Netflix has dropped the first official teaser for Arcane season 2, and it kicks off with a bang: Jinx has destroyed the Council, and now, "Wrath must be met with wrath."

The first season of Arcane was really good, in large part because it managed to separate itself from the complicated lore woven throughout League of Legends: "That's because Arcane isn't about League of Legends' champions, but the regular folk they used to be," we said in our 2022 review.

Having set the stage with its first season, Arcane looks set to move into more familiar territory in season two. There's a lot going on in this trailer, but the central conflict between Vi and Jinx—known by her original name Powder through most of the first season, but now fully immersed in her new persona—has clearly kicked into top gear. 

Netflix's Arcane page isn't exactly laden with details, but it leans into that aspect of the new season too: "Amid the stark discord of twin cities Piltover and Zaun, two sisters fight on rival sides of a war between magic technologies and clashing convictions."

One thing we do know about Arcane's second season is that, as the trailer stated, it will also be the last. 

"The Arcane team set out with a specific end in mind, and season two will be the final season, but the first of many stories to tell in Runeterra," Riot said in a press blast. "The team’s currently working on their next projects—across television and film—which are still very early in development and hope to share more by the end of the year."

That has to be disappointing for Arcane fans, but the promise of more to come across the wider LoL setting is a pretty good counterbalance, I would say. 

Netflix still hasn't shared a specific air date for Arcane season 2, but it's still set to show up sometime in November.

As I've mentioned in the past, it's been wild to see Critical Role go from a casually-streamed game with a small enough audience to accept public pizza donations, into a genuine multi-platform monolith.

One fun consequence of its rockstar popularity is The Legend of Vox Machina animated series, which primarily happened because Critical Role asked their fans if they'd like to see the first campaign animated and they said yes, please, here's $1 million dollars in one hour ($11 million total).

The show has already had its first and second seasons, following the OG stream's Briarwood arc, as well as roughly a third of its Chroma Conclave storyline. We found out last month it's going back in for a third dip—there's still dragons to slay, after all. Courtesy of an IGN exclusive, we also know exactly when—October 3. The site also shared a look at the show's fresh intro sequence, which you can watch below.

The intro opens on Vox Machina walking and laughing before Vax'ildan, the chosen baby of the goddess of death, turns around to see her porcelain mask wielding a thousand strings of fate—kicking off a flashback sequence that lasts for the rest of the intro.

The mentally well-adjusted, normal, and emotionally fine gunslinger Percy burns up the schematics for his weapon, now that he's past his goth—I mean, vengeance—phase. However, we also see Ripley loom threateningly in the ashes. Mild spoilers from the livestream, but yeah—we're not done with her, yet.

Then there's the heartwarming sight of Keyleth, who will live for thousands of years as a druid, slowly left alone as her party members fade one by one—a fact that definitely doesn't still haunt me after the stream's original epilogue.

As for the rest, it's mostly group shots and action scenes from the party of Vox Machina, putting their freshly-earned Vestiges of Divergence to good use. We're also shown a hint of what happens after the current Chroma Conclave arc—straight-up spoilers for that to follow.

The blindfolded individual pondering the world's most ominous orb is almost absolutely Delilah Briarwood from Episode 100 of the livestreamed campaign, Unfinished Business. In it, the party fails to stop the resurrected villain from opening a portal to the Shadowfell to resurrect Vecna, who is bad news for just about everybody.

To see it here makes me wonder whether that episode—and the massacre that follows it—will be a part of Season 3, or saved as a cliffhanger for Season 4. If so, it's going to be one hell of a drop to dangle over. While I'd personally still love to see a Critical Role game at some point, I remain thoroughly excited to see the old crew return for another gorgeously-animated retelling.

Remember Metal Slug Tactics? Don't feel bad if the answer is no: It was announced out of nowhere in June 2021, showed off a spot of gameplay a couple months later, and then—aside from a "coming in 2023" announcement in August 2022 that didn't pan out—completely fell off the radar. But now it's back, with a new trailer and word that, for real this time, it will be out in the fall.

We were genuinely surprised when the Metal Slug series was resurrected as a tactics game, but publisher Dotemu has a pretty solid record with old-school revivals and promises more of the same here, despite the genre shift: "Metal Slug Tactics is both a respectful homage to an all-time classic and an imaginative new way to celebrate the renowned series, channeling Metal Slug's timeless aesthetic through gorgeous pixel art and fluid animation."

The new trailer showcases updated gameplay, with Marco, Eri, Fio, and Tarma demonstrating Metal Slug Tactics' turn-based gameplay. Players will begin by assembling a squad of unique fighters, and then roll them out in battles "testing intuition and efficiency." Combat against lower-ranked enemies will eventually culminate in boss battles that, when completed, will open the door to "new areas deeper behind enemy lines."

We've got some new screens, too:

There's still not a solid release date at this point, but Dotemu says Metal Slug Tactics will be out sometime this fall. The Steam page nails it down very slightly more precisely as Q4 2024, which by my understanding is getting into the wintry side of the season, but October or the first half of November is still fair. (I know winter doesn't technically start until December 21 but I'm Canadian and winter starts when we say it starts.) A demo for Metal Slug Tactics will be available as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, running June 10-17.

After nearly two years of waiting, we've finally got our first proper look at Liam Hemsworth as Geralt in Netflix's The Witcher, and you know what? It's not bad. Not bad at all.

Hemsworth stepped into the role following the surprise departure of original Geralt-portrayer Henry Cavill, who left the series in October 2022 to pursue his Superman dream—which unfortunately for him, didn't quite work out as expected. (Don't worry though, he's found something else to do.) Hemsworth was cast shortly thereafter, and I won't pretend I didn't have doubts—but I also had big reservations about Cavill, and that worked out just fine.

It later turned out that Hemsworth was almost cast in the role the first time around, and made enough of an impression that when it came time to find Geralt 2, Netflix just gave him a call and said "you're in." So that's encouraging, at least.

Hemsworth doesn't speak in the new teaser, and we don't even get to see his face until he turns to face the camera at the very end. Otherwise, it's pure hype: A reflection over a pond, Geralt and Roach emerging from the mist, a closeup of the Wolf School medallion, and finally, the pause and slow, meaningful glance back: It's Liam, baby!

The look is good, but what I'm more interested in is this voice: Henry did a great job of capturing Geralt's low, raspy tone—which apparently happened by accident—and I genuinely wonder how Hemsworth will pull it off, or what sort of spin he'll put on it. I'm not terribly familiar with his past work but here he is delivering some sad lines in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay:

I don't know, maybe?

I'm also curious about how Netflix is going to explain the Witcher switcheroo. Some shows just power through it—Game of Thrones had three different guys portray the Mountain over its seven-season run, and we all just rolled with it—but executive producer Tomek Baginski said in 2023 that the change in this case will be "lore accurate." What does that mean? I have no clue.

It will be a little while yet before we find out, anyway. Today's tease didn't include any kind of release window for The Witcher season 4, but production only started in April—I don't know much about making TV shows but given that both seasons 4 and 5 are being filmed in tandem, I'd be surprised to see it arrive any sooner than the tail end of 2024.

The new series will be written and produced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, known as the creator of the comedy series Fleabag and the original showrunner and head writer of Killing Eve; she's also an actor, appearing in films and television shows including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Solo: A Star Wars story as the voice of L3-37.

As for who will follow in the footsteps of Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander to portray Lara Croft in the series, that remains a mystery for now.

"With great IP, the possibilities are endless," Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann said. "The richness and depth of the fiction allows the Tomb Raider series from Prime Video and the videogame from Amazon Games to tell separate stories about Lara Croft’s adventures. We’re honored that Crystal Dynamics has entrusted Amazon with this iconic franchise, and we’re looking forward to seeing where this collaboration takes us."

That is certainly the sort of thing you say in a low-info corporate press release, and I don't think I would personally describe the Tomb Raider narrative as either rich or deep. But the success of the Fallout series earns Amazon some benefit of the doubt on that front. Fallout is an inherently more interesting setting, but the looser strictures of Tomb Raider, which isn't quite so tightly shackled to its game world and the demands that arise from that canon, should afford Waller-Bridge and company more room to be creatively flexible.

As for when we'll learn how that bit of speculation holds up, there is currently no indication: Amazon said only that it will be exclusive to Prime Video (no surprise there) and that "we look forward to sharing more about both projects as they progress." That "both projects" reference is a reminder that Amazon Games is also publishing the next Tomb Raider game, "a single-player, narrative-driven adventure that will add a new chapter to Lara Croft’s story in the Tomb Raider series." There's no word on when it will be out, either.

Not that this is anything particularly new—the British satirical magazine Private Eye has a running joke of referring to The Silmarillion, a posthumously published collection of Tolkien's Middle-earth tales, as "The Sellamillion". The Lord of the Rings has always been big business. But with franchises like Marvel, Star Wars and Harry Potter showcasing the extraordinary amounts that can be wrung out of extended universes, and the rights for everything outside of the books recently acquired by Middle-earth Enterprises (an Embracer subsidiary) in 2022, we are entering a new era of Hobbit saturation.

If I seem glum about this it's only because, with the best will in the world, nothing since Jackson's trilogy has come close to that level—even Jackson's adaptation of the Hobbit, which should've been a slam-dunk prequel, ended up an overlong and drearily serious trilogy. Amazon's Rings of Power was just middle-of-the-road prestige TV. Then we get to the games and, the shining light of Lord of the Rings Online aside, the most recent example is the mystifying The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which maybe wasn't as terrible as some said but was enough to close its developer Daedelic.

Well buckle up, because Warner Bros. has decided that what this shows is people want more Gollum. The company has announced a new clutch of live action movies based on the Lord of the Rings, with the first focusing on the fish-gobbling ring-fancier (thanks, Variety). During an earnings call Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens will act as producers on the movie and "will be involved every step of the way."

The working title for the film is The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, and it will be directed by and star Andy Serkis as Gollum. The film's script is by Walsh, Boyens, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou and will apparently "explore storylines yet to be told."

A statement from Jackson, Walsh and Boyens reads: “"It is an honour and a privilege to travel back to Middle-earth with our good friend and collaborator, Andy Serkis, who has unfinished business with that Stinker — Gollum! As life long fans of Professor Tolkien’s vast mythology, we are proud to be working with Mike De Luca, Pam Abdy and the entire team at Warner Bros. on another epic adventure!"

"Yesssss, Precious," said Serkis, before going on to talk about how wonderful everyone involved in the film is, ending "it’s just all too delicious…"

Well: this is what happens when you make three fantastic films that gross roughly $3 billion dollars. It's surprising to see Jackson continue his association with the Lord of the Rings, only inasmuch as it's all been diminishing returns since the trilogy, and I somehow suspect a Gollum chase movie isn't going to buck that trend.

This is one of multiple Lord of the Rings projects to come from Warner Bros., with development handled by its New Line Cinema label. The first fruits of this will be the animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, directed by Kenji Kamiyama and due in December. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is due sometime in 2026.

In a chat with Kinda Funny, ​​Howard said that the experience of visiting the set for Amazon's Fallout was "surreal," noting that he "thought there'd be more movie magic, like, 'Eh, they're gonna fake a lot of stuff, a lot of it's gonna be CG,'" before coming face-to-face with the show's Vaults.

"You step in and they've built this two-story Vault, and the lights are all—they're not fake lights… it's incredible attention to detail." Howard says Fallout's production designer Howard Cummings was "meticulous about translating every little thing," to the point that Bethesda was "sharing the files right from the games and they were 3D printing things." The set designers even had to apologise when they couldn't replicate the scale of a hallway one-to-one from the games.

Howard says his favourite example of the show's fanatical obsession with detail (one he's chatted about before) comes from visiting a Vault Overseer's office. "You sit down and they have all the papers, and they have this note that no one will ever see that's, like, to the Overseer that they had written." Even the paperwork was in order: "You have the stack of papers and you flip it over and they have the power report in the Vault and then, like, the food supply. I'm like, 'You didn't even fake the stack of papers!'"

The detail stretched out beyond the Vault, too. Howard says the Wasteland dentist's office was full of grisly tokens like "the most realistic, gross-looking teeth" in a bucket of assorted odds and ends that probably won't ever be noticed by the audience at home.

The attention to detail is something that the Fallout cast have called out, too. In an interview with GamesRadar, Ella Purnell (who plays protagonist Lucy MacLean) noted that stuff like completed paperwork "allows you to be better at your job because you’re reacting in real time. You’re able to improvise a little" using the detailed props that surround actors in their scenes.

All of which just makes me like the show even more than I already did. And hey, credit to Howard, he doesn't take the show's respect for Fallout as a compliment to himself personally. Howard says he's a "caretaker" for the series, and shouted out the "400 people" currently at Bethesda who help make the games as well as "the developers from the past: Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, all of them at Interplay over the days," and, yes, "the folks at Obsidian," too. I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to think Bethesda doesn't hate Obsidian and New Vegas after all.

We're not alone in jetting through the Fallout show, either: according to Amazon, 65 million people watched the show in the first 16 days of its release, which began when all eight episodes became available on April 10. That's a lot of pairs of irradiated eyeballs making Fallout the second-most watched show ever on Prime, following The Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power which aired in 2022.

According to Variety, which has access to a press release I was never sent (I'm not mad, I'm just saying), Fallout is Amazon's most-watched show ever among people aged 18-34 (I just missed that cutoff because I am 35, as far as you know). It was also especially a hit in Brazil, France, and the UK—60% of viewers came from outside the US. In other words, if you're an advertiser and you'd like to sell some Nuka Cola or YumYum Devilled Eggs to young people in those countries, I think you know who to call.

Advertising opportunities aside, 65 million is a heck of a lot of people all watching the same show—though I caution you to take those numbers with a heavy dose of a chem called Grain-O-Salt because I'm still pretty foggy about how these streaming services calculate their viewers. 

Netflix, for example, used to consider anyone who watched 70 percent of just a single episode of a television series as a "viewer," and at one point even considered anyone who watched just two flippin' minutes of any movie or show as having "viewed" it. YouTube apparently also considers 30 seconds a "view" even if a video is an hour long. How does Amazon count its views and viewers? They haven't confided in me yet. If I find out, I'll let you know.

One thing's for sure: the Fallout show is good and however many people actually watched it was enough to quickly get a second season greenlit. That's a big Vault-Boy thumbs up in my book.

"This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care," Sawyer said. "My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made."

Sawyer acknowledged that he might have opinions on changes or new additions to the world of Fallout, but said he doesn't "get attached to things in that way" because he doesn't think it's healthy to be overly invested in something he can't control.

"There are things that I might watch and say, ‘I don’t think I would have taken this that way’, and then there are other things that I think are really cool," he said. "But it’s not my space, it was never my thing. I was a guest working in it. So I try to keep a level of distance between myself and the setting."

Sawyer isn't one of the original minds behind Fallout, but he does have a deep connection to it. Prior to serving as game director on New Vegas, he was project lead on Van Buren, the codename for the isometric RPG that was meant to be Fallout 3 before publisher Interplay went under, taking the game with it. Working on a Fallout game "was a dream of mine," Sawyer said. "Losing that hurt."

He eventually got another shot at the series with Fallout: New Vegas, which Obsidian turned around in just 18 months. That meant the studio didn't have any real time to fiddle around with the underlying technology, and Sawyer said the game was initially criticized for playing too much like Fallout 3. But by using the technology as it was, the team "had the luxury of focusing on conversations and quests, and really making those as robust and dynamic as we could," and that's what stuck: New Vegas carries an "overwhelmingly positive" rating across nearly 160,000 user reviews on Steam and is now widely regarded as the best of the Bethesda-era games.

"There was a lot of effort put into making sure you can twist and turn through the different factions and resolve those things how you want," Sawyer said.

"The initial impact where people said the gameplay feels very close to Fallout 3 is totally fair. But then as time stretches on, and people play them side by side, the fact that we had so much of our time to focus on the content, I think that’s what people were excited about."

That excitement clearly remains: New Vegas, and every other Fallout game, have seen a significant player surge on Steam since the Fallout series launched. And while the debate over whether Bethesda was trying to quietly retcon New Vegas out of existence occasionally veered into silliness, it also reflected how seriously fans take this stuff: It's maybe not entirely healthy, as Sawyer said, but it's genuine.

The Fallout series on Amazon is a hit, and a second season has already been confirmed. More recently, the showrunners hinted, not too subtly, that the city of New Vegas will feature prominently in season two—but perhaps not the New Vegas that gamers are expecting.

The full interview with Sawyer covers a range of topics beyond New Vegas, including burnout—something he recently said has replaced crunch as "the primary hazard of the game industry"—the Pillars of Eternity game, and the brilliant sleeper hit Pentiment. It's a good read—check out the whole thing at RPS.  And if you haven't played New Vegas and are curious what you're missing, be sure to have a look at our guide to getting the most out of it today. 

"We put together all sorts of skeleton outfits," she said, including on location in the Namib Desert. What the skeletons were wearing depended on, among other things, how long they were supposed to have been decaying, and what led to their skeletonification.

The effects of time on Fallout's post-apocalyptic USA don't always feel consistent to me, but it's complicated—bombs, radiation, inconsistent upkeep, and videogame conventions all factor into the deterioration levels of Wasteland stuff. For their part, Westcott says the show's costume department did "a ton of research" to figure out how and how much to age each garment. 

When designing Lucy's wedding dress, for instance, they considered how many generations had used it before her, and what specifically would happen to it after being worn so many times. "You're pulling it on, so you get, maybe, oil from your fingers [in particular places]," Westcott said. "So it was all about traveling through real situations."

Out in the Wasteland, they wondered what would happen to textiles that were left in a box for a century or two, or worn out in the sun. 

"If they found an old warehouse that made jeans, OK, so they're gonna look new, but maybe they were in here for so long that it's like, what do they look like, and then what would these people do with them?" said Westcott. "So it was this sort of knock on effect of, what would you find, what would it look like, and then what would you do with it?"

The costumers did take some artistic license: I'm not convinced that The Ghoul's cowboy costume could really have survived 200 years of rugged use in the Wasteland, for instance, but it's a fun detail. I didn't actually notice that he was still wearing his pre-bombs costume until it was pointed out to me, and that was the idea.

"I pitched that idea early on to [the producers] that we could use his cowboy costume as The Ghoul, and just age it to such a degree that people wouldn't recognize it at first glance," said Westcott. "You wouldn't see that it was the same guy unless you were really, really, really looking. And that was all about our textile department just aging it so much, to such a degree—they're an insanely talented group of people."

The distressing required "a lot of trial and error," Westcott says, because, for example, a certain technique might accidentally change the color of a fabric.

During our chat, Westcott also revealed to me one secret to making utility jumpsuits look good: Italian four-way-stretch fabric. I also recently spoke to Fallout's production designer about the fabrication of the show's wearable power armor, which turned out remarkably faithful even though Bethesda never told them they had to stick to the games.