Bandai Namco appears to be cooking up something new, and it's looking to be a remaster or remake of a "3D action game" for Nintendo.

A user on ResetEra first noted the collection of job listings, which suggest that Bandai Namco has been contracted by Nintendo to give an unnamed game a full HD overhaul. The project is currently hiring a planner and two visual artists, with the latter seemingly focused on reworking and designing 3D backgrounds.

Users at ResetEra are having a fun time speculating on what the upcoming game could be. Common guesses include games from some of Nintendo's biggest franchises, such as Metroid Prime, StarFox, and Kid Icarus. Some posters even think it could be a game from the often forgotten GameCube series Baiten Kaitos.

Little else is known about the project at this time, though it's not entirely unexpected to see Nintendo trust Bandai Namco with something like this. The two companies have a long history of working together across a wide variety of titles.

In recent years, the two gaming giants have collaborated on titles like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, ARMs, and Mario Kart 8. Bandai Namco even developed Switch exclusives Pokken Tournament and New Pokemon Snap.

Billy Givens is a freelance writer at IGN.

QuakeCon 2022 will once again be a digital-only event when it returns from August 18 to 20.

The yearly celebration of id Software games like Quake and Doom (and often their Bethesda stablemates) will mark its third anniversary as an online event, but organisers said they're fully committed to returning in-person next year.

They added: "An event of this size required months of planning, and in this case, we had to make decisions when there was still too much uncertainty to commit to successfully executing an in-person QuakeCon."

This year's QuakeCon will once again be a digital-only event, August 18-20, 2022. pic.twitter.com/UxJTuZDTYJ

— QuakeCon (@QuakeCon) April 13, 2022

Organisers said that, while they're disappointed to remain online for another year, the digital event will feature the full programming of an in-person version including online meet-ups, giveaways, charity opportunities, a virtual Bring Your Own Computer event, and more.

QuakeCon usually takes place in Dallas, Texas, and saw upwards of ten thousand people attend its last in-person event in 2019. It dates back to 1996 when around 100 people brought their PCs to a Best Western Hotel in Texas to play Quake and Doom with other fans.

QuakeCon 2021 revealed new information about Deathloop, Fallout 76, and Elder Scrolls Online, while The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition was also announced for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

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

Destiny developer Bungie has said that it is committed to remote working for "most current and future roles".

Announcing its intentions on Twitter (below), and spotted by Kotaku, Bungie said it would be adopting a "digital-first" approach for future job positions. California, Florida, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington are the "approved" states that are fully remote eligible.

It's currently unconfirmed why fully remote roles are only available in these seven states, or if Bungie plans on extending the offerings to other parts of the U.S., but IGN has reached out for comment regarding these matters.

Bungie is going digital-first.

Most current and future roles will be fully remote eligible in these states with more coming soon! https://t.co/5Jv3FZRv28 pic.twitter.com/Ot43z9tgZm

— Bungie (@Bungie) April 12, 2022

Bungie has become the first major AAA video game company to declare a near-fully remote approach indefinitely. Along with the rest of the world, most developers were forced home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic but some studios are transitioning back into the office.

Employees of Activision Blizzard recently staged a walkout over issues involving remote working and vaccination requirements last week.

A company-wide vaccine mandate was removed "effective immediately" prompting the ABK (Activision Blizzard King) Workers Alliance to organise a walkout in protest, through which they also called for remote work to "be offered as a permanent solution".

Bungie, while arguably best known for creating the Halo series, is now most associated with Destiny. It recently took legal action against several anonymous individuals that filed fake copyright claims in its name that caused havoc in the Destiny community.

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

Josh Brolin will have more action scenes in Dune 2 as his character, weapon master Gurney Halleck, clashes with House Atreides' foes.

During an interview with Collider the 54-year-old actor explained that his role is a lot more physical in the upcoming Dune: Part Two… and he wasn’t really prepared for that.

“Javier [Bardem] and I had a similar thing that we both admitted to each other at the Oscars, because we both have a little bit of paunch right now,” he said. “And we talked to Denis. We hadn’t read anything, and we talked to Denis the week before. He was like, ‘You guys are fighting the whole time. And you’ve been in the desert with the Fremen and all that.’ And we fucking panicked.”

Hilariously, it looks as though Brolin was unaware of his upcoming action scenes, and that forced both Brolin and Bardem to go on a crash diet.

“We looked down and saw this little friend that we’ve been holding on our abdomen,” he said. “So, we were both on full diet mode at the Oscars, even though you absolutely couldn’t tell. We were already in diet mode, in panic diet mode.”

Thankfully, he is fully aware that he’s in the sequel… even if IMDb wasn’t.

“I am a part of Dune Part Two, to the ridiculous extent of when somebody mentioned to me that it wasn't on IMDb, I actually went out of my way to call Liz [his publicist] and say, ‘Can you please put that on IMDb?’ Because it's a proud moment for me, man.”

Of course, Dune: Part Two is now on IMDb for everyone to see.

But Brolin’s pride doesn’t stop there. Dune may have been up for a staggering 10 Academy Awards, taking home six of them, but one award was notably missing – Best Director.

It’s no secret that Villeneuve had been snubbed at the 94th Academy Awards with no nomination for Best Director, despite the film picking up a nomination for Best Picture.

And Brolin wasn’t happy.

“It’s the most asinine, bizarre... I mean, that’s why snubs are such a thing and that’s why we all talk about them, but that’s a snub, of a snub, of a snub that I just thought was an impossibility,” he said.

“But given everything about the Academy Awards, there are many impossibilities that actually materialized. So, it’s all part of the game right now. I don’t know. Is it post-pandemic mentality? Whatever it is, I don’t understand it. He helmed the whole thing. It’s his creation. It’s his interpretation.”

Thankfully, Villeneuve took it all in his stride.

“How he dealt with it was all he did was go right into praise for the ten people who were nominated,” said Brolin. And talk about pancakes. Obviously.

Dune: Part Two will star Timothée Chalamet as Paul alongside Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Florence Pugh, Stellan Skarsgård, and Austin Butler.

Denis Villeneuve will direct the film with a script he co-wrote with Jon Spaihts, based on the original novel by Frank Herbert.

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

Hello Games' new project would feel impossible to create even with 1,000 people behind it, the developer has said.

Speaking to IGN, studio co-founder and managing director Sean Murray said that, while it's not a sequel to No Man's Sky, the new game is just as ambitious.

He said: "For a while now we've been working on something pretty ambitious in the background. It's a small team but we like it that way.

"Similar to No Man's Sky, it's the kind of project that even if we had a thousand people working on it, it'd still seem impossible."

The game was in "very early" development as of September last year but Murray reassured that, while No Man's Sky is still receiving regular updates and isn't finished by a long shot, the two games aren't impacting each other's development.

"No Man's Sky is not being held back by the next project but neither is the new thing being slowed by No Man's Sky," he said. "We're lucky enough to be able to allow folks to move freely to work on what excites them."

Nothing else is known about Hello Games' new project and this will likely be the case for a while, as Murray has previously said "we've learned our lesson" on talking about games too early after No Man's Sky open (and controversial) pre-release.

Outlaws, the latest No Man's Sky update, completely overhauled space combat and added a pirate underworld to the galaxy-spanning game.

While it's available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC today, Nintendo players can enjoy the update alongside the rest of No Man's Sky when it comes to Switch this summer.

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

Oddworld: Soulstorm being a free game on PlayStation Plus was "devastating" for sales according to its creator.

Lorne Lanning, founder of Oddworld Inhabitants, said the game was downloaded close to four million times through PS Plus, significantly more than the studio's expectations of 50 to 100,000.

Speaking on the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast, spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Lanning said there was nothing malicious about the deal on Sony's end but circumstances made it "a double-edged sword".

Soulstorm was free to download in April 2021, the same month it launched, and while Sony has never made clear how it comes to this agreement with developers, it's understood that a one-off payment is made.

Lanning explained that Oddworld Inhabitants and its partner developers were already struggling when they were approached by Sony. "We were hitting a number of legacy, technical, debt issues, and talent issues" he said.

The developer needed more money to finish the game and didn't expect launch sales on PlayStation 5 to earn more than what Sony offered, because in January, when the game was due to launch, there was still a severe shortage of consoles.

"We were supposed to deliver in January. So at that time there wasn't going to be any game machines. We were like, 'how many could we possibly sell?'," Lanning continued. "We needed the money to complete the project and we thought we did a pretty good deal. In January there's no way we'll sell more than this."

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed Soulstorm back three months, however, and by this point more PS5s were in the wild. Therefore, despite Sony essentially funding the final portion of development, Lanning said the four million downloads were "devastating".

“Because it slipped to April, we had the highest downloaded game on PS5 and it was, I think, approaching… close to four million units or something like that for free because they were all subscriptions," he said. "So for us, it was devastating”.

Of course, there's no evidence to suggest that Oddworld Inhabitants actually lost out on potentially millions of sales. A benefit of PS Plus games is being able to try out games you wouldn't normally consider buying yourself, so many of Soulstorm's downloads may not have necessarily translated into sales.

That's not to say all studios consider PS Plus a problem for their eventual sales, as the developers of games like Rocket League and Fall Guys have commented on the importance of the service for establishing their games.

In our 7/10 review, IGN said: "Oddworld: Soulstorm is an excellent remake of a delightfully weird '90s platformer with tons of charm, challenge... and annoying bugs."

Fortnite creator Epic Games has invested in and signed a publishing agreement with Brazilian developer Aquiris.

The studio is best known for the Horizon Chase series and its Apple Arcade release Wonderbox, but Aquiris is also working on a new, currently unannounced game.

Epic Games will publish it alongside an undisclosed number of other future titles, with Aquiris saying the investment will shape the next 15 years of the studio.

CEO Mauricio Longoni said: "We are thrilled to partner with Epic Games. It's a strong endorsement of what Aquiris has built so far, and we can't wait to show the world what we are working on together.

"Epic's publishing power and close collaboration with us on tech, business intelligence, and product development will help us boost the quality and the reach of our titles."

Head of third-party publishing at Epic Games, Hector Sanchez will join the Aquiris board of directors as a result of the investment.

He said: "Aquiris not only have a keen eye for quality game experiences, but have demonstrated great artistic and technical capabilities with their utilization of Unreal Engine in their products.

"We’re honoured to have this opportunity to strengthen our relationship with one of the premiere studios in the growing and important Latin American development scene."

The news comes a few days after Epic Games received its own investment from Sony and LEGO's parent company KIRKBI. The entertainment giants invested $1 billion dollars each to deepen their relationships with the metaverse.

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

Space pirates are coming to No Man's Sky today with the Outlaws update.

Developer Hello Games announced that, while the previous Sentinels update focused on ground combat, Outlaws will overhaul space combat and add other new features.

These are headlined by the introduction of a pirate underworld that lets players embody Han Solo in new rebellion and smuggling missions. Outlaws have taken over space stations across the galaxy and turned them into dangerous, lawless places where players can purchase illegal goods and smuggle them out for a considerable cash reward.

The update also adds the speedy Solar Starship, the first new ship type in more than two years, and for players worried about giving up a previous vessel to make room, the number of ships a player can own has increased from six to nine.

Players can also hire their own squadron of wingmen with the Squadrons feature and are encouraged to build their perfect fleet of ships and pilots (which all have different, upgradeable abilities).

Hello Games has promised more speed and excitement in space combat overall with improved handling and visual effects. Enemy starships now have shields while the player's weapon selection has been broadened with new secondary effects such as being able to slow enemy engines or disable shield systems.

Ship versus ship combat can also now occur within a planet's atmosphere and pirates can raid players' settlements. For those who struggle with space combat, Hello Games said accessibility has been "significantly improved" thanks to a new Auto-Follow mode.

Outlaws arrives two months after Sentinels and is the 20th major update to No Man's Sky since it launched in 2016. Despite six years of post-launch content, game creator Sean Murray told IGN that No Man's Sky isn't finished "by a long shot".

The new update is available April 14 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, Nintendo players can enjoy the update alongside the rest of No Man's Sky when it comes to Switch this summer.

Warner Bros. is allegedly waiting to see how Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore performs before greenlighting any further sequels.

According to Variety, the five-film plan for the Fantastic Beasts franchise now hinges on how The Secrets of Dumbledore is received by audiences, with Warner Bros. allegedly assessing the movie's performance to determine whether to greenlight films four and five. Sources have also apparently confirmed that there's currently no written script for the fourth installment.

The outlet broke down some of the biggest controversies that have plagued the Wizarding World franchise leading up to this point, including Ezra Miller's recent arrest for disorderly conduct and harassment, Johnny Depp's forced resignation due to abuse allegations between he and actress Amber Heard and a libel case Depp had against The Sun newspaper.

Mads Mikkelsen was cast to replace Depp in the role of Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts 3, but the third installment wasn't without its setbacks. Variety notes that "Warner Bros. initially postponed filming in 2019 to retool the third movie," causing extra time to be spent in pre-production. The film then faced further delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling came under fire for being a major voice of anti-trans rhetoric, which forced Harry Potter fans to wrestle with the series they love and its creator's prejudice. They were note alone as franchise stars Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Eddie Redmayne also condemned her remarks on gender identity and trans women.

In terms of box office performance, 2016's Where to Find Them was a commercial success, grossing more than $800 million worldwide, even though its opening weekend numbers fell short compared to the rest of the franchise. 2018's The Crimes of Grindelwald suffered a 20% decline, earning $650 million globally to become the lowest-grossing installment to date.

The Secrets of Dumbledore faces some challenges of its own as some countries where the movie was scheduled to hit theaters have strict censorship mandates that could impact the release. References to Dumbledore and Grindelwald's gay relationship have already been edited out by Warner Bros. for the movie's release in China.

News came from Rowling that the trilogy would be extended back in 2016, saying at that point that considering it a trilogy was "kind of a placeholder." Director David Yates later defended the decision to extend the series from three to five movies, explaining that Rowling realized there was "a whole lot more" to the story while writing the second.

Whether the rest of the story ever makes it to screen remains to be seen. IGN rated The Secrets of Dumbledore a 4 out of 10, calling the franchise's latest entry "an un-fantastical Potter prequel with uninteresting secrets" that "looks drab and feels like it was made by people who want to leave its magical premise behind."

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Tom Hanks WWII movie Greyhound is getting a sequel, and it’s heading to Apple TV+.

According to Deadline, the 65-year-old actor will star in the upcoming war movie and is also producing the WWII series Masters of the Air which will also debut on the streaming platform.

And that’s only the beginning.

“Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman have made a multi-year exclusive overall deal with Apple TV+.”

The Apple TV+ deal includes upcoming films, TV shows, documentaries, and unscripted projects, all of which will be distributed by Apple.

Masters of the Air follows on from Hanks’ earlier WWII epics Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and tells the story of the American bomber boys during World War II with an impressive ensemble cast.

Barry Keoghan stars as Lt. Curtis Biddick alongside Elvis star Austin Butler as Major Gale Cleven.

The series is co-produced by Amblin Entertainment which also brought Band of Brothers and The Pacific to our screens via HBO.

Masters of the Air has been in the works since October 2019 – a month before Apple TV+ even launched – and is based on the Donald L. Miller book, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany.

“World War II could not have been won without the bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, which pummeled Germany by day while the British bombed at night,” reads the book’s synopsis. “In Masters of the Air, prize-winning historian Donald L. Miller tells the dramatic story of the American bomber boys (Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart among them) who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep before Allied soldiers stepped on German soil.”

Greyhound saw Hanks return to WWI as Captain Ernest Krause – an allied officer in command of his first U.S. destroyer as he led a convoy of 37 ships while being pursued by Nazi U-boats.

However, IGN’s own review called it a mess of CGI and a bland supporting cast.

“Despite Greyhound being mostly torpedoes, explosions, gunfire, and screaming, a lot of the tension gets drowned out in a sea (literally and figuratively) of CGI. And because the crisis rarely lets up, there's little room for character. Hanks' Krause is a dutiful and reverent man. His feet are to the fire here, but he also rarely missteps.”

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