With World of Warcraft preparing to roll out its Dragonflight alpha this week, one notable concern is that, if Dragonflight is indeed intended to drop this year, this will be the shortest alpha/beta cycle World of Warcraft has had in recent memory. But Blizzard says this is due to a change in how it’s doing testing, and not a cause for concern.
Speaking to IGN ahead of the alpha release, production director Patrick Dawson reassures that Dragonflight will have plenty of time to cook. For one, he says, it’s been in development since before Shadowlands shipped, and the team has had about as much time working on it as they have any other expansion.
But to answer the question of the late alpha, Dawson admits that while it’s coming at an...
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One element of World of Warcraft that has frequently garnered criticism from its community is the growing number of discarded features that have piled up over the years: introduced for an expansion or two, and then forgotten when some new fancy thing replaces it. Looking at you, artifact weapons.
But with Dragonflight, production director Patrick Dawson says the team wants to focus more on improving existing features for the long haul rather than implementing a bunch of new stuff it will throw away later.
“That’s one of the things we really wanted to engage with, with Dragonflight, is to try and make as much of it for evergreen World of Warcraft as possible,” he says. “That’s why you see things like the HUD updates, the talent...
Since the announcement of Dragonflight, the ninth World of Warcraft expansion, Blizzard has been determinedly tight-lipped on the details of what's coming. Understandably so, given that now seems like a really critical time for Blizzard to impress.
Coming off the heels of Shadowlands, which garnered significant criticism for its endgame content and its story (looking at you, Sylvanas), Dragonflight has a lot to prove. It's an expansion that the community has asked about for years, featuring playable dragon characters in the Dracthyr Evoker hero class and a high-speed new mount system in dragon riding. It promises much-needed upgrades to the profession system, and customizable UI. And it's all coming out by the end of this year, per...
World of Warcraft’s dragons come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, but historically, its most important and interesting dragons have been, well, really darn big. So it’s unsurprising that their home in WoW’s upcoming Dragonflight expansion, the Dragon Isles, needs space for all of them to hang out.
Which is why, according to production director Patrick Dawson, the Dragon Isles are the biggest continent Blizzard has ever made for an expansion.
“This is the biggest expansion continent we’ve ever done, and that was designed with dragon riding in mind so you can traverse it a little more simply,” Dawson tells IGN. “It’s the land of dragons. They need space.”
When you think of pure geographical size, it’s easy to limit that scope to...
It feels wise that Exoprimal, a game that opens with a futuristic weather forecast that suggests the foreseeable future will be cloudy with a chance of raptors, doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself. At its core, if you’ve played a Gears of War Horde mode session, or a few rounds of Destiny 2’s Gambit, then you’ll likely feel at home with what a round of this reptile blaster has to offer. In its first very limited closed playtest, Exoprimal shows a solid foundation for a PvPvE shooter, and if it sticks with its strengths like the time attack-style objective racing and interesting class design, it could be well worth sinking your teeth into.
The meat of a round of Exoprimal sees a team of five running through a stage, stopping...
Rumbleverse, the Fortnite meets pro wrestling Battle Royale game, will be released next month on August 11, for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series, and PC through the Epic Games Store.
The free-to-play, 40-person Battle Royale will feature a battle pass too, but its Season 1 doesn't start until a week after launch on August 18. Iron Galaxy Studios has not announced pricing for the battle pass but, given that Fortnite's Epic Games is also publishing Rumbleverse, it will likely cost around $10 for the standard version.
A new trailer (below) was released alongside the release date announcement, showcasing some of the wackiest moments from Rumbleverse's network tests.
"Rumbleverse has been a passion project for us and a real...
Tengen Uzui is now available in Demon Slayer: The Hinokami Chronicles as the first DLC fighter in the Character Pass.
Though Uzui is also available as a standalone purchase, publisher SEGA is putting the Character Pass on sale to celebrate the launch. A free DLC stage, the Entertainment District, is also being released today to celebrate Uzui coming to the game, referencing his introduction in the Demon Slayer anime. Those who purchase Uzui will also receive a set of profile photos and quotes.
Also being released across all platforms today is the Kimetsu Academy Summer Uniforms pack, which was previously only available on Nintendo Switch. Players on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and PC via Steam can now purchase the...
Elden Ring's latest officially licensed merchandise is available to pre-order on the IGN Store beginning this Friday, July 15th at 12:00 AM PT. This statue is the first release in the S.H.Figuarts Elden Ring set and is based on the notorious world invader, Festering Fingerprint Vyke. If it's anything like the previous Elden Ring figures we carried in the IGN Store, it's likely to sell out quickly, so don't wait too long to place your order!
Elden Ring: Festering Fingerprint Vyke Statue
First encountered outside the Church of Inhibition, Festering Fingerprint Vyke would invade players' worlds along with his signature War Spear to harass players with plenty of Frenzy-inducing spells that would drive just about anyone mad.
This statue...
Something occurred to me as I poured hour after hour into Loopomancer: Roguelites have become so ubiquitous that playing a new one has become a sort of meta-loop of its own. It can feel like you are playing through a remixed version of the same concepts, just with different titles and gimmicks, time and again – lather, rinse and repeat. To stand out, a game must either do something extremely creative, or distinguish itself with quality and polish. Loopmancer, which follows in the footsteps of other 2D action platformer roguelites such as Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells, opted for the latter – to great success. None of its mechanics are groundbreaking, and the cyberpunk story – while cool – is filled with cliches. But after riding this loop...
On this week’s episode of IGN’s weekly PlayStation Show, Podcast Beyond!, host Jonathon Dornbush is joined by Jada Griffin and Mark Medina to talk about the latest and greatest in the world of PlayStation, and also why Mark has a grudge against his PS5.
But before that, the panel jumps into the new PS Plus update for the month of July, talking about the first big refresh for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers. We break down the new releases like Stray coming to the service, alongside games like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Marvel’s Avengers, and how we feel about the value of the Extra and Premium tiers one month into the service. Plus, some hopes for where PS Plus goes from here.
Next we talk about some of the news of the week...
Bandai Namco, publisher for games like Pac-Man, the Tales of series, and Elden Ring has confirmed its been hacked by a ransomware group called ALPHV. The confirmation follows a report earlier this week from VCG that a group had successfully infiltrated Bandai Namco based on a post from vx-underground.
“On July 3, 2022, Bandai Namco Holdings Inc. confirmed that it experienced an unauthorized access by third party to the internal systems of several Group companies in Asian regions (excluding Japan),” Bandai Namco said today in a statement to VCG. “After we confirmed the unauthorized access, we have taken measures such as blocking access to the servers to prevent the damage from spreading.”
Bandai Namco said there is also a chance...
Evil Dead: The Game has received an Army of Darkness update, featuring a new map, more weapons, premium cosmetics, and a single-player Exploration mode.
Evil Dead fans will have a lot of groovy fun with the Army of Darkness update, as it comes with an all-new map featuring several iconic locations from Sam Raimi's 1992 comedy-horror threequel. Those landmarks include the medieval setting of Castle Kandar, the Windmill, the Arthurian Outpost, Fort Gort, and the Castle Kandar Keep.
The trailer for the Army of Darkness update gives players a teaser of what they can expect when entering battle with the skeletal deadites lurking in these new hotspots. Players will be able to hone their slaying skills with two new weapons: the almighty...
Tainted Grail, the board game that burst onto the scene as 2018's biggest Kickstarter campaign, is now aiming even higher. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a first-person, open-world RPG that aims to release into Steam Early Access in Q4 2022. Get a look at the tone and vibe of the game in the new cinematic trailer at the top of this page.
Polish fantasy writer Krzysztof Piskorski created Tainted Grail, which took its first stab at video game success with 2020's Tainted Grail: Conquest, a deck-building roguelike. The Awaken Realms development team describes the world of Tainted Grail as a "gritty, unique retelling of Arthurian legends — an epic dark fantasy setting in which humans arrived at the island of Avalon in search of...
The Red Dead Online community had started planning a funeral for the game, to coincide with the anniversary of the game’s last major update. They didn't know that it would be officially declared dead in advance.
On July 7, 2022, Rockstar Games pushed an update to its Newswire, confirming that Red Dead Online would not receive any more “major themed content updates,” as the studio shifts development resources onto Grand Theft Auto 6.
The news came less than a week before July 13, the one-year anniversary of Red Dead Online’s last major update, Blood Money, which brought a smattering of missions, a dubious in-game currency, and The Quick Draw Club, a rapid-fire monthly iteration of Red Dead Online’s existing battle pass. You could...
Few video game characters are as iconic as Sonic the Hedgehog. The speedy little blue blur has been around for over three decades, touching every corner of pop culture along the way, from games, to comics, to TV, to blockbuster movies. But we’re here specifically to celebrate the mainline Sonic game series and pick the best of them.
Before we start, let’s quickly touch upon our criteria. We tried to rank these games based on a combination of historical significance, innovation, and how well these games stand the test of time. Some games, like Sonic Adventure 1 and the original Sonic the Hedgehog, for instance, are obviously super important to the Sonic series and set the foundation for both 2D and 3D Sonic games to follow, but we felt...
Mass Effect developer BioWare never intended to make the now-beloved Garrus a romance option in the second game and was "blindsided" when fans asked for it.
In an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit, Mass Effect writer Drew Karpyshyn was asked if the BioWare team always intended to bring Garrus and Tali back in the second game or if it was decided later as a response to players' positive reactions towards them.
"We always knew they'd come back as companions," Karpyshyn said. "I was a bit surprised fans wanted the romance options. Tali I could sort of see. You never saw her face, so it was easy to imagine something vaguely human (but she had those weird feet). Garrus blindsided me," he added. "But once we saw what fans wanted, we decided to...
As Doom continues to be played on just about every piece of technology available, things have finally gone full circle as someone has now made Doom playable in, well, Doom.
As spotted by PCGamesN, YouTube user kgsws uploaded a video of himself modding the game into itself, before showing actual gameplay of him playing Doom within Doom on PC.
The 'inner' Doom replaces a wall within regular Doom and mimics any movements the player makes. By walking right up to it, the inner Doom therefore takes up the full screen and can be played in its entirety before players return to playing the main game.
While there's obviously not much practical use for this, it's just another fun and ridiculous way players have found to play the classic 1993...
With an elaborate set of puzzles to solve and no shortage of jolting jump scares to shock you with, unraveling the morbid central mystery of Madison is a bit like trying to evacuate an escape room while simultaneously struggling to prevent the vacuation of your bowels. Taking clear inspiration from Hideo Kojima’s superb 2014 Silent Hill teaser demo, P.T., Madison layers on the clever use of a Polaroid camera for puzzle-solving and exploration with consistently compelling results. It might not be as expertly structured as the spiraling, psychological horror hallways of Kojima’s much revered concept, but Madison’s haunted house is certainly scary enough to be situated somewhere in the same neighborhood.
In Madison you play as Luca, a...
The Halo caretakers and developers at 343 Industries are making a major piece of lost Halo history playable: the infamous Halo 2 E3 2003 campaign demo that never made it into the final game. We react to this fantastic surprise and recall the Halo 2 hype from that time. Plus: a plea for proper, native Xbox Game Pass support on the Steam Deck, our thoughts on the potential Apex Legends Universe single-player game that Respawn might be making (aka Titanfall 3?), our reaction to the long-awaited gameplay reveal of Skull & Bones, and more!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week's episode. For more awesome content, check out our recent interview with Todd Howard, who...
Xbox Best in Show: Redfall, Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5, Starfield, & More - IGN Summer of Gaming
IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, Miranda Sanchez, Destin Legarie, and Cameron Hawkins give their Best in Show picks for the Xbox & Bethesda Games E3 2021 Showcase Best in Show.
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Marvel Comics games were a big part of the Square Enix Presents E3 2021 Livestream. IGN's Max Scoville, Mitchell Saltzman, Cameron Hawkins, and Zach Ryan talk about the Marvel's Avengers - Black Panther: War for Wakanda announcement and the character design of the new Guardians of the Galaxy game.
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Today on IGN The Fix: Games, Starfield gets its time in the sun with a beautiful new trailer, as well as a release date. The upcoming RPG from Bethesda Game Studios will land exclusively on Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC via Game Pass. Xbox fans were treated to an action-packed look at Halo Infinite and its free-to-play multiplayer. The first half of the campaign as well as the multiplayer mode are set to launch this holiday season. 343 Industries' upcoming title will also feature cross-play and cross-progression. And lastly, Stella has the latest on the protagonists of Scarlet Nexus! We've even got a chance for you to win a pair of Scarlet Nexus-themed Vans, all courtesy of Bandai Namco!
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The Xbox & Bethesda Games E3 2021 Showcase had some big reveals, including a multiplayer reveal for Halo Infinite, a Starfield cinematic trailer, a Forza Horizon 5 gameplay overview, and a ton of Xbox Game Pass announcements. IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, Miranda Sanchez, Destin Legarie, and Cameron Hawkins are here to talk about it all.
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Nearly a year after Relic Entertainment and Sega announced Company of Heroes 3, the next entry in the beloved World War II real-time strategy series finally has a release date. Today, Relic Entertainment revealed that CoH3 is set to release on November 17, 2022.
According to a press release, the game will have four playable factions and two separate campaigns at launch: the more open-ended Italian Dynamic Campaign and the focused, narrative-based North African Operation.
These campaigns will also introduce players to new mechanics, including "side armor, enemy vehicle recovery and vehicle-towing, which lets you reposition your hard-hitting artillery like the German Flak 36 and British 17-Pounder."
While the game won't be out until...
I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. The fighters on the North African front in Company of Heroes 3 seem inclined to agree with me. A far cry from the breezy, blooming Italian beaches we saw in IGN’s last preview, the other side of the Mediterranean theater is parched, oppressive, and sparsely-settled. It takes a rugged army with the ability to keep the tank treads running in far less than ideal conditions to succeed here. And the new Deutsch Afrika Korps – who will also be playable in multiplayer as a separate roster from the already revealed German Wehrmacht – are up to the task.
The mission I got to play involves breaking through British lines and capturing a nearby town in order to cut...
Developer Atomic Wolf and publisher Games Operators (the publisher of Rustler [aka Grand Theft Horse], the medieval top-down parody of GTA 1 & 2), are developing another send-up of a familiar genre. Yet Another Fantasy Title is, as the name implies, a fantasy-themed game. It's a top-down-view open-world action-RPG. Watch the announcement trailer above and check out the first screenshots in the gallery below.
You play an outlaw who'd "normally be prey for the protagonist in some sidequest," as the Atomic Wolf team describes it. Instead, you've killed the kingdom's savior and stolen his unicorn. An adventure ensues. Yet Another Fantasy Title promises parodied versions of all of the usual open-world action-RPG fantasy genre tropes, such...
Blasphemous developer The Game Kitchen has announced a virtual reality board game platform called All on Board!, alongside a Kickstarter campaign to help fund it.
All On Board! is similar in approach to the popular Tabletop Simulator, offering licensed board games as mods, but with a suite of creation tools to allow players to create and test their own games. Unlike Tabletop Simulator, All On Board! has been built specifically for VR, and is aiming to offer a more true-to-life virtual version of playing board games with friends.
The platform is focused on creating authentic social interactions in a virtual space, with users actually seeing their friends’ avatars and hand movements as they reach out to move their pieces, roll dice...
Here's a Prime Deal that's almost too good to pass up: Far Cry 6 is down to $12.99 on consoles (see it on Amazon). That's a phenomenal deal on a truly massive open-world shooter. The deal is only available for Prime members, but you can sign up here if you're not a current member -- you might even be eligible for a one-month free trial. The discount will only last throughout Prime Day, which runs July 12 - 13, although it may go out of stock sooner.
There are a ton of other great video game deals as well, so take a look at all the best Prime Day deals in our megapost.
Far Cry 6 is $12.99 with Prime
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Far Cry 6 follows the same template as all the recent games in the series, meaning...
Supermassive Games, the developer behind Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology, and The Quarry, has been acquired by Nordisk Games.
Part of the larger Nordisk Film brand, the Denmark-based entertainment company owns a handful of other game developers including Avalanche Studios, the creator of Just Cause.
As reported by gamesindustry.biz, Nordisk Games acquired a 30.7% in Supermassive in March last year but announced in a blog post that it now wholly owns the studio.
"Having had such a positive experience over the past year it wasn’t a difficult decision when Nordisk Games wanted to explore increasing their investment," said Supermassive CEO Pete Samuels.
"We have an exciting and ambitious growth strategy for Supermassive Games...
Halo Infinite's multiplayer mode recently introduced one of the most memorable Spartan armors in the franchise's history, and now that armor is being immortalized as a statue from Dark Horse Direct.
Check out the slideshow gallery below for an exclusive first look at the Halo Infinite Spartan Chonmage PVC statue:
This statue is based on the Fracture: Tenrai multiplayer event. In the Halo universe, the Chonmage helmet symbolizes ancient samurai generals who harmonized with their fellow warriors, while the Yokai helmet represents those who were consumed by bloodlust and the thrill of battle. This statue includes an alternate Yokai helmet piece for those who prefer that look.
The Spartan Chonmage statue measures 10 inches tall. This...