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Businessman Vasile Tofan was nominated to be Moldova’s new prime minister on Saturday after the previous one, Alexandru Munteanu, stepped down earlier this month amid a series of scandals.

Moldovan President Maia Sandu announced the designation of Tofan during a press conference following a consultation with different parties in the government.

Tofan said that his priorities included relaunching the economy as well as leading Moldova “into the European Union as soon as possible.”

Tofan said, in reply to a question by journalists about Moldova’s EU ascension, that he wanted the country to sign a treaty to join the Union by the end of 2028 .

The previous prime minister, Munteanu, resigned earlier this month after saying that he felt he was no longer able to exercise his mandate in accordance with his beliefs. The government had been rocked by several scandals, including the arrest of a state secretary on suspicious of bribery.

Under Moldovan law, Tofan now has 15 days to call a vote of confidence on the government program in order to confirm his role.

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Denzel Washington was seemingly so regretful about having passed on David Fincher ’s Se7en that he made at least three psychological thrillers modeled after it — Fallen , The Bone Collector , and The Little Things . Will Smith , on the other hand, turned down not one but two movies that ended up becoming genre-defining hits. The first, of course, was The Matrix . Smith was offered the role that eventually went to Keanu Reeves , but he infamously chose to star in the steampunk Western bomb Wild Wild West instead. Smith later admitted that he made a mistake, but also pointed out that his involvement would have altered the DNA of The Matrix , which wasn’t the only classic he passed on. Some years later, Smith turned down the lead role in a Western that grossed more than $400 million worldwide and scored numerous Oscar nominations.

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What are some of the best-looking games of all time? Many examples that come to my mind are not from this generation, but rather the early 2010s: Metal Gear Solid 5, The Witcher 3, and Batman: Arkham Knight all looked stunning upon release, and still do today.

To this list I would also add Ryse: Son of Rome , German developer Crytek’s ill-fated Xbox One launch title in which you play as a Roman centurion seeking to avenge his dead family. It is gloriously, mouth-wateringly cinematic, more so than many actual works of cinema.

Unfortunately, it’s also rather short, taking only around 6 hours to complete. Former employees say as much as two thirds of planned content had to be cut in the race to make launch day. The crunch was brutal, but many of the game’s creators took comfort in the knowledge they were laying the foundations for not just a sequel, but an entire franchise – one that would take us far beyond Rome.

How Empires Fall

While work on the original game was wrapping up, four concept artists, a historical researcher, and the key leadership team of Ryse: Son of Rome got together to figure out where they could take things moving forward.

Leading this group was Patrick Hanenberger, a production designer who had previously worked at DreamWorks. He’d initially been brought on board as a visual consultant to help make Ryse feel – as Crytek’s then-CEO Cevat Yerli used to say – like a “playable movie.” Later, he tells IGN, “they offered me a job as the franchise’s art director.”

Also set to be involved in some capacity was Todd Papy of Sony’s Santa Monica Studio. Papy joined Crytek in late 2013 after having directed God of War: Ascension to work on what was then reported to be an “unannounced project.” A former Crytek employee who spoke to IGN under condition of anonymity affirmed what was back then just speculation: that he would apply his experience with games set in ancient Greece to a game set in ancient Rome.

A lot of people were super keen on Japan, unsurprisingly. But that’s not like going from Rome to Greece. It would have been a big departure.

Whether any of the sequels would in fact be set in Rome was, however, the subject of debate. “Part of the conversations that were happening were about what it was that people were liking about Ryse,” Yannick Boucher, who served as one of the original game’s project managers, tells IGN. “Was it the Roman thing specifically, or history more generally? Do we stay in Rome, or go to some other empire?”

“I was super stoked to do a Viking game,” recalls Peter Gornstein, Ryse’s art director and director of cinematics. For one, the opportunities were endless: a game about Vikings could have taken players on raids along the English and French coasts, the shores of Newfoundland, and even the city of Constantinople, where they served as bodyguards to Byzantine emperors. It was also uncharted territory – at least back then. The History Channel’s Vikings TV show was still on its first season, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla nearly a decade away.

“It would have been great to explore a part of history that a lot of people didn’t yet know about,” says Gornstein.

Other settings that were reportedly considered included feudal Japan – Hanenberger mentions a number of events that interested him, including the failed Mongol invasions led by Kublai Khan, the arrival of European merchants, and the civil wars of the Sengoku period – as well as the Ottoman Empire, which defeated the Byzantines in 1453.

Not everyone was on board with leaving Rome. As Boucher puts it: “Some felt like we had just set the foundations for this IP, and now we were already diverging a bit. A lot of people were super keen on Japan, unsurprisingly. But that’s not like going from Rome to Greece. It would have been a big departure.”

Hanenberger thought of several ways to connect and justify expanding settings. Thematically, for example, the franchise could come to explore the question of “how empires rise and fall – and why.” He also considered tying each installment together narratively, with characters and events in one game linking back to another. Each story could be set in motion by that of the previous installment, like dominos. Or, you know, history itself.

Rhyming With History

Had those planned sequels happened, they would have featured a more open-ended design than the original Ryse. “When we talked about correcting some of that game’s weaknesses,” says Boucher, “changing the levels was among the first things that came up, as most of them were basically just a straight corridor.” The vision at the time was not far off from God of War 2018: not quite open-world, but not completely linear either.

The team also thought about introducing new game mechanics, many of them cut from or left out of the original Ryse due to time constraints, including vehicle navigation and a PVP multiplayer mode (Son of Rome ended up having both solo and co-op PVE where you fought off waves inside the Colosseum).

Microsoft told us it was the most cohesive and well-thought IP pitch they had ever seen.

The anonymous employee tells me they would have liked to have made single-player combat more dynamic. In parts of Ryse, when you venture into Britain to crush the rebellion of Queen Boudica, you advance in testudo formation, raising your shield alongside your fellow soldiers to form an impregnable barrier. In the final game, gameplay is limited to shielding yourself from enemy fire and returning fire of your own – all with the press of a button. “Our original plan was that you’d be able to leave and reenter this formation at will,” they say, “fighting enemies on your own and then returning to position when you feel like doing so.”

The sequels could have played around with other real-world military tactics, like the Parthian shot (where cavalry soldiers feign a full-speed retreat, only to turn around and firing arrows) or Kakuyoku (a Sengoku-era formation where a single defensive line turns into a pincer movement, attacking the enemy from both sides).

One area where the sequels would not diverge from the original Ryse was aesthetics. Son of Rome was not historically accurate, but it did aim for a certain emotional or psychological accuracy. As Gornstein puts it, they did not try to present Rome as it was, but as how it might have appeared to someone “who lived in a village somewhere, five hours away. To someone who visited the city for the first and only time in their life, everything must have seemed completely overwhelming.”

“It’s the same sensation as when, in the game, you go to York and Dover,” Hanenberger adds. “Those cliffs are awe-inspiring. That’s what we were trying to capture, and would have wanted to capture going forward.”

The original game wasn’t just larger-than-life, but also veered into the supernatural, with two seemingly mortal characters – Aquilo and Aestas – revealed to be gods, playing a secret game with people as their pawns. This supernatural element, says Gornstein, would have continued in the sequels, mapped onto different religions and mythologies. As in the original, though, their presence would have remained subtle, pushed into the background.

Ides of March

When Hanenberger and Gornstein pitched their franchise plan to Microsoft, the response was enthusiastic. “They told us it was ‘the most cohesive and well-thought IP pitch they had ever seen,’” Hanenberger recalls. “It all seemed to go very well.”

Until it didn’t.

According to the employees who spoke with IGN, the sequels to Ryse were never formally cancelled. Instead, work on the franchise simply stopped after the original game underperformed both critically and commercially – an outcome that perhaps could have been avoided had the developers not been required to finish the game before the launch of the Xbox One.

Ultimately, the reason the Ryse series ended up in limbo is because Crytek refused to sell the IP to Microsoft. The conglomerate no longer wanted to finance the franchise if they couldn’t buy the rights, while Crytek – to this day a privately owned company – wouldn’t work on something that somebody else owned. As a result of this impasse, the two parted ways, and Crytek switched focus to other projects.

For those who worked on the game, feelings towards Ryse are bittersweet. “The last month, I worked 30 days straight,” Boucher remembers. “Then we breathed a sigh of relief, only to get hit with a 60 on Metacritic.”

At the same time, working on Ryse taught them valuable lessons that they took with them as they went on to work on titles like Hitman, Battlefield 1, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

While Ryse didn’t make the impact that Crytek had hoped for, it still sold more than a million copies upon release. Over time, the game also grew a dedicated cult following that loves it for everything the developers got right. As someone who counts himself among this following, I think I speak for many when I say that wherever this franchise would have led, I would have followed.

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.

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This week's science news was filled with big discoveries from the world of the small, led by a physicist's creation of a mini-universe, which was designed so we can watch time emerge from within an isolated quantum system .

The experiment was performed using a Bose-Einstein condensate — a strange state of matter that consists of thousands of atoms blended into a single quantum object at near absolute zero (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). The system showed time speeding up, slowing down and even stopping, depending on what the system was doing.

Those weren't the only highbrow high jinks using a Bose-Einstein condensate we reported on this week. We also covered NASA's upgrade to its mini-fridge-sized laboratory on the International Space Station that will use the bizarre state of matter to probe the quantum world. Back on Earth, physicists also found that complex numbers aren't necessary for quantum mechanics to work and used quantum computers to create a rare material critical to nuclear fusion . And to stick with news from the small (and weird) things of the world, we also reported that scientists have created little diving suits to transform cockroaches into search-and-rescue cyborgs .

Arctic ice thickening shows promise

First experiment to thicken Arctic ice with seawater shows promise — but there's a big catch

Researchers conducted the first real-life sea ice thickening experiments in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. (Image credit: Arctic-Images/Getty Images) The Arctic is the world's fastest-warming region, where sea ice is rapidly disappearing at a rate of 12.2% per decade.

The ice is crucial for maintaining stable sea levels and marine nutrient flows, and for reflecting solar radiation away from our planet, so its precipitous decline is deeply concerning. That's why one team of researchers turned to a surprisingly simple method to stem the ice loss: flooding ice sheets with seawater to thicken them.

The results, despite some major caveats, showed a lot of promise.

Discover more planet Earth news

— Extreme heat waves are making our cities buckle. Investing in urban nature is no longer optional.

— Colorful 'painting-like' ripples cover an ancient seafloor structure in the Bahamas — Earth from space

— 'Uncharted territory': Record-high ocean temperatures confirmed for June as El Niño strengthens its grip

Life's Little Mysteries

Does fast charging damage your battery more than regular charging?

Some types of batteries charge faster than others. (Image credit: Tfilm via Getty Images) If you're as shamefully attached to your devices as I am, you may have wondered about the wildly differing times it can take for them to charge. So what's the science behind fast charging, and does it damage a device's battery more than regular charging does?

— If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

One of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in the U.S. found

'One of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America' discovered in Boston

The gravestone of "Boston," a formerly enslaved man who died in the 18th century in Boston, Massachusetts. (Image credit: Boston Parks and Recreation Department) It was found amid photos of headstones during a restoration project at Boston's Granary Burying Ground — a gravestone with only one name, "Boston."

That's how a team of conservationists chanced upon the tombstone of Sebastian, a formerly enslaved man who died free in 1729 and chose the city's name as his own.

A search through the historical archives has produced a wealth of information about Boston's past, including his reputation as a hardworking handyman throughout the city, and his emancipation following the death of the man who held him in slavery.

"It's been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story," Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, said in a July 4 speech.

Discover more archaeology news

— 100,000 years ago, one of the earliest Homo sapiens outside Africa was stabbed in the face, analysis finds

— 6,000-year-old broken ribs discovered in Syria may be one of the oldest known cases of child abuse in the world

— Neanderthals and modern humans may have shared culture 59,000 years ago in Turkey, study finds

Also in science news this week

— New sodium metal battery design charges in just 4 minutes and retains its capacity for years

— Dirty 'button' unearthed by metal detectorist turns out to be a rare 900-year-old coin from Norway's last Viking king, Magnus Barefoot

— 'Astronomers have to revise estimates': The Milky Way may be larger, heavier and more lopsided than we realized

— 2,500-year-old tomb of a 'warrior prince' with chariot and helmet discovered on Italy's Adriatic coast

— Malaria had nearly been eliminated around a giant dam in the Amazon — but then it came roaring back. Experts just discovered why.

Science interview

'800 seconds for a sick visit': Some factors driving antibiotic resistance have nothing to do with biology, says medical sociologist Julia Szymczak

Decisions around antibiotic prescribing aren't driven only by medical knowledge — emotions also play a role, a medical sociologist explains. (Image credit: Angel Santana via Getty Images) Antibiotic resistance continues to pose a growing danger across the U.S., with more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occurring in the country each year. Last week, we brought you a report from Live Science health editor Nicoletta Lanese , who visited Japan to investigate how that country is curbing its overuse of antibiotics .

Now, in the second part of a feature series into the fight against this "silent pandemic," Nicoletta interviewed medical sociologist Julia Szymczak to dig into the social and emotional drivers of antibiotic overprescription.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here's a selection from our best opinion pieces, interviews, diagnostic dilemmas and crosswords that we published this week.

— Superintelligent AI in space could explain the Fermi paradox [Opinion]

— 'It's more than a hope; it's a guarantee': The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 10-year movie of the universe is about to 'blow our minds,' chief scientist Tony Tyson says [Interview]

— Diagnostic dilemma: A woman heard voices for years — but not because of psychosis [Diagnostic Dilemma]

— Live Science crossword puzzle #51: Largest rodent on Earth — 4 down [Crossword]

Science photo of the week

Secretive Chinese probe snaps first photo of Earth's mysterious 'quasi-moon' — and it may pose a big problem

China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft captured this photo of the quasi-moon Kamo'oalewa (a.k.a. 2016 HO3) at a distance of around 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) from the near-Earth asteroid. (Image credit: CNSA) It doesn't look like much, but this blurry, gray image is the first-ever close-up photo of one of Earth's temporary "quasi-moons" — a fast-spinning asteroid temporarily orbiting the sun in sync with our planet.

Of equal intrigue is the spacecraft that took the image: a secretive Chinese probe that is likely gearing up to land on the space rock and snag a sample ‪—‬ although an unexpected hiccup will make that more difficult.

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