Monthly Archives: August 2022
Gotham Knights: Check Out a Harley Quinn Boss Fight – IGN First
We discovered that Harley Quinn would be a major Gotham Knights villain earlier this week, and now we have a section of a boss fight against her to reveal.
Harley is part of one of Gotham Knights' villain arcs, entire questlines centred around the activities of of a supervillain, which run in parallel to the main storyline. Warner Bros. Games Montreal's version of Harley has come through her Joker and Suicide Squad phases, and is now setting out to become a master criminal on her own terms.
In terms of the context of this boss fight itself, we had game director Geoff Ellenor explain it for us:
"Right before you start the Harley boss fight, which takes place in Gotham Hospital, up until this moment, you've been pursuing Harley - you've been trying to figure out what she's up to... But of course, this is Harley Quinn and she's up to no good in Gotham, and 'living your best life' in this case means doing murderous and violent things.
"Right before the boss fight starts, you've finally figured out which part of the hospital she's in and you're about to confront Harley about everything that she's been up to."
You can see 7 minutes of that ensuing fight in the video above, and for more we've revealed as part of IGN First, check out the first 16 minutes of gameplay, a reveal of 28 different superhero suits, a look at Mr. Freeze and his chosen gang, and a rundown of how this new version of Gotham City was built.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Gotham Knights: Check Out a Harley Quinn Boss Fight – IGN First
We discovered that Harley Quinn would be a major Gotham Knights villain earlier this week, and now we have a section of a boss fight against her to reveal.
Harley is part of one of Gotham Knights' villain arcs, entire questlines centred around the activities of of a supervillain, which run in parallel to the main storyline. Warner Bros. Games Montreal's version of Harley has come through her Joker and Suicide Squad phases, and is now setting out to become a master criminal on her own terms.
In terms of the context of this boss fight itself, we had game director Geoff Ellenor explain it for us:
"Right before you start the Harley boss fight, which takes place in Gotham Hospital, up until this moment, you've been pursuing Harley - you've been trying to figure out what she's up to... But of course, this is Harley Quinn and she's up to no good in Gotham, and 'living your best life' in this case means doing murderous and violent things.
"Right before the boss fight starts, you've finally figured out which part of the hospital she's in and you're about to confront Harley about everything that she's been up to."
You can see 7 minutes of that ensuing fight in the video above, and for more we've revealed as part of IGN First, check out the first 16 minutes of gameplay, a reveal of 28 different superhero suits, a look at Mr. Freeze and his chosen gang, and a rundown of how this new version of Gotham City was built.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Umbrella Academy Director to Adapt PlayStation’s Horizon Netflix Series
Umbrella Academy director Steve Blackman is heading up the Netflix Horizon series based on PlayStation's Zero Dawn and Forbidden West.
During an interview with Tudum, he confirmed that he’s adapting the popular PlayStation series for Netflix and that Aloy will be the show’s main character.
“Horizon Zero Dawn is an exceptionally well-crafted game with wonderful characters not often seen in the rank-and-file of the gaming world,” he said. “Guerrilla Games has created an incredibly lush and vivid world of man and machine who find themselves on a collision course to oblivion.”
Aloy made her debut in Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017, with a sequel, Horizon Forbidden West released earlier this year. Throughout it, Aloy grapples with her own past while exploring a post-apocalyptic world that’s overrun by machines, leaving humanity on the edge of extinction.
“Their salvation comes in the form of a young female warrior named Aloy, who has no idea she's the key to saving the world,” added Blackman. “Suffice it to say, yes, Aloy will be a main character in our story,” he revealed. “My writing partner on this, Michelle Lovretta, and I are thrilled to be able to expand this remarkable IP into a series for all types of viewers.”
Sure, Aloy may seem like the obvious choice, but with several rich and varied tribal cultures appearing throughout the series, it wasn’t exactly clear. And let’s face it – a Rost prequel show would have been epic.
IGN’s 9/10 review of Horizon: Zero Dawn said it's “a beautiful world full of unforgettable challenges," and its sequel received similar praise: “A triumphant combination of enthralling combat, top-tier creature, and character design, and a captivating open world, Horizon Forbidden West is an absolute blast and fantastic showcase for the power of the PS5.”
Want to read more about Horizon? Check out our top 15 PS5 games as well as our rundown of the 26 amazing details in Horizon Forbidden West.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Umbrella Academy Director to Adapt PlayStation’s Horizon Netflix Series
Umbrella Academy director Steve Blackman is heading up the Netflix Horizon series based on PlayStation's Zero Dawn and Forbidden West.
During an interview with Tudum, he confirmed that he’s adapting the popular PlayStation series for Netflix and that Aloy will be the show’s main character.
“Horizon Zero Dawn is an exceptionally well-crafted game with wonderful characters not often seen in the rank-and-file of the gaming world,” he said. “Guerrilla Games has created an incredibly lush and vivid world of man and machine who find themselves on a collision course to oblivion.”
Aloy made her debut in Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017, with a sequel, Horizon Forbidden West released earlier this year. Throughout it, Aloy grapples with her own past while exploring a post-apocalyptic world that’s overrun by machines, leaving humanity on the edge of extinction.
“Their salvation comes in the form of a young female warrior named Aloy, who has no idea she's the key to saving the world,” added Blackman. “Suffice it to say, yes, Aloy will be a main character in our story,” he revealed. “My writing partner on this, Michelle Lovretta, and I are thrilled to be able to expand this remarkable IP into a series for all types of viewers.”
Sure, Aloy may seem like the obvious choice, but with several rich and varied tribal cultures appearing throughout the series, it wasn’t exactly clear. And let’s face it – a Rost prequel show would have been epic.
IGN’s 9/10 review of Horizon: Zero Dawn said it's “a beautiful world full of unforgettable challenges," and its sequel received similar praise: “A triumphant combination of enthralling combat, top-tier creature, and character design, and a captivating open world, Horizon Forbidden West is an absolute blast and fantastic showcase for the power of the PS5.”
Want to read more about Horizon? Check out our top 15 PS5 games as well as our rundown of the 26 amazing details in Horizon Forbidden West.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Dark Souls 3 PC Servers Back Online After 8 Months, Dark Souls 1 and 2 to Follow
FromSoftware has announced that Dark Souls 3's PC servers are back online after a serious exploit brought them down in January.
Dark Souls' official Twitter account posted the update (below), confirming that Dark Souls 3 can be played as intended again for the first time in over seven months, and that the development team is also working to restore these features to previous games Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2.
"Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls 3 have been reactivated," the tweet said. "We are working to restore these features for all other Dark Souls titles and will inform you when they are back in service. Thank you once more for your patience and support."
Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls III have been reactivated.
— Dark Souls (@DarkSoulsGame) August 25, 2022
We are working to restore these features for all other #DarkSouls titles and will inform you when they are back in service.
Thank you once more for your patience and support. pic.twitter.com/XHiCZDEANC
The servers were first taken down after an exploit was discovered that allowed other players to take over the user's PC, and FromSoftware has been releasing incremental updates ever since as it worked to bring back its games' online features.
As this issue arose just a month before the developer released Elden Ring, fans looking forward to the game were worried it would affect its multiplayer components. Thankfully, however, Elden Ring was able to launch without major issues and became an incredible success.
It did have to deal with a few hacking issues though, after an infamous Dark Souls hacker appeared in Elden Ring and forced illegal items into players' inventories, causing them to be banned. Even weirder, the game's secret underwear was also being used by trolls to get other players banned.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
Skull and Bones: How Exploration Works
With the waves beneath you and the wind in your sails, the Indian Ocean is yours to fully explore in Skull and Bones. But, as we recently learned, most of Ubisoft’s upcoming pirate simulator takes place at sea. So, how much is there to discover out there, aside from water, water, and, well, more water? We spoke to developers from Ubisoft Singapore to find out.
On Land
Despite the majority of Skull and Bones’ map being made up of ocean, you can step off your ship and walk on dry land. Not every island you see is explorable, but you can weigh anchor at dens and outposts; two special location types that have everything a pirate needs to prepare for further adventures.
“The gameplay on land is about socializing, crafting, building up your fleet and taking contracts in the game in either a den or the outpost,” explains Ryan Barnard, game director on Skull and Bones.
“The particular idea of the land is that it offers you a safe zone where nobody can attack you,” says Elisabeth Pellen, Skull and Bones’ creative director. “The role of the pirate is to do some back and forth between the safe land, where you can build and customize your ship, also trade some resources, before [going] on the ocean to steal precious cargo that you can then bring back.”
“So from land, aside from building and training, you can also take some contracts to make some money from other pirate kingpins,” she adds. “As your infamy begins to spread across the Indian ocean, you'll gain access to your own pirate lair from where you can kick start your ascent to pirate kingpin by manufacturing and smuggling illegal and high value goods.”
Skull and Bones’ world has been designed as a living space that changes as frequently as the tides. Some characters won’t stay in one place forever, and so you’ll need to explore the map to find the right people with the right opportunities.
“Spread all over the world, you will find some outposts where you can meet with smugglers or some local rebels fighting against the mega corporations,” Pellen reveals. “We call them ephemeral zones, because the NPCs you will meet in those outposts won't always be the same. They are also traveling. They are moving from one place to another.”
“When you connect to Skull and Bones, the first thing to do is to look at your map and see where the trade routes are, where the merchants are, before selecting the right ship and provision it and equip it and set sail in the direction that is most interesting to you,” she advises.
Sailing, trading, and smuggling are all important aspects of a buccaneer career. But what about treasure hunting, perhaps the most famous of all the pirate pastimes?
“There are a lot of treasures hidden in all the outposts,” promises Pellen. “You need to board some ships and steal some pieces of treasure, or you can also scavenge some wrecks to find some other pieces of map. Then [by following clues in] some drawings and some landmarks, once you find the right island, you can also use a land compass that will help you to find the location of the treasure.”
At Sea
While there are plenty of important things to find and do on land, the core gameplay of Skull and Bones takes place at sea. With that in mind, Ubisoft Singapore has put a huge amount of work into making the ocean an interesting and challenging place to explore.
“Our water is essentially a deforming mesh, and that deforming mesh informs the physics,” explains Kris Kirkpatrick, Skull and Bones’ lead technical director. “So the boat is actually interacting with the waves.”
“We have other physics properties that each ship will read from,” he continues. “So there's buoyancy and there's drag. This affects how far into the water the boat will go, how slow they will go through it. Each ship should feel different based on the size and how heavy it is.”
Since sailing is such a focus, the naval mechanics have had to evolve beyond what we saw in Assassin’s Creed. Things like the weight of the items in your hold and the direction of the wind all need to be taken into account.
“Of course, wind should be important to sailing and navigation. The wind direction actually affects the speed of your ship,” says Kirkpatrick. “So the player needs to follow the wind, and a good player will navigate better with the wind at their back, and tack better, and therefore be a better navigator.”
But while the systems are more detailed now, Skull and Bones is definitely not a hardcore sailing simulator. “You don't need to be a sailor to play Skull & Bones and be able to understand what to do,” promises Barnard, “but as you learn how to use the wind better, and [learn about what your] weight means and your cargo and the type of ship that you have, you'll see that there are advantages to being a better captain and a better navigator.”
The waves of the Indian Ocean can frequently be calm and beautiful, but Skull and Bones has a full weather system that can totally transform its waters. “We want to make sure that there are different types of weather,” says Kirkpatrick. “So you can have some light rain, you can have incredibly crazy supercell storms, and they will feel dynamic. We want the player to be surprised by that and feel the threat.”
A storm can be as dangerous as a 100-gunner galleon, so one of Skull and Bones’ biggest challenges will be learning how to sail when the water is determined to break your hull. “When you enter the storm obviously the waves get a lot bigger,” Kirkpatrick explains. “That means that the certain size of ship you have could affect you. You could flood, you could take damage. Visibility will change. It'll be a lot darker, so maybe you won't be able to see threats. Other ships could get the jump on you. It forces the player to make sure [they are] equipped properly for the journey with the right ship. Maybe they have enough food and weapons in case they engage someone.”
Most open worlds create variety through different biomes and environments, but the ocean setting means Skull and Bones can’t really do that. Instead, the developers have paid close attention to different water states and the iconography of the Golden Age of Piracy to ensure each area of the map feels new and interesting.
“Wind affects the water, the terrain affects the water,” Kirkpatrick says. “So if I'm in a coastal sea near the shoreline, the waters will be appropriately different. I can go inland, and then we're using the river technology [...] So more than ever, the world needs to feed the water and then feed the player to help him decide how to act. Not only that, we have the biodiversity of the Indian Ocean. So when I go to Africa, the water will look and feel different than when I go to the East Indies. We wanted to really show the diversity and the realism of water.”
“As you travel through different territories for the factions, you'll see the colors changing,” says Barnard. “The flags, the iconography change around you, so you'll be aware of ‘Oh, I'm in Farah territory’ or ‘I'm in the French territory.’ The color schemes and all of that will change. Breaking that up [are] dynamic events. Things that get the player to investigate are really important because you don't want to just sail for forever as you're moving, because it's a big game and a big world. So that's basically what we try to do, break up the passage with different things you can engage with: helping a merchant out, repairing a ship.”
“You can be distracted by broken pieces of map you will find in a bottle, and that will lead you toward some treasure,” Pellen teases. “On a remote island you can find a ship that is looking for some help. You can decide to escort that ship first, before going back to the prey you had started to shadow.”
“Something we implemented in the game is that sometimes, depending on the value or the properties of the cargo you are transporting, you can attract specific enemies, such as pirate rogues,” she warns. “The rivals will try to eat a piece of your pie.”
Surviving the Waves
Skull and Bones’ massive open world is beautiful, and you’ll want to explore just for the sake of seeing its many sights. But exploration is also vital to staying alive, thanks to the survival mechanics that fit into the core gameplay loop. You need to constantly be searching for new resources and gathering the raw materials to build better ships, feed your crew, and advance your infamy.
“In the world of Skull and Bones, you will evolve from the status of a castaway stranded on a desert island, to the role of middleman working for other pirates, and then to the status of kingpin,” Pellen says of the game’s core arc. “To rise from zero to hero, you will first have to collect the resources that will allow you to build your ship and craft your weapons.
“In the game, you can use a small ship and a harpoon to fish some sharks and even some crocodiles,” Pellen explains. “You can use also a large set of tools to chop some trees or to collect some iron from some cliff. You can also scavenge some rags and steal some pieces of ship. And, of course, you can plunder the rich merchant company and all their forts to collect a [large] amount of resources. The value of the resources is based on high risk, high reward. With all those resources, you can cook some rations to feed your crew during your long voyage. You can use wood to craft a big ship.”
If the term ‘survival mechanics’ fills you with dread and memories of depleting thirst meters, don’t worry; Skull and Bones isn’t that kind of survival game.
“As a captain, you don't have a status,” promises Pellen. “You don't need to drink or consume some food yourself. [But] if you don't feed or don't provide your crew with water after a while, they might turn against you and kick you out of your own ship and maroon you on some island. If you feed them properly, and if you cook some food providing additional temporary buffs, you can increase the speed of your ship and the damage you will deal, because they have more energy.”
Its massive map may be mostly water, but it looks like there’s still plenty to explore in the world of Skull and Bones. For more on Ubisoft’s pirate sim, check out the seven things you need to know about Skull and Bones.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
High on Life: There’s a Lot More to This Shooter Than We Saw at Opening Night Live
We’ve already seen quite a lot of High on Life, the expectedly bizarre, exceptionally gross new single-player shooter. The big pitch is that Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and his team at Squanch Games have built a first-person shooter that sees you bounty hunting for aliens, and taking them down with talking guns. But it was the little details that impressed when I got to try out the game for myself.
Opening Night Live included a boss fight from High on Life’s early sections, but my 25 minute hands-on (which you can watch below) included the full mission that leads up to that battle. The demo begins in your player-character’s house (populated by their exceptionally confused big sister and their new alien bounty hunter handler, Gene), then has you heading out into the technicolor alien city of Blim, and finally down into its sewer slums for a series of battles. In terms of regular gameplay, it’s a relatively short section - but I managed to fill that 25 minutes simply because of how much incidental detail there was to see.
That attention to detail begins right away - your character’s house is a literal home base, equipped with a Bounty 5,000 computer, which will assign missions and (when it’s repaired by Gene) allow you to take portals to different locations. But more immediately fixating was the house’s TV, which airs animated shorts (some made by Roiland himself) and even four licensed feature length movies. It’s an early sign not just of the game’s relentless approach to telling jokes, but the amount of effort that’s gone into adding fun detail for those who stop to look around.
Blim itself is something like Blade Runner’s Los Angeles if it had been designed by the cast of Sesame Street, a vomit of primary color, indecipherable signs for bizarre businesses, and scattered aliens going about their daily lives.
When you get to talk to those citizens, you’re given RPG-esque dialogue choices, but you’ll quickly realize that the emphasis is very much on hitting punchlines rather than making tough decisions. Two, well, tubes with faces guard the gates to the slums, and will only let you through if you answer a question: which one of them is hotter? I repeatedly said the blue guy was sexier than his red friend. The benefit was that the blue guy’s gate opened and let me continue, the cost was that I made the red guy very sad and self-conscious.
That focus on taking familiar gaming tropes and milking them for jokes is all over the game. Later, I was faced with a very irritating little guy who repeatedly mocked the unnamed player-character. Naturally, the response was to try to shoot him… which resulted in my talking gun rebuking me for even trying. So I tried again. Another telling off. Once more? Oh, it suddenly let me do it after all. “Normally, killing children in games isn’t allowed but he’s dead. We killed this kid,” whined my gun. “There goes our E for Everybody rating!”
Yes, High on Life is very aware that it’s a game, and revels in that fact. What surprised me more was that the game itself is seemingly looking beyond its single player shooter peers for ideas. When I did get into some fights (against a series of giant ants, who increasingly lose confidence as I wipe out their ranks), I was surprised to realize that combat has as much to do with platformers or even bullet hells as it does FPS games.
Enemy projectiles are many, but travel slowly, meaning you’ll spend just as much time dodging and positioning yourself in a fight as you do trying to squeeze off headshots. Cover isn’t a huge consideration, leading you to move constantly to avoid the scatterings of blaster shots around you. Later, we picked up the frankly disgusting Knifey, who adds a melee attack and a grappling hook - it seems pretty clear that Squanch wants you to be moving vertically as well as laterally in these fights as the game goes on.
While I only got to use the one gun - a goop-firing pistol called Kenny - its alternate fire revealed another wrinkle to combat. The Glob Shot fires an arcing, explosive… glob, which offers slowdown as you aim it, and knocks enemies into the air. What I didn’t expect was for it to then offer the ability to juggle enemies, Devil May Cry-style, once they were up there. While I didn’t get to experiment further, it feels as though the game is pushing you to finish your fights stylishly rather than efficiently, and I’d expect other guns to offer combos with these alternate abilities.
That feeling, that I expect the game to offer more ideas as time goes on, is what’s exciting me most about High on Life after playing it. If these 25 minutes included enough jokes, neat touches, references, and combat ideas for me to write this much about, how will it feel once I’m hours into the game? If it keeps up that pace, High on Life will be far from a shooter with a jokey veneer - it could be something truly new.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Gamescom Has Announced Its 2023 Schedule
Despite Gamescom 2022 still being well underway, the 2023 event has already had its schedule revealed.
Gamescom's Opening Night Live host Geoff Keighley posted a photo to his Twitter (below) that shows advertisements at this year's event, with one sign confirming an August 23 to August 27 schedule for 2023.
August 22 will also mark Gamescom 2023's Opening Night Live event, the usually two hour show in which dozens of new game announcements, trailers, gameplay clips, and so on are shown.
Give me a minute but Gamescom 2023 dates have been announced - including Opening Night Live. pic.twitter.com/bnmJRVfirK
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) August 24, 2022
This year's Opening Night Live featured all that and more, including the re-reveal of Dead Island 2, the announcement of Sony's Elite Controller competitor the DualSense Edge, a new release date for Gotham Knights, and a reveal for creepy, Bloodborne-looking Pinocchio game called Lies of P.
Gamescom otherwise brings the opportunity for fans to get their hands on unreleased games for the first time, and so far we've seen new gameplay from the Rick and Morty co-creator's shooter High on Life, Dead Space spiritual successor The Callisto Protocol, and Square Enix's upcoming RPG Forspoken.
IGN is also hosting a live show throughout the entirety of Gamescom, bringing fans in-depth coverage, analysis, and gameplay from a ton of new games plus our own exclusive reveals and announcements too.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
PlayStation 5 Is Getting a Price Increase in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Asia, and Australia
The PlayStation 5 is about to get more expensive in most major markets, and Sony says you can blame continued inflation and other global economic troubles.
Today on the PlayStation blog, Sony announced that it will be raising the price of both editions of the PS5 in Europe, the UK, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Canada. The United States seems to be the only major market not getting a price increase.
"The global economic environment is a challenge that many of you around the world are no doubt experiencing," the blog post states. "We’re seeing high global inflation rates, as well as adverse currency trends, impacting consumers and creating pressure on many industries."
The price increases are as follows:
Europe:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – €549.99, up from €499.99
PS5 Digital Edition – €449.99, up from €399.99
UK:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – £479.99, up from £449.99
PS5 Digital Edition – £389.99, up from £359.99
Japan:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – ¥54,980 yen, up from ¥49,980
PS5 Digital Edition – ¥44,980 yen, up from ¥39,980
China:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – ¥4,299 yuan, up from ¥3,899 yuan
PS5 Digital Edition – ¥3,499 yuan, up from ¥3,099 yuan
Australia:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – AUD $799.95, up from AUD $749.95
PS5 Digital Edition – AUD $649.95, up from AUD $599.95
Mexico:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – MXN $14,999, up from MXN $13,999
PS5 Digital Edition – MXN $12,499, up from MXN $11,499
Canada:
PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – CAD $649.99, up from $629 CAD
PS5 Digital Edition – CAD $519.99, up from $499 CAD
It is unfortunately not clear from the blog post whether or not this price increase will eventually be brought back down again, or if so, when. Sony concludes its blog post by stating that its top priority is to improve the PS5 supply situation, which has struggled since the console's launch due to ongoing chip shortages.
Sony's move follows a very similar one from Meta, which bumped the price of Meta Quest 2 $100 late last month for the same reasons. Ampere Analysis' Piers Harding-Rolls suggests in his own blog post that Sony's move was a necessary one to pass on continued cost increases hitting the component supply chain. Harding-Rolls predicts that the price increase will have "minimal impact" on sales due to continued high demand, and adds that for now, there's no indication that Microsoft will make the same move. However, it may take advantage of Sony's price increase to push the value of its own hardware.
Ampere Analysis estimates that Sony has sold 21 million PS5s as of June 2022, while Xbox Series consoles have sold 13.8 million.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Secret ‘Funeral’ Screening of Batgirl Will Be Shown on WB Lot
Batgirl will likely not see the light of day despite having mostly completed filming. While the movie will forever be known as a victim of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, reports say Batgirl will be shown on the WB lot for cast and crew as a "funeral screening."
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the "funeral screenings" will be held in secret for people who have worked on the movie, cast, crew, and executives as a way to send off the movie before it likely gets locked away in a vault.
Following cost-cutting measures by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, it was announced that the studio will shelve Batgirl, a movie that cost $90 million and mostly finished filming, in order to receive a tax write-down.
The film starred Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon and also featured Michael Keaton as Batman, JK Simmons as Jim Gordon, and Brendan Fraser as the film's villain, Firefly.
Any attempts to revive Batgirl similar to the way Zack Snyder revived Justice League have been shut down as attempts to do so could negate the tax write-down WB Discovery is trying to get by scrapping the movie. Furthermore, neither directors Adil El Arbi nor Bilall Fallah even has access to the movie anymore.
Instead, Batgirl will likely be locked away for good in the vaults, a fate shared by other Warner Bros. properties like the disastrous original pilot for Game of Thrones, and the pilot for the canceled spinoff Bloodmoon.
WB Discovery's cost-cutting measures have extended beyond Batgirl and several other films have either been shelved or removed from HBO Max.
You can read IGN's full rundown of the Batgirl saga, as well as the social campaign to release the film.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.