Latest news with #Monolith
New Indian Express
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Joseph Kosinski to direct Miami Vice film
A film adaptation of the series Miami Vice is in development at Universal Pictures, with Top Gun: Maverick filmmaker Joseph Kosinski attached to direct it. Kosinski is set to work from a screenplay by Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy, who penned the script with Top Gun: Maverick screenwriter Eric Warren Singer's draft. Kosinski is also set to produce the film through his company Monolith alongside Dylan Clark, who is backing it under his namesake banner. The makers are yet to announce plot or cast details. Creator Anthony Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann's TV series Miami Vice follows two undercover cops, played by Philip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson, who bust drug dealers in Miami. It had a five-season run from 1984 to 89 on NBC. There is also a film adaptation, Michael Mann's 2006 feature Miami Vice , starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. Kosinski shot to fame with 2022's Tom Cruise-starrer Top Gun: Maverick . His upcoming projects include F1 , starring Brad Pitt, and a UFO conspiracy thriller alongside producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Time of India
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 Fracture Lore explained
(Image via Sandfall Interactive) In Clair Obscur Expedition 33 's haunting world, the city of Lumière engages the players with Fracture's lingering scars. It's a cataclysmic event that reshaped the city's destiny, birthing a terror cycle and binding the citizens to a mysterious force's orchestrated cruel ritual. While the survivors might cling to hope, the truth behind the event remains shrouded with despair. Here is all you need to know about the Fracture in Obscur Expedition 33. Clair Obscur Expedition 33 Fracture led Lumière city to Isolation The origins of Fracture in Expedition 33 trackback 67 years ago, when a diety-like figure, the Paintress , emerged from the sea. With her, she brought the colossal Monolith on which she inscribed the number 100, sealing the fate of the city. The act severed Lumière city from the mainland to despair and isolation. Every year since then, the figure returns and reduces the number by 1, sealing the fates of ones whose age matches it. The city that was once a vibrant culture now revolves around the annual terror. The survivors live in the dread of Gommage, the macabre ceremony, where the marked individuals vanish in smoke and the flower petals. Despite the fear, the citizens of Lumière city have clung to hope, launching the expeditions to confront the Paintress. However, none returned. Expedition into the unknown with the cycle of despair and hope The first defiant stand of Lumière city against the Paintress started with Expedition 0. The volunteers vowed to dismantle the Monolith or defeat the creator of it. However, their fate is unknown. Over the 6 decades, all missions vanished without any trace. It left behind grief and rumors. Every failed attempt deepened the diminishing hope, and yet the people refused to surrender. The focus of Clair Obscur Expedition 33 embodies desperate perseverance. It is led by Gustave, the protagonist. The team seeks the answers that the others could not uncover. Yet the motives of Paintress and the purpose of Monolith remain elusive. Is she a trapped spirit or a vengeful god? The survival of Lumière city might hinge on unraveling such mysteries. Ritual of sacrifice and survival— The Gommage Every year, Gommage serves as the grim reminder of the grip of the Fracture. As the Paintress lowers the number of Monolithmonoliths, citizens of that age disintegrate instantly. The families mourn the loved ones who get lost while the survivors brace for their potential fate. The ritual underscores the fragility of Lumière, blending brutality with beauty. The cycle fuels division and unity. While some see Gommage as the divine punishment, others consider it the curse to break. Yet, all do agree on one truth: until the Paintress is stopped, Lumière will be the prisoner to her whims. Even though all the expeditions so far have been futile, they symbolize the refusal of the city to surrender. Now, with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 unfolding, the players will have the chance to navigate the world where horror and history collide. The legacy of the Fracture, after all, is not just lore but is a living nightmare woven into the quests, dialogue, and festival quizzes that are shaping all choices. Only time can tell whether the expedition will succeed or join the predecessors.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Silent Hill 4, Deus Ex And F.E.A.R. Among Latest Games To Enter GOG's Preservation Program
The disappearance and unavailability of classic titles is causing an existential crisis in all of video gaming. Last November, in response, online PC games store GOG announced a Preservation Program, where over 100 games are promised ongoing support to be sold and run on modern machines forever. It was announced last night that the beloved Silent Hill 4: The Room, best PC game of all time Deus Ex, and originalFEAR would be among 20 new games joining the scheme. And the rest of the names aren't small, either. In February, when one of the scourges of preservation, Warner Bros. (a company that shelves finished movies such that they may never be seen by anyone, while deleting vast archives of classic animations from its streaming services, alongside closing down game studios that have created some of the best games of recent times), GOG reacted to the news of the closure of Monolith with an announcement that it will attempt to save as many of the studio's games as it's able via the Preservation Program. The first of these, FEAR, is now in. Meanwhile, 2004's Silent Hill 4 has joined the program with the addition of 'restored scenes that were never available on PC before,' according to a press release from GOG. This includes missing 'hauntings,' the strange events that occur, which GOG found were in the PC code but never included—their engineers have dug them out and got them working. Alongside those two headliners are some other classic games that could easily merit the same moniker. Stone-cold classics like Deus Ex,Fallout 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, Alone In The Dark 1 to 3, and all eight original Ultima games are also now included, meaning they will be constantly maintained to work on modern PCs for as long as GOG exists (and, the company told me, it has plans in place to ensure preservation can continue if it was to go away). Oh, and Crystal Dynamic's first threeTomb Raiders. Here's the full list of new additions. It's worth noting most of these are currently at least 75 percent off in GOG's current sale: Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption Tomb Raider: Underworld, Anniversary and Legend Alone in the Dark: The Trilogy 1+2+3 Ultima™ 1+2+3 Ultima™ 4+5+6 Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition Wing Commander™ 1+2 Deus Ex GOTY Edition Jagged Alliance 2 Fallout 2 Privateer 2: The Darkening Port Royale 3 Gold Alien Breed + Tower Assault Cannon Fodderand Cannon Fodder 2 . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We just tried to make what we thought was cool': the story of Monolith Productions
Late last month, Warner Bros announced it was closing three of its game development studios in a 'strategic change of direction': WB Games San Diego, Player First Studios, and Monolith Productions. At a time when the games industry is racked with layoffs and studio closures, the barrage of dispiriting headlines can be numbing. But the shutdown of Monolith cut through the noise, sparking fresh shock and outrage at the industry's slash and burn approach to cost cutting. There are numerous reasons for this, but among them was a pervading belief that Monolith would be around forever. 'I don't think I ever really considered the possibility that it would shut down one day,' says Garrett Price, one of Monolith's seven founding members. True to its name, Monolith was a singular presence. Founded in 1994, it was a prolific developer whose games displayed visual flair, mechanical inventiveness and a knack for synthesising pop-cultural themes. Most excitingly, you could never really predict what the studio would do next. While it primarily produced first-person shooters, there were forays into platformers, dungeon crawlers and open-world games. And even the core FPS titles differed wildly in theme and style, inspired by everything from 60s spy films to Japanese horror. 'Monolith didn't really have a true identity, and we honestly didn't really care,' Price explains. 'We pretty much just made whatever we wanted to make… We didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre would sell the best or what theme would be the most accessible to the mass market. We just tried to make what we thought was cool.' Monolith emerged from the edutainment software company Edmark, where several of the company's founders were previously employed. 'On my interview day, I remember this bald chap walking past me on the stairs wearing a Wolfenstein 3D T-shirt. I figured this would be a great place to work,' says Toby Gladwell, Monolith co-founder and software engineer. He recalls that his co-founders were emboldened by the recent release of Doom, the demonic first-person shooter that catapulted its creators, id Software, to rockstar status and transformed perceptions of the PC as a gaming platform. 'We realised quickly that this was our calling. We simply had to make the best games of all time.' However, Monolith's initial project bore little resemblance to id Software's classic. Claw was a 2D, Mario-style platformer about a pirate cat. It was meant to be Monolith's debut title, but in a quirk of fate, the company acquired another developer in late 1996 – Q Studios – which was deep into production on a Doom-like first-person shooter called Blood. Monolith opted to prioritise Blood's completion over Claw – a decision that would have huge ramifications. Released in March 1997, Blood puts players in the role of Caleb, a gunslinging servant to the demon Tchernobog who is is betrayed and murdered by his fiendish master. 'Those early games, especially Blood and Claw, have a very hand-crafted feel to them and were very much DIY endeavours,' Price says. A 2.5D shooter released as games were pivoting hard into full 3D rendering, Blood was in some ways behind the times. But its gritty visual style, creative weapons such as flare guns and voodoo dolls, and innovative addition of alternate fire modes for weapons, helped it stand toe-to-toe with more technologically advanced games such as Quake. The success of Blood sent Monolith into a frenzy of FPS development. Between 1998 and 2003, it designed seven new games in the genre including Blood 2; the anime-inspired shooter Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, which alternated between on-foot combat and city-flattening battles inside Gundam-style mechs; and two licensed tie-in games, Aliens Versus Predator 2, and Tron 2.0. 'Our studio culture was born from a deep-seated conviction that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to,' Gladwell says. 'We talked games, we played games together, both competitively and to analyse. There weren't significant boundaries, given that we were all new to building a company – other than a strong desire to build games that would stand alongside the giants of the time.' The lack of boundaries also applied to the practical side of game design. 'This was still a fledgling industry when we got started. The more specific roles you see today, such as world builder or environment artist were far more nebulous. Everyone pitched in. This helped give us a broader spread of opinion and feedback, because everyone was contributing to design,' Gladwell says. 'Much of my own time at Monolith was spent in the energy vortex between design, art, audio and engineering.' The brightest star of Monolith's early years, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, or NOLF as it is affectionately known, saw players don the orange catsuit of Cate Archer in a gloriously colourful pastiche of 60s espionage fiction. Its wide-ranging adventure transported players to Morocco, Germany, the tropics and even into space, with each level introducing new ideas, weapons and gadgets. Released in 2000, It was also one of the only shooters of its time with a female protagonist – and her portrayal holds up surprisingly well for a game that owes a significant debt to Austin Powers. Monolith's vintage year, however, came in 2005, during which it released three games. Alongside The Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer adaptation of the 1999 sci-fi action movie, Monolith released a second game partly inspired by the same film: Fear. The culmination of Monolith's mastery of the FPS, Fear combines the espionage themes of NOLF, the stylised ultraviolence of Blood and the Japanese borrowings of Shogo – though this time it looked to J-horror films, particularly Ringu, for inspiration. It bound these elements together with dynamic slow-motion combat and state-of-the-art enemy AI design, pitching the player against an army of clones that could seemingly work together tactically to outfox the player. The result is one of the best first-person shooters ever made. Fear is arguably Monolith's best game. Yet despite its title, it isn't the scariest. One month after Fear launched, Monolith released Condemned: Criminal Origins. A dark and gritty detective thriller inspired by films such as Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Condemned likewise blended horror and battles against eerily human enemies. But the foes you face in Condemned are crazed vagrants who attack the player with steel pipes and wooden planks, these tooth-and-nail duels interspersed with grisly crime-scene investigations. By far Monolith's most unsettling game, Condemned's atmosphere of dread is thicker and more convincing than anything in Fear. A level set in a mannequin-filled department store has become infamous for its paranoia-inducing qualities. 'Their studio had a real talent for permanently altering your imagination by turning everyday locations into memorable levels,' says Cameron Martin, senior producer at New Blood Interactive, publisher of retro shooters including Dusk, partly inspired by Monolith's work. 'After playing their games, you'll never look at empty office buildings or crusty subway stations the same way again.' Fear and Condemned would be the last truly original games the studio would make. By 2005, Monolith had been acquired by Warner Bros, and after providing Fear and Condemned with decent if lesser sequels, Monolith became a servant of Warner Bros' media licences. Yet even in this role, Monolith's inventive, capricious personality shines through, as in 2012's bizarre multiplayer shooter Gotham City Imposters, where players assumed the roles of random Gotham citizens pretending to be Batman and the Joker. The highlight of the studio's latter years, however, was Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. An open-world game in the Assassin's Creed mould, Shadow of Mordor featured the remarkable Nemesis AI system, which reorganised Sauron's faceless army of orcs into a scheming political hierarchy, filled with recognisable personalities players would repeatedly encounter in tit-for-tat blood feuds. Nemesis was a potentially genre-defining concept, an idea dozens of other games would borrow from and riff on. But we will never know what its influence could have been. Warner Bros patented the system in 2021, and the only game to feature it since is Monolith's final release, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Monolith was working on a Wonder Woman game that would also have featured the system, but this project was cancelled alongside Monolith's closure. When a game studio closes, it can be difficult to gauge what is lost. Drive, perhaps, is what ultimately defines Monolith's legacy. Between its foundation in 1994 and Shadow of War's publication in 2017, Monolith created 23 games, one for every year of its existence up to that point. Which makes it more shocking that Monolith closed with nothing to show for its last eight years of existence. That such a dependable studio failed to release another game in almost a decade should raise serious questions about modern industry practices and how studios are increasingly subject to the whims of executives, investors, and venture capitalists. The demand that every release be bigger and better looking, appealing to the widest audience, and poised to serve players for years, is transforming the industry into a zero-sum game – a game that some studios aren't allowed to finish, let alone win or lose.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Legendary Studio Monolith Shuttered, Assassin's Creed Shadows Leaked, And More Of The Week's Top Stories
This week, Warner Bros. shuttered Monolith, the legendary studio responsible for games ranging from 2000's The Operative: No One Lives Forever to 2017's Middle-earth: Shadow of War. The closure means that the studio's promising Wonder Woman game, first revealed in 2021, has been cancelled as well. In other news, Assassin's Creed Shadows has leaked a month prior to launch, a gorgeous new 2D, pixel-art game based on Terminator 2 was revealed, and we got a look at what the Pokémon franchise has in store this year. All these stories and more await in the pages ahead. Monolith Productions revealed it was making a Wonder Woman game back in 2021. Now,publisher Warner Bros. Games has announced that the project has been canned, and the studio best known for the Middle-Earth: Shadow of War games is being shut down as well as part of larger cuts. The shakeup comes after 2024's Suicide Squad bombed and platform fighter MultiVersus failed to make a comeback. - Ethan Gach Read More Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players have been accusing various loading screens and calling cards from the game of being AI-generated since it came out last fall, but it was only ever based on vibes and the occasional very convincing piece of seemingly obvious AI slop. Now Activision has admitted to using AI-generated assets in the hit multiplayer shooter on its Steam page. - Ethan Gach Read More It's that time of year when Pokémon fans get to have an early Christmas. It's Pokémon Day, which commemorates the anniversary of the launch of the original Pokemon Red and Green in Japan in 1996. Each year, The Pokémon Company puts on a livestream to talk about upcoming games, updates on current ones, and other projects within the franchise. Last year's was a little lowkey because it was the first year in a while that Game Freak didn't release a new RPG or DLC, but this year, the studio is releasing Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the second installment in the Legends subseries set in Kalos. That wasn't the only announcement, although things were still pretty quiet. If you want to watch the full livestream, you can check that out below. If you just want the highlights, read on: - Kenneth Shepard Read More It looks like at least a few people have got their hands on physical copies of Assassin's Creed Shadows ahead of the game's official March 20 launch. Reportedly, one player streamed themselves playing the next entry in Ubisoft's long-running franchise online. (No spoilers are included below.) - Zack Zwiezen Read More It's looking like a good Game Pass harvest this year, especially because Microsoft's backlog of big first-party Xbox games like Doom: The Dark Ages and Fable are coming in 2025. But tons of other cool stuff is headed to the subscription service as well, and a bunch of them were announced during the company's ID@Xbox showcase on Monday. - Ethan Gach Read More Terminator 2D: No Fate, a newly announced game based on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, looks like a rad retro-inspired side scroller. And you luckily won't have to wait too long to play it. - Zack Zwiezen Read More Oh no. A new Sims 4 update went live yesterday, and it seems to have added a very disturbing bug. According to some players online, kids are now walking around with big pregnant bellies in The Sims 4. Yikes. - Zack Zwiezen Read More It's only been a month since Pokémon TCG Pocket's Diamond and Pearl-inspired Space-Time Smackdown expansion released, and it looks like the mobile card game's next set of cards is already here. A promo for a set called Triumphant Light, starring the god Pokémon Arceus, leaked earlier this week. Now fans with unfinished collections are already freaking out about all of the new cards they'll need to collect. - Ethan Gach Read More After a year of waiting, we finally got our first look at Pokémon Legends: Z-A during the annual Pokémon Presents showcase. The Switch game seems like a significant departure from the untamed open zones of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which is exciting because we don't know what to expect. The stream gave us a trailer as well as a general breakdown, and we skimmed through both to see what details we could find. Here's everything we noticed. - Kenneth Shepard Read More Forza Horizon 5, which launched over four years ago on Xbox and PC, is making the leap to PlayStation 5 soon, but because it's 2025, the game will lock 'early access' to Xbox's open-world driving sim behind a pricey special edition. It's the next evolution in publishers holding games hostage for extra money. - Zack Zwiezen Read More For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
