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YELLOWJACKETS renewed for Season 4

Showtime have renewed their hit TV show Yellowjackets for a fourth and potentially penultimate season.

The renewal had not really been in doubt, with the show's third season debuting with significantly higher ratings on Showtime than the second and picking up a lot of streams via its international distribution on Paramount+ (including setting record viewership for its finale). However, the third season had been renewed ahead of the second, whilst this time around Showtime made fans wait until six weeks after the third season had wrapped up.

The show has a planned five-year story arc, but Showtime declined to renew the show for its final two seasons in one go, suggesting they still want to see how Season 4 does in viewership before ordering the finale.

The show tells a story divided into two time periods. In 1996 a high school soccer team are marooned in a remote part of Canada by a freak plane crash, and have to survive in the wilderness for almost two years before they are rescued. Twenty-five years later, the few now-adult survivors are trying to get on with their lives and forget the trauma they experienced, but the past has a nasty way of constantly coming back into their lives.

The show stars Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, Warren Kole, Sarah Desjardins, Elijah Wood and Hilary Swank. Season 4 is expected to go into production later this year for a potential late 2026 debut.

Updated version of original STALKER trilogy to be released next week

Fresh from the success of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, GSC Game World are re-releasing enhanced editions of the original three games in the series next week.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl (2007), S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (2008) and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (2009) were seminal first-person shooter games with RPG elements. Each game is set in a different time period and explores a different part of the Zone, a mysterious area of nuclear and paranormal contamination surrounding the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine, after a second accident at the site in an alternate 2006. The player has to follow a mysterious story whilst recovering artifacts, building up an arsenal of weapons and deciding which factions to support.

The new versions of the game have revamped lighting, new skyboxes and upgraded graphics, as well as improved support for modern resolutions and hardware, and a revamped UI. The games have also been optimised for Steam Deck. Impressively, GSC Game World are giving away the updated editions free for owners of the original versions of the game, so even if you have a Steam version of Shadow of Chornobyl from eighteen years ago, you'll still get the new "enhanced edition" for no further outlay. If you don't own any of the games and purchase the new "enhanced edition" of any of the games, you'll also get the original version of the game as well.

If you don't own any of the games, you can purchase the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Legends of the Zone - Enhanced Edition bundle to get all three new versions of the game, and the originals.

The new versions of the games will be available on 20 May on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The Rose in Darkness by Danie Ware

Opal, a gleaming beacon of the civilisation of the Imperium of Man. A peaceful world deep within the Imperium, where vast crowds pay homage to the Emperor and his great hero, Saint Veres, in a glorious celebration held once every eight hundred years. The Skull of Saint Veres is a great relic, one which has been ordered to be moved to a shrine world, but the local leaders are reluctant to part with it. Sister Superior Augusta of the Order of the Bloody Rose arrives to expedite the process, only to find bubbling cauldrons of discontent and heresy waiting for her. She realises that Opal's opulence and tranquillity is a facade, one that is dangerously close to breaking.

My prior explorations of the Warhammer 40,000 universe have mostly been through the works of Dan Abnett and Sandy Mitchell, not to mention Paul Kearney's two books in the setting, which have meant reading a lot about Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Inquisitors. The Rose in Darkness was an appealing read as it meant switching focus to another one of the Imperium's orders, the Adepta Sororitas or the Sisters of Battle. The belligerent death-nuns of the Emperor, the Sisters step in to situations which local militias can't handle but sending in the Space Marines would be massive overkill, with the addition that their religious rites and devotion to the Emperor give them an insight that some of the other orders lack.

This book is a good exploration of what kind of situation requires the Sisters' attention, as they have to respect local traditions, honour the local Saint's day but also be firm in their objective of removing the planet's most holy relic, which the local leaders are understandably upset about. The negotiations are interrupted when it becomes clear that some outside force is stirring up trouble on Opal, and it's up to the Sisters to identify the threat. When it is identified, all hell breaks loose, resulting in lots of crunchy battle sequences of the kind that make up the backbone of most Warhammer 40,000 fiction.

Danie Ware paints Opal in all its Imperial splendor. Most 40K fiction takes place on the ragged frontier, where the Imperium is fighting some kind of conflict against an exterior threat, but here the trouble is much harder to pin down. Unleashing a storm of bolter fire to take care of an Ork invader is one thing, but when the threat is more insidious and you cannot tell friend from foe, it's a more nuanced challenge, something that Augusta and her troops struggle to initially engage with. The author is operating with a constrained page count here but deftly characterises figures so even briefly-appearing players (like the planet's governor and military commander) are given at least some depth and flavour.

The book's main success is this idea of a world deep inside Imperial space, blessed by the Emperor, relatively rich and opulent, but whose workers are poor and downtrodden, sometimes even starving when the rich nobility sits in comfort just a few miles away, creating a sense of natural anger and resentment even without strange cults or xenos interference. The feeling of tension ramping up through the book is remarkably successful. It also helps the book gives us POV characters both in the Sororitas and in the local population, so we get both an insider and outsider's perspectives as events on Opal reach breaking point.

It is worth saying that The Rose in Darkness is bleak as hell, even by 40K standards. Most other 40K fiction I've read takes the view that, sure, things are bad, people die, a lot of things blow up, but the most positive - or least-negative, anyway - outcome is infinitely preferable to the worst-case scenario. The Rose in Darkness instead evokes the idea of fighting against the dying of the light, of fighting a long defeat for the sake of fighting it, and true heroism is counted by people making a stand for the right reasons in the dark, where nobody will ever see or hear.

The Rose in Darkness (****) does what good 40K fiction does well - chunky action sequences, mixed in with moments of supernatural horror - but it does it with an air of melancholy and futility that I had not previously encountered in the setting (despite its reputation), which is interesting, but I suspect won't quite be for everybody.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

GRAND THEFT AUTO VI delayed to May 2026, as was foretold in the ancient texts

Surprising exactly nobody, the most eagerly-awaited video game of the year (if not all time), Grand Theft Auto VI, has been delayed until 26 May 2026. Developers Rockstar Games and publisher Take Two Interactive confirmed the game needed more time in the oven to ensure a smooth release.

The Grand Theft Auto series is one of the most successful in all of video gaming. Since its launch in 1997, the series has sold just under half a billion copies, almost half of those coming from its previous instalment, Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, by itself. The series has been consistently praised for its sprawling, crime-fuelled narratives, action and player freedom. Its early years were blighted by controversies over its depiction of violence, drug use, prostitution and swearing, at a time when video games were believed to only played by children.

Grand Theft Auto V has sold over 210 million copies, making it the second-biggest-selling video game in history (behind only Minecraft). The game was packaged with Grand Theft Auto Online, and it's the latter mode which has helped propel the game's longevity (and immense revenues). However, Rockstar were criticised for not releasing further single-player story expansions to the game, as they had originally promised. The company was also fiercely criticised for not developing Grand Theft Auto VI with greater speed, instead focusing on Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) first. RDR2's overwhelmingly impressive quality did alleviate some of those concerns, however.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be the fourth game in the series to be set in the city of Vice City, Leonida, based on Miami, Florida. The player will control two characters in a Bonnie-and-Clyde-inspired tale of crime, revenge and mayhem. This will also be the first game in the series since the original to feature a female protagonist. Relatively little other information about the game has been provided. This will also be the first game in the series without long-time producer Leslie Benzies (who left before development began) and writer-producer Dan Houser (who left in 2020, early in development); his brother Sam Houser remains in charge of Rockstar and the game overall.

Philip Pullman's final BOOK OF DUST novel, THE ROSE FIELD, will be released this October

Philip Pullman has confirmed the final novel in his Book of Dust trilogy, the prequel/sequel series to His Dark Materials, will be called The Rose Field and will be published on 23 October.

Pullman published the three volumes of His Dark Materials - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - in 1995, 1997 and 2000. The trilogy won immense critical acclaim and was adapted for television as a three-season show by the BBC and HBO, as well as a failed movie adaptation in 2007.

Pullman mooted a prequel/sequel series (starting before the events of His Dark Materials and skipping to after) called The Book of Dust for many years before finally releasing the first two volumes, La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth, in 2017 and 2019 respectively. The third book will apparently be the last one about the character of Lyra.

THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION REMASTERED announced and released

As was prophesised in the ancient texts (well, yesterday), Bethesda Game Studios have announced and released their remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the same day. The game is available right now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

French studio Virtuos created the remaster, working under the watchful eye of Bethesda. The game features a completely reworked graphics engine, with Unreal Engine 5 now handling rendering, though the original GameBryo Engine is apparently still working somewhere under the hood. Every graphical asset in the game was recreated from scratch and some areas have been given a serious glow-up. The game's infamously janky levelling system has been reworked, and combat is more responsive. The game has added new combat animations and physics reactions, and the voice cast has been hugely expanded with many new voice actors added. However, the original voice actors' performances (including Sir Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean) have also been preserved. As expected, the remaster includes both the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansions.

The Skyblivion remake mod team can take some heart from the fact that Oblivion Remastered appears to not have thoroughly reworked area design or the game's infamously samey dungeons. Skyblivion has focused on expanding those areas of the game, which should be a major improvement. Skyblivion has committed to a 2025 release date as well.

The same leaks indicating the existence of Oblivion Remastered a few months ago also claimed that Bethesda are working on Fallout 3 Remastered, which is also a very interesting prospect.

The Last of Us: Part II

Four years have passed since Joel and Ellie's epic trip across North America. They have found a safe haven and new home in Jackson, Wyoming, which has been fortified against the threat of the infected, but have grown estranged. A chance encounter outside the town with a woman named Abby, a member of a group based in Seattle called the Wolves, sees Ellie making her way to that city in search of revenge. But both young women are being driven by circumstances to make harsh choices to survive.

The Last of Us: Part I is regarded as one of the best video games ever made, its combination of a strong narrative, some of the best voice acting in gaming history and survival-horror-combat mechanics being quite compelling. Inevitably, its massive commercial success and critical acclaim demanded a sequel, which Naughty Dog Studios finally delivered in 2020, with a remastered version for PlayStation 5 and PC now available. The question is if they could satisfy the orbit-high expectations for that sequel.

The answer is, sort of? The Last of Us: Part II is larger and longer than its forebear, with way more action setpieces, massive explosions and furious last-ditch battles than you can shake a stick of dynamite at. It also ramps up the emotional and storytelling stakes with shocking deaths, brutal injuries and hardcore moral questions which don't have pat answers. The Last of Us: Part II is a lot to take on board, and some of its ideas work incredibly well whilst others fall flat on their face. At its worst, Part II is bloated and messy, not always confident of what it's trying to do or trying to say. At its best, it's a compelling horror story where the horror doesn't come from its slightly expanded repertoire of fungoid-zombie monsters, but from humans and what we are capable of.

The game divides its 26-ish hour narrative into four distinct sections: an opening section in Jackson where we touch base with the characters from the first game (and some newcomers), followed by two sequences in Seattle and an epilogue taking place elsewhere. The core of the game takes place across three days, which we see from both Ellie and Abby's perspectives. From Ellie's view Abby is a monster who needs to be eliminated, whilst from Abby's her actions are fully justified in retaliation for some of the more questionable things Ellie and Joel did in the first game. The game switches perspectives to allow the player to experience both points of view. This is an interesting device as I can't remember too many games that allow you to play as the protagonist and antagonist; Grand Theft Auto V flirts with the idea through Michael and Trevor's opposing viewpoints but doesn't fully commit (both being frequently forced to team up against much more threatening, obviously outright villains).

Much more common are those games where the player commits heinous acts which they try to justify through self-defence or the ends justifying the means, but this doesn't stop the moral corruption of the soul from such heinous acts. Far Cry 2 and 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and, most notably, Spec Ops: The Line, all explore this moral murkiness in a full-on manner. The Last of Us: Part II isn't quite as alone in this space as it seems to like to think.

Graphically, the game is beautiful, with impressive character models (that extend to more than just the main protagonists this time around), outstanding scenery and very good lighting. It's not quite cutting edge (and some of the skybox city backgrounds feel distinctly archaic), but still impressive, with responsive controls. The game's PC port isn't the most technically stable, though, with my play-through blighted by a memory leak that caused it to crash every two hours or so without fail. It doesn't seem like a universal problem, though.

From a gameplay perspective, things are pretty similar to Part I. You move through an area looking for the way to progress forwards, whilst evading or defeating enemies and scrounging for supplies, ammunition, collectibles and new weapons. Areas can be large or small, sometimes relentlessly linear but sometimes a more open area consisting of multiple houses, shops or rooms. Part II encourages thorough exploration, although sometimes at the expense of logic: the narrative constantly urges you to get a move on, so it can feel weird to take ten minutes out to thoroughly explore a laundromat, sliding through a skylight to open a locked door and toing and froing between neighbouring buildings to solve a puzzle to open a safe filled with supplies. The game has a good stealth system, allowing you to distract and eliminate enemies silently, even the mushroom-fuelled undead, but this can be a bit hit and miss at times. The game continues to cheerfully (and stupidly) refuse to let you move bodies, meaning you have to either trick enemies into going where you want them or "steer" them there whilst holding them at knife-point.

Direct combat is more satisfying this time around, with a more robust shooting model and a better selection of weapons, including silenced SMGs, pistols, revolvers, crossbows, shotguns and longbows. You can also create tripwire-bombs and shrapnel grenades as well as molotovs. If anything, the game gives you so many options for direct combat that it's often faster and more efficient to simply cause some noise and obliterate the enemy as they converge on your location, especially since looting enemy troops is also the best way of acquiring ammo.

This combat-heavy focus is a bit bewildering after the first game, which emphasised stealth and made most encounters with both human and myconoid enemies tense affairs throughout the game. Part II by contrast turns both Ellie and Abby into action heroes, each fully capable of storming a camp of a dozen or more highly-trained enemies and eliminating all of them in short, bloody order. It's hard to invoke terror in your horror game if your characters can fairly casually blow that horror away with a shotgun firing napalm shells like something out of The A-Team. However this does result in the very fun roguelike optional challenge mode, where you guide a character through several maps in succession before fighting a boss, unlocking new characters and weapons as you go.

Whilst the gameplay is solid, this is a story-focused game and it's fair to say that the game has been divisive. The game is not particularly interested in giving us too many likeable characters or sympathetic factions: the Wolves and Seraphites have very different motivations but ultimately are two sides of the same coin, and the late-emerging Rattlers are just cliches. The characters are also put through the ringer so much that some scenes start to feel like torture porn. The Last of Us: Part I was a story driven by hope, but Part II is fuelled by rage and vengeance instead. It's a darker game that flirts with outright nihilism, like writer Neil Druckmann wants to be the Cormac McCarthy of video games but doesn't have the chops for it, and sometimes risks being the "late-stage Walking Dead showrunner of video games" instead. Similarities between the two franchises are inevitable and sometimes possibly intentional, but I'm not sure that's what he had in mind. It largely falls to our protagonists' sidekicks, Dina and Lev, to keep some kind of beacon of light shining for them, but it's a mighty thin light at times.

The game's length (half again that of the first game) and structure is also a bit questionable. When we switch perspectives, we rewind three days and play through those days again from Abby's point of view, but it takes a good seven or eight hours of gameplay for her storyline to synch back up with Ellie's, which is a long time to leave a cliffhanger dangling. Abby's storyline is pretty good, and paced better than Ellie's (though you might feel like you could go a while before visiting an aquarium ever again), but it doesn't feel like the structure entirely works. Maybe intercutting between the two would have been better, though that may have impacted the mystery that Ellie is investigating in Seattle.

Ultimately, The Last of Us: Part II (***½) is a game that doesn't make life easy for itself. Turning in a cookie-cutter sequel of "moar adventures with Joel and Ellie" would have been safe and easy. Instead, embarking on this Heart of Darkness trip of duelling demands for revenge and "whose righteousness is more righteous anyway?" was a riskier path, and easily more interesting. Games don't take enough risks, and taking this kind of risk with a major AAA franchise is impressive. Structurally and in terms of pacing the game can be a bit of a mess, but its action is far more satisfying than the first game. Whether players are prepared to put up with 26 hours of bleakness and moral murkiness is another question, one that five years of (at times, combative) discourse has failed to fully answer.

The Last of Us: Part II is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC. The Last of Us TV series is currently airing its second season, based on the first half of this game, right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Bethesda to announce THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION REMASTERED tomorrow

Bethesda have confirmed they will be making a big announcement about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered tomorrow, April 22nd 2025, at 11am EST, 8am PST and 4pm BST. This follows weeks of speculation and leaks about the game, and widespread rumours the game would be "shadow-dropped" (released with absolutely no preamble or warning) today.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was originally released in 2006 as, obviously, the fourth game in that venerable series, following on from Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1996) and Morrowind (2002). Only one additional game in the mainline series has been released since then, the infamous Skyrim (2011), although The Elder Scrolls Online (2014) has kept some attention on the franchise. Bethesda have confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI (no subtitle confirmed) is their next project but no release date has been mooted.

Oblivion was noteworthy for its very impressive graphics (for the time), its status as a unit-shifter for the Xbox 360 console (the game was later also released on PlayStation 3), its huge open-world environment, outstanding and quirky side-quests and its employment of top vocal talent, including Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. The game eventually saw some criticism for its weird levelling mechanics, the tiny pool of voice actors (often leading to two NPCs with identical voices talking to one another) and the irritating Oblivion Gates, which had a tendency to crop up and interfere with whatever side-quest the player was trying to do at the time. The game was also seen as too much of a standard fantasy, after the extremely weird Morrowind; Skyrim was seen as a more halfway house between Oblivion's conservatism and Morrowind's bizarre experimentation. Finally, Oblivion was the first high-profile game to feature paid DLC, in the form of the infamous "horse armour" upgrade, which some players despise to this very day. Still, Oblivion was well-regarded for its atmosphere, rich assortment of weaponry, interesting bestiary of enemies and its extremely epic conclusion.

Given the number of times that Skyrim has been upgraded, remastered and re-released, fans had been speculating for years about the same attention being given to Oblivion, giving it broadly shares similar technology and a graphics style to the later game (Skyrim's Creation Engine being only a moderate development of Oblivion's GameBryo Engine). Bethesda themselves always seemed cool on the idea, saying they'd rather spend time working on a new game and pointing to numerous fan projects doing similar things. Oblivion has had mods available for many years to improve its mechanics and graphics, to a point.

However, Bethesda may have been slightly disingenuous, having outsourced development of the remaster to Virtuous Studios whilst maintaining oversight from afar.

News broke in 2023 that Bethesda were planning remakes of both Oblivion and Fallout 3 as far back as 2020, as well as considering a Dishonored 3 from their subsidiary studio Arkane. Dishonored 3 never happened - Arkane instead released Deathloop and Redfall, and are now making a video game based on the Marvel character Blade - leading to scepticism about the other claims. These were emphasised by the impressive and sterling work done on the unofficial fan remaster Skyblivion, which was of a very high quality and had committed to a 2025 release, leading to speculation that Bethesda might consider that project for an official release.

Based on the (mostly credible) leaks, Oblivion Remastered will include expansions Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles (and, yes, the horse armour) and will release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, and will be available on Game Pass on both PC and Xbox. The game's graphics have been reworked from the ground up, possibly in Unreal Engine 5, with significant visual upgrades. The UI, combat and levelling also appear to have been reworked for a more modern feel. To what degree other elements have been upgraded is unclear; Skyblivion has redesigned every fort, cave and dungeon in the game to be larger, more expansive and more unique, but it's unclear if Remastered has gone that far.

It's also unclear if tomorrow will be an announcement about the remaster or just the actual straight-up release of the game. We will need to see how that unfolds.

STAR WARS: ZERO COMPANY announced

Lucasfilm, Respawn and BitReactor have confirmed development of Star Wars: Zero Company, a turn-based tactics game set during the Clone Wars. The game is currently targeting a 2026 release window.

The game is basically "XCOM, but in Star Wars." The game sees players taking control of a Republic special forces group fighting the Separatists. Your initial squad of named characters (who will drive story decisions and appear in cutscenes) can be augmented by fresh recruits, who can level up as they do missions. The game will feature an ironman mode and also permadeath, which on the highest difficulty can be applied even to your named characters. On the named characters is a Jedi, one is a droid and there are at least two Clone Troopers. You lead character, Hawks, can be customised in appearance and ability.

The game is being developed by new studio BitReactor (who have veterans of the XCOM, Civilization, Gears of War and Elder Scrolls series on board) but are receiving support from Respawn, who made the recent Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor games. The game will be published by Electronic Arts.