Guided by visual effects supervisor John Knoll, ILM embraced continually evolving methodologies to craft breathtaking visual effects for the iconic space battles in First Contact and Rogue One. By Jay Stobie Visual effects supervisor John Knoll (right) confers with modelmakers Kim Smith and John Goodson with the miniature of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E during production of Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: ILM). Bolstered by visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic, Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) propelled their respective franchises to new heights. While Star Trek Generations (1994) welcomed Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) crew to the big screen, First Contact stood as the first Star Trek feature that did not focus on its original captain, the legendary James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Similarly, though Rogue One immediately preceded the events of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), it was set apart from the episodic Star Wars films and launched an era of storytelling outside of the main Skywalker saga that has gone on to include Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), The Mandalorian (2019-23), Andor (2022-25), Ahsoka (2023), The Acolyte (2024), and more. The two films also shared a key ILM contributor, John Knoll, who served as visual effects supervisor on both projects, as well as an executive producer on Rogue One. Currently, ILM’s executive creative director and senior visual effects supervisor, Knoll – who also conceived the initial framework for Rogue One’s story – guided ILM as it brought its talents to bear on these sci-fi and fantasy epics. The work involved crafting two spectacular starship-packed space clashes – First Contact’s Battle of Sector 001 and Rogue One’s Battle of Scarif. Although these iconic installments were released roughly two decades apart, they represent a captivating case study of how ILM’s approach to visual effects has evolved over time. With this in mind, let’s examine the films’ unforgettable space battles through the lens of fascinating in-universe parallels and the ILM-produced fleets that face off near Earth and Scarif. A final frame from the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). A Context for Conflict In First Contact, the United Federation of Planets – a 200-year-old interstellar government consisting of more than 150 member worlds – braces itself for an invasion by the Borg – an overwhelmingly powerful collective composed of cybernetic beings who devastate entire planets by assimilating their biological populations and technological innovations. The Borg only send a single vessel, a massive cube containing thousands of hive-minded drones and their queen, pushing the Federation’s Starfleet defenders to Earth’s doorstep. Conversely, in Rogue One, the Rebel Alliance – a fledgling coalition of freedom fighters – seeks to undermine and overthrow the stalwart Galactic Empire – a totalitarian regime preparing to tighten its grip on the galaxy by revealing a horrifying superweapon. A rebel team infiltrates a top-secret vault on Scarif in a bid to steal plans to that battle station, the dreaded Death Star, with hopes of exploiting a vulnerability in its design. On the surface, the situations could not seem to be more disparate, particularly in terms of the Federation’s well-established prestige and the Rebel Alliance’s haphazardly organized factions. Yet, upon closer inspection, the spaceborne conflicts at Earth and Scarif are linked by a vital commonality. The threat posed by the Borg is well-known to the Federation, but the sudden intrusion upon their space takes its defenses by surprise. Starfleet assembles any vessel within range – including antiquated Oberth-class science ships – to intercept the Borg cube in the Typhon Sector, only to be forced back to Earth on the edge of defeat. The unsanctioned mission to Scarif with Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and the sudden need to take down the planet’s shield gate propels the Rebel Alliance fleet into rushing to their rescue with everything from their flagship Profundity to GR-75 medium transports. Whether Federation or Rebel Alliance, these fleets gather in last-ditch efforts to oppose enemies who would embrace their eradication – the Battles of Sector 001 and Scarif are fights for survival. From Physical to Digital By the time Jonathan Frakes was selected to direct First Contact, Star Trek’s reliance on constructing traditional physical models (many of which were built by ILM) for its features was gradually giving way to innovative computer graphics (CG) models, resulting in the film’s use of both techniques. “If one of the ships was to be seen full-screen and at length,” associate visual effects supervisor George Murphy told Cinefex’s Kevin H. Martin, “we knew it would be done as a stage model. Ships that would be doing a lot of elaborate maneuvers in space battle scenes would be created digitally.” In fact, physical and CG versions of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E appear in the film, with the latter being harnessed in shots involving the vessel’s entry into a temporal vortex at the conclusion of the Battle of Sector 001. Despite the technological leaps that ILM pioneered in the decades between First Contact and Rogue One, they considered filming physical miniatures for certain ship-related shots in the latter film. ILM considered filming physical miniatures for certain ship-related shots in Rogue One. The feature’s fleets were ultimately created digitally to allow for changes throughout post-production. “If it’s a photographed miniature element, it’s not possible to go back and make adjustments. So it’s the additional flexibility that comes with the computer graphics models that’s very attractive to many people,” John Knoll relayed to writer Jon Witmer at American Cinematographer’s TheASC.com. However, Knoll aimed to develop computer graphics that retained the same high-quality details as their physical counterparts, leading ILM to employ a modern approach to a time-honored modelmaking tactic. “I also wanted to emulate the kit-bashing aesthetic that had been part of Star Wars from the very beginning, where a lot of mechanical detail had been added onto the ships by using little pieces from plastic model kits,” explained Knoll in his chat with TheASC.com. For Rogue One, ILM replicated the process by obtaining such kits, scanning their parts, building a computer graphics library, and applying the CG parts to digitally modeled ships. “I’m very happy to say it was super-successful,” concluded Knoll. “I think a lot of our digital models look like they are motion-control models.” John Knoll (second from left) confers with Kim Smith and John Goodson with the miniature of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E during production of Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: ILM). Legendary Lineages In First Contact, Captain Picard commanded a brand-new vessel, the Sovereign-class U.S.S. Enterprise-E, continuing the celebrated starship’s legacy in terms of its famous name and design aesthetic. Designed by John Eaves and developed into blueprints by Rick Sternbach, the Enterprise-E was built into a 10-foot physical model by ILM model project supervisor John Goodson and his shop’s talented team. ILM infused the ship with extraordinary detail, including viewports equipped with backlit set images from the craft’s predecessor, the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. For the vessel’s larger windows, namely those associated with the observation lounge and arboretum, ILM took a painstakingly practical approach to match the interiors shown with the real-world set pieces. “We filled that area of the model with tiny, micro-scale furniture,” Goodson informed Cinefex, “including tables and chairs.” Rogue One’s rebel team initially traversed the galaxy in a U-wing transport/gunship, which, much like the Enterprise-E, was a unique vessel that nonetheless channeled a certain degree of inspiration from a classic design. Lucasfilm’s Doug Chiang, a co-production designer for Rogue One, referred to the U-wing as the film’s “Huey helicopter version of an X-wing” in the Designing Rogue One bonus featurette on Disney+ before revealing that, “Towards the end of the design cycle, we actually decided that maybe we should put in more X-wing features. And so we took the X-wing engines and literally mounted them onto the configuration that we had going.” Modeled by ILM digital artist Colie Wertz, the U-wing’s final computer graphics design subtly incorporated these X-wing influences to give the transport a distinctive feel without making the craft seem out of place within the rebel fleet. While ILM’s work on the Enterprise-E’s viewports offered a compelling view toward the ship’s interior, a breakthrough LED setup for Rogue One permitted ILM to obtain realistic lighting on actors as they looked out from their ships and into the space around them. “All of our major spaceship cockpit scenes were done that way, with the gimbal in this giant horseshoe of LED panels we got from [equipment vendor] VER, and we prepared graphics that went on the screens,” John Knoll shared with American Cinematographer’s Benjamin B and Jon D. Witmer. Furthermore, in Disney+’s Rogue One: Digital Storytelling bonus featurette, visual effects producer Janet Lewin noted, “For the actors, I think, in the space battle cockpits, for them to be able to see what was happening in the battle brought a higher level of accuracy to their performance.” The U.S.S. Enterprise-E in Star Trek: First Contact (Credit: Paramount). Familiar Foes To transport First Contact’s Borg invaders, John Goodson’s team at ILM resurrected the Borg cube design previously seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), creating a nearly three-foot physical model to replace the one from the series. Art consultant and ILM veteran Bill George proposed that the cube’s seemingly straightforward layout be augmented with a complex network of photo-etched brass, a suggestion which produced a jagged surface and offered a visual that was both intricate and menacing. ILM also developed a two-foot motion-control model for a Borg sphere, a brand-new auxiliary vessel that emerged from the cube. “We vacuformed about 15 different patterns that conformed to this spherical curve and covered those with a lot of molded and cast pieces. Then we added tons of acid-etched brass over it, just like we had on the cube,” Goodson outlined to Cinefex’s Kevin H. Martin. As for Rogue One’s villainous fleet, reproducing the original trilogy’s Death Star and Imperial Star Destroyers centered upon translating physical models into digital assets. Although ILM no longer possessed A New Hope’s three-foot Death Star shooting model, John Knoll recreated the station’s surface paneling by gathering archival images, and as he spelled out to writer Joe Fordham in Cinefex, “I pieced all the images together. I unwrapped them into texture space and projected them onto a sphere with a trench. By doing that with enough pictures, I got pretty complete coverage of the original model, and that became a template upon which to redraw very high-resolution texture maps. Every panel, every vertical striped line, I matched from a photograph. It was as accurate as it was possible to be as a reproduction of the original model.” Knoll’s investigative eye continued to pay dividends when analyzing the three-foot and eight-foot Star Destroyer motion-control models, which had been built for A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), respectively. “Our general mantra was, ‘Match your memory of it more than the reality,’ because sometimes you go look at the actual prop in the archive building or you look back at the actual shot from the movie, and you go, ‘Oh, I remember it being a little better than that,’” Knoll conveyed to TheASC.com. This philosophy motivated ILM to combine elements from those two physical models into a single digital design. “Generally, we copied the three-footer for details like the superstructure on the top of the bridge, but then we copied the internal lighting plan from the eight-footer,” Knoll explained. “And then the upper surface of the three-footer was relatively undetailed because there were no shots that saw it closely, so we took a lot of the high-detail upper surface from the eight-footer. So it’s this amalgam of the two models, but the goal was to try to make it look like you remember it from A New Hope.” A final frame from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). Forming Up the Fleets In addition to the U.S.S. Enterprise-E, the Battle of Sector 001 debuted numerous vessels representing four new Starfleet ship classes – the Akira, Steamrunner, Saber, and Norway – all designed by ILM visual effects art director Alex Jaeger. “Since we figured a lot of the background action in the space battle would be done with computer graphics ships that needed to be built from scratch anyway, I realized that there was no reason not to do some new designs,” John Knoll told American Cinematographer writer Ron Magid. Used in previous Star Trek projects, older physical models for the Oberth and Nebula classes were mixed into the fleet for good measure, though the vast majority of the armada originated as computer graphics. Over at Scarif, ILM portrayed the Rebel Alliance forces with computer graphics models of fresh designs (the MC75 cruiser Profundity and U-wings), live-action versions of Star Wars Rebels’ VCX-100 light freighter Ghost and Hammerhead corvettes, and Star Wars staples (Nebulon-B frigates, X-wings, Y-wings, and more). These ships face off against two Imperial Star Destroyers and squadrons of TIE fighters, and – upon their late arrival to the battle – Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer and the Death Star. The Tantive IV, a CR90 corvette more popularly referred to as a blockade runner, made its own special cameo at the tail end of the fight. As Princess Leia Organa’s (Carrie Fisher and Ingvild Deila) personal ship, the Tantive IV received the Death Star plans and fled the scene, destined to be captured by Vader’s Star Destroyer at the beginning of A New Hope. And, while we’re on the subject of intricate starship maneuvers and space-based choreography… Although the First Contact team could plan visual effects shots with animated storyboards, ILM supplied Gareth Edwards with a next-level virtual viewfinder that allowed the director to select his shots by immersing himself among Rogue One’s ships in real time. “What we wanted to do is give Gareth the opportunity to shoot his space battles and other all-digital scenes the same way he shoots his live-action. Then he could go in with this sort of virtual viewfinder and view the space battle going on, and figure out what the best angle was to shoot those ships from,” senior animation supervisor Hal Hickel described in the Rogue One: Digital Storytelling featurette. Hickel divulged that the sequence involving the dish array docking with the Death Star was an example of the “spontaneous discovery of great angles,” as the scene was never storyboarded or previsualized. Visual effects supervisor John Knoll with director Gareth Edwards during production of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). Tough Little Ships The Federation and Rebel Alliance each deployed “tough little ships” (an endearing description Commander William T. Riker [Jonathan Frakes] bestowed upon the U.S.S. Defiant in First Contact) in their respective conflicts, namely the U.S.S. Defiant from Deep Space Nine and the Tantive IV from A New Hope. VisionArt had already built a CG Defiant for the Deep Space Nine series, but ILM upgraded the model with images gathered from the ship’s three-foot physical model. A similar tactic was taken to bring the Tantive IV into the digital realm for Rogue One. “This was the Blockade Runner. This was the most accurate 1:1 reproduction we could possibly have made,” model supervisor Russell Paul declared to Cinefex’s Joe Fordham. “We did an extensive photo reference shoot and photogrammetry re-creation of the miniature. From there, we built it out as accurately as possible.” Speaking of sturdy ships, if you look very closely, you can spot a model of the Millennium Falcon flashing across the background as the U.S.S. Defiant makes an attack run on the Borg cube at the Battle of Sector 001! Exploration and Hope The in-universe ramifications that materialize from the Battles of Sector 001 and Scarif are monumental. The destruction of the Borg cube compels the Borg Queen to travel back in time in an attempt to vanquish Earth before the Federation can even be formed, but Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E foil the plot and end up helping their 21st century ancestors make “first contact” with another species, the logic-revering Vulcans. The post-Scarif benefits take longer to play out for the Rebel Alliance, but the theft of the Death Star plans eventually leads to the superweapon’s destruction. The Galactic Civil War is far from over, but Scarif is a significant step in the Alliance’s effort to overthrow the Empire. The visual effects ILM provided for First Contact and Rogue One contributed significantly to the critical and commercial acclaim both pictures enjoyed, a victory reflecting the relentless dedication, tireless work ethic, and innovative spirit embodied by visual effects supervisor John Knoll and ILM’s entire staff. While being interviewed for The Making of Star Trek: First Contact, actor Patrick Stewart praised ILM’s invaluable influence, emphasizing, “ILM was with us, on this movie, almost every day on set. There is so much that they are involved in.” And, regardless of your personal preferences – phasers or lasers, photon torpedoes or proton torpedoes, warp speed or hyperspace – perhaps Industrial Light & Magic’s ability to infuse excitement into both franchises demonstrates that Star Trek and Star Wars encompass themes that are not competitive, but compatible. After all, what goes together better than exploration and hope? – Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Of all the jarring things I’ve witnessed on the National Mall, nothing will beat the image of the first thing I saw after I cleared security at the Army festival: a child, sitting at the controls of an M119A3 Howitzer, being instructed by a soldier on how to aim it, as his red-hatted parents took a photo with the Washington Monument in the background. The primary stated reason for the Grand Military Parade is to celebrate the US Army’s 250th birthday. The second stated reason is to use the event for recruiting purposes. Like other military branches, the Army has struggled to meet its enlistment quotas for over the past decade. And according to very defensive Army spokespeople trying to convince skeptics that the parade was not for Donald Trump’s birthday, there had always been a festival planned on the National Mall that day, and it had been in the works for over two years, and the parade, tacked on just two months ago, was purely incidental. Assuming that their statement was true, I wasn’t quite sure if they had anticipated so many people in blatant MAGA swag in attendance — or how eager they were to bring their children and hand them assault rifles. WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 14: An Army festival attendee holds a M3 Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle on June 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty ImagesThere had been kid-friendly events planned: an NFL Kids Zone with a photo op with the Washington Commanders’ mascot, a few face-painting booths, several rock-climbing walls. But they were dwarfed, literally, by dozens of war machines parked along the jogging paths: massive tanks, trucks with gun-mounted turrets, assault helicopters, many of them currently used in combat, all with helpful signs explaining the history of each vehicle, as well as the guns and ammo it could carry. And the families — wearing everything from J6 shirts to Vineyard Vines — were drawn more to the military vehicles, all-too-ready to place their kids in the cockpit of an AH-1F Cobra 998 helicopter as they pretended to aim the nose-mounted 3-barrelled Gatling Cannon. Parents told their children to smile as they poked their little heads out of the hatch of an M1135 Stryker armored vehicle; reminded them to be patient as they waited in line to sit inside an M109A7 self-propelled Howitzer with a 155MM rifled cannon.Attendees look at a military vehicle on display. Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBut seeing a kid’s happiness of being inside a big thing that goes boom was nothing compared to the grownups’ faces when they got the chance to hold genuine military assault rifles — especially the grownups who had made sure to wear Trump merch during the Army’s birthday party. (Some even handed the rifles to their children for their own photo ops.) It seemed that not even a free Army-branded Bluetooth speaker could compare to how fucking sick the modded AR-15 was. Attendees were in raptures over the Boston Dynamics robot dog gun, the quadcopter drone gun, or really any of the other guns available (except for those historic guns, those were only maybe cool).RelatedHowever many protesters made it out to DC, they were dwarfed by thousands of people winding down Constitution Avenue to enter the parade viewing grounds: lots of MAGA heads, lots of foreign tourists, all people who really just like to see big, big tanks. “Angry LOSERS!” they jeered at the protesters. (“Don’t worry about them,” said one cop, “they lost anyways.”) and after walking past them, crossing the bridge, winding through hundreds of yards of metal fencing, Funneling through security, crossing a choked pedestrian bridge over Constitution Ave, I was finally dumped onto the parade viewing section: slightly muggy and surprisingly navigable. But whatever sluggishness the crowd was feeling, it would immediately dissipate the moment a tank turned the corner — and the music started blasting.Americans have a critical weakness for 70s and 80s rock, and this crowd seemed more than willing to look past the questionable origins of the parade so long as the soundtrack had a sick guitar solo. An M1 Abrams tank driving past you while Barracuda blasts on a tower of speakers? Badass. Black Hawk helicopters circling the Washington Monument and disappearing behind the African-American history museum, thrashing your head to “separate ways” by Journey? Fucking badass. ANOTHER M1 ABRAMS TANK?!?!! AND TO FORTUNATE SON??!?!? “They got me fucking hooked,” a young redheaded man said behind me as the crowd screamed for the waving drivers. (The tank was so badass that the irony of “Fortunate Son” didn’t matter.)Members of the U.S. Army drive Bradley Fighting Vehicles in the 250th birthday parade on June 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. Getty ImagesWhen you listen to the hardest fucking rock soundtrack long enough, and learn more about how fucking sick the Bradley Fighting Vehicles streaming by you are (either from the parade announcer or the tank enthusiast next to you), an animalistic hype takes over you — enough to drown out all the nationwide anger about the parade, the enormity of Trump’s power grab, the fact that two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers were shot in their homes just that morning, the riot police roving the streets of LA.It helped that it didn’t rain. It helped that the only people at the parade were the diehards who didn’t care if they were rained out. And by the end of the parade, they didn’t even bother to stay for Trump’s speech, beelining back to the bridge at the first drop of rain.The only thing that mattered to this crowd inside the security perimeter — more than the Army’s honor and history, and barely more than Trump himself — was firepower, strength, hard rock, and America’s unparalleled, world-class ability to kill.See More:

The transformation of Hangzhou’s old steelworks into a park is a tribute to China’s industrial past in a city of the future The congressional hearing about Chinese AI engine DeepSeek held in the US this April has propelled Hangzhou, the heart of China’s new digital economy, to the headlines. With companies such as DeepSeek, Unitree and Alibaba – whose payment app allowed me to get on the metro without needing to buy a ticket – headquartered in Hangzhou, China’s future in AI, robotics and automation is emanating from this city. Getting off the metro in the suburban area of Gongshu, the sun was shining on an old steelworks, overgrown with vines and flowers now that it is being transformed by Jiakun Architects and TLS Landscape Architecture into the Grand Canal Steelworks Park. The unfolding trade war might help to accelerate China’s journey into an automated future, leaving the world of factories behind, yet this new public space shows an impulse to commemorate the country’s economic history, and the forces that have shaped its contemporary built environment. Starting in Hangzhou and travelling more than 1,700km to Beijing, the Grand Canal is an engineering project built 2,500 years ago to connect the different regions of eastern China. The country’s geography means rivers flow from west to east: from higher elevations, culminating in the Himalayas, to the basin that is the country’s eastern seaboard. Historically, it was difficult to transport goods from mercantile centres in the south, including Hangzhou and Suzhou, to the political centre in Beijing up north. As a civil engineering project, the Grand Canal rivals the Great Wall, but if the Great Wall aims to protect China from the outside, the Grand Canal articulates Chinese commerce from the inside. The historic waterway has been an important conduit of economic and cultural exchange, enabling the movement of people and goods such as grain, silk, wine, salt and gravel across the country. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014. The state‑owned enterprise collective was founded, and the physical facility of Hangzhou steelworks built, in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, when China strove for self‑sufficiency, and wended its way through the country’s economic trajectory: first the economic chaos of the 1960s, then the reforms and opening up in the 1980s. Steel remains an important industry today in China, home to more than half of the world’s production, but the listing of the Grand Canal enabled city leaders to move production to a new site and decommission the Hangzhou steelworks. External mandates, including entry into the World Trade Organization, the Beijing Olympics and UNESCO listings, have been instrumentalised in the country to pursue a range of internal interests, particularly economical and real estate ones.  In 2016, the factory was shut down in 150 days, in what the company describes as a ‘heroic’ effort, and the site attracted tourists of industrial ruins. In the competition brief, Hangzhou planners asked for ‘as much of the existing blast furnaces and buildings’ as possible to be preserved. When I arrived in China in 2008, Chinese cities were notorious for heritage demolition, but today urban planners and architects increasingly work to preserve historical buildings. Just like several industrial sites in Beijing and Shanghai have been transformed into major public and cultural spaces in the past decade, in the Yangtze River Delta – of which Hangzhou is a major hub – several industrial sites along the Grand Canal’s course are being given a new lease of life. Today, the three blast furnaces of Hangzhou steelworks remain, with the silhouettes of their smokestacks easily recognisable from a distance. The project preserves as much as possible of the aesthetics of a steel mill with none of the danger or dust, ready to welcome instead new community facilities and cultural programmes in a vast and restored piece of landscape. Situated in a former working‑class district that has been gentrifying and welcoming young families, the new park is becoming a popular venue for music festivals, flower viewing in springtime and year‑round picnics – when I visited, parents were teaching their children to ride a bicycle, and students from Zhejiang University, about a kilometre from the park, were having lunch on the grass. New programmes accommodated in the old coke oven and steel mills will include a series of exhibition halls and spaces welcoming a wide range of cultural and artistic workshops as well as events – the project’s first phase has just completed but tenant organisations have not yet moved in, and works are ongoing to the north of the park. On the day of my visit, a student art exhibition was on display near one of the furnaces, with works made from detritus from the site, including old packing containers. The rehabilitated buildings also provide a range of commercial units, where cafés, restaurants, shops, a bookshop, ice cream shop and a gym have already opened their doors to visitors.  Several structures were deemed structurally unsafe and required demolition, such as the old iron casting building. The architects proposed to partially reconstruct it on its original footprint; the much more open structure, built with reclaimed bricks, now houses a semi‑outdoor garden. Material choices evoke the site’s industrial past: weathered steel, exposed concrete and large expanses of glazing dominate the landscape. The widespread use of red, including in an elevated walkway that traverses the park – at times vaguely reminiscent of a Japanese torii gate in the space below – gives a warm and reassuring earthiness to the otherwise industrial colour palette. Elements selected by the designers underwent sanitisation and detoxification before being reused. The landscaping includes old machinery parts and boulders; recuperated steel panels are for instance inlaid into the paving while pipes for pouring molten steel have been turned into a fountain. The train tracks that once transported material continue to run through the site, providing paths in between the new patches of vegetation, planted with local grasses as well as Japanese maples, camphors and persimmon trees. As Jiawen Chen from TLS describes it, the aesthetic feels ‘wild, but not weedy or abandoned’. The landscape architects’ inspiration came from the site itself after the steelworks’ closure, she explains, once vegetation had begun to reclaim it. Contaminated soil was replaced with clean local soil – at a depth between 0.5 and 1.5 metres, in line with Chinese regulations. The removed soil was sent to specialised facilities for purification, while severely contaminated layers were sealed with concrete. TLS proposed phytoremediation (using plants to detoxify soil) in selected areas of the site ‘as a symbolic and educational gesture’, Chen explains, but ‘the client preferred to be cautious’. From the eastern end of the park, hiking trails lead to the mountain and its Buddhist temples. The old steel mill’s grounds fade seamlessly into the hills. Standing in what it is still a construction site, a sign suggests there will soon be a rowing centre here.  While Jiakun Architects and TLS have prioritised making the site palatable as a public space, the project also brings to life a history that many are likely to have forgotten. Throughout, the park incorporates different elements of China’s economic history, including the life of the Grand Canal and the industrial era. There is, for example, a Maoist steelworker painted on the mural of one of the cafés, as well as historical photographs and drawings of the steelworks peppering the site, framed and hung on the walls. The ambition might be in part to pay homage to steelworkers, but it is hard to imagine them visiting. Gongshu, like the other suburbs of Hangzhou, has seen rapid increases in its property prices.  The steelworks were built during the Maoist era, a time of ‘battling with earth, battling with heaven, battling with humanity’, to borrow Mao’s own words. Ordinary people melted down pots and pans to surpass the UK in steel production, and industry was seen as a sharp break from a traditional Chinese way of life, in which humans aspire to live in harmony with their environment. The priorities of the government today are more conservative, seeking to create a garden city to attract engineers and their families. Hangzhou has long represented the balmy and sophisticated life of China’s south, a land of rice and fish. To the west of the city, not far from the old steelworks, are the ecologically protected Xixi wetlands, and Hangzhou’s urban planning exemplifies the Chinese principle of 天人合一, or nature and humankind as one.  Today, Hangzhou is only 45 minutes from Shanghai by high‑speed train. The two cities feel like extensions of one another, an urban region of 100 million people. The creation of the Grand Canal Steelworks Park reflects the move away from heavy industry that Chinese cities such as Hangzhou are currently making, shifting towards a supposedly cleaner knowledge‑driven economy. Yet the preservation of the steelworks epitomises the sentimental attitude towards the site’s history and acts as a reminder that today’s middle classes are the children of yesterday’s steelworkers, drinking coffee and playing with their own children in grassy lawns next to shuttered blast furnaces.  The park’s second phase is already nearing completion, and the competition for the nearby Grand Canal Museum was won by Herzog & de Meuron in 2020 – the building is under construction, and should open at the end of this year. It is a district rich in history, but the city is resolutely turned towards the future.  2025-06-02 Reuben J Brown Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now

It’s hard to believe it’s already June, but here we are—only a few weeks away from the official start to summer. That means plenty of deals are available on outdoor essentials to get you through the long days ahead, including grill accessories, power stations, tool kits, and lawn mowers. Maybe you'd rather hang out indoors to escape the heat? Well, controllers, PS5 games, and even Apple’s latest MacBook Air are all discounted today. With Father’s Day coming up, many of these items also make great gifts for the father figures in your life. TL;DR: Deals for Today2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerLowest Price EverAnker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Lowest Price EverJBL Bar 700Fremo TP300 Portable Power StationLowest Price EverCraftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool SetThe Last of Us Part I for PS5Lowest Price of the YearPlayStation DualSenseJLab Talk Pro USB MicCuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool SetFive Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1Lowest Price EverEGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower KitLowest Price EverCharmast Portable Charger with Built in CablesBeyond these great deals, the Pokémon Destined Rivals TCG just dropped on Friday, leading a bunch of chase cards to crash. While some cards have regained value over the past couple of days, pre-order remorse is still alive and well. But whether you want to grab just a single card or a sealed pack, now might be a good time to buy. A pre-order for the Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy bundle is also available at Walmart before the launch in a couple of weeks. 2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)2025 MacBook Air (13-inch, M4)Apple’s newest MacBook Air model, which came out only a couple of months ago, already has $160 slashed off its list price, making it under $840. With it comes a powerful M4 processor offering a 10-core CPU and GPU paired with 16GB RAM for a performance boost from previous models. This laptop can zip through everyday tasks and supports Apple Intelligence. Of course, the 13-inch Liquid Retina display is stunning, but this Air model supports a dual monitor setup as well. The camera also got an upgrade this time around, as it’s now 12MP and supports Center Stage and Desk View features. SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerSteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming ControllerWhile the SteelSeries Stratus Duo Wireless Gaming Controller was already a great budget option at its starting price of $50, the $15 price tag after using the code: STEELSERIES makes it a wildly cheap gamepad. Sure, this controller won’t offer the flash and customizations of higher-end offerings, but it gets the job done with Hall Effect triggers, quality hardware, a 20+ hour battery life, and ergonomic design. Pairing with a PC is simple using the lag-free wireless dongle, and Bluetooth support is available for playing on the best gaming phones. The Last of Us Part I and II for PS5The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5The Last of Us Part I for PS5PlayStation’s Days of Play sale isn’t only happening at the PlayStation Store; plenty of other retailers, including Amazon, are getting in on the action by dropping the prices of a bunch of PlayStation products. The Last of Us Part I and Part II for PS5 are both down to the low, low price of just $30. So, get ready to join Joel and Ellie on a harrowing journey across the post-apocalyptic United States. Anker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Lowest Price EverAnker USB-C Charger (Nano 65W)Skip the hassle of having multiple charging bricks to top up devices and opt for this all-in-one solution from Anker instead. It’s an absolute steal right now at just $30, for 46% savings. It comes with two USB-C ports capable of charging speeds up to 65W, which is plenty to charge most laptops and tablets quickly, while a USB-A port is available with up to 22.5W power delivery. Just be prepared for those outputs to lower when charging three devices simultaneously. JBL Bar 700Lowest Price EverJBL Bar 700Kick your home theater setup up a notch with a new sound bar. JBL’s Bar 700 is back on sale for its lowest price ever, knocking $350 off the price tag. This audio system features a 5.1-channel soundbar and a 10-inch wireless subwoofer for a cinematic experience delivering next-level sound with booming bass. With Dolby Atmos support, you’ll be placed right in the center of the action of your favorite movies, shows, and games. The built-in Wi-Fi with AirPlay, Alexa Multi-Room Music, and Chromecast support also makes listening to your favorite music simple. Fremo TP300 Portable Power StationFremo TP300 Portable Power StationSummertime brings storms that can knock out power, and in case of emergencies, backup electricity is a must. Rather than grabbing a gas-guzzling generator, a portable power station that uses a lithium-ion battery is a simpler and safer solution for temporary outages. Fremo has an awesome power station that’s $120 off, costing just $150. It offers a 231 Wh capacity battery and five output ports for charging, including a USB-C, USB-A, AC, and car port. 300W of charging power is divided between those outputs, providing enough juice to top up phones, tablets, laptops, and cameras. It only weighs 6.2 pounds too, making it a portable option for camping trips, while the built-in flashlight ensures easier navigation of darker spaces. Craftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool SetLowest Price EverCraftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool SetLooking to grab a gift for the car lover in your life? The Craftsman VERSASTACK Mechanics Tool Set is down to its lowest price ever, costing just $99 for 50% savings. Not only do you get a massive 230-piece tool set full of all the sockets, wrenches, ratchets, and bits needed to fix up a vehicle, but you can also enjoy the peace of mind knowing you’ll enjoy the high-quality craftsmanship for years to come. It also comes with a durable 3-drawer box to keep things organized. PlayStation DualSense ControllerLowest Price of the YearPlayStation DualSenseThe controller that comes packaged with the PlayStation 5 is at its lowest price of the year, setting you back under $55 for 27% savings. This wireless gamepad is comfortable to use, compatible with a range of gaming devices, and full of reliable controls. Haptics and adaptive triggers are baked in, amplifying your playing experience further. Plus, you can remap buttons, customizing the controls to give you a leg up in certain games. JLab Talk Pro USB MicJLab Talk Pro USB MicKick your game streams up a notch, as the JLab Talk Pro USB Mic is on sale for over 77% off on Woot, making it just $34.99. This plug-and-play microphone is easy to set up and features four directional patterns. Whether you’re looking to record podcasts and music or take phone calls and do ASMR, it’ll be the perfect partner. Sound quality will even be optimized for whatever you’re recording, and the mic features volume and gain controls, ensuring you come across crystal clear. Cuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool SetCuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool SetSummer means it’s grilling season, so it’s always a good idea to have a grill tool set on hand. Right now, Cuisinart has a great deal on a high-quality set for just $23.99. The reputable brand includes all the barbecue essentials in the kit, like a spatula, grill fork, cleaning brush, and tongs. Each of the tools features a sturdy wooden handle and stainless steel for a premium look and feel, while a case is included for safe storage. If you’re on the hunt for a Father’s Day gift, it also makes a great gift for those hard-to-buy-for dads and father figures. Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1If you’re a fan of the horror video game, Five Nights at Freddy’s, a new graphic novel series from the creator, Scott Cawthon, is already discounted to the low price of just $8.90. This volume brings some horrifying and detailed comics to the story from the bestselling series Five Nights at Freddy's: Tales from the Pizzaplex, featuring the under-construction section of Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex, a Tube Maze, and some chaos. EGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower KitLowest Price EverEGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower KitIt’s lawn mowing season, and battery-powered lawn mowers are beginning to take the reign from their gas-powered counterparts. You might think that these electric mowers offer less oomph, but the EGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower Kit will prove you wrong. It’s self-propelled, has a multicut blade system, and runs for 60 minutes on a single charge. A second battery is even included, so you can keep mowing while the other battery charges. Right now, you can grab this kit for its lowest price ever, $599.99. That’s 43% off. Charmast Portable Charger with Built in CablesLowest Price EverCharmast Portable Charger with Built in CablesPortable chargers are great and all, but if you forget the right cord, they’re pretty useless. Charmast fixes this problem by offering a 10,000mAh power bank with USB-C, Lightning, and MicroUSB cables built in, so it’s ready to top off just about any device. Plus, there’s a USB-A cord for charging up the power bank. Each of the cables also has a slot for storage on the portable charger, preventing anything from getting snagged when on the go. Now is the time to buy, too, as it’s back to its lowest price, costing just under $20. Pokémon Destined Rivals Sealed Products and Single CardsDestined RivalsBooster BundleDestined RivalsBooster BoxDestined RivalsElite Trainer BoxDestined RivalsPokemon Center Elite Trainer Box (Exclusive)Destined RivalsHalf Booster Box$199.99 at TCG PlayerDestined RivalsBooster PackDestined RivalsSleeved Booster PackDestined Rivals3 Pack Blister [Zebstrika]See it at TCG PlayerDestined Rivals3 Pack Blister [Kangaskhan]Destined RivalsBuild & Battle BoxAfter the best market value on Pokémon Destined Rivals sealed products? Some great deals are available from TCG Player, as big box stores continue to hike up the prices. Cynthia's Roserade - 184/182Team Rocket's Moltres ex - 229/182Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex - 231/182Team Rocket's Murkrow - 200/182Shaymin - 185/182Ethan's Ho-Oh ex - 230/182Team Rocket's Crobat ex - 234/182Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex - 240/182Ethan's Adventure - 236/182Misty's Psyduck - 193/182Misty's Lapras - 194/182Team Rocket's Giovanni - 238/182Team Rocket's Meowth - 203/182Rotom - 197/182Ethan's Typhlosion - 190/182Hydrapple - 188/182Blaziken - 192/182Rapidash - 189/182Kangaskhan - 204/182Jamming Tower - 243/182Clamperl - 195/182Team Rocket's Houndoom - 191/182Cynthia's Garchomp ex - 241/182Levincia - 244/182Cynthia's Garchomp ex - 232/182Team Rocket's Nidoking ex - 233/182Team Rocket's Ariana - 237/182Crustle - 186/182Yanma - 183/182Arven's Mabosstiff ex - 235/182Team Rocket's Raticate - 202/182Team Rocket's Crobat ex - 242/182Team Rocket's Orbeetle - 198/182Team Rocket's Spidops - 187/182Arven's Greedent - 205/182Team Rocket's Weezing - 199/182Ethan's Ho-Oh ex - 239/182

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.) Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.) By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 

What worked in The Witcher 3 and what didn't: looking back on a landmark RPG with CD Projekt Red "We learned a lot of lessons down the road." Image credit: CD Projekt Red Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on May 31, 2025 Do you remember what you were doing when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released? It came out on 19th May 2015. I remember because I was inside CD Projekt Red at the time, trying to capture the moment for you - a moment I'm unlikely to replicate there or anywhere else. I recall sitting in the studio's canteen in the small hours of the morning, after a midnight launch event in a mall in Warsaw, chewing on a piece of cold pizza and wondering out loud what would come next for the studio, because at the time, who could know? One era was ending and another was about to begin. Would it bring the fame and fortune CD Projekt Red desired? Today, more than 60 million sales of The Witcher 3 later, we know the answer is yes. The Witcher 3 became a role-playing classic. It delivered one of the most touchable medieval worlds we've explored, a rough place of craggy rocks and craggier faces, of wonky morales and grim realities, of mud and dirtiness. And monsters, though not all were monstrous to look at. It was a world of grey, of superstition and folklore, and in it stood we, a legendary monster hunter, facing seemingly impossible odds. The Witcher 3 took fantasy seriously. But the decade since the game's release has been turbulent for CD Projekt Red. The studio launched its big new sci-fi series in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077, and though the game has now sold more than 30 million copies, making it monetarily a success, it had a nightmarish launch. The PS4 version had to be removed from sale. It brought enormous pressure, growing pains and intense scrutiny to the studio, and CD Projekt Red would spend a further three years patching and updating - and eventually releasing an expansion - before public opinion would mostly turn around. Today the studio returns to safer ground, back to The Witcher world with the new game The Witcher 4, and as we look forward to it we should also look back, to the game that catapulted the studio to fame, and see what has been learnt. The Witcher 3 is at version 4.04 today, a number that represents an enormously long period of post-release support.Watch on YouTube It all began with naivety, as perhaps any ambitious project should. It's easy to forget that 14 years ago, when The Witcher 3 was being conceived, CD Projekt Red had never made an open-world game before. The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 were linear in their approaches. It's also easy to forget that the people making the game were 14 years younger and less experienced. Back then, this was the studio's chance at recognition, so it aimed high in order to be seen. "The Witcher 3 was supposed to be this game that will end all other games," Marcin Blacha, the lead writer of the game, tells me. Simply make an open-world game that's also a story-driven game and release it on all platforms at the same time. How hard could it be? "When I'm thinking about our state of mind back in those days, the only word that comes to my mind is enthusiastic," Blacha says. "It was fantastic because we were so enthusiastic that we were full of courage. We were trying to experiment with stuff and we were not afraid. We were convinced that when we work with passion and love, it will pay off eventually." Every project has to begin somewhere and for Blacha, the person tasked with imagining the story, The Witcher 3 could only begin with Ciri, the daughter-of-sorts to The Witcher's central monster hunter character Geralt. As Blacha says, "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters." It's a decision that would have major repercussions for the rest of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red. Blacha didn't know it then, but Ciri would go on to become the protagonist of The Witcher 4. Had she not been the co-protagonist of The Witcher 3 - for you play as her in several sections during the game - who knows if things would have worked out the same way. It's an understandable progression as it is, though there is still some uncertainty among the audience about Ciri's starring role. But Ciri's inclusion came with complications, because the Ciri we see in the game is not the Ciri described in the books. That Ciri is much closer to the Ciri in the Netflix Witcher TV show, younger and more rebellious in a typical teenager way. She might be an important part of the fiction, then, but that doesn't mean she was especially well liked. "People were thinking that she's annoying," says Blacha, who grew up reading The Witcher books. CD Projekt Red, then, decided to make a Ciri of its own, aging her and making her more "flesh and bone", as Blacha puts it. He fondly recalls a moment in the game's development when reviewing the Ciri sections of the game, and saying aloud to studio director Adam Badowski how much he liked her. "I didn't know that she's going to be the protagonist of the next game," he says, "but I said to Adam Badowski, she's going to be very popular." Once Ciri had been earmarked for inclusion in The Witcher 3, the idea to have her pursued by the phantom-like force of the Wild Hunt - the members of which literally ride horses in the night sky, like Santa Claus' cursed reindeer - came shortly after. CD Projekt Red had introduced the Wild Hunt in The Witcher 2 so it made sense. The outline of the main story was then laid down as a one-page narrative treatment. Then it was expanded to a two-page treatment, a four page treatment, an eight page treatment and so on. At around 10 pages, it already had the White Orchard prologue, almost the entirety of the No Man's Land zone, and a hint of what would happen on Skellige and in Novigrad. When it was around 40 pages long, the quest design team was invited in. CD Projekt Red made their Ciri older than she is in the books. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The quest design team's job is to turn a story into a game, and this was a newly created department for The Witcher 3, created because the old way of writers designing the quests wasn't working any more. "We were struggling a bit with making sure that every written story that we have prepared is also a story that we can play well," Paweł Sasko says. He joined CD Projekt Red to be a part of that quest design team. The quest design team carves up a narrative treatment, paragraph by paragraph, and expands those into playable questlines for the game. "It's basically something between game design and a movie scenario," Sasko says. There's no dialogue, just a description of what will happen, and even a one-paragraph prompt can balloon into a 20-30 page design. Among the paragraphs Sasko was given to adapt was a storyline in No Man's Land concerning a character known as the Bloody Baron. The Bloody Baron storyline is widely acclaimed and has become synonymous with everything Sasko and CD Projekt Red were trying to do with the game. It's a storyline that probes into mature themes like domestic abuse, fatherhood, and love and loss and grief. More importantly, it presents us with a flawed character and allows us time and space to perhaps change our opinion of them. It gives us layers many other games don't go anywhere near. When Sasko first encountered the storyline, there was only an outline. "It said that Geralt meets the Bloody Baron who asks Geralt to hunt a monster and look for his wife and daughter, and for that, he is going to share information about Ciri and tell Geralt where she went. That was pretty much it." And Sasko already knew a few things about what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to show No Man's Land as a Slavic region bathed in superstitions and complex religious beliefs, one that had been ravaged by famine and war. He also knew the tone of the area was horror because this had been outlined by Blacha and the leaders of The Witcher 3 team. Says Blacha: "My opinion is that a successful Witcher game is a mix of everything, so you have a horror line, you have a romance, you have adventure, you have exploration. When we started to think about our hubs, we thought about them in terms of a show, so No Man's Land, the hub with the Bloody Baron, was horror; Skellige was supposed to be an adventure; and Novigrad was supposed to be a big city investigation." But there were key missing pieces then from the Bloody Baron sequence we know today. The botchling, for instance - the monstrous baby the quest revolves around. It didn't exist. It was an idea that came from Sasko after he read a Slavic bestiary. "Yes," he says, "the botchling idea came from me." The Bloody Baron. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red He wanted the botchling to be the conduit through which more mature themes of the story could be approached - something overt to keep you busy while deeper themes sunk in. It's an approach Sasko says he pinched from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, after deconstructing his work. "What he's doing is he's trying to find universal truths about human beings and struggles, but he doesn't tell those stories directly," Sasko says. "So for instance racism: he doesn't talk about that directly but he finds an interesting way how, in his world, he can package that and talk about it. I followed his method and mimicked it." This way the botchling becomes your focus in the quest, as the Baron carries it back to the manor house and you defend him from wraiths, but while you're doing that, you're also talking and learning more about who the Bloody Baron - who Phillip Strenger - is. "I wanted you to feel almost like you're in the shoes of that Bloody Baron," Sasko says. "Peregrination is this path in Christianity you go through when you want to remove your sins, and that's what this is meant to be. He's just trying to do it, and he's going through all of those things to do something good. And I wanted the player to start feeling like, 'Wow, maybe this dude is not so bad.'" It's a quest that leaves a big impression. An email was forwarded to Sasko after the game's release, written by a player who had lost their wife and child as the Baron once had. "And for him," he says, "that moment when Baron was carrying the child was almost like a catharsis, when he was trying so badly to walk that path. And the moment he managed to: he wrote in his letter that he broke down in tears." There's one other very significant moment in The Witcher 3 that Sasko had a large hand in, and it's the Battle of Kaer Morhern, where the 'goodies' - the witchers and the sorceresses, and Ciri - make a stand against the titular menace of the Wild Hunt. Sasko designed this section specifically to emotionally tenderise you, through a series of fast-paced and fraught battles, so that by the time the climactic moment came, you were aptly primed to receive it. The moment being Vesemir's death - the leader of the wolf school of witchers and father figure to Geralt. This, too, was Sasko's idea. "We needed to transition Ciri from being a hunted animal to becoming a hunter," he tells me, and the only event big enough and with enough inherent propulsion was Vesemir's death. Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt, breaks Vesemir's neck. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red But for all of the successful moments in the game there are those that didn't work. To the team that made the game, and to the players, there are things that clearly stand out. Such as Geralt's witcher senses, which allow him to see scent trails and footsteps and clues in the world around him. Geralt's detective mode, in other words. Sasko laughs as he cringes about it now. "We've overdone the witcher senses so much, oh my god," he says. "At the time when we were starting this, we were like, 'We don't have it in the game; we have to use it to make you feel like a witcher.' But then at the end, especially in the expansions, we tried to decrease it so it doesn't feel so overloaded." He'd even turn it down by a further 10 to 20 per cent, he says. There were all of the question marks dotted across the map, luring us to places to find meagre hidden treasure rewards. "I think we all scratch our heads about what we were thinking when trying to build this," Sasko tells me. "I guess it just came from fear - from fear that the player will feel that the world is empty." This was the first time CD Projekt Red had really the player's hand go, remember, and not controlled where in the world you would be. Shallow gameplay is a criticism many people have, especially in the game's repetitive combat, and again, this is something Sasko and the team are well aware of. "We don't feel that the gameplay in Witcher 3 was deep enough," he says. "It was for the times okay, but nowadays when you play it, even though the story still holds really well, you can see that the gameplay is a bit rusty." Also, the cutscenes could have been paced better and had less exposition in them, and the game in general could have dumped fewer concepts on you at once. Cognitive overload, Sasko calls it. "In every second sentence you have a new concept introduced, a new country mentioned, a new politician..." It was too much. More broadly, he would also have liked the open-world to be more closely connected to the game's story, rather than be, mostly, a pretty backdrop. "It's like in the theatre when you have beautiful decorations at the back made of cardboard and paper, and not much happens to them except an actor pulls a rope and it starts to rain or something." he says. It's to do with how the main story influences the world and vice versa, and he thinks the studio can be better at it. Ciri and Geralt look at a coin purse in The Witcher 3. This is, coincidentally, the same tavern you begin the game in, with Vesemir, and the same tavern you meet Master Mirror in. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red One conversation that surprises me, when looking back on The Witcher 3, is a conversation about popularity, because it's easy to forget now - with the intense scrutiny the studio seems always to be under - that when development began, not many people knew about CD Projekt Red. The combined sales of both Witcher games in 2013 were only 5 million. Poland knew about it - the Witcher fiction originated there and CD Projekt Red is Polish - and Germany knew about it, and some of the rest of Europe knew about it. But in North America, it was relatively unknown. That's a large part of the reason why the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 was made at all, to begin knocking on that door. And The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red hoped, would kick that door open. "We knew that we wanted to play in the major league," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communications and PR, stealing a quote from Cyberpunk character Jackie. That's why The Witcher 3 was revealed via a Game Informer cover story in early 2013, because that was deemed the way to do things there - the way to win US hearts, Platkow-Gilewski tells me. And it didn't take long for interest to swell. When Platkow-Gilewski joined CD Projekt Red to help launch the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 in 2012, he was handing out flyers at Gamescom with company co-founder Michał Kicinski, just to fill presentations for the game. By the time The Witcher 3 was being shown at Gamescom, a few years later, queues were three to four hours long. People would wait all day to play. "We had to learn how to deal with popularity during the campaign," Platkow-Gilewski says. Those game shows were crucial for spreading the word about The Witcher 3 and seeing first-hand the impact the game was having on players and press. "Nothing can beat a good show where you meet with people who are there to see their favourite games just slightly before the rest of the world," he says. "They're investing their time, money, effort, and you feel this support, sometimes love, to the IP you're working on, and it boosts energy the way which you can't compare with anything else. These human to human interactions are unique." He says the studio's leader Adam Badowski would refer to these showings as fuel that would propel development for the next year or so, which is why CD Projekt Red always tried to gather as many developers as possible for them, to feel the energy. It was precisely these in-person events that Platkow-Gilewski says CD Projekt Red lacked in the lead up to Cyberpunk's launch, after Covid shut the world down. The company did what it could by pivoting to online events instead - the world-first playtest of Cyberpunk was done online via stream-play software called Parsec; I was a part of it - and talked to fans through trailers, but it was much harder to gauge feedback this way. "It's easy to just go with the flow and way harder to manage expectations," Platkow-Gilewski says, so expectations spiralled. "For me the biggest lesson learned is to always check reality versus expectations, and with Cyberpunk, it was really hard to control and we didn't know how to do it." It makes me wonder what the studio will do now with The Witcher 4, because the game show sector of the industry still hasn't bounced back, and I doubt - having seen the effect Covid has had on shows from the inside of an events company - whether it ever will. "Gamescom is growing," Platkow-Gilewski says somewhat optimistically. "Gamescom is back on track." But I don't know if it really is. Michał Platkow-Gilewski cites this moment as one of his favourite from the Witcher 3 journey. The crew were at the game show PAX in front of a huge live audience and the dialogue audio wouldn't play. Thankfully, they had Doug Cockle, the English language voice actor of Geralt, with them on the panel, so he live improvised the lines. Watch on YouTube Something else I'm surprised to hear from him is mention of The Witcher 3's rocky launch, because 10 years later - and in comparison to Cyberpunk's - that's not how I remember it. But Platkow-Gilewski remembers it differently. "When we released Witcher 3, the reception was not great," he says. "Reviews were amazing but there was, at least in my memories, no common consensus that this is a huge game which will maybe define some, to some extent, the genre." I do remember the strain on some faces around the studio at launch, though. I also remember a tense conversation about the perceived graphics downgrade in the game, where people unfavourably compared footage of Witcher 3 at launch, with footage from a marketing gameplay trailer released years before it. There were also a number of bugs in the game's code and its performance was unoptimised. "We knew things were far from being perfect," Platkow-Gilewski says. But the studio worked hard in the years after launch to patch and update the game - The Witcher 3 is now on version 4.04, which is extraordinary for a single-player game - and they released showcase expansions for it. Some of Marcin Blacha's favourite work is in those expansions, he tells me, especially the horror storylines of Hearts of Stone, many of which he wrote. That expansion's villain, Master Mirror, is also widely regarded as one of the best in the game, disguised as he is as a plain-looking and unassuming person who happens to have incredible and undefinable power. It's not until deep into the expansion you begin to uncover his devilish identity, and it's this subtle way of presenting a villain, and never over explaining his threat, that makes Master Mirror so memorable. He's gathered such a following that some people have concocted elaborate theories about him. Lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk tells me about one theory whereby someone discovered you can see Master Mirror's face on many other background characters in the game, which you can, and that they believed it was a deliberate tactic used by CD Projekt Red to underline Master Mirror's devilish power. Remember, there was a neat trick with Master Mirror in that you had already met him at the beginning of The Witcher 3 base game, long before the expansion was ever developed, in a tavern in White Orchard. If CD Projekt Red could foreshadow him as far back as that, the theory went, then it could easily put his face on other characters in the game to achieve a similar 'did you see it?' effect. The real villain in the Hearts of Stone expansion, Gaunter O'Dimm. Better known to many as Master Mirror. There's a reason why he has such a plain-looking face... | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The truth is far more mundane. Other characters in the game do have Master Mirror's face, but only because his face is duplicated across the game in order to fill it out. CD Projekt Red didn't know when it made the original Witcher 3 game that this villager would turn into anyone special. There was a tentative plan but it was very tentative, so this villager got a very villager face. "We just got a request for a tertiary unimportant character," says Mileniczuk. "We had like 30-40 faces for the entire game so we just slapped a random face on him." He laughs. And by the time Hearts of Stone development came around, the face - the identity - had stuck. Expansions were an important part of cementing public opinion around The Witcher 3, then, as they were for cementing public opinion around Cyberpunk. They've become something of a golden bullet for the studio, a way to creatively unleash an already trained team and leave a much more positive memory in our heads. Exactly what went wrong with Cyberpunk and how CD Projekt Red set about correcting it is a whole other story Chris Tapsell told recently on the site, so I don't want to delve into specifics here. Suffice to say it was a hard time for the studio and many hard lessons had to be learned. "The pressure was huge," Platkow-Gilewski says, "because from underdogs we went to a company which will, for sure, deliver the best experience in the world." But while much of the rhetoric around Cyberpunk concerns the launch, there's a lot about the game itself that highlights how much progress the studio made, in terms of making open-world role-playing games. One of my favourite examples is how characters in Cyberpunk walk and talk rather than speak to you while rooted to the spot. It might seem like a small thing but it has a transformative and freeing effect on conversations, allowing the game to walk you places while you talk, and stage dialogue in a variety of cool ways. There's a lot to admire about the density of detail in the world, too, and in the greater variety of body shapes and diversity. Plus let's not forget, this is an actual open world rather than a segmented one as The Witcher 3 was. In many ways, the game was a huge step forward for the studio. Cyberpunk wasn't the only very notable thing to happen to the Witcher studio in those 10 years, either. During that time, The Witcher brand changed. Netflix piggybacked the game's popularity and developed a TV series starring Henry Cavill, and with it propelled The Witcher to the wider world. Curiously, CD Projekt Red wasn't invited to help, which was odd given executive producer Tomek Baginski was well known to CD Projekt Red, having directed the intro cinematics for all three Witcher video games. But beyond minor pieces of crossover content, no meaningful collaboration ever occurred. "We had no part in the shows," Pawel Mileniczuk says. "But it's Hollywood: different words. I know how hard it was for Tomek to get in there, to convince them to do the show, and then how limited influence is when the production house sits on something. It's many people, many decision makers, high stakes, big money. Nobody there was thinking about, Hey, let's talk to those dudes from Poland making games. It's a missed opportunity to me but what can I say?" The debut trailer for The Witcher 4.Watch on YouTube Nevertheless, the Netflix show had a surprisingly positive effect on the studio, with sales of The Witcher 3 spiking in 2019 and 2020 when the first season aired. "It was a really amazing year for us sales wise," Platkow-Gilewski says. This not only means more revenue for the studio but also wider understanding; more people are more familiar with The Witcher world now than ever before, which bodes very well for The Witcher 4. Not that it influenced or affected the studio's plans to return to that world, by the way. "We knew already that we wanted to come back to The Witcher," Platkow-Gilewski says. "Some knew that they wanted to tell a Ciri story while we were still working on Witcher 3." But, again, with popularity also comes pressure. "We'll have hopefully millions of people already hooked in from the get-go but with some expectations and visions and dreams which we have to, or may not be able to, fulfil," Platkow-Gilewski adds. You can already sense this pressure in comments threads about the new game. Many people already have their ideas about what a new Witcher game should be. The Witcher 4 might seem like a return to safer ground, then, but the relationship with the audience has changed in the intervening 10 years. "I think people are again with us," Platkow-Gilewski says. "There are some who are way more careful than they used to be; I don't see the hype train. We also learned how to talk about our game, what to show, when to show. But I think people believe again. Not everyone, and maybe it's slightly harder to talk with the whole internet. It's impossible now. It's way more polarised than it used to be. But I believe that we'll have something special for those who love The Witcher." Here we are a decade later, then, looking forward to another Witcher game by CD Projekt Red. But many things have changed. The studio has grown and shuffled people around and the roles of the people I speak to have changed. Marcin Blacha and Pawel Mielniczuk aren't working on The Witcher 4, but on new IP Project Hadar, in addition to their managerial responsibilities, and Pawel Sasko is full-time on Cyberpunk 2. It's only really Michał Platkow-Gilewski who'll do a similar job for The Witcher 4 as on The Witcher 3, although this time with dozens more people to help. But they will all still consult and they're confident in the abilities of The Witcher 4 team. "They really know what they're doing," says Sasko, "they are a very seasoned team." "We learned a lot of lessons down the road," Platkow-Gilewski says, in closing. "I started this interview saying that we had this bliss of ignorance; now we know more, but hopefully we can still be brave. Before, we were launching a rocket and figuring out how to land on the moon. Now, we know the dangers but we are way more experienced, so we'll find a way to navigate through these uncharted territories. We have a map already so hopefully it won't be such a hard trip."

Fireworks burst in the background behind a Bradley fighting vehicle at the 2019 Salute to America event that was initially supposed to be a military parade. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images 2025-05-21T21:31:44Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? The Army is preparing for a massive 250th birthday parade in Washington, DC, on June 14. The event, designated a national security special event, coincides with President Donald Trump's birthday. The parade will feature tanks, aircraft, and 6,700 soldiers from all Army units. The US Army has shared new details for its massive 250th birthday celebration, which is set to be a mind-boggling logistical feat, with Abrams tanks, artillery, Strykers, horses, and a lot more descending on the nation's capital.The week-long celebratory event is officially designated as a "national security special event," a term used for major events like the Super Bowl or presidential inaugurations. These require extensive inter-agency coordination.This event has been in the works for two years, but was only recently updated to include a parade on June 14 that will coincide with President Donald Trump's birthday. Army officials on Wednesday did not specify to reporters whose idea it was to insert the military parade into the already-planned events.Trump made it known during his first term that he wanted a major military parade. That event never came to fruition.At least 200,000 people are expected to attend the upcoming event, officials said.The parade will start in the early evening and will proceed along Constitution Avenue and continue near the National Mall, a shorter route than previously expected.Here's what's coming to DC for the parade:There will be 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks, each roughly 70-ton tracked vehicle equipped with a 120mm cannon, among other armaments, as well as 28 Bradley Fighting vehicles, lighter tracked armor with 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain guns. Additionally, 28 Strykers will also be included, flexible 20-ton eight-wheeled vehicles with mixed armaments used for a range of missions.Abrams tanks, Strykers, and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles form the backbone of two of the three types of Army "brigade combat teams," self-sufficient units that can fight and maneuver on the battlefield. Some are centered on infantry, others on "armor" like the Abrams and Bradley, and others on the versatile Strykers. A Bradley fighting vehicle sits as a static display at the 2019 Salute to America event. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images The parade will also feature 4 Paladins, tracked self-propelled 155mm howitzers each weighing over 27 tons. There will also be "several" pieces of towed artillery including M777s and M119s. Fifty aircraft are expected to participate, including helicopters like the multi-mission Black Hawks, heavy-lift Chinooks, and attack Apaches. Army officials told reporters they are working closely with the FAA and DC's Reagan National Airport for parade flyover deconfliction, though final details regarding impact to local airports are still being hashed out.All weapons systems will be disabled and inspected by the Secret Service prior to the event, officials told reporters. No ammunition, be it blank or live rounds, will be distributed to soldiers.Roughly 6,700 soldiers — including active duty, reserve, National Guard, Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and special operations forces — are expected to participate.Some soldiers will wear historical uniforms specially made for this event, officials shared Wednesday, to reflect US Army traditions from the Revolutionary War through the Global War on Terror.World War II-era equipment including M4 Sherman tanks, B25 bombers, P51 Mustang fighter planes, and C47 Skytrains, will also be featured.Army equine units from across the country are also expected, including Arlington National Cemetery's Caisson Platoon.The Army's prestigious Golden Knights parachute team will end the celebration with a jump and will present a folded flag to the president. Folded flags are usually presented to grieving military families during funerals, but they are also sometimes presented at military retirement ceremonies or other milestone events as a gesture of respect.

MarcosBrXD Member Aug 28, 2024 1,692 I wonder if this pursuit of this in the Halo franchise has enough demand, did fans really want Halo to become a Destiny like? Did the story (or lore) make Halo Halo or was it the Multiplayer that propelled the Series to its peak in Reach...   JigglesBunny Prophet of Truth Avenger Oct 27, 2017 36,107 Chicago 343's mismanagement and sloppy direction is what caused its downfall, and that extends far beyond their tepid live service.   Forerunner Resetufologist The Fallen Oct 30, 2017 18,793 H4 was a complete package, it just wasn't a good Halo game. Both H5 and Infinite had bare bones MP and it takes them too long to get rolling, so everyone moves on. They need a complete package at launch. It's crazy that they don't have modes from previous Halos at launch and takes them months if not years to add them.  NDA-Man Member Mar 23, 2020 3,983 Tastes changed. COD was stealing Halo's lunch even during the later Bungie days. COD 4 impacted gaming so hard everyone tried to catch up, and Activision having the staff to turn it into an annual franchise after sacrificing most of it's other projects kept it always in the covnersation. Then Hero Shooters rose, then Battle Royales. Yes, poor management and dumb decisions at 343 definitely played a role--but just as big a part is that 4v4 equal starts arena shooters are quite passe. I don't think a "Halo 3 Part 2" that ignores the fact that gaming has evolved in the near two-decades since the franchise peaked in terms of cultural cachet would do any better (Reach was not it's peak. 3 was. Hell, 5, one of the "bad" ones did better at keeping players than Reach).  Pancracio17 ▲ Legend ▲ Avenger Oct 29, 2017 21,730 JigglesBunny said: 343's mismanagement and sloppy direction is what caused its downfall, and that extends far beyond their tepid live service. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Pretty much. You could go on and on about specific problems like Infinites first year of support, the dropping of plotlines after every game, Halo 5s story, etc. But it all comes down to that.   colorboy Member Apr 5, 2025 174 The definitive death for me was Halo Infinite: - not having coop campaign - nonsense open world - no game on disc These 3 combined absolutely destroyed this series and I am so sad since I loved all 4 first entries  HockeyBird Member Oct 27, 2017 13,794 Halo 2 and 3 were already dipping their toes into the live service model with paid for map packs and post launch updates. I think it was pretty natural for Halo to keep going in that direction. I don't think Halo fans exactly dislike the live service model in theory because it means a game they like can continue to get new content for years and years. Putting aside people's opinions about the campaigns, in terms of multiplayer, the 343 games were lacking a lot of the content fans had come to expect at launch. This hurt each game's momentum out of the gate. I think many fans would say that Halo Infinite currently has a ton of content but think a lot of that should have been available at launch and not take this long to get expected features back into the game.  zoodoo Member Oct 26, 2017 14,540 Montreal MS has problems evolving their franchises. Sony on the other either retire them or completely change them (God of War). Gears has the same problem. The games are great but more of the same. They timidly try to incorporate new stuff like larger areas but the changes are not drastic enough. Halo could have had a game like Destiny or Mass Effect. Gears could have had a more horror entry. The attempts they did with boths franchises were low budget or in niche genres  wwm0nkey Member Oct 25, 2017 16,795 Forerunner said: H4 was a complete package, it just wasn't a good Halo game. Both H5 and Infinite had bare bones MP and it takes them too long to get rolling, so everyone moves on. They need a complete package at launch. It's crazy that they don't have modes from previous Halos at launch and takes them months if not years to add them. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The fact Infinite launched without Forge was possibly the dumbest thing. Like they had it, they had a Halo with great gunplay with Infinite finally but didn't have the content to support it, had they had Forge the community could have at least done some heavy lifting for awhile.   Transistor The Walnut King Administrator Oct 25, 2017 41,639 Washington, D.C. 343 caused it's downfall.   PucePikmin Member Apr 26, 2018 5,346 I don't think there's any great mystery about Halo's decline. Bungie left and the games stopped coming as often or being as good.   SoftTaur Member Oct 25, 2017 671 Halo Infinite putting armor colors on a battlepass and expecting people to just accept that was wild. Map packs have fallen out of favor for obvious reasons, and they've never found monetization that worked since.   BloodHound Member Oct 27, 2017 11,247 This forums playbook is blame everything on live service and AI. Zero critical thinking skills required.  Derbel McDillet ▲ Legend ▲ Member Nov 23, 2022 24,332 Forerunner said: H4 was a complete package, it just wasn't a good Halo game. Both H5 and Infinite had bare bones MP and it takes them too long to get rolling, so everyone moves on. They need a complete package at launch. It's crazy that they don't have modes from previous Halos at launch and takes them months if not years to add them. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I mean, it's a lot of freaking modes at this point. Halo 3 has more modes than we'll ask of any shooter except Halo.   Detective Member Oct 27, 2017 3,886 343 is the reason for the downfall from the get go.   Ascenion Prophet of Truth - One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 13,105 Mecklenburg-Strelitz 343 was a poorly led and managed studio. It remains to be seen if Halo Studios is just more of the same but 343 just sucked at management. And Halo Infinite is a fundamental failure at understanding what a live service requires.   Stat Member Oct 25, 2017 6,360 I think the other thing is that arena shooters have really dried up. The idea of a standalone arena shooter just isn't a genre that a lot of people like too and people just expect these games with live service battle passes and seasons. Which is a shame.   chickenandrofls Member Oct 27, 2017 667 People will blame 343 but COD4 changed multiplayer tastes and Halo never recovered. Reach fell off quick compared to H3 and by the time H4 came around and tried to ape COD it just came off half ass. I love halo MP to this day but it was wild seeing my entire crew and casual gaming friends all move over to COD.  MasterYoshi Member Oct 27, 2017 12,224 I couldn't believe how quickly the plug was pulled on substantial updates to Infinite's multiplayer. There was a narrative going with cutscenes that just stopped before it had even hardly began. Halo should have moved to become something like Battlefront where you could play as virtually any infantry from the game's history. All of the Covenant races, the Flood, all sorts of UNSC ranks. That's what I believe would have been a major success at reinventing Halo's wheel.  Gavalanche Prophet of Regret Member Oct 21, 2021 25,900 I think CoD contributed more to it than anything else. Halo used to be the big multiplayer shooter on console. It revolutionised that area. And then Modern Warfare came along and ate its lunch, and bit by bit the goal shifted. Exclusivity probably didn't help either; it is not a coincidence that Halos woes and console selling woes are hand in hand; now that could be simply because Halo has that big an influence that a bad Halo means that many people buy less xboes. But it also means the potential playerbase isn't as big, especially since most Halo weren't on PC at that time. Meanwhile CoD wasn't exclusive and just grew and grew and grew.   Akira86 Member Oct 25, 2017 21,203 I was content being an all Halo and No-Call of Duty ever player, and lots of people were. They fucked up. Plain and simple. Plenty of people loved Reach(the hate was vocal and online as fuck) and just wanted a similar MP experience out of H4, but it wasn't similar. at all. People accused them of kowtowing to the COD type of game play. All they had to do was fix it in Halo 5 and release it on PC with plenty of maps and great MP. that didn't happen, Shake.  VariantX Member Oct 25, 2017 18,026 Columbia, SC SoftTaur said: Halo Infinite putting armor colors on a battlepass and expecting people to just accept that was wild. Map packs have fallen out of favor for obvious reasons, and they've never found monetization that worked since. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Spartan customization was also part of progression, whether its just getting to a certain rank, playing on certain difficulties, skulls, or doing specific tasks, you did the stuff to get the customization you wanted and it kept a part of the audience playing. If you take stuff away or put it behind a monetization scheme, then you have to replace it with something else in the hopes that would keep people coming back and they frankly didn't have any thing to replace what was lost.  Kill3r7 Member Oct 25, 2017 29,044 NDA-Man said: Tastes changed. COD was stealing Halo's lunch even during the later Bungie days. COD 4 impacted gaming so hard everyone tried to catch up, and Activision having the staff to turn it into an annual franchise after sacrificing most of it's other projects kept it always in the covnersation. Then Hero Shooters rose, then Battle Royales. Yes, poor management and dumb decisions at 343 definitely played a role--but just as big a part is that 4v4 equal starts arena shooters are quite passe. I don't think a "Halo 3 Part 2" that ignores the fact that gaming has evolved in the near two-decades since the franchise peaked in terms of cultural cachet would do any better (Reach was not it's peak. 3 was. Hell, 5, one of the "bad" ones did better at keeping players than Reach). Click to expand... Click to shrink... .  inkblot Member Mar 27, 2024 1,090 JigglesBunny said: 343's mismanagement and sloppy direction is what caused its downfall, and that extends far beyond their tepid live service. Click to expand... Click to shrink... first comment  bionic77 Member Oct 25, 2017 33,370 NDA-Man said: Tastes changed. COD was stealing Halo's lunch even during the later Bungie days. COD 4 impacted gaming so hard everyone tried to catch up, and Activision having the staff to turn it into an annual franchise after sacrificing most of it's other projects kept it always in the covnersation. Then Hero Shooters rose, then Battle Royales. Yes, poor management and dumb decisions at 343 definitely played a role--but just as big a part is that 4v4 equal starts arena shooters are quite passe. I don't think a "Halo 3 Part 2" that ignores the fact that gaming has evolved in the near two-decades since the franchise peaked in terms of cultural cachet would do any better (Reach was not it's peak. 3 was. Hell, 5, one of the "bad" ones did better at keeping players than Reach). Click to expand... Click to shrink... Thats how I remember it. COD changed the game. Even on 360 that was THE multiplayer shooter for that generation.   kowhite Member May 14, 2019 7,473 I couldn't tell you what caused the downfall of Halo. Granted I barely played 5 but I liked Infinite.   Multievolution Member Jun 5, 2018 4,179 I still maintain reach was a good game, I put a fair bit of time into it, and enjoyed its lifespan. I think what finished the series off was one part a lack of direction story wise, and one part not knowing how to keep halo both relevant and unique. To the former, I enjoyed 4's story well enough, but learning where they went next put me off ever seeing it. And to the latter, halo needs to just do what it does best, avoid trying to make it into a battle royal as an example. FPS's in general haven't been interesting to me in at least a decade.  MYeager Member Oct 30, 2017 960 I don't get the op. Four wasn't a live service title and 5 wasn't either thought it had some elements. Infinite I wouldn't consider a downfall as it's the most time I've played a Halo title ever, and 3 was my second highest. Live service or not the issue is it exists at a time where arena shooters aren't the mainstream.  NDA-Man Member Mar 23, 2020 3,983 zoodoo said: Halo could have had a game like Destiny or Mass Effect. Gears could have had a more horror entry. The attempts they did with boths franchises were low budget or in niche genres Click to expand... Click to shrink... To be blunt, I don't really buy into the idea of Halo as a universe that really supports much more than an FPS (which I guessed they could've cribbed from Destiny, but I dunno. It'd tick off the old heads who just want arena, and I don't think it'd pull folks away from destiny or their live service of choice). We as fans can get uber excited about a Halo RPG or a Flood horror game, but the vast majority of the playerbase didn't read the Nylund Books or whatever. They hear Halo and don't think of a vast and rich tapestry of a sci-fi universe, they think a shooter where you kill helium space munchkins. MasterYoshi said: I couldn't believe how quickly the plug was pulled on substantial updates to Infinite's multiplayer. There was a narrative going with cutscenes that just stopped before it had even hardly began. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Playerbase dropped off a cliff well over a year before they dropped those cutscenes (game launched late 2021, cutscenes were dropped June 2023). and nobody gave a fuck about the MP story until they axed it.  Sordid Plebeian Member Oct 26, 2017 19,835 It all comes down to 343i never knowing what to do with Halo. The only reason Infinite played it so safe is because they burned all their time chasing ideas no one wanted. Don't have much faith in Halo Studios.   T0kenAussie Member Jan 15, 2020 6,019 Halos lore was never strong in game. If you just watch the cutscenes they are clearly vehicles to get to the next level and that's about it. Halos EU especially the books did a lot of the heavy lifting that people are nostalgically remembering as Bungie lore imo I think halo has done an OK job of doing halo things. H1->3 were always reinventing the wheel and adding new things to each game. But overall I'd argue that everyone remembers the sweaty LAN weekends with your mates in the garage doing a system link on blood gulch and sidewinder over the single player story. At least that's the core halo memory I have  Caiusto Member Oct 25, 2017 6,879 No, the strategy was good, the sheer incompetence of 343i is what caused its downfall.   LilScooby77 Member Dec 11, 2019 12,280 Campaign/co op mode/multiplayer/theater/forge/custom games. Halo Reach will die as the last to launch complete.  Josh5890 I'm Your Favorite Poster's Favorite Poster The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 26,480 I've always been on the outside looking in, but it always felt like things went downhill after Bungie handed off the franchise to 343.   Bishop89 What Are Ya' Selling? Member Oct 25, 2017 42,741 Melbourne, Australia JigglesBunny said: 343's mismanagement and sloppy direction is what caused its downfall, and that extends far beyond their tepid live service. Click to expand... Click to shrink... This.   Richietto One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 26,029 North Carolina 343 were just not ready to step into Bungies shoes. They were not at all as skilled as Bungie was. And in the case of Infinite? They released it too soon. It took a year to get 2 maps. That's insane. The game was not going to recover. They are not good at decision making.   Letters Prophet of Truth Avenger Oct 27, 2017 5,199 Portugal To me it was the chasing of all kinds of trends instead of leaning into all the things in the gameplay what made it special and unique. Counter-Strike or Street Fighter would also be irrelevant today if they had done the same.   Razgriz-Specter Member Oct 25, 2017 34,486 Detective said: 343 is the reason for the downfall from the get go. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'd put some on Bungie even, Halo 3 was like the big climactic game... and then Reach(despite being good) comes out within 3 years Big main Halos needed a break after 3 imo Literally Halo 3... then Reach happened in 3 years then Halo 4 just 2 years after Reach then Halo 5 in 3..  Gunman Member Aug 19, 2020 2,220 Agree with the COD factor. Halo already felt old with 3.   Green Marine Member Oct 25, 2017 450 El Paso Transistor said: 343 caused it's downfall. Click to expand... Click to shrink... This. For multiplayer, they had already lost the team death match crowd to Call of Duty back in 2007. That leaves you with objective modes, where nobody communicates or plays the objectives. I think they missed an enormous opportunity not being "first to market" with a Helldivers II style persistent PvE mode (could have literally called it "Helljumpers"). Instead they've spent fifteen years getting their ass kicked by Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. As for the campaigns and story telling, this is an even bigger mess. Halo Reach through Halo 3 (including ODST) was five campaigns that told a very cohesive, if vaguely unoriginal story. It often came off as a mixture of Starhammer, Ringworld, and The Flood being a dumb ripoff of the The Many in System Shock 2, but it mostly worked. There 343i games were a mess. They had a great opportunity to break away from the events of the Bungie era, but they decided only four years could pass, because Cortana's story was super important, and couldn't be an aspect of what went on between games. Hilarious, considering this is precisely what they did with Halo Infinite. Then you have a really bad story with Halo 5 (The Covenant knew where to scan and dig for the Portal for the Ark, but had no idea a Forerunner super weapon was buried beneath the Elite home world the whole time? That could have won them the way). The Banished were supposedly welcoming of humans, until they're retreating the the same threat of using the Halo Array to kill everyone. Eight years passed since the Prophet of Regret was murdered, but none of the the other alien factions know it's insta kill for anyone not on a shield world or outside of the Milky Way on The Ark? Zero explanation as to why Atriox's own high ranking soldiers think he died. The Endless are worse than The Flood… for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And this is before getting in to AI a level design issues. They couldn't mimic what GTA IV did in 2008 with an AI driving you around? You could have chosen between a scenic route where you noticed high value targets, or skip to the destination to get back the story after. Outside of "The Road", the last four levels were horrible (more gondola rides… a level that so thoroughly seemed like firefight maps and two boss fights stitched together that you eventually got those levels in Firefight events). They should have focused on human factions resurfacing pre-Covenant conflicts. UNSC were essentially the bad guys before Harvest. The Banished could have been an actual "mercenary" force that worked for humans that paid them, rather than just being a drop in replacement for the Covenant. Just one missed opportunity after another. I still like firefight, but that's the only mode I play in Infinite multiplayer. I hope they turn things around, but I'm not optimistic.  Justin Iacobellis Member Oct 27, 2017 2,446 United States I think Call of Duty 4 and onwards were definitely a factor in Halo's demise. On console (360 and PS3), CoD was one of the only multiplayer-focused shooters that offered a virtually consistent 60 FPS experience without overtly compromising elsewhere. On top of that, the range of ways to earn XP and relatively brisk rate at which you would join a new match created a flow that was difficult to remove yourself from, similarly to the "just one more run" mentality of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. While technical reasons prevented Halo from going beyond a 30 FPS limit for the remainder of that console generation, 343 and Bungie attempted to replicate some of the Call of Duty experience with the introductions of armor abilities, loadouts, and the like. These changes are where I personally felt the series was beginning to lose its identity. If you are going to gradually incorporate the key elements of your competitors, why would I not just continue playing those instead?  TechnoSyndro Member May 15, 2019 3,310 Their inability to actually support a live service game is why their live service game died. Halo Infinite had a ton of players at launch but they fumbled the ball immediately.   hydruxo ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 25, 2017 22,716 I don't think that was the problem. I think it's more so that 343 didn't have the juice to keep people interested in Halo. Bungie was just better in every way.   callamp Member Oct 27, 2017 1,641 Trends change over time and the Halo franchise was slow to adapt to that. Industry trends were already changing when Halo 3 was at its apex, with Modern Warfare changing the game. More recently we've had the shift towards battle royale (Fortnite, PUGB, Apex) and Destiny-likes. Halo is still largely operating in the same space it did 20 years ago (although Infinite's single player tried to branch out unsuccessfully). The reality is that Microsoft and 343 were too cautious with the franchise. They delivered games that were typically fine - despite some of the hyperbole that gets thrown about - and you could legitimately argue that mechanically Infinite is the best multiplayer in the franchise. But if trends have changed and gamers aren't as enamoured with arena shooters, then that's ultimately not good enough. From Halo 1 to 3, the series was the trend setter and then after that it became a follower. In an ideal world, Bungie would have kept the franchise and it would have evolved to be similar to what they created with Destiny. Perhaps they would have noted PUGB success and pivoted into the battle royale genre. But none of that happened and so year-after-year the franchise just became a little less prominent.  daegan #REFANTAZIO SWEEP Member Oct 27, 2017 3,304 For SP: Too long between games and they got way way WAY overwritten, simultaneously pulling from deep lore but not giving you reasons to care in the games themselves. 4, 5, Infinite all basically being reboots and supposed to keep going forever and then just not having a great hook to keep people playing. 5 also just being an absolute dogshit campaign that has no business being with the rest of the series, even when the plot points could be interesting. For Multi: The larger audience they chase for multiplayer has splintered and spread out across games that more focus on what each kind of player likes and I don't know how you get that back. What itch does a future Halo scratch that nothing else does and is it an itch millions of people still have who also have the free time to plunge into it?  dotpatrick Member Oct 28, 2017 400 Definitely agree with the people referencing Call of Duty. That was the big turning point and I'm not sure anything there is anything 343 could've done short of figuring out the next big turn for the competitive multiplayer shooter. By the time even Reach came out, CoD had already supplanted it as THE console shooter. I still remember when Xbox used to post how many folks were playing a particular title on Xbox Live for a given week and Call of Duty 4 would beat or be just behind Halo 3.  HockeyBird Member Oct 27, 2017 13,794 Razgriz-Specter said: I'd put some on Bungie even, Halo 3 was like the big climactic game... and then Reach(despite being good) comes out within 3 years Big main Halos needed a break after 3 imo Literally Halo 3... then Reach happened in 3 years then Halo 4 just 2 years after Reach then Halo 5 in 3.. Click to expand... Click to shrink... 3 years as the gap between Halo 1 and 2 and from 2 to 3. So Reach coming 3 years after Halo 3 isn't all that surprising. Also, as part of their agreement to split from Microsoft, they were obligated to produce two more Halo games after 3. One was Halo 3: ODST and the other was Reach. So they were fulfilling their contractual obligation to become independent and go off to create Destiny.  De Amigo Member Dec 19, 2017 550 Halo Reach was a fine enough game but it did feel like the beginning of the franchise releases going from major events to "expect another installment every couple of years no matter what". I wonder if them doing Halo 3 then taking a break until Halo 4 as like an Xbox One launch game could've kept the franchise's event status intact.   saruboss Member Jan 26, 2025 93 If i am not wrong, didn't you make the same thread with "is halo infinite now considered a failure?" a couple of months ago.   Gestault Member Oct 26, 2017 14,690 This is admittedly myopic, but from my perspective, their big public assertion about having learned the lesson from Halo 5 that they need split-screen, effectively (literally?) promising it for future games, then totally omitting it from Infinite made clear the game wasn't being planned by serious people. I say this as someone who had a blast with Infinite overall. 

Passing through a green warp pipe, I see a colorful mushroom kingdom spreading out in front of me. Almost.  Headset pressed to my face, volume up, I'm actually watching the Super Mario Bros. movie in Apple's Vision Pro from a room in my house, the screen stretched out in 3D.  But I'm feeling a little emotional, sort of a visceral thrill, like a memory. That's because the film's blending with my memories of being at Universal Studios' Epic Universe theme park a few weeks ago, when I was walking around an actual physical Mushroom Kingdom, passing through a real and very large green warp pipe — but in Orlando, Florida.  In the park, it's all walls I can touch, blocks I can tap. Coming back to watch the movie again, in 3D, it now feels a little bit like coming home. Imaginary worlds are expanding… both in my brain, and in the virtual and physical realms. It's happening in movies, in games, in VR and in places like Epic Universe, the biggest new theme park in the US in 20 years, which opens to the public on May 22.  All these immersive worlds are tapping into universes we already have somewhat mapped out in our minds, and by mapping them out even further, creators are laying emotional groundwork for staying more deeply connected in the future.  I'm obsessed with immersive technologies and write extensively about them at CNET; I've been reviewing VR and AR headsets and games for over a decade now. But I'm finding that physical places — like theme parks — can fuel our memories, too, and they begin to blend in strange ways. And that's very much by design. We're living in a hyper-connected state of entertainment, and Epic Universe just feels like the latest, biggest step. "The thirst for things that are live, things that are unpredictable, has only increased now that we're getting all of these franchise-based experiences out there," says Kathryn Yu, co-founder of the Immersive Experience Institute in Los Angeles. "Otherwise, that IP is just a thing that you stream that happens to other people in a little box. The next logical conclusion is, well, I would love to go there." The vast new world of Epic Universe is a lot to take in, even without the crowds there. I visited ahead of its opening, intensely curious about the experiences and the technology and what it would all add up to. I saw the future, and also the past. And what I experienced through a frenzied day was that the details, and surprises, were everywhere.  This was my journey there, in the moment itself and remembered from a distance, filtered through the nostalgia that movies, games and immersive tech fill me with now as I look back. I'm going to walk you through what I encountered and put it all into perspective. In this article: A past full of portals Theme parks have been imagining other worlds for years. Disneyland, which dreamed of a series of worlds visited via connected pathways starting from a central hub — a "hub and spokes" model that's mirrored in most major theme parks now — opened way back in 1955. But in the last couple of decades, the ante has been upped, and upped again. CNET/Zooey LiaoParks have gotten more theme-immersive over time: Universal opened Islands of Adventure in Orlando in 1999, where it created mini lands based on franchises like Jurassic Park, Marvel, Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter.  Disney's Animal Kingdom, also in Florida, started with a theme around animals from various continents. It added Pandora in 2017, a section made to feel like you're walking around the alien world from James Cameron's Avatar movies. Disney also has a Toy Story land at Hollywood Studios, opened in 2018, Star Wars-themed lands in both its California and Florida parks that opened in 2019 and Avengers Campus, which opened at Disneyland in 2021.  In a sense, Epic Universe in Orlando is a park full of these extreme-themed locations, connected like magic portals. Four big places, four familiar and deep wells of movie memories to draw from: Nintendo, How to Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter and classic Universal monsters. Of course, these particular themes are in areas where new movies, games and shows are emerging constantly. A live-action How to Train Your Dragon movie arrives this summer; the Nintendo Switch 2 launches in June; there's a new Harry Potter series for HBO Max that's in the works. These are no accidents. On the other hand, if you have no connection to those intellectual properties, then you might not feel the need to visit. "It becomes kind of a double-edged sword, because you have folks who really love a franchise and will definitely buy a ticket if you're featuring that franchise," says Yu of the Immersive Experience Institute. "And then you have folks who may not be so hot on that, and you still need to appeal to them." Franchises are now made to bleed between film, TV, game and theme park. It's a cross-media world, and our physical presence in a park, playing a role in experiencing something first-hand, can end up making all the other pieces feel more emotionally important. Is there a limit to the immersive theming? Disney hit a wall with Galactic Starcruiser, a multiday self-contained hotel experience that opened in 2022 but closed a year later, something that was aiming high but was way too expensive and too immersive to appeal to many people, not to mention badly timed during a pandemic.Bridget Carey, CNET editor at large and theme park expert, who visited Epic Universe with me last month, experienced the ill-fated Galactic Starcruiser firsthand and felt it was a blend of theme park and video game, but it was an experience that locked you into a commitment — both of time and price.  Large-scale immersive theater experiences aren't always successful, either: Life and Trust, a massive multilevel New York theater event designed to be a spiritual follow-up to the decade-plus run of Sleep No More, closed after only nine months. Yet these types of projects show where immersiveness in parks could expand. "The Starcruiser experience didn't just lean into sci-fi tech for a Star Wars vibe. What made it impressive was the improvisational actors that made the sets and effects more transportive," Carey says. "Universal also is weaving that ingredient into Epic, and I was surprised by the number of human character actors we saw in each land — helping make those robotic dragons and magical creatures have emotional connections with guests."  What's different with Epic compared to how theme parks have already been evolving? In some ways, not as much as you'd think. But it's the more intense focus on immersion, combined with the portals that become the entry gates, that feel new. Universal's marketing is all about wanting you to feel like you're teleporting into these places. (Also, the new rides are a whole lot of fun.) The portal gates are made to feel like they're constructed intentionally, waiting for you to make the leap. And I've felt that portal feeling many times before, at home: in VR, where jumping to other worlds almost feels like a ritual — laying out a play space, opening an app, stepping through. All right. Here we go. Into the portals Celestial Park The entrance to Epic Universe begins with a portal. And it has portals all the way through, to the individual subworlds, and even to worlds within those worlds. It's the theme to the whole park. The entrance is the biggest portal of all, called the "Chronos," and it looks sort of like a stargate. It's also just a familiar entrance gate, adorned with symbols to the worlds that await inside,  something of a steampunk galactic theme. Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNETInside, things are strangely sedate. The first "hub world," Celestial Park, is lovely, beautifully landscaped and chill. So chill that you might wonder where the park excitement is hiding. The gardens and vaguely retrofuture architecture feels a bit like the Star Wars planet Naboo, or even the front part of Epcot that used to be called Future World. There are some rides, but just a few. There's an ornate domed carousel, and an interactive water fountain. There's also the park's best roller coaster, a massive twin beast called Stardust Racers, where two trains appear to race as they barrel roll over each other.  The dual coaster has a design that feels both inspired by the lore of an Atlantis lost world and fantasies of Jules Verne. Look closely and you can find an Easter egg: the flux capacitor from Back to the Future — a Universal property that used to have its own ride — flickers on the back of each coaster car. There's no promise of time travel, but the ride accelerates to speeds that feel as intense as Velocicoaster, Universal's notorious Jurassic World-themed ride. Celestial Park feels like a world between worlds. It's the place where the portals to every other world live. Celestial Park's got a lot of good food, relaxing restaurants and calming fountains. I could see this being the place where Universal has future festivals, pop-up experiences. It's also a centering space, a reset point, a rest stop between dives into other worlds. It clears your mind before you head into the next hyper-immersive place.  "The future of the attractions industry isn't one-size-fits-all. It's about creating moments that feel personal, unforgettable and emotionally resonant, regardless of the scale." Jakob Wahl, president and CEO of IAAPA Are centering places like this key to the future of more intense immersive experiences? In my early days of going to VR installations, there was a big focus on the onboarding process, as well as a decompression space where you'd be able to rest and be in your own thoughts for a while. The more stimulation we have, the more we need a way to remove ourselves from it. "For an immersive spectacle to work, it's really got to be all encompassing, but that also means what's on the outside needs to be thought through, too," says Noah Nelson, founder of the immersive entertainment site No Proscenium. "There's a whole art to path making, and while I'm not sure if we need to go the full 'chill room at the rave' route, there is something to be said for an 'ontological crossfade' from one 'reality' into another." All around the edges of Celestial Park, golden gates beckon with statues stacked on top. These are the other worlds, and entering them, you definitely feel the strong crossfade. Super Nintendo World Coin fountains and castle decorations surround Nintendo's portal, and the moment you head in, you ride an escalator. It's a warp pipe, with light beams shooting off to the sides. Then you're inside a familiar castle, Mushroom Kingdom portraits on the walls. Exiting it, you're looking out at a multilevel vista of moving blocks, Yoshis and bouncing creatures: It looks just like a level map from a Super Mario game.  It's made to overwhelm and dazzle you. The paths seem to go everywhere: down, up, to the sides and who knows where else. You descend into it, sinking into the immersion. Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNETSuper Nintendo World already exists in Universal's Tokyo park and in Universal Studios Hollywood, but Orlando's layout is larger and extends through an additional portal tunnel into a subworld of Donkey Kong that's full of palm trees, banana piles and a mine cart coaster that runs in and out of an ancient temple. That moment in the Super Mario Bros. movie where Mario and Peach go to Donkey Kong's kingdom and see all the looping paths everywhere? It's sort of that feeling, but smaller. If you buy a Power-Up Band ($40) from Universal, you can pair it with your phone and bop it against blocks and surfaces everywhere in the land, unlocking scores in mini games you can track on the Universal app. The bands also work as tappable NFC-enabled Amiibo for the Nintendo Switch, giving unlockable extras. I keep thinking that Nintendo could expand that park-to-Switch relationship further, maybe even with the Switch 2.  There aren't that many rides here, but they are memorable. A calmer Yoshi ride moves slowly around the Mushroom Kingdom's edges, more of a young kid's ride or even a way to take in the vistas without walking. And Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge is also surprisingly slow moving for a racing ride, but it's because you wear augmented reality head visors, tethered to your car, that float images of video game opponents all around you. The goal is to shoot flying turtle shells at opponents by turning your wheel and pressing buttons. The best parts feel like you're almost living inside the game itself — a dark tunnel where Rainbow Road floats.  The tech feels old now compared to home headsets like the Apple Vision Pro or Meta's Quest 3 — it is, since it was made for similar rides back in 2021 — but it's also the only AR ride in this park, or nearly anywhere else. And I think future rides could go a lot further. It reminds me instantly of the remote-control Mario Kart toys that Nintendo made to work with an AR-enabled Switch game called Mario Kart Live, which I drove around my home during the pandemic in 2020. Switch 2 games and connected toys could in the future further expand these rides. The Donkey Kong Mine Cart Madness ride is the best of the bunch: The coaster's hidden ride mechanism makes it seem like you're on cartoonishly broken tracks, but you're not. The cart flies off them, jumping gaps, leaping into space, making what seem like impossible turns, and it's full of surprises. It's not loaded with visible tech: Its magic tricks are subtler.  "The thirst for things that are live, things that are unpredictable, has only increased now that we're getting all of these franchise-based experiences."  Kathryn Yu, co-founder of the Immersive Experience Institute While there are little corners to explore around Super Nintendo World, like extra Power-Up Band challenges and little Nintendo Easter eggs, I want more. I want the Power-Up Band minigames to feel even more game-like. I want crazy levels of extra things to find. Maybe that can still come. Nintendo's rumored to make an expansion to Super Nintendo World, possibly adding a Zelda-themed Hyrule area to time with a future Zelda movie Universal is releasing in 2027. Pokemon is also a rumored expansion focus.  The possibilities seem endless, but the cost and planning of building areas that feel timeless and popular enough to work is a whole other challenge. This space filled with Mario and Donkey Kong echoes lots of existing games, and probably games to come. When I played Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World on the Switch 2, I couldn't help thinking about Super Nintendo World all over again. And that's clearly the point: They reflect each other. A Photo Tour Inside Epic Universe See all photos Franchises are now made to bleed between film, TV, game and theme park. It's a cross-media world, and our physical presence in a park, playing a role in experiencing something first-hand, can end up making all the other pieces feel more emotionally important. The same way I watch movies about the UK nostalgically after I've traveled there, I watch the Super Mario Bros. movie and play Super Mario games after I visited Epic Universe. "Epic Universe is a powerful example of how immersive storytelling, cutting-edge technology, and bold vision are shaping the future of themed entertainment," says Jakob Wahl, president and CEO of IAAPA, the Global Association for the Attractions Industry. "It reflects a growing demand from guests for deeply integrated, multisensory experiences that transport them into entirely new worlds with characters from some of the world's most popular movies and video games." How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk Entering the portal into the world of How to Train Your Dragon, you're greeted with an expanse of water, massive carved statues and bridges beyond. Wide skies, flying rides: This is the Isle of Berk, and it's full of dragons, water and people roleplaying as characters from the films. It's the most wide-open feeling world in the park, inviting you to seemingly wander in any direction. It's the biggest, and has the most rides and shows, too. Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNETI didn't grow up with these movies, but I could see the crowds who did, and waited in line for a chance to pet a robotic Toothless dragon in a stable. Chances to meet dragons are everywhere: One, puppeted by somebody inside, proudly struts around, guided by Viking handlers.  In one corner, if you're patient, a baby dragon emerges for photo opps: This is Dart, a self-powered robot that's so convincingly animated that it hypnotized me in my tracks — it has a feel similar to Boston Dynamics' robot dogs, but turned into cartoon form. Disney isn't putting free-roaming robots into its parks yet, although it's test-driving Nvidia-powered BD-0 droids that should be making more appearances in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge eventually.  "The BDX droids are just the beginning," Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, said when the droids were shown off at an Nvidia conference in March, referring to AI advances to come via Google DeepMind and Nvidia. "This collaboration will allow us to create a new generation of robotic characters that are more expressive and engaging than ever before."  Meanwhile, Universal is already doing that with its little Dart appearances. Dart shows the future: animated and free-walking, and acting alongside real human actors that make it feel like the world has come alive.  Drone dragons wheel overhead, too — not during my initial visit, but they'll be there on park opening. Other robotic dragon tails poke out of nests. One ice-breathing dragon pokes its head out from behind a wall.  The dragon moments continue in a lavish show called The Untrainable Dragon, which blends screens and actors and dragons that look like a combination of puppeting and robotics. Toothless wheels overhead during the show, and the emotional scale of it all made me cry.  "For an immersive spectacle to work, it's really got to be all encompassing ... there's a whole art to path making." Noah Nelson, founder of the immersive entertainment site No Proscenium In this land, the rides almost feel secondary. A wheeling, tame sky ride called Dragon Racer's Rally was fine for kids, maybe not worth it for adults. A water-blasting boat ride called Fyre Drill was fun, but similar to a ride I've tried at New York's Legoland. But the family coaster here, called Hiccup's Wing Gliders, is the best thing to try: It's fast, zips over water and around the island, and has other dragons to see. It's a story experience as much as a thrill ride, like Hagrid's Magical Creatures coaster at Universal's Islands of Adventure.Berk doesn't have interactive features like Power-Up Bands or wands, but it has plenty of other merch. It's also, I think, about just feeling happy and free. It feels loose, like a festival. And maybe more of a Disney-type place than any other part of Universal. "The sheer number of dragon animatronics exposed to the outdoors was impressive — both in the ride and peppered across the landscape. But what really amps up the emotion and whimsy is the music from John Powell's soundtrack, which got me bawling happy tears on the coaster," says Carey. "Universal leans hard into movie scores throughout each portal to activate your emotions quickly — which stands out from Disney's choice to use more subtle, natural-sounding background tracks. But I think that's where Epic got it right. People want the music to have that connection." What I remember most from this world, as I portaled back out, was the dragons, whether they were drones, robots or puppets. All of the dragons.  Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Ministry of Magic The Harry Potter portal gate leads into a subway exit, with a wall full of French posters. Around a corner, there's a massive arch. And through that arch is a wide city street, shops everywhere, hints of a skyline in the distance. The Ministry of Magic's recreation of 1920s Paris hits me on a grander, more detailed scale than any of the other worlds.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNETThe buildings loom high. The city's farther-off attractions poke above rooftops. It feels like we've teleported. Take the previous Wizarding World areas at Universal and imagine them even bigger, and you have this. Windows in storefronts are interactive, if you have a wand you've purchased from a shop. Wave it in a certain pattern to make magical things happen. Finding the windows is a little game in itself. Some windows have interactive paintings that speak to you, too. In the middle of the city square is a circus tent, hosting Cirque Arcanus, a live theater spectacle that looks like it's impossibly tucked into this tent, with an immersive show blending magic tricks and screens. Deeper inside, the main show seems to take place inside the suitcase of Newt Scamander from the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movies. Different creatures emerge from shadows and dimensional windows, made of a mix of high-res displays, puppets, robotics and stage magic.  Down one end of the Paris streets is the only ride: a showstopping experience called the Battle for the Ministry of Magic. We pass through a MetroFloo station, entering yet another portal that flashes green smoke as we end up on the other side in a massive recreation of the Ministry of Magic from the Harry Potter movies, but now in modern-day London. I don't realize until I get home days later and rewatch the movies how spot-on this recreation is: Much like Disney's Rise of the Resistance ride, it feels like you've been beamed right into a film.  The Ministry of Magic ride itself, down endless corridors of talking portraits and interactive details you might linger on during what could be seriously long waits, is an elevator you sit in as it leaps and glides through a journey involving Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dolores Umbridge and things that seem real and virtual at the same time.  "Universal leans hard into movie scores throughout each portal to activate your emotions quickly ... People want the music to have that connection." Bridget Carey, CNET editor at large Universal says this ride has a whole new mechanism technology — it reminds me of both the Gringotts and Forbidden Journey rides at Universal's other parks, but more like you're watching a magical theater experience unfold. It's the most eye-popping ride in the park. I wished I could floo-hop over to the other Wizarding World sections at Universal's other parks. You can't: This park is miles from the others, and misses out on the magic train connection. Dark Universe Through another portal that looks embedded in a gnarled mountain of rocks and roots, we pass into a cemetery, tombstones everywhere, leading to a haunted-looking European village. In some ways the most intimate of the four worlds, this lurking gothic zone, themed to house Universal's classic monsters, feels like a permanent version of Universal's Halloween Horror-themed events.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNETThe path snakes around a series of rides and taverns, with details like menacing statues and a cart full of body parts in bottles. You'll see actors here that play various roles: a mad violinist plays a tune and spins through the square. The Invisible Man peers through bandages and insults your intelligence. At The Burning Blade Tavern, a pub at the end of the path that has a burning windmill above it, actors play the roles of monster hunters. The biggest draw here is a decaying mansion that houses Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment, a ride that throws all of Universal's monsters into animatronic form. The ride's built on the same arm structure as Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey: You feel like you're being propelled through rooms where werewolves, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's monster and Dracula battle each other. The vibe is more video game and comic-infused than something truly scary. Still, it's the most animatronics-filled experience in the park — Frankenstein's monster towers above me in the preshow room, stepping forward as if he's about to walk right toward us.  One other roller coaster, Curse of the Werewolf, is weirdly lacking in any actual werewolves, and felt tamer than I expected. And my visit, during the day, didn't seem to fit the horror style of the surroundings.  At night, and with plenty of role-playing actors around, Dark Universe could take on whole new dimensions. This part of the park feels like the biggest leap into an unknown, and could use even more building out to add in extra thrills. But what I felt the most in this subdued, ominous-feeling part of the park was the promise of roleplay. What if I stayed longer and tried to follow the violinist? What if the Invisible Man tried to recruit me for a mission? What does Ygor have to tell me if I seek him out? If I go to the pubs and lurking corners, will I find more mysteries to unravel? As a doorway to the oldest part of Universal's history, could Dark Universe be a permanent way to explore the weird horrors of Halloween all year long? I'd like to stick around here for dinner after dark and see what happens. The future beyond Epic On my way home again, thinking ahead to my next visit around the time of the park's opening day, I wondered about what Epic Universe represents for the future of where amusement parks and immersive entertainment are heading, and what it could also mean for all the games, movies, shows and toys that connect to them. Theme parks are conceived years ahead of time, slowly emerging into completion. Epic Universe is here in 2025, but its ideas were birthed back in 2019 and intended for 2023, delayed because of the pandemic. What we're seeing now is the bleeding edge of large-scale theme parks, but not necessarily a sign of what the future holds.  It's hard to keep large-scale things in business, so I often think about the future of immersive entertainment as coming from smaller productions. There have been a ton of contained immersive ticketed attractions in the last decade that give the I've-been-to-a-park experience, often at a lower cost.  My mind turns to Meow Wolf, a growing collective that makes hallucinatory installations that have mysteries and parts that unlock extras on a phone app. One of Meow Wolf's next locations, in New York, looks to add even more mixed reality and interaction (it's themed like an interdimensional arcade).  Meow Wolf's founders say that smaller indoor spaces can build out higher levels of next-level interaction beyond what Universal or Disney can do.  "We see them as sort of scratching the surface," Meow Wolf's Vince Kladubek tells me, speaking about parks like Epic Universe. "When you have a dedicated indoor space, you have far more possibilities than when you're in an outdoor theme park land. We're really honing in on the capabilities that are now possible when you have a fixed indoor space in bringing this mixed-reality experience forward." "Epic Universe is a powerful example of how immersive storytelling, cutting-edge technology and bold vision are shaping the future of themed entertainment." Jakob Wahl, president and CEO of IAAPA And while these smaller interactive experiences emerge, it's rare to see a completely new theme park open in the US — the last one was Disney's California Adventure in 2001. Disney and Universal have been locked in a back-and-forth competition for decades, one-upping each other with new immersive ideas, licensing deals and park upgrades, but Disney has no new US park planned. Instead, Disney is focused on specific park upgrades — a Monsters, Inc. area for Hollywood Studios, new Cars and Villains lands for Magic Kingdom, an Encanto and Indiana Jones expansion to Animal Kingdom, more Avengers rides at California Adventure. New parks are opening overseas, though: Universal has a UK park in development, and Disney just announced a deal to open a theme park in Abu Dhabi. Universal's next steps beyond Epic are already in the works, but in lots of smaller pieces. A horror-themed permanent Universal attraction, called Universal Horror Unleashed, opens in Las Vegas this August. Its four haunted houses should feel like the ones in Universal's seasonal horror night fests, but year-round. Universal also has a kid-focused, smaller park that's opening in Frisco, Texas next year. "We're seeing