Obsession star Inde Navarrette may or may not have had another meeting with X-Men director Jake Schreier, and she wants to play Mystique.

"I thought what Jake brought to Thunderbolts was what I used to love about Marvel," Navarrette told Variety. "It was character-driven, and the whole time I just couldn’t stop yapping about how much I appreciated what he did with Marvel."

When asked what character she'd like to play, Navarrette replied: "I mean, Mystique has always been super cool."

Navarrette continues to be in high demand after Obsession earned over $400 million at the global box office against a budget of just $750,000. Directed by YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Curry Barker, the indie horror follows a dude who, instead of just being normal and chill, decides to magically enchant a woman into being in love with him, and it goes just about as well as you might think.

The film's viral marketing campaign showcased some of Navarrette's acting chops as Nikki, said woman who gets unfortunately magically enchanted... though you'll just have to watch the entire film (if you haven't already) to get the full experience.

"I really want to prove that Obsession wasn't just lightning in a bottle," Navarrette previously told Nylon. "This is something that I really love and want to continue doing, but of course that’s going to take time. I want people to take that time to trust that I have that capability."

Schreier's X-Men movie just found its second mutant in Samara Weaving, casting her as the villainous Emma Frost. You'll just have to guess who the first one is...

Obsession is streaming now on Peacock. Marvel's untitled X-Men movie is set to arrive sometime in 2028. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows on the way, as well as everything you need to know about Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I'd wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn't lose my character the second I had control again.

When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens of Reddit threads about the same issue. People have been suffering from intermittent freezes and crashes since the game launched in early access and the only solution was to swap a setting that made it look considerably worse until developer Grinding Gear Games figured out a solution.

It turns out the freezes were just the first part of a troubleshooting saga that the developers have been on for the last year and a half. As of this week, the war against Path of Exile 2's constant GPU shader crashes is finally over thanks to a mountain of effort GGG put into diagnosing them.

Despite identifying the exact Nvidia driver code that caused it, game director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video that the graphics company won't fix anything unless you provide it with the steps to recreate it. "And those steps unfortunately can't be 'just grind to top tier juiced maps,'" he said.

"Even though ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver and it affected a huge number of high level players, quite frankly, they just didn't really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was," he explained.

GGG started by having someone just play the game for multiple hours hoping it would eventually crash. But with no real clues on what could be causing it, this was a crapshoot. "You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point," Rogers said.

After making no progress toward a solution, the dev team decided to build a system to at least prevent the game from crashing. The freezes I, and many others, experienced were the result of the GPU crashing and the game reloading the textures, shaders, and entire engine without closing down.

Rogers said the solution was "pretty good" but that they were still determined to figure out what was actually causing it. "So we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole of trying to reproduce it," he said. GGG added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful data and a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.

"Eventually with the replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to get it to happen fairly consistently," he said. "We got a replay that would reproduce it every five to seven minutes on average."

They took that replay, packaged into a file you could use to run it again, and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—"PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there."

It took some time, but Nvidia finally got back to them and said it would look into it. It came back a few weeks later with a fix: by increasing the shader heap size, the crashes would go away completely. And earlier this week, the Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88 was released with this note: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode."

"The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems," Rogers said, before popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.

I would be celebrating too if it took almost two years to solve a problem that wasn't even your own fault really. There's nothing worse than being surrounded by dangerous monsters—or looking at a pile of valuable loot—and having the game go unresponsive for a solid 20 seconds. Fingers crossed that no other bugs will show up so everyone can have a smooth experience when it hits 1.0 later this year.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey player count soared for the first time in years since Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey adaptation released earlier this month, according to data gathered by Alinea Analytics.

Alinea head of market analysis Rhys Elliott explains in a new post on Substack that, once The Odyssey zapped onto IMAX screens on July 17, "the cultural spillover into games was immediate." 10 days later, Ubisoft's 2018 ancient Greek adventure Assassin's Creed: Odyssey had nearly doubled its active player count, swelling from an approximate total of 122,000 players to 233,000 across platforms.

"That's a 90% surge in engagement," says Elliott, "at 1.8x the game's pre-film July baseline." But unlike the Greeks as they piled into their Trojan horse, most recent Assassin's Creed: Odyssey players are unwilling to risk more than a boring afternoon. Only 26% of the action RPG's new recruits came from Steam, while PlayStation players went off like a car alarm up 94% to 114,000 daily active users, and Xbox boomed plus-134% from 36,000 to 84,000 active users.

Probably, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey's luck on console came from PS Plus and Game Pass subscribers – even with Game Pass currently limping toward death. Elliott says, "Lapsed fans jumped straight back in, while new players found a 60+ hour Greek epic waiting inside a subscription they already pay for."

Though, Nolan's The Odyssey also blessed Ubisoft's Odyssey with some fresh sales. "Software sales moved modestly at around 400K copies year-to-date," Elliott says, but the real news "is pure player engagement. The film didn't make millions buy an eight-year-old game, but it got a massive cohort playing it again. That data gives Ubisoft great ammunition for an eventual AC Odyssey Resynced."

The developer's recent Black Flag Resynced has been a gargantuan financial success for Ubisoft, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it capitalize further on Nolan fever – if it stops laying off devs long enough to do so.

Ubisoft had a very on-brand problem with Assassin's Creed Odyssey: there weren't many tall buildings in Ancient Greece even though it's a "climbing-frame game."