shapiro said. The fact is, predictive models will always make mistakes but both researchers and investors alike want to make sure that AI innovations in the space can make "fewer errors and less expensive errors" than the ones made by human beings.

But ultimately, Shapiro agrees with Cousins. He believes artificial intelligence will replace some payrolls for sure. "Might it replace talent scouts? Absolutely," he said. However, the ultimate decision-makers of how resources are being used will probably not be replaced by AI for some time. Contrary to both perspectives, Richard Felton-Thomas, director of sports sciences and chief operating officer at ai.io, said the technology being developed and used by the MLS will not replace scouts: “Scouts are super important to the mentality side, the personality side, you've still got to watch humans behave in their sporting arena to really talent ID them.”

Photo by Rob Hart

When the aiScout app launches in the coming weeks and is used by the MLS later this year, players will be able to take videos of themselves performing specific drills. Those will then be uploaded and linked to the scout version of the app, where talent recruiters working for specific teams can discover players based on whatever criteria they choose. For example, a scout could look for a goalie with a specific height and kick score. Think of it as a cross between a social media website and a search engine. Once a selection is made, a scout would determine whether or not they should go watch a player in person before making any final recruitment decisions, Felton-Thomas explained.

“The main AI actually happens less around the scoring and more around the video processing and the video tracking,” Felton-Thomas said. “Sport happens at 200 frames per second type speeds, right? So you can’t just have any old tracking model. It will not track the human fast enough.” The AI algorithms that have been developed to analyze video content can translate human movements into what makes up a player’s overall performance metrics and capabilities. 

Getty Images

These ‘performance metrics’ can include biographical data, video highlights and club-specific benchmarks that can be made by recruiters. The company said in a statement that the platform’s AI technology is also able to score and compare the individual players’ “technical, athletic, cognitive and psychometric ability.” Additionally, the AI can generate feedback based on benchmarked ratings from the range of the club trials available. The FIFA Innovation Programme, the experimental arm of the association that tests and engages with new products that want to enter the professional soccer market, reported that ai.io’s AI-powered tools demonstrate a 97 percent accuracy level when compared to current gold standards.

Beyond the practical applications of AI-powered tools to streamline some processes at SRUSA, Cousins said that he recognizes a lot of the talent recruitment process is “very opinion based" and informed by potential bias. ai.io's talent recruitment app, because it is accessible to any player with a smartphone, broadens the MLS’ reach to disadvantaged populations. The larger goal is that aiScout will potentially disrupt bias from continuing to play a huge role in who gets what opportunity, or at least in the pre-screening process. Now, a scout can make the call to see a player in real life based on objective data related to how a player can perform physically. “The clubs are starting to realize we can't just rely on someone's opinion,” Felton-Thomas said. Of course, it's not an end-all-be-all for bias, considering preferential humans are the ones coding the AI. There is no complete expunging of favoritism from the equation, but it is one step in the right direction.

aiScout could open doors for players from remote or disadvantaged communities that don't necessarily have the means or opportunity to be seen by scouts in cups and tournaments. "Somebody super far in Alaska or Texas or whatever, who can't afford to play for a big club may never get seen by the right people but with this platform there, boom. They're going straight to the eyes of the right people," Cousins said about ai.io’s app.

The MLS wrote in a statement that ai.io's technology "eliminates barriers like cost, geography and time commitment that traditionally limit the accessibility of talent discovery programs." Felton-Thomas said it is more important to understand that ai.io will “democratize” the recruiting process for the MLS, ensuring physical skills are the most important metric when leagues and clubs are deciding where to invest their money. “What we're looking to do is give the clubs a higher confidence level when they're making these decisions on who to sign and who to watch.” By implementing the AI-powered app, recruitment timelines are also expected to be cut.

Silvia Ferrari, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and ​​Associate Dean for cross-campus engineering research, who runs the university's 'Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls' said she couldn't agree more. AI has the potential to complement the expertise of recruiters while also helping, "eliminate the bias that sometimes coaches might have for a particular player or a particular team,” Ferrari said. Adjacent to this subject, algorithms developed in Ferrari's lab can accurately predict the in-game actions of volleyball players with more than 80% accuracy. Now the lab, which has been working on AI-powered predictive tools for the past three years, is collaborating with Cornell's Big Red men's ice hockey team to expand the project’s applications. Ferrari and her team have trained the algorithm to extract data from videos of games and then use that to make predictions about game stats and player performance when shown a new set of data.

LISC lab

"I think what we're doing is, like, very easily applicable to soccer," Ferrari said. She said the only reason her lab is not focused on soccer is because the fields are so large that her team’s cameras could not always deliver easily analyzed recordings. There is also the struggle with predicting trajectory and tracking the players, she explained. However, she said in hockey, the challenges are similar enough, but because there are fewer players and the fields are smaller, so the variables are more manageable to tackle.

While the focus at Ferrari’s lab may not be soccer, she is convinced that research in the predictive AI space has made it “so much more promising to develop AI in sports and made the progress much faster." The algorithms developed by Ferrari's lab have been able to help teams analyze different strategies and therefore help coaches identify the strengths and weaknesses of particular players and opponents. “I think we're making very fast progress," Ferrari said.

LISC lab

The next areas Ferrari plans to try to apply her lab’s research to include scuba diving and skydiving. However, Ferrari admits there are some technical barriers that need to be overcome by researchers. "The current challenge is real-time analytics," she said. A lot of that challenge is based on the fact that the technology is only capable of making predictions based on historical data. Meaning, if there is a shortage of historical data-there is a limit to what the tech can predict. Beyond technical limitations, Felton-Thomas said implementing AI in the real world is expensive and without the right partnerships, like the ones made with Intel and AWS, it would not have been possible fiscally.

Felton-Thomas said ai.io expects “tens of millions of users over the next couple of years.” And the company attributes that expected growth to partnerships with the right clubs, like Chelsea FC and Burnley FC in the UK, and the MLS in the United States. And while aiScout was initially designed for soccer, the company touts that its core functionalities can be adapted for use in other sports.

LISC lab

But despite ai.io’s projections for growth and all the buzz around AI, the technology is still a long way from being fully trusted. From a technology standpoint, Ferrari said “there's still a lot of work to be done” and a lot of the need for improvement is not just based on problems with feeding algorithms historical data. Predictive models need to be smart enough to adapt to the ever-changing variables in the current. On top of that, public skepticism of artificial intelligence is still rampant in the mainstream, let alone in soccer.

“If the sport changes a little bit, if the way in which players are used changes a little bit, if treatment plans for mid-career athletes change, whatever it is, all of a sudden, our predictions are less likely to be good,” Shapiro said. But he’s confident that the current models will prove valuable and informative. At least for a little while.

Meta has teamed up with UFC to bring live mixed martial arts (MMA) in VR to Horizon Worlds, the company announced in a Quest Blog post seen by The Verge. The experience, launching in November, will let UFC Fight Pass subscribers (via Xtadium and YBVR streaming) watch MMA action at 4K resolution and 180-degree VR capture on Horizon Worlds. "Enjoy the action alone or with friends and switch camera angles throughout the fight to get the best view of every matchup," Meta wrote. 

Users will also be able to discuss UFC with other Horizon Worlds users, check out a virtual version of the Octagon and compete in single player and multiplayer in-world games to gain unlockable rewards — all with the goal of becoming a UFC "Hall of Famer." 

The new experience is one of a number of ways Meta is attempting to lure users to Horizon Worlds. Recently, the company added Quests to keep users returning to the site, including mini-games like Giant Paddle Mini Golf,Arena Clash and Bad Roommates. It also recently introduced Rumble World, the first of many next-gen Horizon Worlds games featuring improved graphics and more complex gameplay. 

Meta said it latched onto UFC due to the "engagement and passion of this audience," noting that fans enjoy not just the fights but also sharing the experience with other fans. "We tested this technology successfully with a handful of MMA events last year, and now we’re going further," says MMA chief content officer Craig Borsari. "We’re just scratching the surface of how we can use this technology to create greater fan engagement and grow this sport."

UFC also makes sense on Meta given CEO Mark Zuckerberg's apparent interest in the sport (though his cage match with Elon Musk seems doubtful at the moment). In any case, live sports may be a potent way to attract new users to the reportedly flagging service, so it'll be interesting to see if Meta adds others along with UFC.