Fortnite fans have gainded a first look at how The Office characters Michael Scott and Dwight Scrute will appear in the game, when they become available later tonight.
The pair of new Fortnite skins include the likenesses of actors Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson, and come with a range of alternate styles and accessories. The Michael Scott skin includes the option to wear sunglasses, or unbutton his shirt and wear a backwards cap for his "Date Mike" look.
Dwight Scrute, meanwhile, comes with the option to wear his suit jacket or not — and without, the skin can be seen with a holster strapped to his uncovered belt (complete with banana, as seen in the show). Another reference comes in the shape of Dwight's skin mask option for his face, as worn by the character after he memorably cut it off of a CPR dummy.
Said CPR dummy (without face) is appropriately Dwight's backbling. Michael's backwear, meanwhile, is a giant World's Best Boss mug, as used by the character throughout the show. Further accessories include Dwight's Broom-Stake and Michael's Dundee award statue, both used as pickaxes.
There's even a Megadesk glider, and emotes for Dwight's convertible (which he leans out of yelling in his megaphone), and Michael's Scarn dance. Both feature original dialogue from the show.
Today, the collaboration has been decrypted within Fortnite's files, ahead of the items going on sale via the game's shop at its next reset. This has allowed the game's usual leakers such as ShinaBR, whose posts are embedded above, to show off the content early.
Fortnite launched into its Chapter 7 era in November with an Avengers Endgame-style team-up event. Crossovers added since then have included skins for Kim Kardashian, Bleach, and South Park. Next week will bring a skin for Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy. Today also sees the launch of Fortnite's 3v3 Fall Guys basketball mode Crown Jam, which is available for a limited time. Take a first look at that just below.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
The Corsair Katar Pro XT's silhouette is alien. At first glance, its bulging middle resembles the wider egg shape popularized by great gaming mice like Logitech's G305, but as soon as I held it, something felt weird.
It's two things: first, everything in front of its hump – about two-thirds of the way along the mouse – is essentially a dead straight slope down. The middle and front of most mice curve to fit the shape of your hand, but not here. It's like a shelf for your index and middle fingers. Second, the sides slope sharply inwards. Most mice fall straight down and some slope outwards to give your ring and pinky fingers somewhere to rest, but the idea of the Katar Pro XT is that your fingers wrap around it, giving you full control.
That's the theory, at least. In practice I found a comfy position, but only after lots of trial and error. It feels like an exaggerated version of the Logitech egg, with a flatter top and slopier sides: I ended up liking the shape, but felt like I had to work to get there.
And that's the story all over with this mouse: at $35/£35, there's plenty to like – the left and mouse clicks are particularly rapid — but you'll have to contend with some missteps, too.
Rapid-Fire Mouse Buttons and a Solid Sensor
Corsair has packed plenty of impressive tech into the Katar Pro XT.
The left and right clicks are excellent: Corsair's "Quickstrike" tech sounds gimmicky, but lives up to the name. The switches for the clicks sit right below the buttons, so as soon as you push down even slightly, it detects an input. The result is rapid-fire spamming that sounds clean and bouncy. I was at first worried I'd inadvertently click when I didn't mean to, but that never happened.
I've reviewed plenty of budget gaming mice recently and this PMW3391 sensor, with a maximum DPI of 18,000, is slightly better on paper than some of the others I've tested. Combined with the 1,000Hz polling rate (the number of times per second it reports its position to your PC), it's certainly good enough for most gamers in whatever genre you want to play.
I tested it in Arc Raiders, Counter-Strike 2, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and whether I was flick-shotting or lazily swinging a sword, it reacted to my hand movements with no noticeable stuttering or inconsistencies. It felt precise, and any issues I faced were more down to the mouse feet than the sensor.
Itchy Feet and Mushy Side Clicks
Those feet felt ever-so-slightly inconsistent in-game. I couldn't work out what it was, so I did some testing. If I pushed the mouse sideways and let go, it slid a short distance, but if I pushed it up and let go, it stopped instantly. Basically, there's more friction on vertical movements than horizontal ones. What's more, the top feet produce more friction than the bottom ones. When I pushed sideways and let go, the bottom travelled further than the top, meaning the mouse tilted sideways. The third offense: left and right swipes are much louder than top to bottom swipes, which rings alarm bells.
Those problems sound worse than they actually are, and replacement mice feet are pretty cheap. In-game, these quirks didn't seem to affect performance and I felt I could land all my shots accurately, but it just wasn't the smoothest ride – and I could feel every bit of its 74g weight. I've tested other budget mice that glide more gracefully.
Pressing the side buttons isn't particularly enjoyable, either. They barely protrude from the body of the mouse, so when you click them you touch the edges of the shell, while the actual clicks feel soft and mushy. And I don't love the scroll wheel, which feels stiff. It also rattles if you shake the mouse: the overall build quality of the Katar Pro XT is solid, and its body won't bend or creak even if you squeeze it really hard, but the rattling scroll wheel is the one sore spot.
You can expect some good, some bad with any budget gaming mouse, and that's what you get here. Whether the Katar Pro XT is good for you, then, might come down to its shape.
Comfortable Shape That Requires Trial and Error
I like that Corsair have at least tried something different: so many mice sport the same shape, and that might not suit everybody.
I can immediately rule out palm grip, where your whole palm rests on the body of the mouse. The inward-sloping sides won't accommodate your pinky and ring fingers, plus the angle of the bulge leaves awkward gaps: this is very much a fingertip grip and claw grip mouse.
I actually really like the shape for fingertip grip. Minimal contact with the mouse surface means the lack of curves really doesn't matter, and the straight, flat mouse buttons give you maximum clicking space. The inward sloping sides fit my thumb, index, and pinky finger well, and I feel fully in control of the mouse. The subtle mesh texture on the mouse sides give you ever more grip, and it feels nimble and agile in my hands. That said, this is a wide mouse. My hands are slightly larger than average, and people with narrower palms might struggle to find a comfortable spot for their ring and pinky fingers.
As for claw grip, I simply couldn't find a comfy position. The width of the mouse means you really have to curl your ring and pink fingers onto the sides, and my hand just felt cramped and contorted.
That was until I tried a variation of the claw grip with three fingers on the top of the mouse: index finger for left click, middle finger for the scroll wheel, and ring finger for the right click, with my pink on the side of the mouse. This felt very comfortable, and I was fully in control of the mouse. It's not my natural claw grip – I prefer two fingers on top – but I know some people favor this version. If you're one of them, this mouse will work for you.
So if you like fingertip grip or a modified claw grip, and you don't have small hands, the Katar Pro XT is tempting, especially if you see it on sale. But if not, there are plenty of better options on our list of best budget mice that will feel more comfortable.
Samuel is a freelance reporter and editor specializing in longform journalism and hardware reviews. You can read his work at his website.
One of the most popular sets from the Scarlet and Violet era, Pokémon TCG: 151, continues to be immensely popular even now in the Mega Evolution era. Market price on its selection of sealed products remains high on resale marketplaces like TCGplayer, so it's always good news to find boosters at a better price from major retailers.
But, still, it's better than the $120+ market price, which is coincidentally on the rise again. According to TCGplayer, 151 Booster Bundles have skyrocketed by 73.48% in value in 12 months, and 23.96% in the past month alone. That being said, it's still a mighty lot higher than the $26.96 MSRP, but you'll be hard-pressed to find that anywhere these days.
If you're just after some cool 151 chase cards, you might be better off just picking up some singles (or several) from marketplaces like TCGplayer.
But, if you want the thrill of opening up some 151 packs, Amazon's listing is the cheapest option going right now, and even includes free delivery, plus one to two day delivery if you're a Prime member. It's also shipped and sold by Amazon directly, so you can be sure you're getting what you ordered.
While stock lasts, at least, as this is such an excellent deal, and below market price, I fully expect these to fly off the digital shelves. Other Phantasmal Flames deals include that UPC for $150 at Amazon or TCGplayer, or you can pick up the Elite Trainer Box for just $79.94 at Amazon as well.
All around, these are pretty excellent deals, and hopefully a sign of things to come when Ascended Heroes, Perfect Order, and everything else that 2026 has in store for Pokemon TCG, come out later this year.
Robert Anderson is Senior Commerce Editor and IGN's resident deals expert on games, collectibles, trading card games, and more. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter/X or Bluesky.
Luke Ross, creator of the R.E.A.L. VR mods for games such as Elden Ring, Days Gone, and Far Cry, reportedly earns $20,000 a month through Patreon, which acts as a paywall for his work.
He ditched work on his Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod following CD Projekt’s DMCA strike, and has now said he received another strike from publisher 505 Games for his VR conversion of 2020 first-person cyberpunk action game Ghostrunner. IGN has asked 505 Games for comment. Ross declined to comment further when contacted by IGN.
Ross’ Patreon page now carries a warning, telling potential subscribers that “for the moment there will be no benefits available.” That means that even if you subscribe to his Patreon, you won’t get access to any of the more than 40 mods he has locked behind it. Ross said he’ll keep his Patreon locked down “until the legal situation clears out.” Existing subscriptions will have their access extended for one month without further payments, Ross said.
Ross hit the headlines this month when Jan Rosner, VP, Business Development at CD Projekt Red, tweeted to say the company issued its DMCA strike because the Cyberpunk VR was a paid mod, which violates its fan content guidelines.
“We never allow monetization of our IP without our direct permission and/or an agreement in place,” Rosner said. “We were in touch with Luke last week and informed him that he needs to make it free for everyone (with optional donations) or remove it.
“We are big fans of mods to our games — some of the work out there has been nothing short of amazing, including Luke’s mod for Cyberpunk 2077. We’d be happy to see it return as a free release. However, making a profit from our IP, in any form, always requires permission from CD Projekt Red.”
Ross responded to Rosner’s tweet to take issue with his work being characterized as fan content. Rather, Ross insisted, it is independent software and thus does not infringe on CD Projekt’s IP rights.
“I'm sorry but I don't believe you are within your rights in demanding that my software needs to be free,” Ross said. “It is not ‘derivative work’ or ‘fan content’: it supports a large number of games which were built upon different engines, and it contains absolutely zero code or assets from your IP. Saying that it infringes your IP rights is equivalent to maintaining for example that RivaTuner violates game publishers' copyrights because it intercepts the images the game is drawing on screen and it processes them in order to overlay its statistics.”
In a new post to subscribers, Ross said Patreon automatically complied with 505 Games’ alleged DMCA takedown notice for his Ghostrunner mod.
“I don't blame them,” he continued. “DMCA law is carefully worded to give infinite power to big companies, who only need to write on a slip of paper that they ‘believe’ their copyright has been infringed in order to nuke from the sky anything they don't like — and to give infinite headaches to creators like me, who instead have the only recourse of going to court, sustaining huge costs to get through the legal process.”
Ross said his Patreon is now under threat of termination because of repeated DMCA strikes, and must “avoid posting material that will subject your account to further claims of copyright infringement."
“In light of the above facts, I'm being forced to take immediate action,” Ross explained. “I'm making unavailable all versions of the mods and also all the posts related to the wonderful work we have done here together for years, so that there will be no ground for further claims. And since I cannot stop people from subscribing without closing down the account altogether, I'm making it clear on the About and Welcome pages that new subscriptions will have the only effect of supporting me and that no access to the 40+ conversions can or will be provided at this time.”
IGN had asked Ross if he planned to make the Cyberpunk VR mod free, thus complying with CD Projekt’s terms of service. Responding, Ross said that while he wouldn’t rule out doing so, it would be a lot of work.
“I do not rule out releasing the mod free for everyone,” he said. “But it would take time, because my software supports 40+ games and various completely different engines, which makes creating a version that specifically supports only Cyberpunk 2077 a non-trivial task. Also, the people who have voluntarily given their money to me in order to support my development efforts for the framework might not be happy about seeing the mod being given away all of a sudden to everyone just because I've been bullied into it.”
Ross told subscribers that “people on the web are thirsty for blood because back in the GTA 5 and RDR 2 era, an article came out stating that I was raising $20,000 a month.”
He continued: “Is that ‘reasonable’? Assuming that overall the work I poured into making my software support Cyberpunk, turning it into the ‘most immersive gaming experience’ some people had in their lives, amounted to a few months, say $50,000: is that ‘reasonable’ according to the arbitrary criteria of Cyberpunk's publisher? Something tells me it wouldn't be considered reasonable, despite being a tiny fraction of the many millions they would have to invest for porting CP2077 to VR themselves, and despite the fact that the cost was entirely financed by passionate gamers and none of it was incurred by CD Projekt.
“Hopefully we'll find a way together, in the next few weeks. But if we can't, we'll always have the memories of the wonderful times we spent in those beautiful virtual worlds. Oh and by the way: if you have existing copies of the mods that you downloaded here before all this drama, you will of course be able to use them indefinitely and without restrictions, just like people have been doing for years with the RDR2 mod, as long as the games do not get breaking updates from the publishers.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Here's hoping you didn't have anything else planned for your weekend, as Nintendo has announced a surprise Super Mario Galaxy Movie Nintendo Direct for this coming Sunday.
A weekend Nintendo Direct is pretty much unheard of, but the company will hold one this Sunday, January 25 at 6am Pacific time / 9am Eastern / 2pm UK time, to reveal new details of its upcoming animated movie sequel.
Back in November, the movie was the focus of another dedicated Nintendo Direct that confirmed the film will introduce Rosalina to the big screen, voiced by Marvel star Brie Larson. Another new addition to the animated ensemble will be Bowser Jr., here voiced by Benny Safdie.
That Direct opened with the first-ever full trailer for the film, which you can watch just above. The movie was revealed to begin with Bowser still trapped by the Mario brothers, as seen in the previous Super Mario Bros. Movie. However, Bowser Jr. soon appears — keen to set his beloved papa free.
Safdie and Larson will be joined by the returning cast from the first movie: Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, and Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek.
Previously, we've heard word that the movie will feature some Nintendo characters that "are really deep cuts", and fans have speculated that its plot may finally confirm a long-held theory around Peach and Rosalina's origins. Lastly, back in November, Minions animation studio Illumination said it was just "weeks away" from completing its work on the film, ahead of its theatrical release on April 3, 2026 in the US and April 24 in Japan.
What else does Nintendo have left to reveal? Join us on Sunday to find out.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Ark Nova, a long, complex and richly strategic game of zoo-building and conservation, took board gaming by storm after its release in 2021. When a game gets that popular, while having big barriers to new players, a simplified spin-off is almost guaranteed – and now we have Sanctuary from the same designer. It has the same widely appealing theme and keeps some of the innovative mechanisms of its parent, but how much of its strategic clout can it retain?
What’s in the Box
Sanctuary comes in a big box with considerable heft. When you slide the lid off the reason becomes clear: it contains sheet after sheet of large, punch out, cardboard hexes. Like Ark Nova, these are all illustrated with photos of animals, zoo staff, or pertinent buildings and landscapes. Photo-art in the obviously artificial medium of board gaming can look odd but here it works well, re-enforcing the feeling that you’re building something real and tangible.
Most of the hexes are peppered with confusing icons which initially appear very mysterious but, once you’ve internalized the game rules, you’ll appreciate having all the information on the game state front and center. The game thoughtfully includes a plastic rack for each player to hold their “hand” of hex tiles during play.
Aside from the hex tiles there’s a bunch of other cardboard to pop out, not only tokens but also action “cards” for each player, which are made of thick cardboard rather than playing-card stock. There are two central boards, one for tracking objectives and another for holding the market of tiles which requires a little assembly, as the edges fold in and stick down to keep the tiles in place. Finally, there’s a two-sided hex map for each player to build their zoo on. Unlike the parent game, everyone here uses the same map during play, one side of the board or the other.
Rules and How It Plays
You can get some sense of how much more simple Sanctuary is than Ark Nova simply by comparing rulebooks, which otherwise have similar layouts and fonts. Ark Nova weighs in at 20 pages: Sanctuary a modest eight, with plenty of examples. It jettisons the bigger game’s separation of animals and enclosures, making everything a single tile that you lay onto the hex board representing your zoo.
One thing it keeps, however, is the notion of action card strength. You have four different actions arranged beneath your zoo board in a ranking from weakest to strongest. When you use one, it operates at a “level” equal to its current position in the queue. Then it moves into the weakest slot and the other cards all slide up one rank. All the actions allow you to place tiles into your zoo: three of them are for animals of different habitats while the fourth is for “projects”, which include things like specialist researchers, conservation efforts and the like. All the matching tiles have a strength requirement and the action card you use to lay it must be at that level or higher.
Many tiles have additional requirements. The most common is for arrows on the tile edge to line up with empty spaces: you start with a couple in your zoo map but you can add more by playing tiles from your hand face-down. Others need to be adjacent to tiles already in your zoo that carry certain icons. All have at least one icon representing an animal type, a habitat or a continent. Most tiles improve the appeal of your zoo, which is essentially your victory point tally. For many that’s a fixed value, while others depend on how many of a particular icon you have adjacent to that tile or on your map as a whole.
You can get bonus appeal by satisfying conservation objectives. Five are drawn randomly for each game, matching particular animal type and continent icons. To claim one you must simply have the matching number of icons in your zoo; the more icons, the more points. You can also spend conservation markers, in place of a missing icon, making these tokens very powerful. They can be obtained by getting matching male and female animal tiles of the same species next to each other on your map, or from certain project tiles.
These are the parameters of the puzzle that Sanctuary lays before you, fiendishly pulling you in multiple directions at once.
These are the parameters of the puzzle that Sanctuary lays before you, fiendishly pulling you in multiple directions at once. Many tiles reward you for specializing in particular icons. Conservation bonuses, meanwhile, reward you for diversity. Your challenge is to try and decide how, given the limitation of what tiles you pick up and the actions at your disposal, you’re going to balance this problem to eke out the highest score.
To complicate matters, each level of conservation bonus can only be claimed once. So if you claim one with two bird icons, say, and then get more birds in your zoo later, you can’t then go back and claim the bigger-scoring four- or five-icon rewards via birds later on. You need to have four or five of a different animal type or make up the difference with those precious conservation tokens. The whole thing is a mess of competing priorities that can make the game surprisingly tense for what is essentially an un-interactive game where you’re focused on building out your own map.
Because you’re being asked to do so many different things at once, how you pick up and hold tiles is very important. At the start of your turn you have to take one tile from the six in the display. However, you can only take that tile from the queue position up to the current level of your projects action card, making this one particularly important. After that you take an “official” action which involves either using a card to play tiles or you can take more tiles. Animal actions used this way give you two random tiles, while the projects action lets you take one tile of your choice from the display.
Again, given that the game is essentially a race, this results in surprising tension. Play ends when someone either fills their map or collects all five conservation bonuses, both of which are reliant on playing tiles. So missing a turn to take more tiles feels like you’re falling behind. But it’s always so tempting! There are often hexes available that you desperately want because their icons fit with the conservation objectives, or others in your zoo, or even male-female animal pairs but the more you collect them in hope of making combos, the further you risk getting behind in the race for points. The fact you can only hold six tiles at once adds a delightfully frustrating element to these decisions.
Your action order is the final plank in the game’s puzzle. Often, you’ll want to play a given tile and you won’t have the requisite action at a high enough level. So you have to muddle through potentially laying and taking less interesting tiles to get where you want to be. Forward planning your action chains to get cards to the required levels becomes a hallmark of experience when you’re selecting tiles from the display, muddied by the desire to keep projects high to maximize your choices. Cards can also be levelled up to get higher action levels by fulfilling four different criteria, such as claiming your first spot on the conservation track. As is typical for the game’s circular approach to strategy, fulfilling these is yet another competing priority to juggle.
There are times when all the different things going on become an active problem for the game, however. The need for tiles to support each other, and particularly the reward for animal gender pairs, can be frustratingly hard to fulfill if the tiles you want are simply not in the display when it’s your turn. As such, it works better at lower player counts: with five, especially, it feels overlong. The mechanisms also feel very abstract, especially compared to Ark Nova which at least presents an illusion of running a real zoo.
Once the game is finished, everyone has to tally up their points, which is an annoyingly time-consuming process. With the score offered by many tiles being dependent on many other tiles it takes a while to tot them up, and it’s very easy to make errors in what is often quite a tight game. While everyone is raring to know who won, the time and effort it takes to chalk up the scores has the unfortunate effect of deflating whatever excitement has built up during play, leading to the final result arriving as a bit of an anticlimax.
This article contains spoilers for various Ryan Murphy shows, including FX and Hulu’s new series, The Beauty.
Can anyone stop Ryan Murphy? Whatever you think qualitatively of the mega-producer’s creations, there was a time that he was at least reliably churning out hit after hit – controversial series that captured the zeitgeist like Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story. But as his output has increased over time, the accompanying reaction has varied, both in terms of viewers as well as critical – and more importantly, fan – response. Basically, the hitmaker has started turning in more misses than hits, and given the goopy mess of FX and Hulu’s new comic book adaptation, The Beauty, it’s time for Murphy to take a step back, assess what he’s doing, and figure out once again how to make, if not good TV, at least watchable TV.
First, a word about Ryan Murphy shows…because they’re not all created equal. There was a time when Murphy was the man behind everything – creator, producer, writer, and director. He may have worked with partners, but his voice came through clear and true, starting with the 1999-2001 WB critical fave but short-lived Popular, to 2003-2010’s controversy-drawing FX plastic surgery drama, Nip/Tuck, co-starring the late, great Julian McMahon.
But it really wasn’t until 2009 that Murphy created what would elevate him to the lofty heights of TV greats like Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and others. Fox’s Glee was a massive, culture-shifting hit that defined a generation of young TV viewers, created massive stars, and launched a world tour. Love it or hate it – it was impossible to avoid Glee. Murphy did it again in 2011 with American Horror Story, which was a bunch of insane nonsense that nevertheless hit like a lightning bolt with its dark turns for faves like Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott, an unhinged performance by Jessica Lange, and most importantly for the Glee crowd, relatively fresh-faced young performers to become obsessed with in Evan Peters and Taissa Farmiga.
That’s all Early Murphy™; a little over a decade into his storied career, things started to change. There were misses like the 2012 sitcom, The New Normal (which was canceled after one season), and Fox’s Scream Queens in 2015, although the horror comedy has seen a reappraisal in recent years thanks to performances by Glen Powell and Ariana Grande. And there were shows that worked, but could arguably be more attributed to Murphy’s collaborators than the man himself: American Crime Story, Feud, and Pose all counted Ryan Murphy as part of the team, but other voices came through, with Murphy clearly not the loudest one in the room.
At the same time, Murphy created the long-running Fox hit, 9-1-1, which launched in 2018 and later spun off into another hit, 9-1-1: Lone Star (2020-2025). From the outside, both shows felt Murphy’s influence, but seemed like the sort of procedurals that run themselves…even if the emergency crews sometimes deal with getting stuck in space or bee tornadoes, two Murphy touches if there ever were ones.
The biggest shift, and in some aspects the biggest mistake in Murphy’s career, was his 2018 deal with Netflix. It wasn’t perhaps a monetary mistake – Murphy netted $300 million from the deal – but going from weekly programming to the binge model not only changed the rhythm of his shows, but also stretched him too thin. To wit: In 2018 when the deal kicked off, Murphy had American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, 9-1-1, and Pose, and was prepping more down the road. In the first decade of his career, he ran three shows that only briefly overlapped, but in the past decade, running up to this year’s The Beauty? 21 TV series, with at least two more on the way. Even for a super-producer like Murphy, one cannot sustain a consistent level of quality at that pace, particularly when one is pulling double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple duty on a series. That’s not even taking into account the movies, reality shows, and many public appearances Murphy has been involved in. There are high performers, and then there are people who are constantly on the brink of burnout; Murphy’s more recent output indicates the latter.
While not by any stretch of the imagination a complete picture of a career, take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Murphy’s shows. Other than The New Normal, in that pre-2018 period, all Ryan Murphy shows were in the “Fresh” portion, with Glee hitting a low of 70% and Pose a high of 98%. After 2018? The Politician came in rotten with 51%, Hollywood also rotten at 58%, with Ratched, Halston, and American Horror Story barely scraping by with 62-67% fresh. We won’t list every show Murphy has done, but at least on the inexact scale of Rotten Tomatoes, Murphy went from a pretty good hit ratio in his first decade to nearly 50/50 fresh versus rotten post-2018. On Rotten Tomatoes’ scale? That’s rotten. (The lone exception is Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, which Murphy produced but did not create, write, or direct).
On Metacritic, which has a more focused critic base than Rotten Tomatoes’ wide berth and breaks things down more granularly, Murphy has a lifetime average career score of 62 out of 100. Earlier Murphy is almost exclusively in the green (aka positive), but since 2018, he’s mixed to negative, leading up to last year’s critical failure – the Kim Kardashian-starring Hulu series, All’s Fair.
There are high performers, and then there are people who are constantly on the brink of burnout; Murphy’s more recent output indicates the latter.
That’s all well and good, but what about viewers? There, Murphy has been more successful. On Nielsen’s independent rankings of streaming numbers, Netflix’s The Watcher hit number one, as did the One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest prequel, Ratched, as well as both iterations of the controversial serial killer series, Monster, focusing on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers. All’s Fair, meanwhile, matched its critical drubbing by not hitting the Nielsen Top 10, although it did hit in the Top 15 on Luminate’s rankings, and was picked up for a second season.
The fact of the matter is that Murphy does still know how to produce hits and cause debates – check out the furious arguments over Monster – but where fans and critics were often aligned on his past projects, more recent reactions have been all over the place, particularly when it comes to the abysmal response to All’s Fair. Murphy’s flair for pulp fun seems to have turned into a parade of “hey, I know that guy” as he combs through his rolodex for friends to hang out with. That has worked less and less on American Horror Story, with later seasons barely hitting the way earlier ones did, and the American Horror Stories anthology spin-off coming and going with hardly any discussion.
All of that brings us to The Beauty, a comic book adaptation in 11 episodes starring (once again) Evan Peters, Rebecca Hall, Anthony Ramos, Ashton Kutcher, and Jeremy Pope. While as of this writing we don’t know about the critical response or the viewership levels, it has all the hallmarks of a Murphy show: There’s an all-star cast (nearly every speaking role is a Murphy regular and/or supermodel); a pulpy premise (an STD causes people to grossly transform into their most beautiful selves and sometimes explode into bloody chunks); and the unerring support of his frequent collaborators, FX.
But without getting too far into spoilers for the season – it premieres with three episodes, then has a staggered release until a two-episode finale on March 4 – the show is barely coherent as a television series. The initial premise is quickly and rudely shoved to the side as the series gets distracted by other sci-fi concepts. Characters appear and disappear at random; some sections are full-on music videos; a flashback begins halfway through an episode, and then continues into the next episode. Coming from a man (that would be Murphy) who made his bones in weekly, episodic television, it’s wild to look back on (for example) Glee, one of the most unhinged shows ever created, as a bastion of good TV format versus whatever The Beauty is delivering on a weekly(ish) basis.
There’s every chance that The Beauty will be another Murphy success, or at least deliver on what FX and Hulu are looking for. It’s hard to deny that Bella Hadid exploding on the Paris police or Meghan Trainor getting thrown out a skyscraper window are the sort of scenes crafted for meme-able, TikTok-clippable moments, but – nothing against TikTok – that’s not a TV show. There is no arc to the series on an episodic basis, and definitely not to the season. The same can be said for All’s Fair or any number of recent seasons of American Horror Story that feel like Murphy is a dog chasing cars, looking to grab whatever shiny bumper catches his fancy next.
Maybe there isn’t that impetus – that young man’s drive to prove himself – that the now 60-year-old Murphy once had at the beginning of his career. At the New York Comic Con panel for The Beauty, Murphy opined pretty extensively about the good food they ate and nice boats they rode on while filming in Venice. If he’s in his Adam Sandler go-on-vacation-with-my-friends phase, and if his goal is to travel the world and have a nice time, well, good for him. There also may not be the monetary or viewership impetus, given everyone from Netflix to Disney keeps tossing money his way while the algorithm gets people watching. Perhaps he’s merely run out of things to say about the underdogs of Glee or the drag ball culture of Pose.
But for those of us who have been watching Murphy’s shows since the beginning of his career, they’ve gone from someone saying, “hey, you wanna see a car crash?” and then purposefully ramming their car into the wall, to him seemingly sitting in the backseat and letting the Cybertruck take him where it wants to go, admiring the view along the way. That’s not sustainable, and it’s not the way to have a career that stands the test of time. Murphy’s oeuvre has always been characterized by wild swings and by too much stuff, but at least with the structure of a 42-minute drama punctuated by commercials, some of those baser instincts were reined in by default. The streaming era has eroded that, leading to some awful television that just does not work.
Will Murphy heed this advice, take a year or two off, and come back with something truly great? Probably not, but one can hope. And that’s what we missed from Glee.
Steve Downes, the actor behind Master chief’s iconic voice, has said deceptive AI reproductions of his voice “cross a line that gets into an area I am uncomfortable with” — and he wants it to stop.
Speaking in an AMA on his YouTube channel, Downes acknowledged the inevitability of AI, and even described some fan-made projects as “really cool,” but hit out at unauthorized use of his voice.
“One of the things that can be overwhelming when it comes to attention from fans is when AI gets involved,” he said. “A lot of it is harmless I suppose, but some of it cannot be harmless. I've been very vocal about my feelings about the use of artificial intelligence, which on the one hand is inevitable and has many positive effects on not only show business but humanity in general, but it can also be a detriment. It can also be something that deprives the actor of his work.
“I've heard some things online in terms of AI and the reproduction of my voice that sounds like my voice that… like I said, most of the stuff I've seen is pretty harmless, but it can be not that way real quick. So, I'm not a proponent. I don't like it. I would prefer that it not be done.
“There's a lot of fan-made projects out there that are really cool, that are done just from the heart. But when you get to the AI part and deceiving somebody into thinking, in my case, that these are lines that I actually spoke when they're not, that's when we cross a line that gets into an area that I am uncomfortable with. I'll go on the record with that.”
In the absence of significant law reform, AI deepfakes have exploded alongside the emergence of generative AI and its increasing accuracy and availability. And Downes is certainly not alone in complaining about how deceptive it can be for video game voice actors.
There have been a number of high-profile cases in which celebrities have complained publicly about fake adverts. In 2023, Tom Hanks warned fans that an AI version of his likeness was being used without his consent in an online advert for a dental plan. In 2024, Morgan Freeman thanked fans who alerted him to AI-generated imitations of his voice online after a series of videos created by someone posing as his niece went viral.
And last year, Jamie Lee Curtis was forced to appeal to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an Instagram post because she couldn’t get the company to pull an AI-generated ad that featured her likeness for “some bullshit that I didn’t authorize, agree to or endorse.”
Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
BioWare is slowly beginning to build itself back up following the downsizing it experienced in the wake of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with hiring now underway for a new senior role on Mass Effect 5.
Now, as work on Mass Effect 5 quietly continues, BioWare is hiring a Production Director for the game who will report directly into the project's overall boss, BioWare and Mass Effect franchise veteran Mike Gamble.
"Hi, I'm hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble wrote on social media. "They'll report to me and it's gonna be awesome." A job description notes that the role will involve partnering with Mass Effect 5's "creative leadership, studio teams, and internal and external partners to champion the game's vision and ensure its execution at the highest quality bar."
"Since 1995, BioWare has been dedicated to creating games defined by rich storytelling, unforgettable characters, and expansive worlds," the job description continues. "Over the years, the studio has earned recognition for developing some of the industry's most critically acclaimed titles. Today, BioWare is building on that legacy with the development of the next Mass Effect game, continuing one of the highest-rated and most celebrated series in video game history."
BioWare first announced plans to make Mass Effect 5 back in 2020 — a date that now feels a lifetime ago — in part to simply reassure fans that it remained committed to the franchise. In reality, though, the company was still busy devoting most of its development efforts into getting Dragon Age: The Veilguard done and out the door.
During this time, BioWare is believed to have had only a small team working on its next Mass Effect game concept, while the bulk of the studio was busy elsewhere. With The Veilguard finally launched in late 2024, Mass Effect 5 became the sole focus of the studio — albeit in its newly-slimmed down form.
Gamble previously confirmed that Mass Effect 5 was being led by a team of fellow Mass Effect veterans who served key roles on the franchise's original three games, including art director Derek Watts, creative director Parrish Ley, senior level designer and Normandy programmer Dusty Everman, and game director Preston Watmaniuk.
The leadership team behind Dragon Age: The Veilguard, including its lead writer, senior systems designer, various editors, producer and both its co-directors, Corinne Busche and John Epler, are all no longer at the company following the studio's downsizing, meanwhile.
Consecutive years have seen BioWare release snippets of concept art and other brief teasers for the game, which is expected to be set hundreds of years after the end of the original Mass Effect trilogy and feature at least one returning character. At the same time, pre-production has also begun on Amazon Prime's Mass Effect TV series that will also be set after the events of the trilogy.
"Let's start by setting the record straight: the next Mass Effect game is in development, and EA and BioWare remain committed to telling more stories in this universe," Gamble wrote in a blog post last November. "The truth is, the last few years have been an incredibly busy time at BioWare," Gamble continued today. "But currently, the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out."
BioWare has given no indication of when Mass Effect 5 will arrive, though here's hoping 2026 brings a better sense of the company's progress as development ramps up.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
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