ENTERTAINMENT

Crytek has announced a round of layoffs affecting 60 of its 400 staff.

In a tweet, Crytek said that while Hunt: Showdown is growing, the company could not “continue as before and remain financially sustainable.” The developer put Crysis 4 “on hold” late 2024 and had worked to shift staff over to Hunt, reducing costs and operating expenses in the process, but the layoffs became “inevitable,” affecting 15% of its workforce.

The layoffs hit staff across Crytek’s development teams and shared services. The company said it will offer severance.

Last year, it emerged that Crytek had worked on a battle royale-inspired Crysis project codenamed Crysis Next when very early gameplay hit YouTube. The footage revealed third-person shooting in a basic warm-up arena, with Crysis’ trademark abilities and sound effects layered on top.

Crytek never announced Crysis Next, which was canceled in favor of Crysis 4 ahead of its announcement in January 2022.

Crysis is a first-person sci-fi shooter series known for its impressive visuals, cool nanosuit powers, and open-ended gameplay. The first game in the series, released in 2007, was often used as a PC benchmark given the demands it would make of PCs at the time. Crysis was so demanding that it spawned the now infamous catchphrase, “But can it run Crysis?” which was used in the years following the game’s release to deliver a verdict on a PC spec.

The last mainline game in the series, Crysis 3, came out in February 2013. Crytek released remasters of the originals in recent years, but fans hadn’t heard more about Crysis 4 since its announcement and teaser three years ago.

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.

Former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick believes Universal’s 2016 adaptation of Activision Blizzard’s Warcraft was “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”

In a candid interview on Grit, Kotick — who led Activision Blizzard for 32 years before stepping down in December 2023 — suggested the movie also impacted the development of World of Warcraft as the film was a “distraction” to the team and one of the reasons veteran designer Chris Metzen left the company in 2016.

“Chris Metzen was — and is, to me — the heart and soul of creativity of the company,” Kotick said.

“He left, got burnt out. They made World of Warcraft the movie, which I thought was a terrible idea [but] they had signed the deal before [Activision] had owned the company.

“It took a lot of resources and distracted [developers at Blizzard],” Kotick added. “You think about all these people who make video games for a living, and now they have the chance [to], like, make a movie. They’re helping with the casting, and they’re on the set, and… it’s just a huge distraction.

“Our expansions were late. You know, patches weren’t getting done on time. And the movie was terr— it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”

While fans of the Warcraft movie may never get a sequel, in 2020 director Duncan Jones opened up about his cancelled plans for a trilogy. The overall arc for the trilogy would have seen “the fulfilling of Durotan’s promise to give his people a new home,” according to Jones.

While Warcraft underperformed in North America, grossing a measly $47 million domestically, it went on to temporarily become the most successful video game adaptation of all-time internationally, largely due to its popularity in China. Overall, Warcraft brought in $439 million for Legendary Pictures, which largely deemed it a failure after not breaking even on its massive budget.

Claiming Metzen “took it very personally” before he left to start a boardgame company, Kotick added that he eventually “begged” the designer to return on a consultancy basis.

However, Metzen was unimpressed by plans for the next two expansions, suggesting they needed to be “redone” entirely.

Asked if he spoke to Metzen much after his return to Blizzard, Kotick said: “Hardly ever. What am I going to tell Chris Metzen about game design, you know? I just wanted him to do his thing.

“The last expansion, he had his fingertips all over it. It’s excellent. The next one is going to be great.”

That last expansion certainly impressed us, too, securing a 9/10 in our World of Warcraft The War Within review. We called it “the best World of Warcraft has been on all fronts in many years, making this two-decade-old MMO feel fresh and thrilling again.”

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.

Alan Wake 2 has exceeded 2 million sales worldwide.

That’s up from the 1.3 million copies sold between October 2023 and March 2024, when developer Remedy hailed the horror sequel as its fastest-selling game ever.

In its latest financial report to investors, Remedy said the milestone — coupled with the release of The Lake House expansion and Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition — now means the game has “started to accrue royalties” after recouping its development and marketing costs.

Looking ahead, the studio also teased that Control 2, which is being developed in partnership with Annapurna, “has been finalizing the production readiness stage” and will enter full production at the end of February 2025, along with Max Payne 1&2 Remake, which is also “making steady progress in full production.”

Similarly, FBC: Firebreak, Remedy’s multiplayer Control spin-off, continues in full production following a “successful” closed technical test in December, which saw external players test matchmaking and back-end services. While no firm release date was confirmed, FBC: Firebreak will be self-published by Remedy later in 2025.

“We are in a great place to begin our strategy period and have set targets we are confident in reaching,” CEO Tero Virtala said.

In IGN’s Alan Wake 2 review, we awarded the sequel an impressive 9/10, calling it a “superb survival horror sequel that makes the cult classic original seem like little more than a rough first draft by comparison.”

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.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy streams on Peacock beginning Thursday, February 13, and opens in theaters outside the United States on February 14.

Even the cheeriest romantic comedy ending can leave us with a nagging question: What follows happily ever after? After all, there are no neat, easily satisfying endings in real life – a truth hit home in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth in a series of rom-coms whose heroine has seen her share of “happily ever after.” It’s the first entry in the franchise to be undercut by a note of genuine sadness, leaving Bridget (Renée Zellweger) the widowed mother of two small children: 9-year-old Billy (Casper Knopf) and 4-year-old Mabel (Mila Jankovic). While director Michael Morris’ take on Helen Fielding’s novel of the same name also has a totally unexpected and novel touch of childlike wonder and magic, there’s no avoiding that this chapter in Bridget’s story is in large part about grief. She’s older and a little wiser and, though the movie ditches some of the usual silliness as a result (for the better perhaps, after the misfire that was 2004’s Edge of Reason), this is more than made up for by a whipsmart script from Fielding, Dan Mazer, and Abi Morgan.

With her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) gone – though not Firth himself, who plays the late Mr. Darcy as Bridget’s imagined companion at some especially poignant moments – Mad About the Boy jokes that its protagonist is back where she started in Bridget Jones’ Diary. She’s still susceptible to bad advice, with her trio of pals Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson), and Tom (James Callis) reiterating their favorite solution to life’s many problems: sex. As the endearing everywoman navigates the era of Tinder while simultaneously juggling childcare, all the things the series is known and loved for – relatability, mishap-packed charm, picture-perfect London locations, and great running gags – are in plentiful supply. She even finds herself at the epicenter of a classic love triangle, caught between the affections of swoony, part-time ranger Roxster (Leo Woodall – the “boy” of the title) and the more sedate new teacher at her kids’ school, Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Much as a calamitous meet-cute in the park with Roxster and stomach-suctioning date-night knickers might sound like well-worn ground for the series, Mad About the Boy ascends to fresh levels of sly self-awareness and crackling comedy – with the bonus of parenting jokes that rival the heights of About a Boy or the BBC sitcom Outnumbered. In fact, young Mabel gets some of the best lines, and her comic timing often outstrips that of her older co-stars. (Her main quip is asking every man she encounters if he is going to be her “new daddy”.) Having Mabel and Billy’s perspective in the mix leavens some of the heavier passages; the enigmatic owl who takes up residence outside of the kids’ bedroom window takes much of the credit there.

There is also a sizzling energy between Zellweger and her latest love interest Woodall, and the movie is refreshingly unjudgmental about the 27-year age-gap wedged between them. If anything, one of its few disappointments is that their relationship could use more screentime. We don’t get much backstory for Roxster, a character who claims to be more responsible than your average 28-year-old but then wildly waltzes in and out of Bridget’s life more than once. Mr. Wallaker is shown to be the more reliable prospect in comparison, with Mad About the Boy drawing obvious parallels between his brand of uptight rationalism and Mark’s no-nonsense approach to life. The heat Ejiofor generates opposite Zellweger can’t quite compare to the uncontrolled flames she and Woodall ignite, but smaller sparks do fly.

Alongside these bright new stars in the Bridget Jones universe, fan favorites from earlier in the series make encore appearances, including Emma Thompson as Bridget’s snippy doctor and Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones as her madcap parents. Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), miraculously raised from the dead after being killed off in Bridget Jones’ Baby, appears to offer a trace of the franchise’s smutty, slightly outdated 2000s humor while he occasionally mucks in with babysitting duties. But most notably there is a newfound gentleness in this story about loss. Mad About the Boy recycles some some musty material on the topic, but treads carefully to ensure it’s meaningfully used: a lesser movie would have over-sentimentalized Billy’s storyline of a son struggling after his father’s death or cynically used his plight simply as a means to bring Bridget and Mr. Wallaker together. Whatever room is made for schmaltz, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy always stays (one sickly musical number notwithstanding) just on the right side of artlessness and sincerity.