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writer

Dave Bautista And Stray Writer Team Up For Cat Assassin Stealth-Action Game

by admin June 13, 2025

Former WWE wrestler Dave Bautista has made a name for himself as an actor over the last decade, but now he’s moving into the video game space as a producer. Bautista and Titan1Studios have agreed to partner up to bring Cat Assassin to life as a new media franchise including an upcoming video game.

As announced on GameRant, Cat Assassin was created by Steve Lerner, the writer of the critically acclaimed indie game Stray. While that title put players in control of an adorable cat in a city of robots, Cat Assassin’s lead character, Hugh, is considerably less cuddly. He’s described as “a skilled assassin navigating a chaotic world of warring cartels and corrupt power players.” Presumably that’s a role that Bautista may be interested in playing, but the announcement doesn’t specify his involvement as an actor.

Cat Assassin takes place in a “neo-noir city populated by anthropomorphic felines.” The video game is being planned as a stealth-action game with dark humor. The announcement notes that the Cat Assassin game is inspired by Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and Sifu.

Bautista’s Dogbone Entertainment production company is also developing Cat Assassin as a potential animated series and a feature film. Further details about their plans for the franchise and the upcoming game aren’t currently known.

After wrapping his decade plus as Drax the Destroyer in the MCU, Bautista has expressed his interest in starring as Marcus Fenix in the Gears of War movie in development at Netflix.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Last of Us writer says hated season 2 ‘dad’ line was last-minute change

by admin June 12, 2025

There are no shortage of reasons why The Last of Us season 2 has proven controversial, but many of those criticisms have a common root: the script. As dissatisfied fans tell it, the protagonist of the show is an immature and incompetent interpretation of Ellie, the character portrayed in the Naughty Dog games. There’s one moment in the show in particular that was so emblematic of that tonal discrepancy, fans turned it into a meme. And now, showrunner Craig Mazin has given some insight as to how he and his collaborator Neil Druckmann arrived at the oft-ridiculed dialogue.

In early episodes of season 2, Dina, Ellie’s love interest and companion during her journey to seek revenge, is shown repeatedly throwing up. At first, it seems as if Dina is having a human reaction to witnessing gory carnage that could twist anyone’s stomach. Later, it becomes clear that Dina is pregnant with the baby of a former lover, Jesse.

Dina reveals this piece of information after the duo pass through a pharmacy, where she picks up a bunch of expired pregnancy tests that all turn out positive. Ellie is bewildered at the news, but quickly adapts to the idea. “So we’re all having a baby,” Ellie says with a buoyant expression. Dina meets her gaze with a lighthearted smile that diffuses the weight of the news. Ellie then takes a deep breath and exclaims, “I’m going to be a dad!”

The scene unfolds much differently in the games. Dina shares the state of her pregnancy while crying. She doesn’t seem enthused about the pregnancy at all. If anything, she seems anxious. Ellie responds incredulously, which matches the show, but the scene never exhales that initial tension. In the games, rather than instantly warming up to the idea, Ellie becomes angry. She asks Dina how long she knew she was pregnant. An exasperated Dina responds by saying that she suspected it but wasn’t sure, and she didn’t want to say anything to avoid becoming a burden. Ellie throws it back in Dina’s face by responding, “Well you’re a burden now, aren’t you?”

Though the show’s depiction of that moment matches the more jovial tone of Ellie and Dina’s relationship in its world, the two scenes couldn’t be any more different. Ellie isn’t excited about the prospect of parenthood in the games, which later informs the player’s understanding of why Ellie leaves her family life behind in pursuit of Abby once more.

Previously, the HBO showrunners said that they didn’t feel that they needed to have total fidelity to the games. Rather, the writers were preoccupied with maximizing the strengths of their perspective mediums. In a clip shared by Sky Ireland on TikTok, Craig Mazin gave further insight as to how he arrived at the dialogue in the show.

“Bella and I were talking about that episode, I like to run things past them all the time,” Mazin recalls. “And I was like — this just popped into my head. I don’t know why, it just felt right. It’s not an expression of gender as much as state of mind.”

Mazin then suggests that when he makes alterations like these to the script, he gauges the reactions from the actors. It is not enough for the actor to be amenable to the changes — the performer has to seem excited, Mazin says. An emphatic reaction tells Mazin that his adjustments are on the right track. And apparently, Bella was excited about the change.

”The joy that just burbles out of Bella when they say, ‘I’m going to be a dad,‘ it’s wonderful,“ Mazin says.

Unfortunately, the line did not land with fans, who ultimately turned into a meme. To wit, when I typed “ellie im going to be a dad” into Google, it auto-completed to add “meme” at the end. The top results are all Photoshops of the line read where Bella’s face has been distorted to capture the absurdity of the scene.

Google

Mazin’s breakdown, which makes the dialogue change almost seem like a random idea, tells me that the jokes around the dad line just got more fuel added to the fire.

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June 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Star Trek Beyond writer Doug Jung announced as showrunner for Amazon’s Mass Effect series

by admin June 9, 2025

Star Trek Beyond writer Doug Jung has been appointed showrunner of Amazon Prime’s Mass Effect adaptation.

As reported by Deadline, Jung will also serve as executive producer on the project. Jung is currently executive producer and showrunner of Apple TV+’s Chief of War. He also has credits on series including Mindhunter, Banshee, and Big Love.

Jung will join writer Dan Casey, who is also an executive producer on the project. Electronic Arts’ Michael Gamble, Cedar Tree Productions’ Karim Zreik, and Arad Productions’ Ari Arad and Emmy Tu will also produce.

Amazon’s Mass Effect adaptation was greenlit last November, when Casey’s involvement was also announced.

The streaming platform has found major success with its adaptation of the Fallout franchise, with its second season premiering later this year. It has also been renewed for a third season.

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June 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Come say hello to Mark Warren, RPS’s new senior staff writer

by admin June 6, 2025

You might have seen a new name around the homepage this past week: Mark Warren. It might also be that you recognise the name if you’re a reader of RPS sibling site VG247, where Mark has already been plying his trade for several years. Well, we’ve adopted Mark here at RPS, as one might adopt a puppy if the puppy really liked mods, RPGs and Helldivers 2. Come say hello in the comments.

Mark joined VG247 back in 2023, and since then he’s written news, features and reviews that would have all sat comfortably on our own pages. He’s had a breakdown about his lack of interior design skills in The Sims, braved talking to the Fallout community, interviewed developers behind one of the half-dozen Disco Elysium spiritual successors, and built a baseball team made entirely of George Costanzas. He’s also, yeah, written a lot about Helldivers 2, including three posts for us this week alone, so you know he’s not afraid to follow through on his passions.

It’s been an odd year for RPS, with more departures than arrivals. We continue to work to hire a new reviews editor, too. In the meantime, I’m glad that Mark is bringing his expertise to the site. Please give him a warm welcome below.

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June 6, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

EA never grasped Dragon Age’s value as an RPG, says Inquisition writer

by admin May 23, 2025

Summerfall Studios co-founder and former Dragon Age writer David Gaider has been reflecting, not for the first time, on his career at BioWare under EA. In a brisk recap of a decade-and-change of sequels, changes of direction, and mid-project reboots, he sums up EA’s difficulty with Dragon Age as basically one of having no real faith in the wide appeal of role-playing games.

“In many ways, Dragon Age was, I think, not a good match for EA,” Gaider explained, in a new interview with PCGamesN. “They never really knew what to make of it, or what to do with it. The expectation was always that it wouldn’t do well, and when it did do well, it took people by surprise.”

EA were far more convinced by sci-fi stablemate Mass Effect, Gaider went on, despite Mass Effect sporadically falling short of expectations. “By comparison, Mass Effect was slick and it was action-driven and very much up EA’s alley, so they always expected that it should do better, and every time it didn’t, it got excuses like ‘oh they released in the wrong timeframe, or X, Y, and Z.’

“The idea was that the potential for Mass Effect was more – it could get the action audience as well as the RPG audience,” he said. “It wasn’t until Mass Effect 3 that they started to realize that ‘no, there’s an action RPG audience, like a crossover,’ but you don’t just get both audiences together.”

Last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard certainly suggests a level of hesitancy about the value of Dragon Age as a ‘pure’ role-playing game. Its development was, by most accounts, hellish: originally pitched as another narrative-led RPG, The Veilguard was re-envisaged as a live service multiplayer offering, as was the style at the time, then rebooted as a single player action-RPG in light of Anthem’s commercial failure.

Gaider – who left BioWare after working on Dragon Age: Inquisition, my beloved – has yet to play The Veilguard, having poured so much of himself into Dragon Age that he feels uneasy about it evolving without him. He’s also wary of judging its creators, many of whom have been laid off or relocated after EA declared The Veilguard a disappointment. But he does regard the game as symptomatic of EA’s on-going mistrust toward Dragon Age and role-playing.

“Even though Dragon Age only catered to the RPG audience – at least initially – [EA] kept wanting it to move into the action space as well – and maybe by Veilguard it has,” he went on. “I think their idea was that the ‘cap’ on the RPG audience was only so big. Then Baldur’s Gate 3 comes along and proves no, it’s possible that if you lean into what a genre does really well, you can grow the audience, as it turns out.”

Gaider would have liked EA and BioWare to similarly “double down on the choice-driven narrative, double down on the production value, like the presentation of the characters and the cinematics and dialogs, and just take it to the extent where quality is the watchword.” But as he concludes, it’s hard to imagine a publicly traded company like EA doing what Larian did with BG3, because the two “live on two different planets”.

It’s not clear what the future holds for Dragon Age. Or indeed BioWare, who have been stripped down to a core team currently working on Mass Effect 5.

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May 23, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

A writer used AI to generate this widely circulated summer reading list which includes fake books, and is published in the Chicago Sun-Times

by admin May 22, 2025

There’s a reason the mention of AI, particularly in creative spaces, gets a bit of an eyeroll. Actually there’s several. It’s trained on stolen content for starters, robbing real artists and writers of credit and income. Furthermore, it’s often just pretty bad, especially when it comes to factual articles. Language models like ChatGPT are known to hallucinate pretty badly, and this has led to real outlets like the Chicago Sun-Times printing a summer reading list full of fake books.

Several outlets have covered the story, such as Arstechnica and The Verge, and of course now I’m doing it here. It could be that we are somewhat motivated to point out when AI stuffs up in the writing space, considering people seem to want to keep giving our jobs to it. But it was 404, which is a paywalled publication, who found the origins of this fake list that made its way into a few publications.

The Chicago Sun-Times made a post on Bluesky, which rather passes the buck on the situation. “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” it reads, adding “It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”

It turns out the list was bought from a partner of the publications, and was found to come from the media conglomerate Hearst. The listicle features some real books but it’s also plagued by some that don’t exist, credited to both real and fabricated authors. It even points to non-existent blog posts, and is generally just a bout of confusion. Especially for anyone actually trying to get their hands on any of these recommended summer reads.