ENTERTAINMENT

Good Burger and Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson just launched his movie production studio, Artists For Artists, and one of its first projects will be an animated series based on a PlayStation video game.

First details on the mystery adaptation come from an interview Forbes conducted with Thompson about the studio. Co-founded alongside John Ryan Jr., it’s a company that got its start with Good Burger 2 just last month and already has 50 other movies and TV shows in the works with giants like Netflix and Universal.

Sony is in the mix, too, with AFA looking to make a series based on one of its many gaming IPs. Sadly, Thomspon and Ryan aren’t ready to talk about which game viewers can expect to see come to life.

“We worked with Sony to get the rights to and we’re turning this game that’s done over $1 billion in sales into a cartoon,” Ryan added. “And they’ve been so giving with the freedom; we thought it was going to be a bigger lift than it was.”

The question is obvious; What game is AFA working on making a cartoon? Jak and Daxter or Ratchet & Clank come to mind as clear options, but PlayStation has access to dozens of franchises that could work as an animated series. LittleBigPlanet, Sly Cooper, or even Infamous have potential in the realm of animation, too, though it’s hard to make guesses with so little go off of.

Sony has been busy bringing its games to other entertainment mediums for the last few years. The Last of Us and Twisted Metal both recently received the television show treatment at HBO and Peacock, respectively. There’s also the Gran Turismo movie, which attempted to retell the real-life story of a gamer-turned-racer earlier this year.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

It’s good news and bad news for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. First, the bad news: the permadeath mode Ubisoft had said would come out in December is delayed to early 2024.

Now, the good news: Mirage’s New Game Plus mode comes out next week, Ubisoft announced in a post on X/Twitter.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage came out in October and, soon after, Ubisoft revealed its launch was “in line” with that of previous entries in the series, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey.

IGN’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage review returned an 8/10. We said its “return to the stealthy style that launched this series doesn’t do everything right, but everything it does feels like it was done with purpose.”

New Game Plus for Assassin’s Creed Mirage lets you dive back into Basim’s journey with your current progression and new rewards. Ubisoft has yet to detail the permadeath mode, but we do know it will be available across all difficulties.

In October, Ubisoft’s long-awaited Japanese Assassin’s Creed game, codenamed Assassin’s Creed Red, seemingly had its protagonist leaked by a developer. An image revealed what appeared to be a female assassin wielding a katana against a red background, which features the Japanese Assassin’s Creed logo and a pagoda.

Set in feudal Japan, Assassin’s Creed Red was revealed in September 2022 as Ubisoft’s “next premium flagship title and the future of our open-world RPG games”, suggesting it will be closer in style to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Odyssey than Mirage. A brief concept trailer showed an assassin jumping onto a roof during the sunset.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

After trademark disputes, multiple delays, and everything in between, FNTASTIC has finally released The Day Before on Steam in early access. But it is not off to the best start right now with many players complaining, citing server and performance issues as among the biggest problems.

At time of writing, The Day Before’s Steam page has been flooded with negative reviews from users. Many criticize that despite being labeled an open-world game or an MMO, in reality, it is an extraction shooter, as some players have pointed out.

One reviewer posted about how their character was randomly falling through the map as soon as the opening cutscene ended. My colleague Mark Medina actually suffered the same thing himself, and he was kind enough to upload the first 22 minutes of the game along with the infamous bug right at the beginning, which you can check out below:

That is, of course, assuming you were able to get into the game at all, as many players aired their frustrations online about the server issues.

The Day Before launched and the servers are apparently getting crushed, can’t start the game at all. pic.twitter.com/E6gyPCR83E

— Spawn Wave (@SpawnWaveMedia) December 7, 2023

Even developer FNTASTIC acknowledged that there was an overload of the North American servers on X/Twitter.

Overload on North American servers. The servers are working. Fills up too quickly. #thedaybefore

— Fntastic (@FntasticHQ) December 7, 2023

That does not even consider other issues players have had. For instance, one user on The Day Before subreddit pointed out that despite being a zombie game, the zombies are anything but threatening.

What’s more, the developer seems to be totally overwhelmed by the negative feedback. At the time this was written, mods of the official The Day Before Discord had shut down discussion in most server channels, saying the following:

We’ve made the decision to temporarily lock the channel for several reasons. Firstly, it’s essential to let things calm down due to the overwhelming toxicity that we currently cannot manage effectively. Secondly, we need to channel all bug reports to the development team, and we can’t accomplish this if we aren’t allowed to share those reports.

Continuous moderation here is diverting our time away from addressing major bugs and making crucial fixes. A patch is in the works, so please be prepared for an upcoming game update.

IGN has reached out to FNTASTIC for comment.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

After launching nearly three months ago in early access, Skybound Games and Other Ocean Interactive announced that they’re stopping the development of The Walking Dead: Betrayal, with the project set to be removed from Steam early next week.

In a new blog post, Skybound Games revealed that The Walking Dead: Betrayal will be delisted on Steam on December 1. By December 15, the game will be shut down completely. Those who purchased the game will be able to receive a full refund with updates confirmed to be published on both Steam and the official TWD: Betrayal Discord server.

“Despite the hard work put into the game, we were not able to find a path to build the spirited community of backstabbers we originally envisioned,” Skybound Games wrote in the blog post.

Announced during San Diego Comic-Con this past July, The Walking Dead: Betrayal is a multiplayer game where up to eight survivors fend off the undead. Social deception and survival were the big focuses in The Walking Dead: Betrayal, where players could decide whether or not they wanted to deceive the other survivors or work with them to survive the apocalypse.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.