Director Ben Wheatley, the man behind the disturbing psychological thriller Kill List and last year’s J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise, takes aim at the action genre with his new movie Free Fire. The film centers around a massive gunfight that follows an arms deal gone awry, and Wheatley used Minecraft to help orchestrate the chaos.
Plotting out an action sequence that lasts over an hour is no small feat, and requires plenty of forethought. Wheatley and his team made storyboards, drew up blueprints, and even made a physical model of the warehouse, according to a report from Wired. They also re-created the space in Minecraft, so they could get a feel for its dimensions in-game.
Being that Free Fire is a film about a drawn-out gunfight, it was imperative that Wheatley could make sure the action would seem credible ahead of time. To that end, he used the version of the warehouse built in Minecraft to check up on things like the line of sight of various combatants, and how much scenery would be required on-set to give his characters enough cover to work with.
Every block in Minecraft is roughly one cubic meter in size, which made it relatively easy for the crew to translate what was constructed in the game to the real world. While there are always going to be some inconsistencies because of things like the height of the player character, and the game’s intentionally simple building mechanics, the game provided a good basis to work from.
Of course, the green grass and wild pigs that populate Minecraft wouldn’t be completely appropriate for the purposes of designing a set where hardened gangsters would be riddling each other with bullets. Wheatley employed a non-standard texture pack inspired by Blade Runner in order to give his virtual warehouse a more appropriate look and feel. A texture pack is a collection of files used to change the in-game textures of blocks, items, mobs, and more.
Minecraft has obviously been a huge commercial success since it launched in 2009, but its greater cultural relevance comes from the fact that it’s one of the few titles that can truly claim to be an open-ended sandbox. The game is as useful on a movie set as it is in the classroom, and that’s pretty incredible for something that started out as an indie project.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.