Ballerina is what happens when a studio wants to extend a franchise but really has no reason to do so except a financial one. Subtitled From The World of John Wick, this action thriller contains too much action and precious little thrills. Directed (maybe) by Len Wiseman of Underworld fame, Ballerina is set in the same universe as the four majestic adrenaline epics starring Keanu Reeves, and incorporates as many elements from those films as possible, including the Continental Hotel and the Ruska Roma, not to mention appearances from Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, the late, great Lance Reddick, and Mr. Reeves himself. But what is also found in ample supply in the John Wick movies and sadly missing in Ballerina is heart, character, and a sense of conviction. At the center of the movie is a miscast, utterly bland Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro, whose father’s death sent her as a little girl into the custody of McShane’s Winston Scott and, eventually, the tutelage of the Director (Huston) of the Ruska Roma ballet/assassin school. It’s there that Eve goes through the usual training montage, with her inability to dance only matched by her evident aptitude at killing and fighting. Once her training is complete, Eve is sent out into the world on Ruska Roma business, but of course her main goal is avenging her dad, who was killed by members of a mysterious cult led by the enigmatic Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). No sooner can you say “she’s gone rogue” than she does just that, jetting off to Prague in pursuit of a cult member (Norman Reedus) who’s trying to get himself and his own little daughter out from under the Chancellor’s thumb, while finding herself at odds with the Director and pursued by the Chancellor’s minions at every turn. The movie’s thin “lady vengeance” premise, which we’ve seen countless times before, is reheated once again by screenwriter Shay Hatten, who has co-written the last two John Wick entries but seems lost here. Unlike John Wick himself, whose single-minded quest for revenge over the death of his dog took on mythic overtones as more layers to both John and the surreal world of elegant criminality in which he moved were revealed, Eve has nothing to define her that hasn’t been done or said before. It doesn’t help that Armas, while up to the role’s physicality, offers nothing in terms of personality—she’s an empty vessel. Which is a shame, since she’s displayed earthiness (Knives Out), complexity (Blonde), and a sexy playfulness (No Time to Die) in previous work. The rest of the non-Wick cast is forgettable as well, with Byrne’s Chancellor and his entire regime badly underdeveloped, and Reedus completely wasted in what amounts to maybe two scenes. McShane, Reddick, and Huston just go through their paces, spouting lots of portentous lines about “choice” and “fate” that ring mostly hollow, as does a late-stage twist that carries no weight because one of the characters involved barely registers. As for the Baba Yaga himself, the largely non-verbal Reeves is the “Chekhov’s gun” of the film: introduced briefly in the first act, he inevitably turns up again in the third act, parachuted in by the magic of rumored reshoots even though his contribution to the narrative amounts to absolutely nothing. It’s always nice to see him, but if you took him out, it wouldn’t drastically change the picture. Speaking of reshoots, there’s a Frankenstein nature to the proceedings that provides evidence for the reports that Wick director (and franchise torch-bearer) Chad Stahelski refilmed much of the movie after Wiseman’s first draft came up short. While the first act is a murky, enervated slog, things seem to pick up in the middle, with a more eye-catching color scheme (such as a sequence in a neon-lit club reminiscent of a similar scene in the magnificent John Wick: Chapter 4), a creative, free-flowing use of the camera, and some of the more inventive, oddball action that has become part and parcel of the franchise—most notably in a scene where de Armas and an enemy smash a pile of dinner plates over each other’s heads with manic Three Stooges-like energy. Unfortunately, there’s also a sadistic edge to a lot of the action this time as well, particularly in a climactic fight involving flamethrowers that badly wants to emulate the famous overhead apartment shot from John Wick: Chapter 4 but goes on for far too long and ultimately becomes actively unpleasant. That’s a problem with even the better action on hand in Ballerina, as if the filmmakers want to make up for the film’s deficiencies by overdoing what the series is best known for. Hatten’s script was an original piece that was rewritten to fit into the John Wick universe, with elements introduced in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum to pave the way for the arrival of Eve and Ballerina. But this reverse engineering highlights the pitfalls of trying to create a cinematic universe without stopping to wonder whether it’s a good idea. Watching John Wick stonily fight and slaughter his way through his off-center world and its population of funky, eccentric weirdos has been fantastic fun (the threat of an arc-undermining John Wick 5 notwithstanding) because of the unique nature of the character and that world. But dropping the more conventional, cliched tropes of Ballerina into the mix, along with a protagonist (and actor) not nearly as compelling, only exemplifies that the John Wick movies are character-driven first and foremost. All the brutal action, heavy-handed callbacks, and predictable cameos in the world can’t make this Ballerina into a better dancer. Ballerina opens in theaters in the U.S. on Friday, June 6. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

The Obalende bus terminus is one of Lagos’s most important transport nodes and a ‘graveyard’ for old danfos, which in Yoruba means ‘hurry’. These yellow‑painted minibuses form the backbone of Lagos’s informal transport system and are mostly second‑hand imports from the global north. Located in the heart of Lagos Island, Obalende is one of the first areas to be developed east of the lagoon that splits Lagos into two main halves: the Island and the Mainland. It receives a large portion of urban commuters daily, especially those entering Lagos Island for work. Obalende plays a critical role in the cycle of material reuse across the city. The life of a danfo does not end at retirement; it continues through a vast network of informal markets and recyclers that sustain entire communities. Their metal parts are either repurposed to fix other buses or sold as scrap at markets such as Owode Onirin. Located about 25km away on the Lagos Mainland, Owode Onirin, which means ‘money iron market’ in Yoruba, is a major hub for recycled metals. Waste collectors scour the city’s demolition sites for brass and mild steel; they find copper, bronze and aluminium in discarded vehicles. These materials are then processed and sold to companies such as African Foundries and Nigerian Foundries, as well as to local smiths who transform them into building parts, moulds and decorative objects. Sorters, welders and artisans form the backbone of this circular micro‑economy. Their labour breathes new life into discarded matter.  Lagos has a State Waste Management Authority, but it is fraught with politicking and inefficient in managing the city’s complex waste cycle. In the absence of intelligent state strategies, it falls on people to engineer solutions. They add armatures, build networks and modulate the static thresholds and borders imposed by the state. Today, these techniques and intelligences, born out of scarcity, are collectively labelled ‘informality’, a term that flattens their ingenuity.  Across the streets of Obalende and around its central roundabout, kiosks and pop‑up shops dominate the landscape. Most are constructed from materials such as timber reclaimed from collapsed buildings or fallen fascias, along with salvaged tarpaulins. Stones and concrete blocks found at demolition sites are moulded into anchors using discarded plastic paint buckets, serving as bases for umbrellas offering relief from the scorching Lagos sun. To anticipate flash flooding, many structures are raised slightly above ground on short stilts. Space, which is in short supply, is creatively repurposed to serve different functions at various times of the day; a single location might host breakfast vendors in the morning, fruit sellers in the afternoon and medicine hawkers at night. Due to its proximity to the city centre, Obalende experiences constant population shifts. Most entering the city at this node have no means of livelihood and often become salvagers. Under the curling ends of the Third Mainland Bridge, for example, a community of migrants gathers, surviving by scavenging motor parts, sometimes from old danfos, zinc roofing sheets and other materials of meagre value. Discarded mattresses, bedding and mosquito nets are repurposed as shelter beneath the noisy overpass, which becomes both workplace and home. In the absence of supportive state frameworks, communities like those in Obalende create micro‑responses to urban precarity. Their fluid, multifunctional spaces are adaptive and resilient architectures resulting from necessity, survival and material intelligence.  ‘Informality as a way of life is inherently circular in its use of space and materials’ In Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria and one of the most populated in Africa, two thirds of the population live on less than US$1 a day, according to Amnesty International. This speaks not only to income levels but to multidimensional poverty. Unlike global cities such as Mumbai, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro, where poorer demographics are largely confined to specific neighbourhoods at the margins, informality in Lagos is not peripheral but integral to how the city functions, defying the rigid thresholds and boundaries of formal urban planning.  Across Lagos, self‑sustaining circular economies flourish. Orile, a metal market located on the mainland, is one of the sites where discarded metals from sites in Lagos can be sold as part of a recycling system. Further out in the suburbs of Lagos, also on the mainland, is the Katangua Market, which is the biggest second‑hand clothes market in the city. In Nigeria’s largest hardware technology hub, Computer Village, just south of Lagos in Ikeja, used electrical and electronic equipment (UEEE) is sold for parts. A TRT World report notes that about 18,300 tonnes of UEEE arrive in Nigeria annually – although the number varies in other studies to as much as 54,000 tonnes smuggled in – with the majority coming from Europe, closely followed by the US and China.  Computer Village evolved into a dense network of shops, stalls and kiosks between 1998 and 2000, just before Nigeria adopted early digital cellular network technology. The market sits just minutes from the local airport and the Ikeja High Court, but its edges are fluid, spilling out from the Ikeja Underbridge. Over time, formal plots have dissolved into an evolving mesh of trade; the streets are lined with kiosks and carts, built from repurposed plywood, corrugated metal and tarpaulin, that come and go. Space is not owned but claimed, temporarily held, sublet and reshuffled.  Today, Computer Village generates an estimated US$2 billion in annual revenue. Yet most of the shops lack permanence and are constantly at risk of demolition or displacement. In March this year, over 500 shops were demolished overnight at Owode Onirin; in 2023, shopping complexes at Computer Village were torn down in a similar way. The state has continuously announced plans to relocate Computer Village to Katangua Market, with demolition of parts of Katangua Market itself making way for the move in 2020. Urban development patterns in Lagos prioritise formal sectors while ignoring self‑organised makers and traders. This contributes to spatial exclusion, where such communities are often under threat of eviction and relocation.  Discarded devices eventually make their way to landfills. Olusosun, in the very heart of Lagos, is one of Africa’s largest landfills. Over 10,000 tonnes of waste are delivered daily, and more than 5,000 scavengers live and work here, sifting through an artificial mountain of refuse in search of value: aluminium, copper, plastic, cloth. The waste stream, enlarged by the influx of used hardware and fast fashion from the global north, creates both livelihood and hazard. Recent studies have shown that most of the residents in and around the site are exposed to harmful air conditions that affect their lungs. Additionally, the water conditions around the site show infiltration of toxic substances. Scavengers have lost their lives in the process of harvesting metals from discarded electronics.  More than a landfill, Olusosun is a stage for the politics of waste in the global south. Poor regulation enables the flow of unserviceable imports; widespread poverty creates demand for cheap, second‑hand goods. The result is a fragile, and at times dangerous, ecosystem where the absence of the state makes room for informal innovation, such as space reuse and temporary architecture, material upcycling and recycling. In Olusosun, metals are often extracted, crushed and smelted through dangerous processes like open burning. Copper and gold harvested from the ashes then make their way back into products and institutions, such as the insets of bronze or aluminium in a piece of furniture that might eventually travel back to the global north. In its usual fashion, the government has promised to decommission the Olusosun site, but little has been seen in terms of an effective plan to repurpose the site under the state’s so‑called ‘advanced waste treatment initiative’. Informality as a way of life is inherently circular in its use of space and materials. It embodies adaptability, resilience and an intuitive response to economic and environmental conditions. The self‑built infrastructures in Lagos reveal the creativity and resilience of communities navigating the challenges of urban life. Now is the time for designers, policymakers and community leaders to work together and rethink urban development in a way that is more sustainable and responsive to the needs of the people who make cities thrive. The question is not whether informal economies will continue to exist, but how they can be designed into wider city planning – making them part of the solution, not the problem. Featured in the May 2025 issue: Circularity Lead image: Olympia De Maismont / AFP / Getty 2025-05-30 Reuben J Brown Share

Large projectile point made of Gray Whale bone from the Duruthy rockshelter, Landes, France, dated between 18,000 and 17,500 years ago.   CREDIT: Alexandre Lefebvre. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Prehistoric stone tools are among some of the oldest and important pieces of evidence we have of a time when our species began to evolve a higher level of intelligence. Many of these tools were also made from animal bones–including the bones of some of the biggest animals on the planet. New research finds that humans living up to 20,000 years ago may have been making tools out of whale bones. The discovery not only adds more to the story of early human tool use, but gives a glimpse into ancient whale ecology. The findings are detailed in a study published May 27 in the journal Nature Communications. “That humans frequented the seashore, and took advantage of its resources, is probably as old as humankind,” Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in France and study co-author, tells Popular Science. “There is evidence of whale scavenging at the site of Dungo 5 in Angola dating to 1 million years.” Fragment of projectile point from the cave site of Isturitz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France), made of bone from right whale or bowhead whale, dated to 17,300-16,700 years before present, curated at the Musée d’Archéologie Nationale (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France). CREDIT:  Jean-Marc Pétillon. By land and sea For our Paleolithic ancestors living in coastal areas, the sturdy bones of large whales were potentially an excellent resource for various tools. However, many prehistoric coastal archaeological sites are fragile and are at risk of rising sea levels, making reconstructing the past interactions between marine mammals and humans a challenge for scientists..   “The tools were dated between 20,000 and 16,000 years before [the] present, a period way before the invention of agriculture, and during which all human groups in the world lived a life of nomadic hunter-gatherers,” says Pétillon. “Climatically, this is the last part of the last glaciation, with a climate much colder than today.” That colder climate brought a sea level that was roughly almost 400 feet lower than it is today. With this change in sea level, we have no direct evidence of the human occupations on the shore, since the rise in sea level either wiped them out or the settlements lay buried under 300 or so feet of water.  Excavations in 2022 in the Basque cave of Isturitz, France, where several dozen whale bone objects were discovered. CREDIT: Jean-Marc Pétillon, Christian Normand. With this lack of evidence Paleolithic people have historically been viewed as inland hunters. Those living in present day western Europe would have hunted red deer, reindeer, bison, horse, and ibex. While they did hunt inland, there is a growing body of evidence from the last 20 years showing that they also took advantage of the Paleolithic seashore. “There are studies showing that people also gathered seashells, hunted seabirds, fished marine fish, etc., as a complement to terrestrial diet, and these studies were made possible because Paleolithic people carried remains of marine origin away from the seashore, into inland sites,” explains Pétillon. “Our study adds whales to the lot. It is one more contribution showing that Late Paleolithic humans also regularly frequented the seashore and used its resources.” Ancient giants In the new study, the team analyzed 83 bone tools that were excavated from sites around Spain’s Bay of Biscay and 90 additional bones uncovered from Santa Catalina Cave in Spain. They used mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating to identify which species the bones belonged to and estimate the age of  the samples.  The bones come from at least five species of large whales–sperm, fin, blue, gray, and either right whales or bowheads. The latter two species are indistinguishable using this technique. The oldest whale specimens are dated to roughly 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, representing some of the earliest known evidence of humans using the remains of whales to make tools. Some of the whale bone points themselves were over 15 inches long.  Fragment of projectile point from the rockshelter site of Duruthy (Landes, France), made of gray whale bone, dated to 17,300-16,800 years before present, curated at the Arthous Abbey Museum (Landes, France). CREDIT: A. Lefebvre. “Most of the objects made of whale bone are projectile points, part of the hunting equipment. They can be very long and thick, and were probably hafted on spear-style projectiles rather than arrows (and the use of the spearthrower is documented in this period),” says Pétillon. “The main raw material used to manufacture projectile points at that period is antler, because it is less brittle and more pliable than bone, but whale bone was preferred in certain cases probably because of its large dimensions.” The ocean’s bounty Most of these whale species identified in this study are still found in the Bay of Biscay and northeastern North Atlantic to this day. However, gray whales are now primarily limited to the North Pacific Ocean and Arctic. Additional chemical data from the tools also suggests that the feeding habits of the ancient whales were slightly different than those living today. According to the authors, this is likely due to behavioral or environmental changes. That the whales in the area have stayed relatively the same was particularly intriguing for Pétillon. “What was more surprising to me—as an archeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas—was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,” he says. “In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.” Importantly, the findings here do not imply that active whaling was occurring. The techniques at the time would not allow humans to hunt sperm, blue, or fin whales and the team believes that these populations took advantage of whale strandings to harvest the bones for tools.  “The earliest evidence of active whaling is much younger, around 6,000 [years] before present in Korea (site of Bangudae) and maybe around 5,000 before present in Europe (Neolithic sites in the Netherlands),” says Pétillon. Future studies could look at the systematic way that these ancient Atlantic Europeans systematically used the seashore and how they developed their ocean hunting techniques. 

Following last week’s sojourn to the past, the season 2 finale of The Last of Us throws us right back into the aftermath of Ellie killing Nora. If there were any doubt that her innocence has been lost, Ellie’s conversation with Dina this week confirms it. She’s numb, looking blankly into a mirror and not quite recognising who she sees in the reflection. It’s in stark contrast to the last time we saw Ellie commit such violence: in season one, when her emotions burst forth after fighting off David. Back then, she could collapse into Joel’s arms. But now she’s the protector, looking after Dina and the child she’s carrying. At least she’s the protector in theory. Because little of what Ellie decides to do next reflects that outlook.Instead, it's Jesse who must act like the responsible adult, despite barely being older than Ellie or Dina. His words of warning fall on deaf ears, as Ellie refuses to see how her mission is bringing down everyone around her. It culminates in a lesson in selflessness at a Seattle bookstore in which Jesse finally admits that he voted against going after Abby in episode 3. Young Mazino is fantastic in this moment of revelation, bringing a much-needed level of maturity and level-headedness, without ever patronising Ellie. Jesse knows her too well to know she won’t react well to being told what to do, so he gently nudges her in the right direction. Sadly, she chooses a different path.PlayEllie’s choice between avenging those she’s lost or retreating back to Jackson with those who remain echoes her decision way back in episode 2. On that Wyoming mountain, she opted to follow her heart and go after Joel, rather than helping the greater Jackson community fight the flames and infected. You’d think her journey since would’ve been an eye-opening one, but it’s clear she hasn’t learned her lesson, as the ever-strong fuel of love and hate dominate her decision making, and seemingly always will. Bella Ramsey is great in this rooftop confrontation with Jesse, displaying a sternness and personality that far outsize their stature.The dynamic between Ellie, Dina, and Jesse makes for a strong first half to the episode, but I feel the rest of the finale loses its way. We barrel along towards its horrifying centerpiece: the murders of Mel and Owen. The realisation that Mel is pregnant is undoubtedly a real sickener, compounded further by Dina’s situation and Ellie flicking through the pages of a children's book only minutes prior. But I find the choice to make her death accidental a curious one. What’s meant to represent the lowest Ellie will sink in her quest for revenge is reduced to a tragic mishap.Another example of this adaptation pulling its punches when it comes to moments of pure violence, numbing the impact of the story as a result.“We’re made to feel some sympathy for Ellie in the show’s version of this event, when really, it should be the point at which we fear her most. She should feel like a lost cause, not like a lost child stumbling into a horror movie. She can’t lie like Joel could. Not even a little white one to put Mel at ease. This moment acts in fantastic concert with the story of Eugene in last week’s episode, but it’s just nowhere near as effective in its overall execution, and another example of this adaptation pulling its punches when it comes to moments of pure violence, numbing the impact of the story as a result.Bella Ramsey is astonishing in their display of Ellie’s despair, but the scene is harmed by the speed at which their character finds herself in this situation. The episode darts from one location and set of characters to another across its final 20 minutes. We see Isaac’s armada setting off into the night, with their intentions unknown. He fully expects to die tonight, but where are they going? It’s a mystery for another time (unless you’ve played The Last of Us Part 2, of course). The moving pieces and distance covered can be a little disorientating, especially if you’re not already familiar with the game’s plot and narrative devices. We barely know Isaac, and barely know any of the people Ellie will kill. Oh, and we even see her washed up on an island before almost being dispatched with in a uniquely Seraphite manner, only to be saved by a distant alarm. It’s all over in the blink of an eye, and it feels like one too many ingredients have been tossed into the mix as we’re thrown around like Ellie in the choppy Pacific waters.We’re getting scraps of a story here, including that almost-hanging. The problem is, this is TV and viewers will have to wait many months, if not years, to see the gaps filled in, rather than the half dozen hours of game that follow in The Last of Us Part 2. I admire the decision to stick to this structure, although I do feel the main effect of the dual perspectives was to hold the reveal of Abby’s motive until the halfway point – a revelation granted to us only two episodes into this season. I wonder how much impact seeing her perspective will have when our hatred for her hasn’t been built up in quite the same way.Even Jesse’s death is done too quickly, barely giving us a moment to sit with it before the clock rewinds. Ultimately, it’s a tough one, because it’s hard to judge just how successful this part of the story is without a third season for context. A barely half-told story is hard to evaluate, but the decision to let the viewers know that we’re following the same structure as the source material is a smart one. A smash cut to black following Abby’s arrival would’ve been tantilising, but I think even more bewildering for an audience not familiar with where this story goes. Rewinding time teases a whole new side to this story, one seen through the eyes of characters we’re just getting acquainted with – and without the performances of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey to anchor it. I’m fascinated by the prospect, and eager to see Druckmann and Mazin contend with the challenge it presents.

Reallusion combines Vicon technology with industry-standard timecode support in iClone. Reallusion announces its official partnership with Vicon, enabling direct motion capture support for iClone. For the first time, Vicon systems can seamlessly connect with Motion LIVE, offering full integration of real-time, high-fidelity body capture, along with facial and hand mocap, all within one unified platform. Jeff Sheetz, founder of Monkey Chow Animation Studio, shares his experience with this powerful iClone-Vicon suite, which he believes delivers studio-quality results faster than ever before. Jeff Scheetz, Motion Capture Orlando Since leaving his role as co-founder of The Digital Animation & Visual Effect (DAVE) School, Jeff Scheetz, alongside his wife Anne, has been running Monkey Chow Animation Studio in Orlando, Florida. In 2021, they expanded into motion capture with the launch of Motion Capture Orlando, serving the theme park industry. Their work can be seen at Universal Studios and Walt Disney World, and they’ve also produced various motion capture packs for iClone and ActorCore, such as Run for Your Life, Bank Heist, and Avenging Warriors. Jeff’s team also collaborated with Actor Capture on the Netflix movie The Electric State. Key team members include senior mocap technicians Kaszmere Messbarger and Nelson Escobar. iClone and Vicon—The New Dynamic Duo One of the most exciting aspects of Jeff’s relationship with Reallusion is getting to test out cutting-edge technology before it’s officially released. When he was informed that iClone would soon support Vicon integration and timecode synchronization, it was a game-changer. Motion Capture Orlando has been using Vicon’s cameras and software since they started investing in mocap gear, but they were unable to integrate Vicon data directly into Motion LIVE until now. This breakthrough is especially significant for Jeff, as the previous workflow involved streaming Vicon data into Motion Builder for retargeting, and then moving that data into Unreal Engine. The integration of facial data, hand motion (via data gloves), and the inherent latency in this multi-step process presented challenges. Now, with iClone’s Motion LIVE, Vicon streams directly into iClone, allowing for seamless integration of face, body, and hand all within the platform. This streamlined approach reduces complexity, making it easier to execute live shows and set up production workflows. Record, Edit, and Render Previz in iClone When it comes to previz, speed and cost-effectiveness are essential. Traditional mocap workflows can be time-consuming due to the necessary exports and imports between different software tools. However, by recording directly into iClone, you can immediately start blocking shots, working out camera moves, and rendering previews. Jeff’s team recorded a few assassin chase scenes on their stage, using Motion LIVE to capture data, and the resulting iProject files served as the foundation for their productions. The quality of the capture was impressive due to starting with Vicon data. This allowed them to present high-quality previz to a director quickly. The renders included vital data on the edges, such as version info, lens used, and notes for feedback, helping the team stay organized throughout the process. From Previz to Polished Video: Cleaning and Syncing with Timecode After capturing mocap for the previz, the team performed proper data cleaning using Shogun Post (Vicon’s mocap cleaning software), and motion edits were carried out in iClone. They identified the best takes—approximately 20% of what was shot—and cleaned only those pieces. One major challenge was syncing the cleaned data, but the introduction of timecode has made this process much easier. Using the new Timecode Plugin, Jeff could instantly sync the cleaned motion data with the original timeline. By dropping the new motion (as an FBX) onto their character and selecting “Align Clip to Embedded Timecode”, iClone automatically aligned it with the original recording. This feature works not only for motion data but also for facial capture, hand data, audio, and video. Seamless Mocap Sync with Live Action This seamless integration was especially useful when creating a sitcom scene for Life with Bob! in which a live actress performed against a CGI character. Mocap actors, placed just out of frame, could improvise and interact with the CGI character. The use of a Tentacle Sync device transmitted timecode across all systems: Vicon, the Live Face app, the video camera, and sound recording devices. This made it incredibly easy to sync everything once the master shot was completed. Reshooting and Updating with Motion LIVE One of Jeff’s favorite features of this new workflow is the ability to quickly make adjustments, such as reshooting facial animation without the need for a full reshoot. Using his iPhone, he could capture just the parts that needed improvement, like the lips, while leaving other aspects of the face intact. The flexibility to isolate and reshoot specific elements is a major time-saver and enhances the overall efficiency of the production process. The New Workflow: Speed, Efficiency, and Creativity For creators using Reallusion products, the integration of Vicon with iClone opens up new possibilities for creating high-quality animated content in a fraction of the time previously required. For a more detailed insight into the workflow, please find the full article here. The new workflow allows for fast, professional results with minimal overhead. With the addition of the Timecode plugin, keeping everything aligned and organized is simple. Motion LIVE, combined with Vicon’s mocap system, empowers creators to focus on what matters most: creativity and storytelling. And after all, that’s why many of us got into animation in the first place. Brought to you by Reallusion: This article is part of the befores & afters VFX Insight series. If you’d like to promote your VFX/animation/CG tech or service, you can find out more about the VFX Insight series here. The post Pro-Level Mocap Sync: Stream Vicon in iClone for Real-Time Animation appeared first on befores & afters.

There’s a fresh wave of co-operative action-slash-shooters on the horizon, all vying for your squad’s attention and all looking decent, for the most part: ARC Raiders, FBC: Firebreak, Marathon, amongst others. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a new golden age in online co-op, so to pitch Elden Ring Nightreign as the cream of the crop, as one of 2025’s biggest games, we must be confident it has both the magic to entice players into its world and the power to make them stay.  We’ve between now and Nightreign’s worldwide release on 30th May to convince you this is the one to plump for if you’re on the fence as to which of 2025’s upcoming blockbuster co-ops to funnel your hours into. Straight off the bat, first thing to state with Elden Ring Nightreign is this is a standalone adventure. Not only do players require zero prior knowledge of Elden Ring’s expansive narrative and lore to get the best out of Nightreign but, unlike last year’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, players don’t even need to own the original title. This is a one-time purchase, not live service, no seasons, or battle passes – at least, there’s nothing officially announced at time of this feature’s creation. Instead, squads of three can jump right in and start battling away in a reimagined version of Elden Ring starting area Limgrave, rebranded here as Limveld. The premise is straightforward enough: Elden Ring Nightreign is an action survival adventure with roguelike structure. Three warriors find themselves castaway in a hostile realm, an environment lulling them in with its lush pastures and golden canopies, yet bandits, soldiers, and monsters – some cameoing out of Elden Ring, some brand-new creations cooked up by FromSoftware – stalk the landscape. The task is to kill and pillage, to scavenge the loot of your slain foe to level up during each run. Runs last three days, and this scavenging phase takes place during daytime. An ever-shrinking battle royale-style perimeter – confusingly dubbed the Night Rain, as in rain shower – channels players to the map’s centre where an end-of-day boss awaits. The clock is ticking, and as a result exploration is much less cerebral than FromSoft’s usual Souls style. Exploration is still critical mind, just done at a ramped-up pace. Supporting all the bandit slaying are subterranean caves dotted with treasure, guarded bastions harbouring documents, short environmental puzzles, and middling bosses. Should squads survive two nights in Lemveld then they’ll be transported to an arena known as the Spirit Shelter where they can put all their skills and upgrades to the test and take on one of eight pre-chosen mega bosses, known as Nightlords. If Elden Ring’s boss battles are anything to go by, these climactic showdowns at the end of a couple of days’ toil are sure to be a spectacle. Each run begins with players at level one but Nightreign’s upgrades, via discoverable runes, come quickly. In fact, levelling up in this Elden Ring spin-off is extremely fast, and to demonstrate Nightreign’s pick-up-and-play ethos adding XP to your character isn’t as arduous a task as it is in FromSoftware’s other titles. Spending runes here levels up your character whilst boosting their overall stats. There’s no time to labour over which ability to upgrade. Furthermore, each of the game’s playable heroes can wield just about every weapon; it’s their unique skills and abilities which distinguish them from each other. So, build customisation is a shade more limited compared to traditional RPG levelling up, but it is possible in the form of randomised loot which, of course, is dropped by downed enemies. Some of this loot functions passively – weapon stat buffs, elemental and physical affinities, and numerous other effects – and some is housed in breakable chests that usually contain some sort of consumable to upgrade weapon damage or similar. Progression outside of the action exists too in the form of advancing character stories. See, in between runs players return to an alternative version of the Roundtable Hold from Elden Ring and here, alongside affixing permanent runic upgrades, they’ll be able to experience a form of narrative progression for each of the game’s eight hero characters. Before we get into describing these characters in-depth, it’s worth pointing out that FromSoftware have stated that as each character’s story advances then the world of Limveld will re-shape and react in tandem. It’s incarnation upon starting the game is a mix of fixed structures and landmarks, but – to alleviate any staleness – there’ll be elements of variation in where enemies spawn and the like. As an aside, dramatic, unexpected changes can occur too: crashing meteorites, boss ambushes, and… uhm, sudden volcanoes. So, onto Elden Ring Nightreign’s cast of heroes and, yes, we’re calling them heroes as FromSoftware have clearly gone down the route that’s well established by Apex Legends and Overwatch, et cetera. Each hero in Elden Ring Nightreign is uniquely skilled, with their own abilities and combat style. Together with collectable loot and upgrades, this blend of skills across three-player teams is sure to create innumerably powerful synergies. Unlike FromSoft’s usual fayre, there isn’t ability to create or customise these characters beyond permanent upgrades and collectable outfits. As you’d expect, there’s breadth to the cast though. All info on their uniqueness is available on Bandai Namco’s website, but just know that each playable hero possesses distinct passive ability, character skill, and ultimate art, the latter being a powerful signature move. Wylder is an easy to learn tough to master hero who’s attacking and defensive capabilities are evenly balanced. Their passive ability – Sixth Sense – allows them one free respawn, presumably retaining runes that’d be dropped in any other death. Raider is tough as old boots, a powerful, armour-clad sea farer who wields humungous weapons. Ironeye is an archer with pinpoint accuracy, Recluse is the mage able to conjure powerful spells and cursed magic. Guardian is defensive, with a solid shield that can withstand the most ferocious attacks. Finally, Duchess is like the spy, nimble, swift, and evasive, with an ultimate art capable of making herself and the rest of the squad invisible. At face value, without considering any runic powerups, there’re clear strategies that Nightreign players can pursue. For example: Ironeye’s character skill marks enemy weakpoints, Raider’s retaliate skill pummels the marked enemy until they recoil, before Wylder unleashes their powerful character art onslaught stake to finish the stunned foe off. The fact that these situations will occur at breakneck speed is enticing. FromSoftware, as per reports of early demo players, haven’t reinvented the wheel when it comes to Elden Ring’s combat. Veterans of The Lands Between will feel right at home when the skirmishes commence. With scalable difficulties – another first in FromSoftware’s Souls canon – there’s the hope here that players with less finely-tuned reflexes will finally be able to enjoy the ravishing combat upon which FromSoft have made their name. Players cannot expect this to perform like a multi-player Soulslike though, no. Elden Ring Nightreign is very much its own thing, taking the macabre universe already established in its single player guises and translating it into an experience more akin to Apex Predators or – sacrilegiously perhaps – Fortnite. It’s a sure-fire winning combination, and one that has potential to elevate Elden Ring Nightreign above the pile of co-op games coming out before the end of the year.  Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Old Enemies, New Alliances: Black Ops 6 Season 04 is Here! Though he once had the chance to end Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin’s reign of terror, Adler spared his nemesis after they met at the culmination of Black Ops Cold War. Latest intel reveals Kuzmin was later captured and locked up in an Icelandic CIA black site until he might prove useful. Following the events and evidence uncovered by the deceased CIA Agent Jason Hudson, that day has come, and in an unlikely team up, Adler and team have broken Stitch out from his confinement, seeking his help to crack the codenames needed to find the Pantheon moles. With Verdansk once again an area of operations for deployment, what other plans might Stitch have in store? For now, Adler needs him to complete the mission at hand.  To succeed, the two must put their past behind them in pursuit of a new goal. Get in on the action when this stacked offering of free and premium content comes to Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6, launching in Season 04 on Thursday, May 29 at 9AM PT across all platforms. Nomenclature Note: Throughout the blog, you’ll see references to when gameplay content launches. Here are what these various suffixes mean: “Launch”: Expect to access this content immediately at the Season launch “Launch Window”: Expect to access this content between launch and up to 72 hours after launch.  “In Season”: Expect to access this content during the season, but before either the mid-season or next season arrives. “Mid-Season”: Expect to access this content at Mid-Season or later. All content timing may be subject to change. Multiplayer Content Summary Five MP Maps: Drop into Icelandic AOs with three new maps at launch including the Shutdown and Fugitive 6v6 Core maps and the Blitz Strike map. In the mid-season, party it up in Eclipse and play a reimagined Fringe. New and Returning Modes: Pick up dog tags to drain the enemy’s reserves in Team Elimination, a fun new twist on the Kill Confirmed formula. Make every bullet count with the return of One in the Chamber and get festive in the Party Ops Limited-Time Mode. Additional Equipment: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak returns from the original Black Ops, offering an explosive payload that’s guaranteed to blow the competition sky high. Season 04 Ranked Play: Challenge the best of the best, get those wins, and climb the Ranks in a new season of Multiplayer Ranked Play, with all-new rewards and bragging rights. Shutdown (Launch) Brand-New, Core, 6v6, Small-Sized Before breaking out Stitch, Adler and team first need to cut off the power to the black site prison, bringing them to a hydroelectric plant built on the rugged volcanic terrain of Iceland. Fight in and around the central building housing the now wrecked Turbine or dive down the Sluice into the Lake, its waters hugging the plant’s south end by the Transformers. Jump up by the red container to target enemies from far out or swim back onshore to reach the Atrium and Parking. Head to the north side to fight in the rugged Yard, away from the shoreline and bookended by the Pumphouse and Canteen. It’s a quick run to the Turbine from here, giving you good map coverage down the middle. If things get too hot, you can always drop down the Chute and swim your way to safety.  Fugitive (Launch) Brand-New, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Deploy to a secret CIA black site in a remote part of Iceland, the very location where Stitch has been imprisoned until Adler brings him in as an unlikely ally for an urgent operation. With the power out, Adler and his crew seize their chance to infiltrate the prison, climbing, zipping, and battling their way through the frozen compound. Upon reaching their target, Adler and Stitch strike a deal. Following the jailbreak, the alarms are blaring and warnings of a power failure light up the Cell Block. Though the area may appear smaller than expected when first glancing at the minimap, the prison’s intricate layout presents multiple levels and shortcuts to the various outside areas including the Checkpoint, Courtyard, and Recreation Yard. In the upper Cell Block, newly opened cells present the danger of ambush. Be on guard and look for ziplines for quick access to your next target. Blitz (Launch) Brand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon reinforcements race toward the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Leave the road and seek out targets over the rugged terrain of the Cliffside or move inland, ambushing enemies at the Waterfall. To approach the battle head on, move down the central Bridge, using the scattered convoy for cover. Jump down from the center to move underneath the Bridge, a great means of pivoting to a new location. Though a small map overall, Blitz’s long lanes leave room for marksmen to shine. Eclipse (Mid-Season) Brand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Stitch and the team arrive in Avalon, slipping into the shadows of an underground nightclub to discuss business. The neon lights flicker as they form a plan to break the Pantheon codenames, but the meeting is cut short when Pantheon agents storm in. Show off your best moves on the dance floor, dodging shots and flanking targets down the sides where seating offers party goers a chance to rest and order a drink from the bar. Ambush passing enemies from the DJ booth and then break through the broken façades on the walls, escaping into the halls. Fringe (Mid-Season) Remaster, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Revisit Fringe from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, reimagined for the first time ever in Black Ops 6. Attend the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery, established in an idyllic setting with several navigable buildings and the surrounding grounds. Battle along the main Road or dive into the Bar for a closer fight. Watch for sharpshooters in the upper Barn and along the Bridge and relive the thrill of trying to make it out alive through the narrow Loading route. The first half of Season 04 brings two exciting Multiplayer modes: Team Elimination and One in the Chamber. In the mid-season, loosen up in the Party Ops Limited Time Mode. Team Elimination (Launch) In this twist on Kill Confirmed, two teams are given a limited amount of lives each round as they fight to be the last surviving team. Players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill or by a teammate to deny the opposing team. Survive longer than the other team or hold the most remaining lives when the timer ends to win the round. Balance aggression and defense as you seek out enemy dog tags while preserving your life. Dig in with your teammates to counter enemy attacks and then ask for cover while you collect the droppings. Picking up tags is a great way to earn your next Scorestreak, so stay aggressive and keep up the momentum. Once your team’s life pool is drained, your remaining teammates can still revive you where you were last killed in a last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. One in the Chamber (In-Season) Another Black Ops fan-favorite mode returns as One in the Chamber shows up in Season 04! In this free-for-all mode, each Operator is given one pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Precision is king, as bullets always eliminate on impact and the only way to earn another bullet is to get an elimination. Stay cool, aim true, and preserve your lives while aiming for the highest score. UAV scans keep the action moving, so don’t try to hide. At the end of the match, the top three scoring Operators will step up to the Winner’s Circle. Party Ops (Mid-Season) Get the party started with a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season: Compete in a randomized set of party themed minigames. The player with the highest score at the end of the match wins it all. The devastating Grim Reaper Scorestreak is back from the original Black Ops, unleashing massive hits on other Operators and Scorestreaks alike. New Scorestreak Scorestreak: Grim Reaper (In-Season) Type: Lethal Score: 725 Mastery Badges: Yes Powerful semi-automatic launcher that can fire up to four rockets in one load. Wield the Grim Reaper, a quad tube loaded Launcher capable of inflicting heavy damage on enemies. Whether targeting Operators or locking on to enemy Scorestreaks, the Grim Reaper’s payload delivers a huge explosion. The weapon is lost if you’re taken out, so save it for the right moment and bring backup to ensure you have the protection needed to unleash havoc.  Season 04 Ranked Play Overview Prove you’re the very best by dedicating your Multiplayer match time to Ranked Play, using the same settings, maps, modes, and weapon restrictions used by the Call of Duty League™. Win matches to earn SR (Skill Rating) and progress through the Ranks while earning career rewards like Rank Skins and Win Challenge rewards. As usual, match wins ensure you progress through the Ranks throughout Season 04 to earn new seasonal rewards like a new Pro Issue Weapon Blueprint, Rank-themed Calling Cards, Ranked Charms, and more: Season 04 Ranked Play Rewards Get 10 Wins: “Pro Reissue AMES 85” AMES 85 Weapon Blueprint Get 100 Wins: “Ranked Season 4 – 100 Wins” Large Decal Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Calling Card Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Calling Card and Charm Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Calling Card and Charm Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Calling Card and Charm Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Calling Card and Charm Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Calling Card and Charm Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Calling Card and Charm Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Calling Card Note: Multiplayer Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. Zombies Content Summary Grief Returns! Drop into this epic 4v4 competitive battle on all maps, outlasting the opposition while securing Capture Zones to debuff and Grief your opponents. The last team still standing wins! Additional Gameplay Content: Crack open the armored undead and create area-of-effect explosions with the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, chew over the impressive effects of three new GobbleGums, and create even bigger explosions with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. New Modes and More: Unlock hidden rewards with more Dark Ops Challenges, then prepare to face down a powered-up Abomination, survive as long as you can in the Starting Room LTM, and prove your Leaderboard worth by zombie slaying for bragging rights and rewards! 4v4 competitive mode where two teams outwit and outlast each other. Capture zones to debuff enemies. No damage against other players. Respawns every third round. Available Maps: Liberty Falls, Terminus, Citadelle des Morts, The Tomb, Shattered Veil. Restricted: Wonder Weapons, GobbleGums: Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex (Season 04 GobbleGum).  Not seen since Black Ops 2, Grief returns to Zombies! This fan-favorite mode pits two teams of four against each other, with both sides vying to out-survive the other. As the battlelines are drawn between S.A.M. and Director Richtofen, each team pledges their support to one of these rivals at the start of a match, subsequently receiving handler comms support from one of them throughout the ensuing chaos. Indirect PvP Combat The action is almost immediate as both teams drop into either side of the same Grief Arena within the chosen Zombies map, and indirect PvP combat comes into effect: The two teams of four players can’t outright kill members of the enemy team, but can interact with them by body-blocking, or slowing them  by using melee, bullet-based weapons, or projectiles.  Victory Conditions: The winning team is the one that manages to “Grief” their rivals into being killed or entering a downed state. As long as one or more team members are upright, the match continues! Grief Arena Features The action is constant and can get incredibly chaotic, due in part to your proximity to your opponents and the hordes of undead encroaching on your team, thanks to the Arena being a sub-section of the main Zombies map. These are known as “Grief Arenas.” Within a Grief Arena are a variety of features: An Open Environment: Grief Arenas are clearly defined areas where any critical doors have already been opened, and the power will already have been turned on. All other Door Buys are inactive. Both teams spawn on opposite sides of the Arena, each in a group of four. Player Respawning: Any team members that are downed – provided one or more of their team are still alive – can be revived at any time, though rival teams, undead enemies, and Shock Charges can hamper this action! Additionally, a Wave Respawner triggers every third round, automatically reviving any eliminated teammates from both teams. Join In Progress: Any player not in the game can join up until Round 10 has been completed and has a small grace period to orient themselves before they’re swarmed by zombies. Additionally, if a team has won back-to-back Capture Zones (see below), join-in-progress is not available. Essence and Salvage: Unlike in Standard playlists, Salvage pickups in Grief are worth 100 Salvage, visible to all players, and can only be picked up by the first player to grab it. Zombies: Rounds will progress faster than usual and the amount of zombies per round has been increased to account for 8 players! All undead entities – except for bosses – are to be expected. If players fail to kill zombies, the round will turn. Core Mechanics: The Arsenal, Pack-a-Punch, Mystery Box, Crafting Tables, Perk machines, GobbleGum machine (with Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex restricted), Armor Wall Buys, and Der Wunderfizz machine are available in a Grief Arena where they normally reside, or in a new location if they don’t normally exist in this portion of their respective maps. Note: While the current GobbleGum restrictions are in place to keep matches dynamic yet balanced, additional restrictions may be made in the future as the developers keep an eye on game balance, similar to Ranked Play. Capture Zones: Appearing at a regular cadence during a match, these are smaller areas within a Grief Arena where players are required to stand and earn specific types of kills to trigger a Grief  on the opposing team. Plan A: Survive! Plan B: Capture Zones! Keeping your team upright and focused on undead slaying for longer than your rivals is the main plan in this mode. However, there’s an important secondary focus you need to plan for: Capturing zones and “Griefing” your rival team! Capture Zones appear at regular intervals throughout a match, and after stepping through the glowing perimeter, you and your team can secure the Zone by staying inside it and dispatching zombies. Beckon your crew into a Zone to quicken the zombie slaying, and once your kill count meets the requirement, a Grief is triggered on the opposition. Note that if neither team reaches this requirement within the countdown inside a Capture Zone, the Grief is applied to both teams. What is a Grief? It’s a temporary debuff, penalty, or negative gameplay mechanic that you can inflict on your rival team at a Capture Zone. The type of Grief is shown at the objective tracker within a Capture Zone. Here are the possible Griefs you’re aiming to inflict on your foes: Weapon Nerf: The affected players inflict considerably reduced damage to zombie enemies. Ammo Drain: All ammo-based weapons, including those stowed, receive an ammo drain with bullets or shells being removed constantly while the Grief is active. Zombie Ambush: An Elite zombie is summoned, and it solely focuses its killing power on the enemy team until either the Elite or the team are defeated, or the timer runs out. Weapon Carousel: The rival players’ weapons are randomly swapped every few seconds. Frozen: This Grief reduces the enemy players’ movement, along with frost and ice coating the characters. Griefs and Capture Zones also introduce new score types, including: Capture Zone Kill: Awarded to a player who defeated a zombie type during a successful Capture Zone completion. Capture Zone Win: Awarded to all players on a team who successfully commandeer a Capture Zone. Capture Zone Elite Kill: Awarded to a player who slays an Elite spawned in a Capture Zone. Available Grief Arenas (11 Arenas, Launch) A total of 11 different Grief Arenas are available in this mode. Here’s a list along with a brief description of the points of interest within each one: Liberty Falls Arena 1: Pump & Pay, Motor Lodge, and Fuller’s Liberty Lanes Liberty Falls Arena 2: Dark Aether Church, Cemetery, Hilltop Terminus Arena 1: Bio Lab Terminus Arena 2: Crab Island  Citadelle des Morts Arena: Courtyard, Ramparts, and Entrance Hall The Tomb Arena 1: Dig Site, Mausoleum The Tomb Arena 2: Dark Aether Nexus Shattered Veil Arena 1: Garden Pond, Lower Terrace Shattered Veil Arena 2: Upper Terrace, Shem’s Henge, Motor Court Shattered Veil Arena 3: Mansion Foyer, Overlook, East Foyer, Library Shattered Veil Arena 4: West Hallways, Southwest Balcony, Bottlery Access the following new content within all five Zombies Maps (unless otherwise stated) throughout Season 04: Dark Ops Challenges (Launch) A mysterious new set of hidden Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP are available at the start of Season 04, thanks to a fresh drop of Zombies Dark Ops Challenges. Who knows... maybe there’s even one for Grief. All further information is [[REDACTED]]. New LTM: Starting Room (Mid-Season) Inspired by the starting room in the classic “Moon” Zombies map, drop in with up to three of your Zombies crew into a more straightforward but challenging experience where you’re locked into the first zone of a map. Raptor One is gone, and those undead hordes are only getting stronger, but all doors in the initial zone are locked. Survive to the highest round you can! New LTM: Abomination Challenge (Mid-Season) Enter a warped version of Liberty Falls during this new Mid-Season Event, and hunt down an ultra-powered-up Abomination. Perhaps it’s wise to bring backup. Wreck even the most battle-hardened undead threat with the explosive power of the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, then drop even more devastating firepower on the hordes with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. There’s three new chewables, too! Ammo Mod: Shatter Blast (Launch) Available: Augments Menu, and In-Game (Pause Menu) “Bullets deal explosive damage. Each bullet has a chance to create an explosion that destroys armor.” Modify your ammunition to explode the toughened armor of certain normal and Special undead enemies. This mod also has a second benefit, creating an area-of-effect blast radius at the same time, whether any armor is shattered or not.  Due to the somewhat chaotic nature of this modification, there is a random chance of the Shatter Blast effect triggering, and it won’t happen every time you fire. Also expect a cooldown period after the effect. Note that Shatter Blast doesn’t directly affect Elite enemies (pending some Augment research!), but area-of-effect explosions can still damage them. You are wise to wrangle your undead into hordes so they’re near each other, to really inflict some damage! Shatter Blast: Major Augments Research the following Augments to further customize this Ammo Mod. Big Game Shatter Blast can be used against Elite enemies. Expect an impressively sized explosion. Blast Chain On explosion, three additional explosions occur in rapid succession. Blast Repair For every enemy that has its armor destroyed by Shatter Blast, armor health will be restored for the player. Shatter Blast: Minor Augments Blast Zone Increase the size of the explosion. Blast Boost Increase the explosion damage. Blast Wave Normal enemies are knocked down by the explosion. New GobbleGums (Launch) Crack your teeth on three new GobbleGums, available across all maps once you earn or unlock them and equip them in your GobbleGum Loadout Pack. Explosive Flourish (Epic): Reloading your weapon creates an explosion around you. GobbleGum lasts 2 minutes. Flavor Hex (Legendary): Activates a random Ultra GobbleGum. Rainburps (Whimsical): Zombies killed belch sparkly rainbow bubbles. Lasts 3 minutes. Additional Support Weapon: Grim Reaper (In-Season) Available: Rivals Event reward Salvage: 2000 Hammer away at the Crafting Table and assemble a powerful semi-automatic launcher known as the Grim Reaper, which deals out lethal damage to the undead with up to a quartet of missiles fired in one load. With a capacity to carry up to a dozen rockets, and the ability to fire them individually or as a quartet of devastation, this can level a courtyard of undead with a single launch! Unlock this Support weapon once you’ve earned it via the Rivals Event. Note: Zombies Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover a first look at events for this mode across Season 04, including the King of the Dead Leaderboard challenge! Call of Duty: Warzone Content Summary New Point of Interest: The towering skyscraper known as The Overlook comes to Downtown Verdansk, with ziplines, cranes, and an impressive interior to explore. New and Limited Time Modes: Clash mode – the massive 52v52 Verdansk Deathmatch – is back! Join 51 other Operators in a chaotic firefight to claim domination points and defeat foes. Then compete in a specially themed area of Verdansk in a match with rule-bending modifiers in Havoc Royale. And drop into Rebirth Island for a spot of Resurgence Casual human and bot combat. Doubling Down on Ranked Play: Call of Duty: Warzone doubles down – literally – with two separate Ranked Play modes; Battle Royale: Ranked (Verdansk) at launch running throughout the entire season, and the return of Ranked Play to Rebirth Island at Mid-season. New Features: Cranes and horizontal ziplines Downtown. Lobby Lockdown in The Overlook. Look up and look out!  Dominate foes with a gigantic new skyscraper point of interest, available to Operators within the vicinity of Downtown! The old tenement blocks, Burger Town, and SKN Comm tower have been demolished, and construction crews are finalizing a sprawling skyscraper that dominates the landscape! Look for a full recon tour below. Recon Tour: The Overlook As construction nears completion on this behemoth of a skyscraper (more than twice the height of any previous building within the Verdansk conurbation), it’s worth gaining a tactical advantage on this monolithic new point of interest. The Overlook Footprint: The “Diamond” and Perimeter Security Checkpoints Drop into the grounds of The Overlook, and you’ll immediately see the grounds of the new skyscraper under construction stretch in a rough diamond shape around the location of the old SKN Comm Tower. Flanked by two massive cranes, the building plot perimeter runs from the corner of the main bank, clockwise past the Post Office, passing the Rothwynn Donna building, northeast to the Museum/Art Gallery, and follows the road around to City Hall.  All the older structures (the Burger Town, low-rise tenement blocks, the building site, and the small coffee shop and bar across from the Museum) have been bulldozed in the name of progress! Perimeter Security Checkpoints Military-style security checkpoints have been set up on the corners and roads of the plot of land within the footprint of the structure. Most aren’t secure enough to impede vehicular progress, and some have ramps to allow airborne access. These serve as helpful visual cues that you’re entering the new POI, The Overlook.  Ground Level: Construction Sites Most of the groundwork around the skyscraper is in its final stages of completion, but there are plenty of barriers, fencing, canopies, and containers to use as cover in the area below each of the two giant cranes north and south of the structure. Ground Level: Restaurants Burger Town: Fans of the famous Burger Town Double Cheeseburger will be thrilled to know the fast-food chain has relocated a few meters further down the road from its previous location and is contained within the massive footprint of The Overlook. This outlet also serves as a lower entrance into the grand foyer interior of the building. Sushi Bar: Diagonally opposite the Burger Town, on the northwest side of the POI, is a small Sushi bar, within the footprint of the tower itself. Nestled in the stepped courtyard, you can quickly advance to the north crane or main lobby entrance. It’s also worth pointing out that the sight lines around this POI have significantly changed since Season 03, with much greater visibility across familiar POIs within Downtown and the surrounding districts. North and South Cranes Two huge cranes flank the north and south side of the monolith and are another way to traverse into The Overlook at great height. With five separate platforms attached to the mast to land on (two at ground, and three at height), use the vertical Ascender built into the crane’s mast and take an eight-second ascent to a platform just below the jib that extends out to the main winch, and the hoist allowing a jump to The Overlook roof. Operators who aren’t challenged by vertigo will have wild and panoramic views that extend to all of Verdansk’s POIs (except Quarry)! Both cranes are also functional, and providing you’ve found the necessary controls in the vicinity (both on and off the cranes’ superstructures), cargo on the hook block and hoist can be summoned and moved to various locations around the tower and nearby Downtown buildings, in case you or your team needs a daring lift! Zip Lines and Additional Rooftop Cover Increasing the ways you can quickly traverse and gain (or lose) great height in your tactical positioning near The Overlook exterior, zip-lines provide a diagonal route to and from the surrounding Downtown building rooftops.  Each also has a small billboard or other protective cover as you reach the zipline mechanism. Access to and from Overlook at the following locations: South: Post Office rooftop to Skydeck. West: Rothwynn Donna building rooftop to Skydeck. Northeast: Art Gallery/Museum rooftop to Skydeck. East: City Hall dome rooftop to Skydeck.  The Overlook: Entrance and Lobby Lockdown The Overlook has a substantial exterior and interior presence, mainly tiered fountains, planting, and stairs up to forecourts and shuttered entrances to the north, east, south, and west, all leading to a central interior lobby. If you find the main entrances shuttered, it means the lobby is experiencing a lockdown. Perhaps there’s a way to breach this security? Are there other ways to get in? The interior lobby has a coffee shop, mezzanine office, stairs, a variety of cover options, and other areas to investigate, not least the marginally terrifying 18-storey elevator ascenders to the northeast and southwest, and even those only get you halfway up the inside of the tower. The Overlook: Atrium and Skydeck (Interior, Exterior) Just above the midway point within The Overlook tower is a five-floor interior with exterior Skydeck. Depending on your use of ziplines, you’re able to access a large Atrium with concrete tile and planters and an abundance of plant life. Around the perimeter are rooms, stairwells, and two new elevator shafts, all enabling you to reach the exterior Skydeck. Known by some locals as the “cyclops” tower, due to this large central upper opening you can fly a helicopter through, the Skydeck features a small glass pyramid, some windswept seating, and infiltration to the floors above.  The large, rectangular holes on all four sides provide zipline access around Downtown, as well as daring helicopter maneuvers through the gaps. The ascent doesn’t end here; enter any of the four pillars holding up the roof of the skyscraper for another elevator ascender ride. The Overlook: Penthouse (Interior), Roof (Exterior) The remaining upper floors of The Overlook are nearing completion, meaning health and safety rules aren’t being observed as stringently as you’d like. Top floors up from the Skydeck is the roof. Missing windows, exterior gantries without railings, and exposed exterior ladders mean you’ll be thankful for your parachute.  Depending on which of the tower corners you’re fighting through, this offers another five floors to investigate, including rooms that are fully furnished.  These include a security and server room, a two-floor penthouse level with opulent bedroom, kitchen, and games area, and that’s before the more perturbed of Operators learn the secrets of the [[REDACTED]] room!  As well as the usual Battle Royale and Resurgence playlists across Verdansk and Rebirth Island, major modes – Clash and Battle Royale: Ranked Play – return to the game, with the intriguing Havoc Royale and the arrival of Resurgence: Ranked Play on Rebirth Island at mid-season! Clash LTM (Launch) 104 players (52v52), 15-minute matches 52v52 Team Deathmatch chaos is back in Call of Duty: Warzone! First introduced into Call of Duty: Warzone during Season Five of Black Ops Cold War back in September 2021 as a revamped version of the original “Rumble” mode, Clash is back, bigger than ever, and now includes some impressive, game-changing equipment and power-ups only available in this mode. But what is Clash Mode? This is Team Deathmatch and Domination on a massive scale! Overview, Win Conditions, and Scoring This action-packed team-based mode takes place in and around a specific POI within Verdansk, and pits two teams of 52 players (divided into 13 Quad Squads per side) against each other. With no Circle Collapse, no last stand benefit for the Survivor Perk, and your Loadouts available immediately, the plan is simple; your side needs to acquire 500 points by the end of the 15-minute time limit. These are mainly gained by slaying enemies (sometimes aided with power ups you can acquire within a match), completing contracts, and participating in the in-game Public Events, as well as the following: Scoring: 1 point per enemy elimination 2 points per enemy elimination with Double Down Power Up 5 points per Contract completed 10 points for capturing a Domination Point (Flag) 10 points for capturing a Bonus Crate or a Cash Crate Clash: Available Locations Expect Clash matches to occur across a sub-section of the main Verdansk map, incorporating several adjacent areas around the following POIs: Quarry Boneyard Farmland Promenade (East) Clash: Available Vehicles With the impetus to reach the enemy forces never more important, expect heavy use of vehicles throughout a Clash Match. The full complement of currently available ground and air vehicles are as follows: Heli Cargo Truck LTV (Light Tactical Vehicle) Polaris RZR Pro R 4 Available Contracts There are three available Contracts to complete in Clash Mode: Scavenger Search and Destroy Recon The Scavenger and Recon Contracts work in the same way as they do in Battle Royale Matches. In addition to the usual rewards and in-game cash, you receive five team points for each Contract completed. Search and Destroy Contracts (Clash Mode Only): Everything must go with this new contract, where one team plants a bomb on a Buy Station, and on detonation, they can earn impressive rarity weapons and items from the Buy Stations’ inventory. The other teams can defuse the bomb to earn a Fire Sale for a major discount from the Buy Stations.  Expect the Search and Destroy Contract to be available in Battle Royale, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, at Mid-Season. In-Match Events and Domination Points During a Clash match, expect several in-match Events to occur. These are like those in Battle Royale Matches, though Clash Events are timed throughout the match rather than related to the Circle Collapse. The available Events are: Domination Points Bonus Points Crates Clash Firesale Cash Crates Power Surge Domination Points Event: Up to three single capture Dom Points (flags) appear on the map, and these respawn throughout the match. Much like the Multiplayer Mode of the same name, a team that reaches and captures one of the Dom Points receives a reward; in this case, 10 team points. Bonus Points Crates Event: A cargo plane flies across the center of the map, and up to four crates are dropped. Teams are likely to head to the crates as they float to the ground, as capturing a crate awards you with 10 team points. Clash Firesale Event: For the next two minutes, all players can take advantage of a Firesale as two Portable Buy Stations are dropped into the backfield of each team (a total of four). Additionally, all loot crates are restocked and cash found in crates is also increased.  Cash Crates: Capture one (or more) of the three Cash Crates that drop during this event also nets you 10 team points. Power Surge Event: For the next two minutes, there’s an increased drop rate of Power Ups when you dispatch an enemy player or loot any ground caches. Clash Mode Gameplay Features As well as the previously mentioned new Search and Destroy Contract, Clash comes loaded with features unique to the mode. Here’s the full run-down of what to expect: Buy Stations (Clash Mode only): Expect Buy Stations to be scattered across a Clash map and roughly split between each team’s area of operations. Portable Buy Stations are also available during the Firesale In-Match Event. Here’s what you can purchase: Armor Plate: $500 Munitions Box: $1,000 Trophy System: $1,500 Counter UAV: $3,000 Sentry Turret: $3,000 Hand Cannon: $4,000 Bunker Buster: $4,000 Cluster Strike: $4,000 Precision Airstrike: $6,000 Specialist Perk: $10,000 New Field Upgrade: Door Barricade (Clash Mode at Season Launch): Control access points more easily during mid or close-quarter combat scenarios and delay enemy incursions with the Door Barricade. Fit a barricade to a close single or double door, and a heavy-duty lock attaches to (and is visible on) both sides, preventing the opening or access through the door. This is until the barricade is either removed (only by the Operator or squadmates who fitted it), or destroyed, usually by using explosives, though gunfire and melee equipment is also an option. Expect the Door Barricade to be loot in Battle Royale and Battle Royale Casual Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. New Killstreak: Hand Cannon (Clash Mode at Season Launch): This high-powered pistol Killstreak, originally available in Multiplayer during Season 01, is available in ground cache as rare loot. Expect a slow rate of fire and finite ammunition, but good handling, and improved hip fire accuracy with faster hip-fire shooting speed. Expect the Hand Cannon to be rare loot in Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. Feature: SAM Turrets (Clash Mode only): Chopper and drone pilots take note; Clash mode maps feature SAM Turrets in various tactical positions across the environment. Spend $1,500 of in-match cash to activate these anti-air missile batteries and use them up to four times to target any aircraft and drones in the area. If you’re flying in the Heli on the receiving end of a SAM barrage, now’s the time to utilize flares to counter the incoming missiles! Train (Clash Mode only): If a Clash map features a portion of the large, circular railroad track that the train travels along, then this hulking engine and loot-filled carriages are parked and available to use as added cover and looting opportunities. UAV Towers (Clash Mode only): Providing you have the $2,000 in-match cash to activate them, teams can head to and capture a few scattered UAV Towers, allowing pinging of enemy movement across the local area. Clash Mode Powerups  Clash Mode features five differently hued in-match Powerups that are automatically used when found. Available as a possible loot drop or sometimes appearing as dropped loot near the body of an eliminated enemy Operator, these Powerups are color-coded and offer temporary benefits to the Operator who grabs them. All five can be obtained in a single match and expect the frequency of available Powerups to be significantly increased if the in-match Power Surge Event activates (usually in the final stages of a match). Here’s what each of the five Clash Powerups grant you: Hunter (Red Aura): Highlights enemies and allies in red and blue respectively. Allies are visible through walls. Applies Tracker and High Alert Perks. Speed Boost (Yellow Aura): Prevents fall damage and provides approximately 20 percent speed boost to your movement. Regeneration Aura (Green Aura): Refills your health and armor at roughly 20 percent per second. Allies within a small radius around you also receive this benefit. The effect does not stack. Double Down (Blue Aura): Grants you two points per enemy Operator elimination instead of one. Kill Mag (Purple Aura): Refills your active weapon magazine after a kill and quickens your reload. Havoc Royale LTM (Mid-Season) 44 players (Quads), 15-minute matches Compete in a Call of Duty: Warzone match like no other, where rule bending modifiers twist the realities of the usual Resurgence gameplay in chaotic and game-changing ways.  Drop into a specially themed area of Verdansk with your Loadout. Every new gas circle activates a different modifier. Adapt fast to sudden changes as Havoc modifiers may impact you, the environment, and even the gameplay rules. Survive the Havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory! Expect a full rundown of this game mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Resurgence Casual (Mid-Season) 44 Players, Players & Bots Infil into Rebirth Island with your squad and commit to winning using the regular Resurgence ruleset, but with one important twist; some of your adversaries aren’t human! Whether facing down a bot or not, Resurgence Casual is a great mode to drop into whether you’re warming up, teaching a new player about the game, or you’re wanting a Resurgence match that isn’t quite as extreme as normal. As with Battle Royale Casual or Call of Duty: Warzone Bootcamp, game progression is limited in this mode and results will not count towards or against your stats. This mode also doesn’t count towards your eligibility to accessing Resurgence Ranked Play when it arrives at Mid-Season. Grind your way towards a coveted position in the Top 250 as Battle Royale: Ranked Play becomes the first of two Ranked Play variants to drop in Season 04 within Call of Duty: Warzone. Harness the competitive spirit and earn new rewards for ranking up and advancing through the Skill Divisions, unlocking the following rewards as you go: Season 04 BR Ranked Play Rewards First Season Win: Weapon Charm Get 25 Eliminations: Elimination Sticker Get 100 Eliminations: Elimination Weapon Camo Get 250 Eliminations: Elimination LR 7.62 Weapon Blueprint Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Emblem Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Emblem and Decal Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Emblem and Decal Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Emblem and Decal Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Emblem and Decal Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Emblem and Decal Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Emblem and Decal Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Emblem Ranked Play: Resurgence (Mid-Season) Trios, Rebirth Island Craving some real competition on Rebirth Island? Then squad up with your winning Trio, and attempt dominance over the very best players as Resurgence Ranked Play makes its triumphant return! Expect the same rules set you remember during the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® III era, and an expanded look at this returning, fan-favorite mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Ranked Play Notes: Battle Royale: Ranked Play (Verdansk) runs from Launch Window throughout the entirety of Season 04. Resurgence: Ranked Play (Rebirth Island) begins at Mid-Season, and runs alongside Battle Royale: Ranked Play, meaning you can play one or both Modes when they are active. The ranking is separate from Battle Royale: Ranked Play. A new Contract, Field Upgrade, Killstreak, Perk, and ATV are all set to drop into Verdansk during Season 04: Clash Mode Features Expansion (Mid-Season) After an evaluation period in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Clash Mode, expect the following new equipment to become available across additional modes at mid-season. Here’s what to expect: Contract: Search & Destroy: Battle Royale, Resurgence, Plunder. Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Hand Cannon: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, and Plunder Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Care Package (Mid-Season) Open ground loot caches for a rare chance to obtain the Care Package, a throwable Killstreak that, when lobbed, explodes into trail of smoke, after which a loadout-sized crate falls from the skies. Open this crate for a chance to obtain rare loot including rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more. New Perk: Loot Master (Mid-Season) Available only as Ground Loot during Resurgence and Plunder matches, the Loot Master Perk allows you to maximize your scavenging potential and gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches. Gain the early advantage or sustain yourself during prolonged engagements. Expect an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, a higher chance to find tacticals and lethals, more cash, and a greater chance at field upgrades, killstreaks, and other high-tier gear. ATV: Polaris Sportsman XP 1000 (Launch) Added to the vehicle pool is the Polaris Sportsman XP 1000, a real wild ride allowing you to hit the Verdansk goat trails in comfort with legendary suspension, great clearance and traction, and versatility for positioning up to three Operators on the surface of the vehicle. Compared to the current ATV, the wheelbase and size of the Sportsman XP 1000 offers more stability than ever before.  Note: Call of Duty: Warzone Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. General Content (MP, ZM, WZ) Call of Duty: General Content Summary (All Modes and Games) Weapons Detail: Five new weapons arrive in Season 04, including two at launch: the LC10 SMG and FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Later in the season, get your hands on the , Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon and Pickaxe Melee weapon, and change up your playstyle with new attachments. The Events Horizon: Season 04 is packed with Events, including Rivals, Ballerina (From the World of John Wick), and even more coming mid-season.. Plus, prove your worth across the Zombies leaderboards and become King of the Dead! Battle Pass and BlackCell: The Season 04 Battle Pass brings Stitch and brutal BlackCell Operator Omen to the forefront alongside new Weapon Blueprints, Operator Skins, Calling Cards, Finishing Moves, Emotes, and more in a mix of free and premium tiers. Free tiers include two new base weapons and the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip. Season 04 Operators: Stitch returns after being freed from prison, headlining the new Battle Pass next to the sinister Omen leading BlackCell. Plus, deploy as assassin Eve Macarro in a collaboration with Ballerina, followed by much more at the mid-season. CDL Announcements: Major IV is almost here! Find out where to watch, plus the in-game rewards you can unlock, just for tuning in! Primary Weapon: LC10 (Launch) SMG, Battle Pass Page 3, Page 14 Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 38 MAGS: 4 MAG SIZE: 34 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camos and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Full-auto submachine gun. Excellent accuracy and range, with a moderate rate of fire. Average mobility and very slow handling for its class. Returning after its debut in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the LC10 SMG spits out rounds fast coupled with good accuracy and range, moderate damage, and a quick reload to get you back into the fight. The weapon performs well off the hip or down sights, with 34 rounds in the base magazine for a hefty ammo supply. Via Gunsmith, equip a variety of improvements such as a Laser for improved hipfire spread and an updated Barrel to further extend the weapon’s respectable damage range. Primary Weapon: FFAR 1 (Launch) Assault Rifle, Battle Pass Page 6, Page 11 HVT Tier Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 42 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3).  Full-auto assault rifle. Very high rate of fire and excellent CQB power, but slower handling and mobility. Boasting a blazing fast fire rate that rivals the SMG weapon class, this bullpup Assault Rifle is designed for taking down targets fast. The somewhat unpredictable recoil favors burst fire when tackling distant targets, but once you’re locked on it’s all over for them. Supporting a variety of Underbarrel Launcher attachments, use Gunsmith to add greater versatility to the weapon. Running low on ammo? Grab an Extended Mag while you’re at it. Primary Weapon: Essex Model 07 (In-Season) Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Levels: 38 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 8 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Lever, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Lever-action marksman rifle. High damage potential. Balanced by slower rate of fire and handling. Inflict heavy critical point damage with this lever-action tactical rifle. An ideal tool for the new sheriff in town, this classic armament offers smooth handling with shots that quickly recenter after kicking up. Choose from a variety of Levers to further customize the weapon’s action, improving ADS speed, sprint to fire speed, and other movement abilities.  Special Weapon: Olympia (Mid-Season) Special, Event Reward Levels: 30 MAGS: 8 MAG SIZE: 2 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Barrel, Stock Customize Options: Skins, Camos (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Double-barrel shotgun. Very high damage and respectable range but requires frequent reloading. The double-barrel Olympia – not seen since Black Ops 3 – makes its debut in Black Ops 6, returning as a Special Weapon that makes for the perfect backup when entering tight spaces. The Olympia holds two shots at a time, each spraying multiple pellets when your Operator pulls the trigger. Light customization via the Short Barrel and Cut-Off Stock attachments gives you some control over the weapon’s playstyle, but the fundamentals remain the same: get up close and make your shots count. Fire down the sight for a tighter pellet spread or shoot off the hip to inflict damage over a wider area. Melee Weapon: Pickaxe (Mid-Season) Melee, Event Reward Levels: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: None Customize Options: Skins. One-hit kill. Medium attack speed. Short range. Without a Pickaxe, you’ll be lost in the tundra. Bring the right tool for the job when deploying to Iceland in Season 04’s Multiplayer maps, starting with this deadly Melee weapon that downs unarmored enemies with brutal severity. Though its range is short, the Pickaxe’s combination of rapid slashes and overhead swipes will keep enemies frozen in their tracks. Close the distance and say farewell. G-Grip (Launch) SMGs (except PP-19), Assault Rifles, Battle Pass Page 7 Reward Vertical foregrip with integrated laser for improved firing stability, horizontal recoil control, and tightened spread when transitioning between hipfire and aiming down sights. Beam: Blue. Blocks Laser attachments. Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod (Launch) Stryder .22 Pistol, Event Reward Convert the Stryder .22 into a 3-round burst. Drastically improves fire rate and maintains manageable gun kick but alters the weapon’s damage profile outside of the effective range. SVD Full Auto Mod (In-Season) SVD Sniper Rifle, Event Reward Convert the SVD from semi-auto to full-auto functionality, ramping up the speed of your damage output and drastically improving recoil and handling. TR2 CQB Auto Conversion (In-Season) TR2 Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Alter the TR2 Marksman Rifle to fire handgun caliber rounds, resulting in a Marksman Rifle with a compact frame and fully automatic capabilities that rival fire rates of an SMG! Stitch Returns to Action in the Season 04 Battle Pass Stitch returns to the fray, leading this season’s Battle Pass content in a shocking team up with Adler. Purchase the Season 04 Battle Pass for 1,100 COD Points or the Season 04 Battle Pass Bundle for 2,400 COD Points to immediately unlock the Instant Rewards Page of the Battle Pass, including the following items: 10% Battle Pass XP Boost The new “Supermax” Stitch Operator and “Supermax BlackCell” Stitch Operator Skin for those who purchase BlackCell The “Lock Up” Legendary Blueprint for the Feng 82 LMG The “Try Me!” Emote The “Untamable” Large Decal Start to unlock up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass The Season 04 Battle Pass includes over 110 pieces of unlockable content (excluding BlackCell) including two new Base Weapons, the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip Attachment, and several unlockable mil-sim style skins for Bailey, Payne, Grey, Caine, Brutus, Toro, Adler, Nazir, and Marshall. Stay tuned for the BlackCell, Battle Pass and Store Bundles blog prior to Season 04 launch for more details. BlackCell Offerings When the job needs to get done, summon Omen, the otherworldly Operator leading BlackCell content in Season 04. The menacing Operator and his three-headed guard dog are joined by a cast of infected, black and purple-hued Operator Skins and Weapon Blueprints earned exclusively through BlackCell. BlackCell owners can access the Season 04 Battle Pass via the exclusive BlackCell Page, instantly unlocking the following items: The “Omen” BlackCell Operator and Skin 10% XP Boost 1,100 COD Points The “Guard Dog” Companion Finishing Move The “Hellblock” Mastercraft Blueprint for the Ladra SMG The “Kill Tally” Gun Screen The “BlackCell” Clan Tag (showcased in Lobbies and Winner’s Circles) BlackCell owners get access to page after page of additional exclusive rewards within the Season 04 Battle Pass, including: Seven BlackCell-exclusive skins for Stitch (two skins), Bailey, Payne, Caine, Brutus, and Adler.  Seven BlackCell-exclusive Weapon Blueprints for the Krig C (Assault Rifle), XMG (LMG), SWAT 5.56 (Marksman Rifle), ASG-98 (Shotgun), FFAR 1 (Assault Rifle), Model L (Assault Rifle), LC10 (SMG) Over 130 item rewards (Battle Pass and BlackCell related) for those who fully complete the Season 04 BlackCell Battle Pass. As usual, players who upgrade to BlackCell after purchasing the Battle Pass will also receive back the COD Points they spent. BlackCell Daily Challenges: Players with BlackCell will receive additional Daily Challenges throughout Season 04 for Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone, giving even more chances to rake in the XP during your play sessions! BlackCell Loyalty Bonus: Players who purchased BlackCell in a previous Black Ops 6season and go on to purchase Season 04 BlackCell will earn a permanent 10% Player and Weapon XP Loyalty Bonus, up to 30% for players who purchased Season 01, Season 02, and Season 03 BlackCell! The return of Stitch signals a shift in the battles ahead, requiring new Operators to meet the demands of the intensifying conflict. Predict a swift demise for your opponents with Omen leading BlackCell, joined by Stitch at the head of the Battle Pass plus a special appearance by Eve Macarro from Ballerina. Omen (BlackCell, Crimson One, Launch) “Omen” Operator: BlackCell Instant Reward Page It’s time for lockdown. Omen is a presence who strikes fear even in the world’s most dangerous criminals, with an almost preternatural ability to keep even the most sinister prisoners in line. Stitch (Battle Pass, Rogue Black Ops, Launch) “Supermax” and “Yard Dog” Skins: Battle Pass Instant Reward Page, Battle Pass Completion Page Until recently, Stitch was assumed dead. Instead of eliminating his enemy, however, Adler sent him off to a black site prison. Now the time has come, and following a daring jailbreak, Stitch is once again free. Adler needs his help cracking the codenames that will finally lead to the Pantheon moles, but at what cost? Ballerina (Bundle, Crimson One, In-Season) Store Bundle Seeking revenge for her slain father, Eve Macarro embarks on a relentless mission against the High Table’s most feared opponents in Ballerina, the highly anticipated new action film from the World of John Wick. Deploy as the elite assassin in one of two looks in the Ballerina Bundle arriving in Season 04. Participate in a new round of scheduled Events across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Earn rewards like new weapons, special attachments, and more. Here’s a first look at the Events to come (with more announcements in the Season 04 Reloaded blog): Event: Ballerina (MP, ZM, WZ, In-Season) Activation Dates: June 5 to June 12 Total Rewards: 10 (+ One BlackCell reward) Enter the world of John Wick with the new Ballerina Event. Prove your capabilities as a supreme assassin by slaying your way across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Rewards include the new Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle and a Ballerina-themed Nunchuck Melee Blueprint for BlackCell Owners. Event: Rivals (MP, ZM, WZ, In-Season) Activation Dates: June 12 to June 26 Total Rewards: 15 (+ One BlackCell reward) Enemies become allies in the Rivals Event, when Stitch brings his code-cracking expertise to help uncover the real names of the final Pantheon moles in the CIA. The goal is simple; prove you’re the most proficient Operator by earning XP across all game modes and unlock a plethora of impressive free items. Dominate your enemies to become the first to unlock rewards including the Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod (Attachment) and Grim Reaper (Scorestreak). Events: King of the Dead, Master of Grief (Zombies, Mid-Season) Activation Dates (King of the Dead): June 26 to July 3 Activation Dates (Master of Grief): July 10 to July 17 King of the Dead: “Eliminate zombies in any Zombie mode to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Master of Grief: “Collect Essence in Grief to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Earn points by slaying all types of undead! As you’d expect, you receive more points for dispatching the harder zombie types. This, in turn, causes you to climb the Zombies leaderboard, and once the Event is over, rewards will be granted based on your leaderboard position. Everyone receives some kind of reward, but to obtain the really good stuff, it’s time to perfect your Special and Elite Zombies slaying!  Season 04 brings new Bundles to the Store, including a special crossover event with Ballerina. Get more intel in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Bundles blog arriving before launch. Tracer Pack: Ballerina Choose one of two Operator Skins for Eve, a red sequin dress as “Eve Macarro” or a sleek black professional fit as the “Ruska Rogue.” Bring light to the darkness with three Legendary Weapon Blueprints featuring High Table Coin Tracers and High Table Coin Death FX: the “Relevé” AK-74 Assault Rifle, “Plié” Saug SMG, and the “Arabesque” 9MM PM Pistol. For a snazzier elimination, take them out with the “Dance With Death” Finishing Move. Balance lethality and elegance with additional Ballerina themed content, including the “Pirouette” Emote, “Keepsake” Weapon Charm, animated “Caged Grace” Emblem, animated “Pas de Duex Calling Card, and the “Take a Bow” Loading Screen. Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke Reactive Ultra Skin Add some class to your deployments with the cel-shaded, black and greyscale “Hardboiled” Ultra Operator Skin for Weaver, accompanied by the Reactive “Lethal Inspection” AMES 85 Assault Rifle and “Personal Detective” ASG-89 Shotgun Weapon Blueprints, both featuring Noir Tracers and Ink Annihilation Death FX. For a closer finish, leap for their throats using the “Wire Cut” Finishing Move. When taking on the undead, equip the “Search Engine” Wonder Weapon skin for the Thrustodyne M23 and show off your Zombies credentials with the “Sidepiece” Weapon Charm, “Dead Noir” Weapon Sticker, “Evidence” Spray, “Greyscale” Loading Screen, and the consumable Time Out GobbleGum. Other Incoming Bundles There’s plenty more awesome new content arriving in the Season 04 Store, including the “Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt Mastercraft Ultra Skin” Bundle, featuring an electrifying Mastercraft Weapon Blueprint for the new LC10 SMG alongside a divine Ultra Operator Skin for Caine. Also incoming is the “Tracer Pack: System Breach” Bundle, and the “Tracer Pack: The Goat Ultra Skin” Bundle with a Goat Companion Finishing Move. See more of the season’s upcoming Bundles and more in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Store Bundle blog. Call of Duty League, the pinnacle of competitive Call of Duty, is bringing its fourth and final Major of the season to the DreamHack Dallas show floor. Guests with a CDL add-on ticket can watch Major IV live, where the 12 Call of Duty League teams will battle it out for the final CDL points to qualify for 2025 Call of Duty League Championship in June. Ensure you get into the action by tuning in and watching Major IV live on YouTube. Be sure to link your YouTube account with your Activision ID Account to earn some special viewership rewards (shown above). Click here for more intel. The event starts at 10:300 AM PT Friday, May 23, and continuing at 10:30 AM PT Saturday May 24 with the Finals beginning at 10:30 AM PT Sunday May 25.  Black Ops 6 is available now, and now’s definitely the time to experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of best-in-class Multiplayer, and to soak in the gory glory of an incredible round-based Zombies experience with five maps and the brand-new Grief mode! Click here to Purchase Black Ops 6. © 2025 Activision Publishing, Inc. ACTIVISION, CALL OF DUTY, CALL OF DUTY WARZONE, MODERN WARFARE, CALL OF DUTY LEAGUE, and CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS are trademarks of Activision Publishing, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. 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Look, y’all, I try to start these recaps with lighthearted jokes and gags that all of us, both lovers and haters of The Last of Us season two, can enjoy, to set a welcoming and pleasant tone before I start unleashing my critiques of a given episode. However, I don’t think I have it in me this week. I’ve been dreading writing a recap for the sixth episode of this season because it is exactly the kind of sentimental, dramatic episode of television that often captivates audiences and gets award show buzz, but it is also one of the most nauseating adaptations of the original work the show has given us yet. This is where all of showrunner Craig Mazin’s odd creative choices collide like the gnarliest 10-car pileup you’ve ever witnessed, and the result is the absolute bastardization of the most important scene in all of The Last of Us Part II.Suggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishSuggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go HigherDoing betterAlmost all of this episode is told in flashbacks that, in the game, were sprinkled throughout Ellie’s bloody quest for revenge in Seattle (and after, but we’ll get to that), but here are condensed into a single hour of television. But before we get to that, we start out with a brand new scene of a young Joel (Andrew Diaz) and Tommy (David Miranda) in their home, long before the cordyceps fungus was a concern. It’s 1983, and the younger brother tearfully tells his brother that he’s scared of their father, and that he’s going to get “the belt” whenever dad gets home from work. Joel assures Tommy that he will take the fall for whatever it was his brother did, and sends him up to his room to wait for their father alone.When J. Miller Sr. (Tony Dalton) arrives, it’s in a cop car. He walks into the kitchen and doesn’t so much as say hello to Joel, instead telling him to “talk fast” about what happened. Joel tells him he got into a fight with a pot dealer, but his father already talked to the witnesses and knows Tommy was the one buying the drugs. Joel stands firm and tells his dad he’s not going to hurt his little brother. Rather than getting the belt, Officer Miller grabs two beers out of the fridge and hands one to his son. He then tells a story about a time he shoplifted as a kid, and his father, Joel’s grandfather, broke his jaw for it.“If you know what it feels like, then why?” Joel asks. He then proceeds to justify his own abuse by saying his was “never like that,” never as bad as what his father inflicted upon him. He says he might go too far at times, but he’s doing a little better than his father did. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me,” he says as he heads back out on patrol without having laid a hand on his son, this time.So, I hate this. Depending on how cynical or charitable I’m feeling, I read this as both an uninspired explanation for Joel’s misguided, violent act of “love” at the end of season one, when he “saved” Ellie from her death at the hands of Abby’s father, the Firefly surgeon, and then lied to her about it, and a tragic reason for why he’s so hellbent on giving Ellie a better childhood, even in the apocalypse. Last of Us fans will likely run with both interpretations, but in the broader scope of the series, this previously undisclosed bit of backstory is the exact kind of shit that lets people excuse Joel’s actions and place the blame on something or someone else. This sympathetic backstory is the kind of out the show has been oddly fixated on giving viewers since season one as it tries to soften the world’s views of Joel and Ellie, even as they do horrific things to those around them. First, it was players and viewers creating their own justifications, telling themselves that the Fireflies wouldn’t have been able to distribute a vaccine anyway, or that they couldn’t be trusted with such a world-shifting resource, though Joel clearly doesn’t give a fuck about the prospect if it means Ellie’s life. Now, it will be “Joel was just perpetuating the same violence his father put on him and his brother, but at least he didn’t hurt Ellie. He’s doing better, and Ellie will in turn do better as well, and this cycle of generational trauma will eventually be broken.” What is with this show’s inability to confidently lay blame at its leads’ feet without cushioning it with endless justifications and explanations?The maddening part of this addition is that it’s much harder to just call this another overwrought Mazin embellishment because this episode is co-written by Last of Us director Neil Druckmann (who also directs the episode) and Part II narrative lead Halley Gross, alongside Mazin. I’ll never know how some of these scenes came to be, but I’ve seen what this story looks like when Mazin’s not in the room, and many of his worst tendencies are still on display, even with Druckmann and Gross writing on this episode. But I’ll be real, if I had been rewriting what is essentially my magnum opus for television, I would have fought to keep the kid gloves off. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Giving Joel even more tragic backstory to justify his actions is hardly the worst crime this episode commits.We jump forward a couple decades to the small town of Jackson, just two months after Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) settled in following season one. Joel’s putting his old smuggling skills to use to make deals with local bigot Seth (Robert John Burke). He found a bag of Legos for Seth’s grandkids, and he wants something in return. Whatever it is, he needs it by tomorrow, and he needs it in vanilla flavor. Before he goes, however, he says there’s one more thing he needs, but Seth has plenty of it, so it shouldn’t be a problem.Image: HBOJoel sneaks through his house and verifies Ellie isn’t in her room, then takes his prize out from his coat pocket: a bone. He takes it to his workshop and starts carving it into the shapes he needs to finish a woodworking project he’s been saving for this day: a refurbished tobacco sunburst acoustic guitar with a moth decal on the fretboard. The guitar’s origin is more or less the same as the game, but with a few added details like Joel carving in the moth based on one of Ellie’s sketches. It inverts the origins of Ellie’s moth tattoo, which was originally implied to have been designed based on the guitar Joel found rather than the other way around, but it’s a cute personal touch for the show to add.Joel gives the guitar a quick once-over before his work is interrupted by Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Ellie arriving with the latter loopy on painkillers. While working in town, Ellie intentionally burned off the bite mark that kicked off this whole series. She apologizes before finally passing out in her bed. As we saw in Seattle, Ellie justified this as wanting to wear long sleeves again without an infected bite mark scaring the hoes, but I still prefer the interpretation that she did this because being constantly reminded of the cure she never got to be was more painful than a chemical burn. When she wakes up, the pain has mostly subsided, which is good, because today’s not a day for pain: It’s Eli’s 15th birthday. At least, that’s what the vanilla cake Seth baked says on top. An illiterate bigot ex-cop who can’t spell “Ellie”? This is who survives in the post-apocalypse?Ellie, still a bit doped up, is unfazed, shoves a fistful of the cake into her mouth and says it’s good. Sure, queen. It’s your day, and silverware is for people who aren’t the birthday girl. One of the surprises Joel has is not edible, though. He brings the guitar into the kitchen and reminds Ellie that he promised to teach her how to play last season. Ellie wants to hear something and insists that Joel sing. He protests, but Ellie reminds him that it’s her birthday. So Joel huffs and puffs, then sits down and finally sings Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.” Well, I mean, I guess it’s a Pearl Jam song? As we went over last week, this song should not exist in the show’s timeline because the album it came from wasn’t released until 2013, and the apocalypse began 10 years earlier in the show for no real discernible reason beyond some weird Bush-era anti-terrorism hoopla in the pilot. So maybe “Future Days” is a Joel Miller original in The Last of Us? Eddie Vedder, who?Pascal’s performance, like Troy Baker’s in the game, is very understated and sweet, and sounds like a person who can’t really sing doing his best. Ellie says the impromptu song didn’t suck, and he hands her the gee-tar. She holds it in her lap and accidentally touches her bandaged arm with it. Joel tells her he understands why she burned the bite mark off, and they’re not gonna let that ruin her birthday.Sweet 16Next, we jump to one year later for Ellie’s 16th birthday. The duo is walking through a forest as Ellie tries to guess what Joel’s surprise is for her big day. He says he found whatever they’re traveling to see while on patrol, which prompts Ellie to bring up that she’s tired of working inside Jackson when she could be fighting infected alongside Joel and others. She says Jesse told her he’d train her to help expedite the process, but Joel changes the subject by asking if something is going on between the teens. Our funky little lesbian chuckles at the notion, and Joel insists he has an eye for these things. “I don’t think you do,” Ellie laughs.This interaction is pulled from The Last of Us Part II, and I love it because it says a lot about the two’s relationship. Most queer kids have stories of their parents assuming that any person of the opposite gender you’re standing near must be a potential romantic flame, and in the best case scenarios this comes from a place of ignorance rather than malice. I had always attributed Joel’s extremely off-base theory to a growing distance between the two after they made their way to Jackson, and a sort of southern dad obliviousness that’s incredibly real and also endearing. Yes, yes, Joel did terrible things, but he is also Ellie’s surrogate peepaw who wants to be part of her life, and when he’s not being a violent bastard, he has a softer side which Naughty Dog developed brilliantly, and it’s a huge part of why millions of players still stand by him after all the mass murder and deception. HBO’s show? Well...put a pin in this, we’ll get back to it.Image: HBOWe finally arrive at our destination, and it’s an abandoned museum. Right out front, Ellie finds an overgrown T-Rex statue. Immediately, she climbs up to the top, which just about gives Joel a heart attack. Standing on top of its head, she sees the museum in the distance, and Joel tells her that’s the main attraction, if she doesn’t break her neck falling off the dinosaur. Once inside, we see what Joel wanted Ellie to see: a huge exhibit dedicated to space travel. So far, Ellie has only really fueled her passion for astronomy through textbooks and sci-fi comics, so getting to see a full diorama of the solar system is a dream come true. But her real dream is to go to space. In another life, one in which a fungal infection hadn’t leveled the world, she would’ve been an astronaut going on intergalactic adventures.Joel can’t take her to space, but he can give her a chance to imagine what it was like. He walks her a bit further into the exhibit and shows her the remains of the Apollo 15 Command Module, which went to space and back in 1971. Ellie is speechless as she excitedly climbs inside, but before she gets in, Joel points out that any astronaut worthy of the title needs a helmet. He hands her a rock to break into one of the suit displays, and she picks her favorite helmet of the bunch.“How’s it smell in there?” Joel asks.“Like space...and dust,” Ellie replies.The two get inside, and Ellie starts flipping switches and narrating her space trip. However, Joel has a better idea. He pulls out an old cassette tape, and Ellie asks what’s on it. He says it took a great deal of effort to find in this fucked up world, but doesn’t answer. When Ellie puts the tape in her Walkman, Joel tells her to close her eyes as she listens. When she presses play, she doesn’t get some old world music Joel liked as a teen; instead she hears the countdown of a real orbital launch. She closes her eyes and imagines herself flying up into space. We see the spacecraft shake, the lighting change as it passes through the atmosphere, and then finally, the sun shine over her helmet as she comes back down to Earth. Joel asks if he did okay, and Ellie just lets out a flabbergasted “Are you kidding me?”Alright, yeah. This scene is still incredible, and I imagine it’ll hit even harder for newcomers who haven’t played the games because they didn’t get a similar scene in season one in which Ellie imagines playing a fighting game. Even before Joel or her first love, Riley (Storm Reid), died, Ellie was a girl in a constant state of grief. She mourns a life she never got to have as she gets nostalgic for a world whose remains she gets to rummage through while scavenging, but that she will never truly experience. Joel can’t give her the world, but he can give her the chance to imagine it, just for a little bit. Joel’s love languages are obviously acts of service and gift giving, and my guy knows how to make a grand gesture even in the apocalypse. God, I know there’s someone out there wagging their fingers about the war crimes but leave me alone, that’s fucking ohana. He’s just a baby girl trying to do nice things for his baby girl.As the two head back to Jackson, Joel says they should do trips like this more often. Ellie agrees, but then briefly stops as something catches her eye: a group of fireflies gathering in the woods. For a show that loves to just say things to the camera, it’s a nice bit of unspoken storytelling. Ellie stares at them long enough to convey that what happened at Salt Lake City still haunts her, but it’s subtle enough that a viewer who isn’t paying close attention might not catch it.Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit has a body countNow it’s time for the 17th birthday. Joel comes home with another cake, but this one spells Ellie’s name right. He heads upstairs to give it to Ellie, but hears giggling inside her bedroom and barges in without so much as a warning. He finds Ellie on her bed with Kat (Noah Lamanna), freshly tattooed, smoking weed and fooling around. Joel goes into full-blown angry dad mode and tells Kat to get out.“So all the teenage shit all at once,” he barks. “Drugs, tattoos, and sex...experimenting with girls?”Ellie says it wasn’t sex, and it certainly wasn’t an “experiment.” Joel says she doesn’t know what she’s saying and storms out.Well, homophobic Joel Miller was not on my bingo card for this show, but it’s done almost nothing but disappoint me, so maybe it should have been. As I wrote when we learned about Dina’s bigoted mother in episode four, the way The Last of Us weaves old-school homophobia into its world has far more long-standing consequences to the series’ worldbuilding than I think Mazin, and now Druckmann and Gross, considered. The more people who are shown to have carried bigotry into the apocalypse, the more it makes it odd that Dina and Ellie have no idea what Pride flags are. The more that queerness is othered in this world, the more its indiscriminate, post-apocalyptic loss of culture instead reads like a targeted one for queer people specifically. I already wrote about that enough for episode four, though, so I want to focus on what it means for Joel to dabble in active bigotry rather than exude the passive ignorance he did in The Last of Us Part II.There’s an argument to be made that adding this layer of disconnect between Joel and Ellie helps add weight to their reconciliation. If your dad has had homophobic outbursts most of his life, then starts wearing an “I love my lesbian daughter” t-shirt, that’s a feel-good story of redemption worth celebrating. However, was it necessary? Did we need Joel to become a late-in-life homophobe on top of all the other questionable things he’s done? The reason I love him asking if Ellie is interested in Jesse is that it’s a silly, light-hearted interaction. In Part II, the fact that he hasn’t picked up on her being a raging lesbian when he asks about Jesse speaks to how distant the two have become by the time she’s turned 17, and ultimately underlines that he’s a clueless dad at heart. This change for the show, however, replaces ignorance with malice, and the dynamic is entirely different. Yeah, homophobia is inherently ignorant, but Joel asking about Jesse isn’t malicious, it’s just dumb. My man is not reading the room. Here, Joel is reading the room and doesn’t like what he sees.It’s another example of the show not being willing to leave well enough alone. HBO can’t be content with all the subtle shades of grey the game provided, so it has to expound on everything, no matter how unnecessary or damaging it is for the characters. Joel is no longer just a well-meaning (albeit overbearing and violent) dad to TV viewers, he’s a well-meaning (albeit overbearing and violent) dad who also was secretly a bigot the whole time. Fuck this.Image: HBOEllie heads out to the shed in the backyard to get away for a bit. It’s dusty and full of tools, but Ellie’s got a vision and starts to move her mattress out of her room. Joel wakes up and asks what’s going on, and he says Ellie can’t move into the shed overnight because there’s no heat or running water. Ellie says she’s not sorry she smoked weed, got a tattoo, or fooled around with Kat. Rather than admit that homophobia is so 2003, Joel agrees that she should have her own space and says that he’ll spend a few days making it livable. As they put the mattress back on the bed, Joel asks to see the tattoo. It’s not quite finished, but the moth illustration is already inked over the mostly healed burn mark. He asks why she’s so fixated on moths, and she says she read they’re symbolic in dreams. Joel asks if it represents change, and Ellie, clearly not wanting to dig into what it actually means, just says it’s late to get him to leave.Ah, crap, I forgot about Gail. Hello Catherine O’Hara, I wish you were playing a less frustrating character. Joel ambushes the doctor at the local diner and asks what moths mean in dreams. Gail says moths usually symbolize death “if you believe in that shit.” When Joel seems paralyzed by the answer, Gail, annoyed, asks why he wants to know. He doesn’t answer and heads home.Ellie has wasted no time getting her shit together to start moving out. The camera lingers over some of her moth sketches, including one that reads “You have a greater purpose” in between the drawings. She grabs them and puts them in a box, but it’s clear the purpose she thought she had weighs on her mind when we see her next.All the promises at sundownThe show jumps forward two years, almost bringing us to the “present” of the show. A 19-year-old Ellie sits in her hut and rehearses a speech she wants to give Joel. She’s been thinking about his Salt Lake City story and some of the odd inconsistencies with what he told her four years ago. How were the Fireflies surprised by a group of raiders when they saw the pair from a mile away in the city? How did Joel get away from the raiders while carrying her when she was unconscious? Why haven’t they heard from any of the other supposed immune people besides her? Before she can finish her spiel, Joel knocks on her door and says her birthday present this year is that she’s finally getting to go on a patrol. All the animosity melts off of Ellie’s face and is replaced by a childlike glee. She grabs her coat and a gun, and they head out.The pair head onto what Joel describes as the safest route they’ve got so she can learn the ropes. Ellie’s clearly dissatisfied with wearing training wheels, but the two banter and scout out the area until Joel says it would be nice if they could spend more time together. Ellie hesitantly agrees, clearly once again thinking about Salt Lake City. Joel asks if she’s alright, but the conversation is derailed by a radio call informing them that Gail’s husband Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) spotted some infected and needs backup. Joel tells Ellie to head back to Jackson but she protests, reminding him that she’s not his kid, but his scouting partner. Joel realizes he’s losing time arguing, so they head out.Image: HBOAs the two scale down the side of the Jackson mountainside, they hear gunfire and infected screeches in the distance. They follow the noise and see the corpse of Eugene’s patrol partner, Adam, being dragged by his horse, but Gail’s husband is nowhere to be found. Joel leads them down the path the horse came from, and they soon find the aftermath of the scrap, and Eugene leaning up against a tree. Joel asks if he got bit, and while it seems like he considers hiding it for a moment, he shows a bite mark on his side. Joel keeps his gun trained on Eugene, who asks if he can go back to the Jackson gate to say goodbye to his wife before he turns. While Joel isn’t entertaining it, Ellie asks Eugene to hold out his hand and count to 10, and verifies that the infection hasn’t spread to his brain yet. There’s time for him to see Gail. They just need to tie him up and bring him back. Joel hesitates, then tells Ellie to go get the horses, and they’ll meet up. She starts to leave but then stops and turns to Joel with an expectant look. He sends her off with a promise that they’ll be there soon. But he’s promised her plenty of things before.Joel directs Eugene to a clearing next to a gorgeous lake. But the awe is short-lived as he realizes that Joel never had any intention of taking him back to the town to see Gail. Joel says if he has any last words for his wife, he’ll pass them along. But Eugene didn’t have anything to tell her; he just wanted to hear her last words for him.“I’m dying!” he shouts. “I’m terrified. I don’t need a view. I need Gail. To see her face, please. Please let that be the last thing I see.”Joel doesn’t relent and says that if you love someone, you can always see their face. Eugene gives in and stares off into the distance until he dissociates. Then, finally, he tells Joel that he sees her. We never hear the gun go off, but we see a flock of birds fly away from the scene.Image: HBOEllie finally arrives with the horses, and Joel merely apologizes as she stares in horror at what he’s done. He ties Eugene to one of the horses and says he’ll tell Gail just what she needs to know. Ellie is dead silent. She tearfully realizes that Joel’s promises mean nothing as they slowly make their way back to Jackson.Inside the Jackson wall, Gail cries as she stands over Eugene’s body. Joel tells her that he wanted to see her, but didn’t want to put her in danger as the cordyceps overtook him.“He wasn’t scared,” Joel says. “He was brave, and he ended it himself.”Gail hugs Joel both for her own comfort and as thanks for his kind words. But it’s all bullshit. If there’s one thing Joel is good at other than gift giving and torture, it’s lying. But Ellie is here and knows this better than she ever has, and she’s not about to let him get away with it.“That’s not what happened,” she says. “He begged to see you. He had time. Joel promised to take him to you. He promised us both. And then Joel shot him in the head.”Joel is stunned, then turns to Gail to try to explain himself, but she slaps him right across the face and tells him to get away from her.“You swore,” Ellie growls at him before walking away.For the uninitiated, this entire side story with Eugene is new for the show, and I have mixed feelings on it. It’s well acted, with Pantoliano giving us one of the season’s best performances in just a few minutes of screentime, but it’s also a very roundabout way for the show to finally create what seems like an unmendable rift between Joel and Ellie without them, you know, actually talking about what happened between them. Yes, it’s an extension of that conflict, as Ellie realizes that Joel is a liar who will do what he wants, when he wants, and anyone who feels differently will find themselves on the wrong side of a rifle or with a bogus story to justify it. But we’re not directly reckoning with what happened in Salt Lake City here. As illustrated in the first episode, Joel doesn’t even realize that Ellie’s anger is rooted in what he did to her, and he chalks the distance between them up to teen angst. If I didn’t know any better, I would also be confused as to why Ellie didn’t talk to him for nine months. My guy doesn’t even know that Ellie is on to the fact that he committed the greatest betrayal she’s ever suffered. Which makes the show’s actual unpacking of it all the more oddly paced, and dare I say, nonsensical?With one more leap forward, we finally reach something familiar from episode one. It’s New Year’s Eve, and Dina (Isabela Merced) is the life of the town’s celebration. Joel is sitting with Tommy and his family and watching Ellie from an acceptable distance. Tommy’s wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), says that her calling him a “refugee” five episodes ago was out of line, and that he’s still family and has done a lot for Jackson in the years since he and Ellie moved to the town. The sentimental moment is interrupted by Seth calling Ellie and Dina a slur for kissing in the middle of the crowd, and Joel remembers that homophobia is not it and shoves the illiterate, cake-baking, bigoted ex-cop to the ground. He quickly leaves after Ellie shouts at him for interfering, but hey, at least you decided to remember not to be a bigot yourself in your final 24 hours.Oh my god, I’m bracing myself. I have spent weeks trying to gather the words for talking about this next scene. I work with words for a living, and they usually come naturally to me. But when I first watched this scene recreated in live action, all I could do was fire off expletives as my skin crawled off my body. The tragic part is, this scene is my favorite in all of the Last of Us games. It is the foundation of everything that happens in Part II, and originally, it is only shown to you in the last five minutes, after hours of violent conquest for which the game refuses to provide neat, softening explanations. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s version of this interaction is everything that makes The Last of Us Part II work, condensed into a stunning five-minute scene of career-defining performances, sublime writing that says everything it has to without having to explain it to the viewer like they’re talking down to a child, and a devastating reveal that explains every painful thing you’ve witnessed and done in this game with heartbreaking, bittersweet clarity. I’m talking about Joel and Ellie’s final conversation before his death, and y’all, I cannot believe how badly the show tarnished this scene, and that Druckmann and Gross let it happen.Part of the issue is that the show’s version of what has become colloquially known as “The Porch Scene” not only has to bear the weight of what was originally Joel and Ellie’s final conversation, but also that it mashes the original scene together with another in such a condensed fashion that it kinda undermines the entire point of Joel and Ellie’s year of no contact. In Part II, there was an entire playable flashback dedicated to Ellie traveling back to the Salt Lake City hospital and discovering the remnants of the Firefly’s base to confirm her worst fears about what Joel had done. It’s much more straightforward than the game’s approach to driving a wedge between the characters, but maybe Mazin and co. thought it was too implausible for show audiences to buy, or they didn’t have the Salt Lake City base set to use anymore. Who’s to say? Instead, we got the Eugene subplot to serve a similar purpose, and Ellie lives with mostly certain but never confirmed suspicions that Joel lied to her about what happened at the hospital. So, on top of the two talking out the Eugene stuff, they also have to lay out the entire foundational conflict between them at once. The result is an extremely rushed revelation and reconciliation, while the show is also juggling Mazin’s overwrought annotated explainer-style writing. So the once-perfect scene is now a structural mess on top of being the show’s usual brand of patronizing.At first, Ellie walks past the back porch where Joel is playing her guitar, as we saw in episode one. Long-time fans were worried this brief moment might mean the show was going to skip this scene entirely, but it turns out that was just a bit of structural misdirection. The two stand side-by-side at the edge of the porch with their hands on the railing. They occasionally look at each other, but never outright face each other as they talk. Neither of them is quite ready to look the other in the eye just yet.Ellie asks what’s in the mug Joel’s sipping on, and he says he managed to get some coffee from some people passing through the settlement last week. My king, it is past midnight. We all have our vices, but do you think you need to be wide awake at this hour? Anyway, Ellie’s not here to scold him for his coffee habits; she’s here to set some boundaries. She says she had Seth under control, and tells Joel that she better not hear about him telling Jesse to take her off patrols again. Joel agrees to the terms, and there’s a brief, awkward silence before he asks if Dina and Ellie are girlfriends now. Ellie, clearly embarrassed, rambles about how it was only one kiss and how Dina is a notorious flirt when intoxicated, and asserts that it didn’t mean anything. Joel hears all this self-doubt and asks a new question: “But you do like her?” Ellie once again gets self-deprecating and says she’s “so stupid.” Then Joel goes into sweet dad mode.“Look, I don’t know what Dina’s intentions are, but, well, she’d be lucky to have you,” Joel says.Naughty Dog / HotoP GaminGThen Ellie says he’s “such an asshole” and gets to what she actually wants to talk about. He lied to her about Eugene and had “the same fucking look” on his face that he had when she asked about the Fireflies all those years ago. But she says she always knew, so she’s giving him one last chance to come clean. “If you lie to me again, we’re done,” she says.Then Ellie asks every question she wanted to ask on the morning Eugene died. Were there other immune people? Did raiders actually hit the Firefly base? Could they have made a cure? Did he kill the Fireflies and Marlene? For the first time, Joel gives honest answers to all of her questions, and says that making a cure would have killed Ellie, to which she says that she should have died in that hospital then. It was the purpose she felt she was missing in this fucked up world, and he took that from her. He took it from everyone.All right, so here we go. Most of what’s happened up to this point is, bar for bar, the original script. And then Pascal just...keeps talking, prattling off embellishments and clarifications in keeping with Mazin’s writing style, massacring what was once an excellent example of natural, restrained writing and conflict resolution, all so there’s no danger that the audience watching could possibly misinterpret it. Incredibly complicated characters who once spoke directly to each other without poetic flair are now spoonfeeding all the nuances to viewers like they’re in an after-school special about how to talk to your estranged family members.I’m going to type up a transcript of this interaction, bolding the dialogue that is new for the show. Take my hand, follow me.Joel: I’ll pay the price because you’re gonna turn away from me. But if somehow I had a second chance at that moment, I would do it all over again.Ellie: Because you’re selfish.Joel: Because I love you in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will, but if that should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me.Ellie: I don’t think I can forgive you for this...But I would like to try.Welp, glad that’s resolved. Ellie learned about the greatest betrayal of her life and is ready to try moving past it in all of five minutes, rather than taking a full year to sit with that pain before even considering talking to Joel again. Yeah, maybe at this point Ellie is just trying to resolve things with her surrogate father, and that’s less about one thing that transpired than it is everything they’ve been through, but it still feels like the show is rushing through the biggest point of tension these two face in favor of a secondary conflict.Besties, there are bars on my apartment windows put there by the building owners, and if they hadn’t been there, I cannot guarantee I would not have thrown myself out of my second-story home and suffered an inconvenient leg sprain watching this scene. In just a few additional lines, The Last of Us manages to turn the game’s best scene into one of the most weirdly condescending ones in the show, spelling out every nuance of Joel’s motivations, and explaining his distorted view of what love is with all the subtlety of a Disney Channel Original Movie. It’s not enough for Joel to boldly say he’s seen the fallout of what he’s done and would still have saved Ellie’s life, the show has to make sure you understand that he did it not because he’s a selfish bastard trying to replace one daughter with another like all the meanies who hate him say online, but because he loves her…while also quoting his newly-revealed abusive father. God, I can already hear Ellie likely quoting this “doing better” line when she makes a big decision at the end of Part II’s story in a hokey attempt to bring all of this full circle. I already hate it, HBO. It’s not too late to not have her quote an abusive cop when talking about her as-of-yet unborn child.Watching this scene feels like having an English teacher’s hand violently gripping my shoulder, hammering down every detail, and making sure I grasp how important the scene is. It’s somehow both lacking confidence in the moment to speak for itself while also feeling somewhat self-important, echoing how The Last of Us as a whole has been publicly presented in the past five years. Sony and HBO’s messaging around the franchise has been exhaustingly self-aggrandizing in recent years, as they’ve constantly marketed it as a cultural moment too important to be missed. That’s why it’s been remastered and repackaged more times than I care to count, and why we’ve reached peak Last of Us fatigue.The Last of Us has reached a point of self-important oversaturation that even I, a diehard fan, can’t justify. But while Sony’s marketing has often felt overbearingly self-important, that quality never felt reflected in the actual text. Here, however, the Last of Us show insists upon driving home the lessons it wants to teach so blatantly and clumsily that I once again find myself feeling that this adaptation was shaped by discourse, reacting to potential bad-faith (or just plain bad) responses in advance rather than blazing trails on its own. It knows this moment is important to fans who spent a whole game fearing Joel and Ellie parted on bad terms before his death, so it’s gotta make sure viewers, who only had to wait halfway through the story, know how significant it is, too, by laying the schmaltzy theatrics on real thick when understated sentimentality would’ve sufficed. Even the best moment in the game isn’t immune to the show’s worst tendencies.I’ve spent the whole season racking my brain about why Mazin chose to rewrite The Last of Us Part II’s dialogue this way, because the only explanations I can come up with are that he believes this to be an improvement on the source material or that he thinks the audience couldn’t follow the nuances of this story if they weren’t written out for them like in a middle school book report. But after seeing how the show butchers Joel and Ellie’s final talk, I don’t think his motivations matter anymore. The end result is the same. Even though HBO is stretching Part II’s story out for at least one or two more seasons, I don’t think there’s any coming back from this haughty dumbing down of the game’s dialogue. The Last of Us has already fumbled the landing before the story’s even halfway over. The show will continue, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a failed experiment, and it’s fucking over.Now, we’re back in the present day. As Ellie walks through a rainy Seattle back to the theater where Dina and Jesse are waiting, and we’re back in the midst of her revenge tour, I have whiplash. HBO has already shown its hand. We’re at least another season away from seeing the resolution to this entire conflict, but we already know…almost everything? We know Abby killed Joel as revenge for him killing her father. We know Ellie is so hellbent on revenge (well, that’s debatable, considering the show has drained her of that drive and given it to Dina instead) because she was denied the opportunity to truly reconcile with Joel. The show has demolished so much of its narrative runway that I don’t know what the tension is supposed to be anymore. Wondering who lives and dies? Well, fucking fine. I’ll watch the show aimlessly and artlessly recount the events of the game, knowing its ending, which feels more predictable than ever, is coming in a few years.

N=1 From birth to gene-edited in 6 months: Custom therapy breaks speed limits The N-of-1 accomplishment provides a template for swift, personalized genetic therapies. Beth Mole – May 16, 2025 2:00 pm | 58 Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD, and Penn Medicine’s Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, visiting KJ Credit: CHOP Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD, and Penn Medicine’s Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, visiting KJ Credit: CHOP Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more News broke yesterday that researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a 6-month-old baby boy, called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJ—and he would have a 50 percent chance of dying in infancy. While the gene-editing treatment isn't a complete cure, and long-term success is still uncertain, KJ's condition has improved and stabilized. And the treatment's positive results appear to be a first for personalizing gene editing. Now, who doesn't love a good story about a seemingly miraculous medical treatment saving a cute, chubby-cheeked baby? But, this story delivers more than an adorable bundle of joy; the big triumph is the striking timeline of the treatment's development—and the fact that it provides a template for how to treat other babies with ultra-rare mutations. Breakneck breakthrough The gene editing technology used for KJ is not exactly new, nor is the delivery system. CRISPR has already proven to be a successful gene therapy. What's stunning is the speed. KJ's mutation was identified within days of his birth. Within weeks, researchers were growing cells in petri dishes that carried genetic sequences copied from KJ. In month two, they used those cells to train molecular gene-editing machinery to target and correct KJ's mutation—a spot in the DNA coding for the liver enzyme where there's a T (thymine) instead of a C (cytosine). At the beginning of the third month, researchers had created genetically engineered mice that carry KJ's specific mutation, too. In the boy's fourth month, researchers were meeting with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss regulatory approval for a clinical trial—a trial where KJ would be the only participant. They were also working with the institutional review board (IRB) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to go over the clinical protocol, safety, and ethical aspects of the treatment. The researchers described the unprecedented speed of the oversight steps as being "through alternative procedures." In month five, they started toxicology testing in mice. In the mice, the experimental therapy corrected KJ's mutation, replacing the errant A-T base pair with the correct G-C pair in the animals' cells. The first dose provided a 42 percent whole-liver corrective rate in the animals. At the start of KJ's sixth month, the researchers had results from safety testing in monkeys: Their customized base-editing therapy, delivered as mRNA via a lipid nanoparticle, did not produce any toxic effects in the monkeys. A clinical-grade batch of the treatment was readied. In month seven, further testing of the treatment found acceptably low-levels of off-target genetic changes. The researchers submitted the FDA paperwork for approval of an "investigational new drug," or IND, for KJ. The FDA approved it in a week. The researchers then started KJ on an immune-suppressing treatment to make sure his immune system wouldn't react to the gene-editing therapy. Then, when KJ was still just 6 months old, he got a first low dose of his custom gene-editing therapy. “Transformational” After the treatment, he was able to start eating more protein, which would have otherwise caused his ammonia levels to skyrocket. But he couldn’t be weaned off of the drug treatment used to keep his ammonia levels down (nitrogen scavenging medication). With no safety concerns seen after the first dose, KJ has since gotten two more doses of the gene therapy and is now on reduced nitrogen scavenging medication. With more protein in his diet, he has moved from the 9th percentile in weight to 35th or 40th percentile. He's now about 9 and a half months old, and his doctors are preparing to allow him to go home from the hospital for the first time. Though he will have to be closely monitored and may still at some point need a liver transplant, his family and doctors are celebrating the improvements so far. In the past, the development of such a treatment would have taken years. But the swift and diligent response to KJ's condition led to timely treatment. The timeline and steps provide a guide for development of other customized gene therapies. KJ's treatment was presented this week at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy Annual Meeting in New Orleans. It was also simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In an accompanying editorial, Peter Marks—a former top regulator at the FDA—called KJ's  treatment a "platform technology" that could be used as a template for treating millions of others with rare genetic conditions. "The development of gene-editing products to address N-of-1 disorders with the use of mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles represents one of the most obvious opportunities for the application of a platform-technology approach that could be transformational," he wrote. In all, KJ's treatment "shows the potential strength of the application of cutting-edge science and technology with a forward-leaning regulatory approach to safely expedite the development and availability of life-saving medicines," Marks wrote. KJ's doctors agree. “Years and years of progress in gene editing and collaboration between researchers and clinicians made this moment possible, and while KJ is just one patient, we hope he is the first of many to benefit from a methodology that can be scaled to fit an individual patient’s needs," said Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a pediatrician and gene therapy expert at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania, who treated KJ. Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 58 Comments