Maze Runner star Jacob Lofland just joined the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 26-year-old actor has joined the Joker sequel in an unknown role, but is thought to be playing a key supporting role as an Arkham Asylum inmate and friend of Arthur Fleck (aka The Joker).

Lofland is known for the role of Aris in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials as well as its sequel, Maze Runner: The Death Cure.

Joker 2 stars Joaquin Phoenix returning to the role of Arthur Fleck/The Joker. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga has been cast in the upcoming sequel, with many reporting that she has landed the role of his iconic lover, Harley Quinn. Additionally, Harry Potter star Brendan Gleeson has joined in an unknown role.

At the moment, little is known about the plot of Joker 2, except that it’s widely thought to have a musical aspect. Whether this will be a result of the titular Folie à Deux – a mental condition shared by two or more people – remains to be seen.

Joker was released back in 2019 and told an alternate origin of sorts for Batman’s iconic nemesis. IGN’s Joker review gave the film 10/10 and said: “Joker isn’t just an awesome comic book movie, it’s an awesome movie, period. It offers no easy answers to the unsettling questions it raises about a cruel society in decline. Joaquin Phoenix’s fully committed performance and Todd Phillips’ masterful albeit loose reinvention of the DC source material make Joker a film that should leave comic book fans and non-fans alike disturbed and moved in all the right ways.”

Its placement outside of the main DCEU means that it’s difficult to predict whether or not any of these new castings will portray known DC figures, or whether they’re cast in entirely new roles. Either way, it looks as though Joker 2 is shaping up to be quite an interesting sequel.

Joker: Folie à Deux sees director Todd Phillips return to the helm, also co-writing the script alongside Scott Silver, who wrote the first film.

Want to read more about Joker: Folie à Deux? Check out the Joker: Folie à Deux teaser trailer and delve into what the film’s title could tell us about its plot.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

This isn’t the Harley Quinn you know.

As Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding puts it: “She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I'm your manic pixie.’ She doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”

Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in how to adapt a beloved comic book character. Her look, her voice, and her brand of villainy are immediately recognisable – but her story, and her reason to be is fundamentally altered. It came out of a general philosophy for villains that guided Warner Bros. Games Montréal throughout the design process:

“All of the villains that we've included in Gotham Knights were chosen for a few reasons,” explains Redding. “One, we knew we wanted recognizable members of the rogues gallery, but we also wanted specific villains who had an interesting relationship with Batman, where once you took Batman out of the picture, it would cause that character to question, ‘Well, what's my function now? In a world where I don't have my main nemesis, what do I do next?’”

Where for the likes of Mr. Freeze, that questioning seems to have led him to, well, just commit more bombastic crime, the story behind Gotham Knights’ Harley is more personal, and more interesting. For a start, the team chose to depict an older, wiser Harley than we’ve ever seen in a game before, one no longer led by others’ whims.

“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we've seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” says Redding. “It informed a bunch of the performance choices that were made in shooting cinematics. It informed her fighting style. It informed how she presents herself, how she costumes herself. And as we'll see in some of the middle chapters of the Harley Quinn arc, even how she presents herself to Gotham City.”

Crucially, though, this isn’t a different Harley Quinn – it’s one further down her personal timeline than we’re used to seeing. As Redding puts it, this Harley has “been through two main acts of her story already.”

“We are familiar with her as like the Joker's accomplice and girlfriend, and kind of pathological love interest. And we're familiar with her breaking free from that and finding herself in her Suicide Squad era, where she's kind of semi being coerced into doing the right thing or doing terrible things for good reasons, sort of anti-hero. People love this character [so much] that they kind of want to root for her. So they kind of want to see her doing things that at least ultimately have a positive outcome, even if she does it in an insane and chaotic way.

“For us, we thought, ‘Well, that idea of Harley kind of branching into the direction of good. That's been pretty well-explored in a lot of places.’ So we thought, ‘What happens if we take her the other way?’ What happens if Batman's absence and the rise of his successors inspires Harley to say, ‘Well, why don't I finally get to have my career as a super villain on my own? I have all sorts of ideas. I'm a brilliant psychiatrist. There's all sorts of crazy things that I can do, especially in Gotham City.’”

Effectively, this Harley Quinn’s superpower is self-actualization – after years spent working in the shadow of others, she’s now unleashing the true Harley on Gotham. For the art team, it was a fascinating process to find what this version of the character could look like – as you can tell from the many different concept sketches in the gallery above.

“I don't even know if it's about physically aging her up,” says character art director Jay Evans. “It's more like just a confidence that character has that maybe she didn't have before, in this stage of her life as a supervillain. But on the visual side it was cool because we got to do a fresh take. This hadn't been done.”

Initially, the team simply worked from what we’d seen from Harley before – the same kind of haircut, the same kind of clothes, even having her more closely tie in with Gotham Knights’ unruly Freaks gang, who will ally with her at points. Associate character art director Jianli Wu said that design was fairly far along before the team was told to scrap it try something new:

“The criteria we were given was to make her really fresh, new and iconic. That was one of those keywords I remember from going through that process. And it was very challenging, but also it was such an exciting opportunity for us to go about this character, because [it’s] not often we can deviate that much from her iconic haircut and all that. We were pretty much given, ‘Don't do that. We want something new.’ So that was really liberating from an artist's point of view, and very challenging. It's probably one of the most challenging characters we've designed in the team.”

The result is a Harley that references the past of the character in new ways. Her boss fight costume makes use of the black and red design with diamond accents that was part of her original appearance in Batman: The Animated Series, but pushed further, with the diamond design made more prominent. Her hair and make-up have changed, even her iconic hammer has ‘grown up’.

“This is Harley Quinn, even though from a silhouette or haircut perspective, she's really changed,” says Wu, “which is different from, say, Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze, we retained the dome, the goggles and all that. For her, we broke that.”

This constant balance between the Harley we know and the Harley we’ll get to know touched every part of her design, even how she fights.

“We had a very specific vision in mind for Harley,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “She's more herself than she's ever been in her imagination in our Gotham. She has taken this opportunity to say, ‘I am actually a bad person. This is the version of myself that I want to be. I want the freedom to do whatever I want to Gotham and in Gotham.’ And when we got into designing her combat, we loved the old, ‘I have a big goofy hammer.’ But if you take that into the Gotham Knights aesthetic, it becomes an actual giant heavy block of metal that later in the boss fight has a lot of articulated, sparking, electrical equipment attached to it to make it worse.”

Harley’s not often one for straight up hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, her villainous plot involves providing implants to Gothamites that remove their inhibitions and allow them to live their best lives alongside her – which inevitably leads to them violently attacking you when you try to stop her.

“Her move set is really about moving through this crowd of enemies that she attracts because she has all these devotees just essentially to slow you down and distract you,” continues Ellenor. “And she constantly keeps that hammer in motion and she's very strong, she's very powerful, she's extremely agile, so she can dodge a lot of your moves. And it's always about the player or players trying to get the opportunity to interrupt something Harley is doing and deal damage to her before that big hammer comes back upon you.”

Ultimately, like any gaming boss, Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is first and foremost a foil for the player, designed to offer interesting wrinkles of story and gameplay. But the way the team has turned her into that foil is a wonderful way to honor the character herself.

Redding points out that it’s a neat reflection of what the Gotham Knights themselves are going through. These are four sidekicks being forced to grow up and take on a lead hero’s mantle. She’s doing the same for a supervillain. Where Joker was always a mirror to Batman, it seems Harley is aiming to perform the same favor for whoever steps up as a new Dark Knight. Redding sums it up in words that could have come from Harley’s own mouth:

“Hell, if they want to be the new protectors of Gotham City, they're going to need a villain. They're going to need a nemesis – and who better to do it than me?”

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.

This isn’t the Harley Quinn you know.

As Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding puts it: “She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I'm your manic pixie.’ She doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”

Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in how to adapt a beloved comic book character. Her look, her voice, and her brand of villainy are immediately recognisable – but her story, and her reason to be is fundamentally altered. It came out of a general philosophy for villains that guided Warner Bros. Games Montréal throughout the design process:

“All of the villains that we've included in Gotham Knights were chosen for a few reasons,” explains Redding. “One, we knew we wanted recognizable members of the rogues gallery, but we also wanted specific villains who had an interesting relationship with Batman, where once you took Batman out of the picture, it would cause that character to question, ‘Well, what's my function now? In a world where I don't have my main nemesis, what do I do next?’”

Where for the likes of Mr. Freeze, that questioning seems to have led him to, well, just commit more bombastic crime, the story behind Gotham Knights’ Harley is more personal, and more interesting. For a start, the team chose to depict an older, wiser Harley than we’ve ever seen in a game before, one no longer led by others’ whims.

“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we've seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” says Redding. “It informed a bunch of the performance choices that were made in shooting cinematics. It informed her fighting style. It informed how she presents herself, how she costumes herself. And as we'll see in some of the middle chapters of the Harley Quinn arc, even how she presents herself to Gotham City.”

Crucially, though, this isn’t a different Harley Quinn – it’s one further down her personal timeline than we’re used to seeing. As Redding puts it, this Harley has “been through two main acts of her story already.”

“We are familiar with her as like the Joker's accomplice and girlfriend, and kind of pathological love interest. And we're familiar with her breaking free from that and finding herself in her Suicide Squad era, where she's kind of semi being coerced into doing the right thing or doing terrible things for good reasons, sort of anti-hero. People love this character [so much] that they kind of want to root for her. So they kind of want to see her doing things that at least ultimately have a positive outcome, even if she does it in an insane and chaotic way.

“For us, we thought, ‘Well, that idea of Harley kind of branching into the direction of good. That's been pretty well-explored in a lot of places.’ So we thought, ‘What happens if we take her the other way?’ What happens if Batman's absence and the rise of his successors inspires Harley to say, ‘Well, why don't I finally get to have my career as a super villain on my own? I have all sorts of ideas. I'm a brilliant psychiatrist. There's all sorts of crazy things that I can do, especially in Gotham City.’”

Effectively, this Harley Quinn’s superpower is self-actualization – after years spent working in the shadow of others, she’s now unleashing the true Harley on Gotham. For the art team, it was a fascinating process to find what this version of the character could look like – as you can tell from the many different concept sketches in the gallery above.

“I don't even know if it's about physically aging her up,” says character art director Jay Evans. “It's more like just a confidence that character has that maybe she didn't have before, in this stage of her life as a supervillain. But on the visual side it was cool because we got to do a fresh take. This hadn't been done.”

Initially, the team simply worked from what we’d seen from Harley before – the same kind of haircut, the same kind of clothes, even having her more closely tie in with Gotham Knights’ unruly Freaks gang, who will ally with her at points. Associate character art director Jianli Wu said that design was fairly far along before the team was told to scrap it try something new:

“The criteria we were given was to make her really fresh, new and iconic. That was one of those keywords I remember from going through that process. And it was very challenging, but also it was such an exciting opportunity for us to go about this character, because [it’s] not often we can deviate that much from her iconic haircut and all that. We were pretty much given, ‘Don't do that. We want something new.’ So that was really liberating from an artist's point of view, and very challenging. It's probably one of the most challenging characters we've designed in the team.”

The result is a Harley that references the past of the character in new ways. Her boss fight costume makes use of the black and red design with diamond accents that was part of her original appearance in Batman: The Animated Series, but pushed further, with the diamond design made more prominent. Her hair and make-up have changed, even her iconic hammer has ‘grown up’.

“This is Harley Quinn, even though from a silhouette or haircut perspective, she's really changed,” says Wu, “which is different from, say, Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze, we retained the dome, the goggles and all that. For her, we broke that.”

This constant balance between the Harley we know and the Harley we’ll get to know touched every part of her design, even how she fights.

“We had a very specific vision in mind for Harley,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “She's more herself than she's ever been in her imagination in our Gotham. She has taken this opportunity to say, ‘I am actually a bad person. This is the version of myself that I want to be. I want the freedom to do whatever I want to Gotham and in Gotham.’ And when we got into designing her combat, we loved the old, ‘I have a big goofy hammer.’ But if you take that into the Gotham Knights aesthetic, it becomes an actual giant heavy block of metal that later in the boss fight has a lot of articulated, sparking, electrical equipment attached to it to make it worse.”

Harley’s not often one for straight up hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, her villainous plot involves providing implants to Gothamites that remove their inhibitions and allow them to live their best lives alongside her – which inevitably leads to them violently attacking you when you try to stop her.

“Her move set is really about moving through this crowd of enemies that she attracts because she has all these devotees just essentially to slow you down and distract you,” continues Ellenor. “And she constantly keeps that hammer in motion and she's very strong, she's very powerful, she's extremely agile, so she can dodge a lot of your moves. And it's always about the player or players trying to get the opportunity to interrupt something Harley is doing and deal damage to her before that big hammer comes back upon you.”

Ultimately, like any gaming boss, Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is first and foremost a foil for the player, designed to offer interesting wrinkles of story and gameplay. But the way the team has turned her into that foil is a wonderful way to honor the character herself.

Redding points out that it’s a neat reflection of what the Gotham Knights themselves are going through. These are four sidekicks being forced to grow up and take on a lead hero’s mantle. She’s doing the same for a supervillain. Where Joker was always a mirror to Batman, it seems Harley is aiming to perform the same favor for whoever steps up as a new Dark Knight. Redding sums it up in words that could have come from Harley’s own mouth:

“Hell, if they want to be the new protectors of Gotham City, they're going to need a villain. They're going to need a nemesis – and who better to do it than me?”

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.

Sega has announced Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, a spin-off game coming in 2023. It will connect Yakuza 6 with the upcoming Like a Dragon 8, and star Kazuma Kiryu.

Coming to PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam, this will be an action-adventure game, unlike the mainline series' RPGs, although gameplay details were held back. 'Gaiden' is a term for a side story, and this will be a canon story, set during the events of Yakuza 7. It will explain how Kiryu comes to end up in Like a Dragon 8.

The game will apparently be around half the size of a mainline Yakuza title. "You'll still be able to go into the town and hang out, and have the side quests," explained a translator for Sega's announcement stream.

In a trailer, we saw Yakuza hero Kazuma Kiryu meditating at a temple, asking for forgiveness, having abandoned his name and past. However, he appears to be pulled back in for one last job in the criminal underworld, under the codename Joryu.

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.

Sega has announced Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, a spin-off game coming in 2023. It will connect Yakuza 6 with the upcoming Like a Dragon 8, and star Kazuma Kiryu.

Coming to PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam, this will be an action-adventure game, unlike the mainline series' RPGs, although gameplay details were held back. 'Gaiden' is a term for a side story, and this will be a canon story, set during the events of Yakuza 7. It will explain how Kiryu comes to end up in Like a Dragon 8.

The game will apparently be around half the size of a mainline Yakuza title. "You'll still be able to go into the town and hang out, and have the side quests," explained a translator for Sega's announcement stream.

In a trailer, we saw Yakuza hero Kazuma Kiryu meditating at a temple, asking for forgiveness, having abandoned his name and past. However, he appears to be pulled back in for one last job in the criminal underworld, under the codename Joryu.

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.

Yakuza 8, now officially titled Like a Dragon 8, will be released in early 2024 and will unexpectedly feature a return for original series hero Kazuma Kiryu.

Announced during a stream from developer RGG Studio, the game will also see the return of Yakuza: Like a Dragon heroes Ichiban Kasuga, Koichi Adachi, and Yu Nanba. We saw a teaser trailer featuring the Kasuga and Kiryu (who has a new, grey haircut) wandering through the fictional Kamurocho. The game will be released for PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam.

Onstage, the game's producer and two voice actors appeared to tease the game, saying that this would be the story of both characters, both of whom will lead a party. It appears to be an RPG again, in the vein of Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon. The team also said it will be "the largest game to date" in the series. Kiryu will apparently also introduce a new fighting style in the game.

As for why Kiryu is returning, the team was coy, but they said the game's theme is about "the man with all the weight of the past on his back, and the man with all the weight of the future on his back".

We'll get an explanation for how Kiryu returns in the spin-off, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which arrives in 2023.

This will be the first mainline Yakuza game made without series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, who has left the studio to create his own with NetEase.

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.

Yakuza 8, now officially titled Like a Dragon 8, will be released in early 2024 and will unexpectedly feature a return for original series hero Kazuma Kiryu.

Announced during a stream from developer RGG Studio, the game will also see the return of Yakuza: Like a Dragon heroes Ichiban Kasuga, Koichi Adachi, and Yu Nanba. We saw a teaser trailer featuring the Kasuga and Kiryu (who has a new, grey haircut) wandering through the fictional Kamurocho. The game will be released for PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam.

Onstage, the game's producer and two voice actors appeared to tease the game, saying that this would be the story of both characters, both of whom will lead a party. It appears to be an RPG again, in the vein of Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon. The team also said it will be "the largest game to date" in the series. Kiryu will apparently also introduce a new fighting style in the game.

As for why Kiryu is returning, the team was coy, but they said the game's theme is about "the man with all the weight of the past on his back, and the man with all the weight of the future on his back".

We'll get an explanation for how Kiryu returns in the spin-off, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which arrives in 2023.

This will be the first mainline Yakuza game made without series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, who has left the studio to create his own with NetEase.

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.

Disney is officially taking on the likes of Magic: The Gathering, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Yu-Gi-Oh with its own TCG called Lorcana.

Featuring the likes of Mickey Mouse, Frozen's Elsa, Robin Hood, and Stitch, the first handful of cards available at D23 are already selling for thousands of dollars and piquing the interest of card game players around the world.

Despite Disney's annual fan expo featuring the world's biggest franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, one of the most popular booths at D23 is for Lorcana, with Disney quickly running out of the seven collectible cards it was handing out at the event.

While a Mickey Mouse card was handed out to anyone who attended, a special collector box featuring the remaining six cards - Cruella De Vil, Elsa, Captain Hook, Maleficent, Robin Hood, and Stitch — was only available to the first 300 attendees on each day.

Both promotions were intended to give card game fans a look at Lorcana ahead of its release in fall 2023 but, as one Reddit user reported, hundreds of people were already queued up early in the morning, meaning those arriving after even 9 am had no chance whatsoever - at least not for free.

Ebay is currently filled with the cards, with Mickey selling in the range of $250 to $300 and the six-card set selling for $2,000 or more. These seven cards are all confirmed to be available in Lorcana's first set when it's released next year, but will not be holographic in the wide release.

This first collection already features unique numbering and a D23 stamp that definitely won't be available in the packs, so if the game blows up and proves incredibly successful, the current $2,000 price tag may seem like pennies in a few years.

Card games certainly have precedence for pricey pieces, with perhaps the most infamous example being Magic: The Gathering's Black Lotus card which sells for at least $10,000. A particularly rare one also broke records last year when it sold for more than $500,000.

These Lorcana prices are therefore causing a bit of concern for its potential players. "I'm interested in the game but I'm genuinely concerned that it will turn into a collector's game," said Giang Nguyen, Keyforge's Vietnamese national champion and competitive Flesh and Blood player.

Let's tour our Disney Lorcana booth together! #D23 #D23Expo2022 #DisneyLorcana #Ravensburger pic.twitter.com/ZXD9MfOCiX

— Disney Lorcana (@DisneyLorcana) September 10, 2022

"Kids will want the cards and their parents will try to get them, so demand will be so high," he added. "If Mickey is busted and exclusive and costs upwards of $1,000 then there's no way I'm playing this game."

The worry is that, ironically, Disney might be almost too big to make a card game work, as if people can't access the product then they simply can't play. Vice president of product design at Disney John Balen has already promised an "unprecedented" amount of characters and Lorcana "will contain more original Disney artwork than any other single product ever created" — something desirable for collectors regardless of the TCG format.

Disney will release four sets per year, "which sounds great in terms of quantity of support, but we need to ensure that the sets support the meta in a healthy manner rather than be a sweatshop for collectors' items," said Shen Ang, a fellow competitive Flesh and Blood, and ex-Digimon TCG player.

"In Pokémon and Digimon, the new sets, more often than not, make older decks obsolete," he continued. A new set came out every two to three months, and the meta immediately shifts, and you'd need to build a deck from scratch again. This was not very player friendly and takes the enjoyment out of the game.

"That said, I'm very interested in the game because I can see them trying very hard to design this as a legitimate, competitive, complex game that is also fun for casual and hardcore Disney enjoyers. It's the first time a family-friendly IP like Disney is doing this and saying 'hey, we're making a serious game'. This is not something like Top Trumps. It's real interactive gameplay."

And actual game mechanics are ultimately more important than collectability in a card game. The D23 Mickey Mouse might be worth hundreds of dollars, but if a regular version, with the same text and abilities, is readily available in booster packs, then people can at least play the game. It's similar to skins in Fortnite - players can pay more to look fancy but there's no difference in actual gameplay.

There are still many unanswered questions around Lorcana that Disney will try to address ahead of its launch next year, but the company has presented itself confidently so far.

"The Disney Lorcana team is an incredible and passionate group with over a century of combined experience creating trading card games," said brand manager and Lorcana co-designer Ryan Miller. "Great care has gone into delivering an unforgettable world and gameplay experience that will be equally fun for Disney superfans, trading card game beginners, and the most enthusiastic and advanced players."

D23 produced a ton of other news over the weekend too, with major announcements from the likes of Marvel and Star Wars headlining the event.

The Mandalorian Season 3 received its first trailer, the line-up for Marvel's Thunderbolts was finally revealed, Christian Slater was confirmed to join the cast of Willow.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Disney is officially taking on the likes of Magic: The Gathering, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Yu-Gi-Oh with its own TCG called Lorcana.

Featuring the likes of Mickey Mouse, Frozen's Elsa, Robin Hood, and Stitch, the first handful of cards available at D23 are already selling for thousands of dollars and piquing the interest of card game players around the world.

Despite Disney's annual fan expo featuring the world's biggest franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, one of the most popular booths at D23 is for Lorcana, with Disney quickly running out of the seven collectible cards it was handing out at the event.

While a Mickey Mouse card was handed out to anyone who attended, a special collector box featuring the remaining six cards - Cruella De Vil, Elsa, Captain Hook, Maleficent, Robin Hood, and Stitch — was only available to the first 300 attendees on each day.

Both promotions were intended to give card game fans a look at Lorcana ahead of its release in fall 2023 but, as one Reddit user reported, hundreds of people were already queued up early in the morning, meaning those arriving after even 9 am had no chance whatsoever - at least not for free.

Ebay is currently filled with the cards, with Mickey selling in the range of $250 to $300 and the six-card set selling for $2,000 or more. These seven cards are all confirmed to be available in Lorcana's first set when it's released next year, but will not be holographic in the wide release.

This first collection already features unique numbering and a D23 stamp that definitely won't be available in the packs, so if the game blows up and proves incredibly successful, the current $2,000 price tag may seem like pennies in a few years.

Card games certainly have precedence for pricey pieces, with perhaps the most infamous example being Magic: The Gathering's Black Lotus card which sells for at least $10,000. A particularly rare one also broke records last year when it sold for more than $500,000.

These Lorcana prices are therefore causing a bit of concern for its potential players. "I'm interested in the game but I'm genuinely concerned that it will turn into a collector's game," said Giang Nguyen, Keyforge's Vietnamese national champion and competitive Flesh and Blood player.

Let's tour our Disney Lorcana booth together! #D23 #D23Expo2022 #DisneyLorcana #Ravensburger pic.twitter.com/ZXD9MfOCiX

— Disney Lorcana (@DisneyLorcana) September 10, 2022

"Kids will want the cards and their parents will try to get them, so demand will be so high," he added. "If Mickey is busted and exclusive and costs upwards of $1,000 then there's no way I'm playing this game."

The worry is that, ironically, Disney might be almost too big to make a card game work, as if people can't access the product then they simply can't play. Vice president of product design at Disney John Balen has already promised an "unprecedented" amount of characters and Lorcana "will contain more original Disney artwork than any other single product ever created" — something desirable for collectors regardless of the TCG format.

Disney will release four sets per year, "which sounds great in terms of quantity of support, but we need to ensure that the sets support the meta in a healthy manner rather than be a sweatshop for collectors' items," said Shen Ang, a fellow competitive Flesh and Blood, and ex-Digimon TCG player.

"In Pokémon and Digimon, the new sets, more often than not, make older decks obsolete," he continued. A new set came out every two to three months, and the meta immediately shifts, and you'd need to build a deck from scratch again. This was not very player friendly and takes the enjoyment out of the game.

"That said, I'm very interested in the game because I can see them trying very hard to design this as a legitimate, competitive, complex game that is also fun for casual and hardcore Disney enjoyers. It's the first time a family-friendly IP like Disney is doing this and saying 'hey, we're making a serious game'. This is not something like Top Trumps. It's real interactive gameplay."

And actual game mechanics are ultimately more important than collectability in a card game. The D23 Mickey Mouse might be worth hundreds of dollars, but if a regular version, with the same text and abilities, is readily available in booster packs, then people can at least play the game. It's similar to skins in Fortnite - players can pay more to look fancy but there's no difference in actual gameplay.

There are still many unanswered questions around Lorcana that Disney will try to address ahead of its launch next year, but the company has presented itself confidently so far.

"The Disney Lorcana team is an incredible and passionate group with over a century of combined experience creating trading card games," said brand manager and Lorcana co-designer Ryan Miller. "Great care has gone into delivering an unforgettable world and gameplay experience that will be equally fun for Disney superfans, trading card game beginners, and the most enthusiastic and advanced players."

D23 produced a ton of other news over the weekend too, with major announcements from the likes of Marvel and Star Wars headlining the event.

The Mandalorian Season 3 received its first trailer, the line-up for Marvel's Thunderbolts was finally revealed, Christian Slater was confirmed to join the cast of Willow.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Update:

Sony shared a first look at some of the items that will be available as part of its free PlayStation Stars loyalty program, as well as a timeline for when you can try to collect them yourself.

Sony's Grace Chen said the program will begin rolling out in certain regions of Asia later this month. It will then launch in the Americas and Europe in the weeks that follow, but no specific timeline was given.

Alongside the new timeline, PlayStation revealed some of the first digital collectibles players will be able to earn through the program, including a PocketStation, Toro and Kuro, Polygon Man, and Punto from Ape Escape 2.

Check out the digital collectibles in the video below.

Original Story:

Sony has announced a new reward points programme called PlayStation Stars that will allow players to earn points with real cash value.

Announced on the PlayStation Blog, the loyalty programme will begin later this year (though Sony didn't say when exactly) and will be free to sign up to. Players will be able to complete objectives - with some as simple as playing a game once a month - to earn points that can be later redeemed on the PlayStation Store or for other rewards.

The catalogue of items " may include PSN wallet funds and select PlayStation Store products," and members of PlayStation Plus will also receive points for purchasing items on the store, similar to the My Nintendo programme on Switch.

Outside of PlayStation Store related rewards, users can also earn "digital collectibles" that are "digital representations of things PlayStation fans enjoy, including figurines of beloved and iconic characters from games and other forms of entertainment, as well as cherished devices that tap into Sony’s history of innovation."

Additionally, according to The Washington Post, the first player to get the Platinum trophy in certain games will receive an extra special award, which no one else can get. It's not clear exactly how this will work - there's mention of it being within a local time zone, so it could be a territory race for the Platinum rather than a global one - but PlayStation has promised it will crack down on any attempts to get the rewards through fraudulent means.

New collectibles will be added regularly, with Sony stating that some will be particularly rare and something for players to continuously work towards.

The programme will mark another upgrade to Sony's digital offerings as it recently introduced new PlayStation Plus tiers. While the basic tier is more or less the same as the previous PlayStation Plus, the middle and most expensive tiers offer hundreds of extra games in a service similar to Xbox Game Pass.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.