The Final Fantasy 9 animated series will be revealed at the Las Vegas Licensing Expo this week.

Bruno Danzel d’Aumont, the vice president of international licensing and marketing at Cyber Group Studios - the animation studio that's developing the series with Square Enix - revealed to Animation Magazine that the Final Fantasy series would be one of four new shows revealed at the event.

The Licensing Expo takes place from May 24 to May 26, at which point the Final Fantasy series will seemingly have been in production for a few months, as work was expected to begin in late 2021 or early 2022. The Final Fantasy 9 series was revealed in June last year with an episode count and length still unconfirmed by either Cyber Group Studios or Square Enix.

"[The Expo] will be a great opportunity to share our upcoming plans with our licensees, agents, and new partners," d’Aumont said. "Additionally, our most recently developed shows — Digital Girl, The McFire Family, Press Start! and Final Fantasy IX — will be presented for the first time.

"These four new series have a strong licensing appeal for different age targets," he added.

It's unclear at what point during the Licensing Expo this first look at the Final Fantasy series will be given but the entire event is expected to be streamed online, meaning fans won't need to be in attendance in Las Vegas in order to see the reveal as soon as it happens.

In our 9/10 review of the original game, IGN said: "Square's developers have once again outdone themselves as far as technical execution and visual artistry, building a fantasy world that I could be content to simply stare at."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

The Final Fantasy 9 animated series will be revealed at the Las Vegas Licensing Expo this week.

Bruno Danzel d’Aumont, the vice president of international licensing and marketing at Cyber Group Studios - the animation studio that's developing the series with Square Enix - revealed to Animation Magazine that the Final Fantasy series would be one of four new shows revealed at the event.

The Licensing Expo takes place from May 24 to May 26, at which point the Final Fantasy series will seemingly have been in production for a few months, as work was expected to begin in late 2021 or early 2022. The Final Fantasy 9 series was revealed in June last year with an episode count and length still unconfirmed by either Cyber Group Studios or Square Enix.

"[The Expo] will be a great opportunity to share our upcoming plans with our licensees, agents, and new partners," d’Aumont said. "Additionally, our most recently developed shows — Digital Girl, The McFire Family, Press Start! and Final Fantasy IX — will be presented for the first time.

"These four new series have a strong licensing appeal for different age targets," he added.

It's unclear at what point during the Licensing Expo this first look at the Final Fantasy series will be given but the entire event is expected to be streamed online, meaning fans won't need to be in attendance in Las Vegas in order to see the reveal as soon as it happens.

In our 9/10 review of the original game, IGN said: "Square's developers have once again outdone themselves as far as technical execution and visual artistry, building a fantasy world that I could be content to simply stare at."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Editor's Note: The war in Ukraine is an ongoing, painful and emotive topic. IGN urges community members to be respectful when engaging in conversation around this subject and does not endorse harassment of any kind.

Kyiv-based GSC Game World has seemingly confirmed it has resumed development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl following a pause that was due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As reported by PC Gamer, GRY-Online shared the news of the update in Polish, saying a message was delivered in Discord by GSC Game World community representative Mol1t that said development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 "continues" and "the work is in progress."

GSC said that development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 would be paused earlier this year due to the invasion and that work on the game would continue after Ukraine's victory over Russia in the ongoing war. The team also explained on its YouTube channel titled "Lights! Camera! War..." how their lives have changed since the invasion began.

PC Gamer has noted that rumors have indicated that some of the developers have relocated to Prague, and it also wrote about how GSC changed the name of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl to reflect the Ukrainian spelling rather than the Russian.

It was also shared that the game's official Discord was closed to new chat following the development pause announcement, but it has reopened in the past few days.

In January, GSC revealed that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was delayed to December 8, 2022, and it has shared no further updates since as to whether that date has been impacted by these recent developments.

For more on the ongoing war in Ukraine, check out others in the games industry who have been either impacted by it or who have thrown in their support for Ukraine.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Editor's Note: The war in Ukraine is an ongoing, painful and emotive topic. IGN urges community members to be respectful when engaging in conversation around this subject and does not endorse harassment of any kind.

Kyiv-based GSC Game World has seemingly confirmed it has resumed development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl following a pause that was due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As reported by PC Gamer, GRY-Online shared the news of the update in Polish, saying a message was delivered in Discord by GSC Game World community representative Mol1t that said development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 "continues" and "the work is in progress."

GSC said that development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 would be paused earlier this year due to the invasion and that work on the game would continue after Ukraine's victory over Russia in the ongoing war. The team also explained on its YouTube channel titled "Lights! Camera! War..." how their lives have changed since the invasion began.

PC Gamer has noted that rumors have indicated that some of the developers have relocated to Prague, and it also wrote about how GSC changed the name of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl to reflect the Ukrainian spelling rather than the Russian.

It was also shared that the game's official Discord was closed to new chat following the development pause announcement, but it has reopened in the past few days.

In January, GSC revealed that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was delayed to December 8, 2022, and it has shared no further updates since as to whether that date has been impacted by these recent developments.

For more on the ongoing war in Ukraine, check out others in the games industry who have been either impacted by it or who have thrown in their support for Ukraine.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Colin Cantwell, the concept artist who designed Star Wars' X-Wing Starfighter, TIE Fighter, Star Destroyer, Death Star, and more, has died at the age of 90.

As reported by THR, Cantwell's long-time partner Sierra Dall confirmed that he passed away at his Colorado home on Saturday, May 23.

While he was perhaps most well-known for his work on Star Wars, his impressive resume also includes special photographic effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, technical dialogue for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and computer graphics design consultant for WarGames.

For 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cantwell worked closely with Stanley Kubrick and "persuaded him not to start the movie with a 20-minute conference table discussion" alongside being instrumental in creating the film's opening.

For WarGames, he programmed the Hewlett Packard monitors to show the bomb scenes on NORAD screens as the WOPR almost launched nuclear weapons. His work on that project would led him to program software that "took the actual Hewlett Packard from a few colors to 5,000 colors.

Cantwell was born in San Francisco in 1932 and was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a partial retina detachment at an early age. During a Reddit AMA in 2016, he shared that the cure was to stay in a dark room with a heavy vest on his chest to prevent coughing attacks.

"I spent nearly two years of my childhood immobilized in this dark room. Suffice to say, nothing else could slow me down after that!” Cantwell said.

He would continue on to graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in animation and would then be personally invited by Frank Lloyd Wright to attend his School of Architecture.

Prior to taking Hollywood and that galaxy far, far away by storm, Cantwell worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA during the '60s space race between the U.S. and Russia and created educational programs for the public to better understand what was going on.

He was even the one who fed information to Walter Cronkite as he made his historic moon landing broadcast in 1969.

Outside of all this work, Cantwell also found the time to write two science fiction novels, CoreFires 1 and CoreFires 2.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Colin Cantwell, the concept artist who designed Star Wars' X-Wing Starfighter, TIE Fighter, Star Destroyer, Death Star, and more, has died at the age of 90.

As reported by THR, Cantwell's long-time partner Sierra Dall confirmed that he passed away at his Colorado home on Saturday, May 23.

While he was perhaps most well-known for his work on Star Wars, his impressive resume also includes special photographic effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, technical dialogue for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and computer graphics design consultant for WarGames.

For 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cantwell worked closely with Stanley Kubrick and "persuaded him not to start the movie with a 20-minute conference table discussion" alongside being instrumental in creating the film's opening.

For WarGames, he programmed the Hewlett Packard monitors to show the bomb scenes on NORAD screens as the WOPR almost launched nuclear weapons. His work on that project would led him to program software that "took the actual Hewlett Packard from a few colors to 5,000 colors.

Cantwell was born in San Francisco in 1932 and was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a partial retina detachment at an early age. During a Reddit AMA in 2016, he shared that the cure was to stay in a dark room with a heavy vest on his chest to prevent coughing attacks.

"I spent nearly two years of my childhood immobilized in this dark room. Suffice to say, nothing else could slow me down after that!” Cantwell said.

He would continue on to graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in animation and would then be personally invited by Frank Lloyd Wright to attend his School of Architecture.

Prior to taking Hollywood and that galaxy far, far away by storm, Cantwell worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA during the '60s space race between the U.S. and Russia and created educational programs for the public to better understand what was going on.

He was even the one who fed information to Walter Cronkite as he made his historic moon landing broadcast in 1969.

Outside of all this work, Cantwell also found the time to write two science fiction novels, CoreFires 1 and CoreFires 2.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has held off Downton Abbey: A New Era to win its third straight domestic weekend box office.

As reported by Variety, Doctor Strange 2 brought in another $31.6 million domestically, pushing its total North American haul to $342 million. The latest Marvel film has reached $461 million internationally and has officially crossed $800 million worldwide.

Downton Abbey: A New Era earned $16 million in its first weekend and placed second. While it was a bit lower than projected, it performed well for those 55 and older as nearly 50% of ticket sales were from that demographic.

Internationally, Downton Abbey: A New Era brought in another $35 million, bringing its global tally to $51.7 million. This second Downton Abbey film cost $40 million to produce and was twice as expensive as the original.

Speaking of the original, the first Downton Abbey opened to $31 million at the domestic box office and crossed $192 million during its global theatrical run.

In our Downton Abbey: A New Era review, we said that it "starts out as a wistful return to the familiar before shedding its skin and letting the series’ nauseating ugliness come frothing to the surface. It goes from funny and charming to jaw-droppingly grim at the drop of a hat — a wild tonal whiplash that’s absolutely worth a watch. It’s a concentrated dose of Downton Abbey."

The Bad Guys took third place with $6.1 million and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 added another $3.9 million to its total. Rounding out the top five and finally knocking off Everything Everywhere All at Once was Alex Garland's Men with $3.29 million.

While Everything Everywhere All at Once's $3.1 million didn't make the top five, it did cross the $52 million mark and has officially become A24's highest-grossing domestic release in history.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has held off Downton Abbey: A New Era to win its third straight domestic weekend box office.

As reported by Variety, Doctor Strange 2 brought in another $31.6 million domestically, pushing its total North American haul to $342 million. The latest Marvel film has reached $461 million internationally and has officially crossed $800 million worldwide.

Downton Abbey: A New Era earned $16 million in its first weekend and placed second. While it was a bit lower than projected, it performed well for those 55 and older as nearly 50% of ticket sales were from that demographic.

Internationally, Downton Abbey: A New Era brought in another $35 million, bringing its global tally to $51.7 million. This second Downton Abbey film cost $40 million to produce and was twice as expensive as the original.

Speaking of the original, the first Downton Abbey opened to $31 million at the domestic box office and crossed $192 million during its global theatrical run.

In our Downton Abbey: A New Era review, we said that it "starts out as a wistful return to the familiar before shedding its skin and letting the series’ nauseating ugliness come frothing to the surface. It goes from funny and charming to jaw-droppingly grim at the drop of a hat — a wild tonal whiplash that’s absolutely worth a watch. It’s a concentrated dose of Downton Abbey."

The Bad Guys took third place with $6.1 million and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 added another $3.9 million to its total. Rounding out the top five and finally knocking off Everything Everywhere All at Once was Alex Garland's Men with $3.29 million.

While Everything Everywhere All at Once's $3.1 million didn't make the top five, it did cross the $52 million mark and has officially become A24's highest-grossing domestic release in history.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Battle for Baldur’s Gate sees Magic: The Gathering once again crossing over with Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), only this time, in the Commander Legends format. What is Commander Legends? Well, it first debuted in 2020, and combines the hugely popular Commander format with Draft. This means players take it in turns picking from a limited pool of cards to build the best deck they can. Unlike regular Commander, however, decks can contain multiple copies of a single card and are comprised of 60 cards instead of 100, and unlike Draft, synergies are easier to create, as players pick two cards at a time.

The last D&D set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (AFR), featured a host of classic D&D settings, characters and gameplay elements, and so too will Battle for Baldur’s Gate. Backgrounds, for instance, are a new type of enchantment, and will help represent your commander’s story so far and give them a bonus. Initiative, meanwhile, is a new keyword ability that ties into Undercity - a new dungeon card - as well as improving certain cards in the set if you have the initiative. Characters like Tasha the Witch, Elminster, and iconic duo Minsc and Boo are also featured. You can read about all the new mechanics here.

It’s an intriguing looking set and a great match for two famous properties. I spoke to Game Designer Corey Bowen about returning to D&D for a Commander Legends set. “Dungeons & Dragons is a social game about collaboration. Commander is currently Magic’s greatest expression of a social game where winning isn’t everything. The union of these two social gathering-based games makes for a lot of harmony in this set,” he says. “Commander Legends sets usually need a wealth of legendary characters, too, so borrowing from a mostly untapped IP that is overflowing with characters and adventurers fits the bill as well.

“There are some ties between Adventures in the Forgotten Realms and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate,” he says, when I ask about links between the two. “The Dungeon mechanic and the d20-rolling mechanic both return, for instance. Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate’s two-color themes were mostly built agnostic of the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms themes, but you’ll see parallels as they both are forming from similar source material. You’ll see rogues in UB and fighters in RW just as you’ve seen in AFR.”

I also ask about how Wizards of the Coast’s focus on world- and character-building changes when working with an existing property. “Many of the characters here are already defined with a history and a power suite,” Bowen explains. “There’s a lot of inspiration to pull from to make some very resonant and charming cards. But, that’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Sometimes there are card slots that need to be a specific thing that the character fit for that slot doesn’t provide. Or maybe the character’s power suite translates very poorly into Magic cards. In the first Commander Legends, it was easy to create, change, or adapt any character we wanted to. When working with an IP, there’s always a sacrifice to the resonance of the character’s story by changing an aspect of the card text — a sacrifice that doesn’t exist when we’re defining who that character is in our own IP.”

With all that background in mind, today we have a brand new card to reveal:

While high cost, Legion Loyalty’s use of the myriad keyword seems extremely powerful. I ask Corey Bowen about it. “I love myriad,” he says. “Giving your creatures myriad is awesome. Giving all your creatures myriad is REALLY awesome. One of the things I like about myriad is how many things it combos with — enter-the-battlefield effects, sacrifice outlets, token synergies, aggro strategies, you name it. There are a number of strategies you could use Legion Loyalty with. In this set, if I drafted this card early, I’d probably play some sort of WU dungeon deck and try to play the creatures that take the initiative when they enter play. With myriad, they’d each put me through the dungeon twice on attacking!”

Legion Loyalty also seems to be a good example of the kind of card design that’s possible in a “fun-first” format like Commander Legends. “I would argue that every set we make is ‘fun-first’ as the primary heuristic,” says Bowen when I posit this and ask about how the team’s card design philosophy changes. “For Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, the difference is that it doesn’t need to consider their cards in competitive formats. It’s also true that multiplayer games (and especially socially-oriented ones) are typically more tolerant of high-variance games. In a given set, if a specific combo is too reliable and easy to pull off, then it becomes a problem in that limited format and potentially the constructed competitive format. In this set, mixing and matching abilities on your commander and finding those niche combos among the giant set of cards is fun. Assembling those combos is a lot less reliable, so we don’t have to balance them too harshly for limited or a competitive constructed environment. There are also three opponents-worth of removal spells that are there to rein you in if you get too far ahead. So the format embraces large swings and big plays, which is a lot of the heart of Commander to me.”

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate will contain 361 cards and comes out for tabletop on June 10. For more info be sure to visit the official Battle for Baldur's Gate homepage.

Cam Shea has worked at IGN since before the before times, and has played more Breath of the Wild than just about any other game. When he's not playing games he's mixing records.

Battle for Baldur’s Gate sees Magic: The Gathering once again crossing over with Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), only this time, in the Commander Legends format. What is Commander Legends? Well, it first debuted in 2020, and combines the hugely popular Commander format with Draft. This means players take it in turns picking from a limited pool of cards to build the best deck they can. Unlike regular Commander, however, decks can contain multiple copies of a single card and are comprised of 60 cards instead of 100, and unlike Draft, synergies are easier to create, as players pick two cards at a time.

The last D&D set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (AFR), featured a host of classic D&D settings, characters and gameplay elements, and so too will Battle for Baldur’s Gate. Backgrounds, for instance, are a new type of enchantment, and will help represent your commander’s story so far and give them a bonus. Initiative, meanwhile, is a new keyword ability that ties into Undercity - a new dungeon card - as well as improving certain cards in the set if you have the initiative. Characters like Tasha the Witch, Elminster, and iconic duo Minsc and Boo are also featured. You can read about all the new mechanics here.

It’s an intriguing looking set and a great match for two famous properties. I spoke to Game Designer Corey Bowen about returning to D&D for a Commander Legends set. “Dungeons & Dragons is a social game about collaboration. Commander is currently Magic’s greatest expression of a social game where winning isn’t everything. The union of these two social gathering-based games makes for a lot of harmony in this set,” he says. “Commander Legends sets usually need a wealth of legendary characters, too, so borrowing from a mostly untapped IP that is overflowing with characters and adventurers fits the bill as well.

“There are some ties between Adventures in the Forgotten Realms and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate,” he says, when I ask about links between the two. “The Dungeon mechanic and the d20-rolling mechanic both return, for instance. Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate’s two-color themes were mostly built agnostic of the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms themes, but you’ll see parallels as they both are forming from similar source material. You’ll see rogues in UB and fighters in RW just as you’ve seen in AFR.”

I also ask about how Wizards of the Coast’s focus on world- and character-building changes when working with an existing property. “Many of the characters here are already defined with a history and a power suite,” Bowen explains. “There’s a lot of inspiration to pull from to make some very resonant and charming cards. But, that’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Sometimes there are card slots that need to be a specific thing that the character fit for that slot doesn’t provide. Or maybe the character’s power suite translates very poorly into Magic cards. In the first Commander Legends, it was easy to create, change, or adapt any character we wanted to. When working with an IP, there’s always a sacrifice to the resonance of the character’s story by changing an aspect of the card text — a sacrifice that doesn’t exist when we’re defining who that character is in our own IP.”

With all that background in mind, today we have a brand new card to reveal:

While high cost, Legion Loyalty’s use of the myriad keyword seems extremely powerful. I ask Corey Bowen about it. “I love myriad,” he says. “Giving your creatures myriad is awesome. Giving all your creatures myriad is REALLY awesome. One of the things I like about myriad is how many things it combos with — enter-the-battlefield effects, sacrifice outlets, token synergies, aggro strategies, you name it. There are a number of strategies you could use Legion Loyalty with. In this set, if I drafted this card early, I’d probably play some sort of WU dungeon deck and try to play the creatures that take the initiative when they enter play. With myriad, they’d each put me through the dungeon twice on attacking!”

Legion Loyalty also seems to be a good example of the kind of card design that’s possible in a “fun-first” format like Commander Legends. “I would argue that every set we make is ‘fun-first’ as the primary heuristic,” says Bowen when I posit this and ask about how the team’s card design philosophy changes. “For Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, the difference is that it doesn’t need to consider their cards in competitive formats. It’s also true that multiplayer games (and especially socially-oriented ones) are typically more tolerant of high-variance games. In a given set, if a specific combo is too reliable and easy to pull off, then it becomes a problem in that limited format and potentially the constructed competitive format. In this set, mixing and matching abilities on your commander and finding those niche combos among the giant set of cards is fun. Assembling those combos is a lot less reliable, so we don’t have to balance them too harshly for limited or a competitive constructed environment. There are also three opponents-worth of removal spells that are there to rein you in if you get too far ahead. So the format embraces large swings and big plays, which is a lot of the heart of Commander to me.”

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate will contain 361 cards and comes out for tabletop on June 10. For more info be sure to visit the official Battle for Baldur's Gate homepage.

Cam Shea has worked at IGN since before the before times, and has played more Breath of the Wild than just about any other game. When he's not playing games he's mixing records.