Crowdfunding platform Fig will go offline on Sunday, May 28th, and all pages related to previously funded campaigns will disappear along with it. That means that creators who were continuing to use the platform to communicate and deliver rewards to backers are currently scrambling to transition to alternative methods, including the likes of Double Fine and Gearbox.
Sons Of The Forest is about crash-landing on a remote island described as a “cannibal-infested hellscape.” If you’ve played the early access survival game and thought, “Hellscape? More like swellscape,” then Patch 06 might be for you. Released yesterday, it adds a “first pass of hard survival” mode, alongside cooking improvements and the ability to craft custom effigies. Lovely.
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Daedalic Entertainment have apologised for the “underwhelming experience” players are having with Lord Of The Rings: Gollum. In a statement shared on Twitter, the developers say they “deeply regret that the game did not meet the expectations we set for ourselves” and say they’re working to address bugs and technical issues.
The Wii and GameCube emulator Dolphin has had its Steam release ‘indefinitely postponed’ after the team received a cease and desist order from Nintendo.
The Dolphin Emulator Project team shared the update in a blog, stating it was notified by Valve that Nintendo issued a “cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page.”
“It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed,” The Dolphin Emulator Project wrote. “We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.”
As reported by PC Gamer, the team launched Dolphin’s Steam page on March 28 and, on May 26, received a legal notice from Nintendo that was addressed to Valve’s legal department.
“Because the Dolphin emulator violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, including but not limited to its rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s Anti-Circumvention and AntiTrafficking provisions, 17 U.S.C. § 1201, we provide this notice to you of your obligation to remove the offering of the Dolphin emulator from the Steam store,” the document states.
For a bit more context, Dolphin’s ex-treasurer, Pierre Bourdon, took to Mastodon to explain their reading of the situation in greater detail and to explain why this isn’t a typical DMCA takedown notice.
“The DMCA is a broad set of laws that includes, a process for copyright owners to ask publishers to take down data,” Bourdon said. “This is defined in sect. 512(c) of the copyright act, and it comes with some requirements from the claimant side of things (here: Nintendo), and some liability on the publisher side of things (here: Valve). It also includes rights for the entity accused (here: the Stichting Dolphin Emulator) to counter claim, allowing the publisher to reinstate the content until the claimant sues.”
According to Bourdon, none of this process was followed and this falls in line more with “standard legal removals / [cease and desist] between two companies.” Instead of issuing a notice that Dolphin violated copyright, it was more that it violated the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions.
If this is in fact true, this means Dolphin itself isn’t technically a party in this and Valve has the right to simply remove this after Nintendo requested it to. This also means “there’s no counter claim process or anything like this.”
So, this could signify there isn’t much hope for Dolphin to ever make it to Steam, but it also indicates Dolphin itself has “no particular risk or liability.”
However, legal matters could always go either way and there is a chance Nintendo could sue Dolphin, especially as the emulator distributes the Wii AES-128 Common Key, “which is used to encrypt Wii game discs.”
There is, unfortunately, a lot of unknowns in this case. The one thing that is clear, however, is Dolphin’s future on Steam is very much in question. As it stands, Dolphin hasn’t received any notice from Nintendo or otherwise about other places the emulator is hosted.
For more, check out Xbox head Phil Spencer’s comments on supporting legal video game emulation and that one time Valve accidentally plugged a Nintendo Switch emulator in a Steam Deck promo.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
When Diablo 3 was first revealed in 2008 the internet lost its collective shit. Thousands of fans signed petitions and rallied against the game, demanding that Blizzard made a change. Why? Because Diablo 3, in a departure from its predecessors, looked like a “cartoon.”
Prior to Diablo 3, Blizzard’s action RPG series had a distinctly gothic visual palette. The stones that walled the dungeons of Diablo 1 and 2 were dark, and the shadows in their crevices even darker. The light generated by flickering flames or bolts of magical lightning illuminated a grim fantasy world with a realistic texture. Well, at least as realistic as PCs of the late 1990s could render. Diablo 3, though, looked like a horror fantasy comic book. Its world glowed with eerie, saturated colours. Its characters were built of exaggerated angles and oversized pauldrons. Its textures were hand-painted reimaginings of the natural world.
“It’s a stylized feel and in that sense, it’s very sort of a Blizzard philosophy”, said lead producer Keith Lee in an interview with MTV back at the time. And that was Diablo 3’s problem – it was too Blizzard. Or, to be specific, it was too World of Warcraft. The two games undeniably spoke a similar visual language, and fans lamented that Blizzard’s colossally popular MMO behemoth was apparently eroding away the gothic menace of its stablemate. The studio’s two fantasy settings began to look like companions rather than distinct universes. But, despite the protest, Blizzard refused to shift its design goals. When Diablo 3 launched in 2012 it even featured a secret level filled with rainbows and unicorns, named Whimsyshire, as a way to poke fun at its detractors.
Just over a decade later, a fourth Diablo game is about to launch. Compare it side by side with its predecessor and one thing is instantly clear: grimdark gothic is back. Diablo 4 has returned to its artistic roots, and with it reclaimed its menacing identity.
In the multi-year road to release, Blizzard made sure to emphasise the revived art style. “The ‘return to darkness’ pillar is a through-line in everything from dungeons to lighting and embodies the idea that Sanctuary is a dangerous and dark medieval gothic world,” said art director Chris Ryder last year.
That darkness is evident from the moment Diablo 4 begins. The opening CGI cinematic, rendered in movie-like quality by Blizzard’s excellent animation team, features a blood sacrifice that summons the viscera-covered Lilith. It’s a far cry from the cinematics of Diablo 3, which used shadow and flame rather than gore to depict its demons. There’s a clear shift in aesthetic; where Diablo 3 embraced dark fantasy, Diablo 4 values grisly horror.
Without that World of Warcraft-like lens, Sanctuary appears a more oppressive and hostile world. Drawn in a style that feels somewhere between Game of Thrones’ most deprived areas and Dark Souls’ gothic grandeur, it possesses a grimy sense of authenticity. Towns and villages seem barely held together, and the catacombs that run beneath them feel as if the walls themselves may reach out and try and strangle you. The humans that suffer this world look beaten and weary, as if just one more day here will break their very soul. The gnarled monstrosities that torment them, from wolves to wood wraiths, make your journey to Kyovashad and beyond continually dangerous and unnerving.
Much like the original two games, the world makes heavy use of shadow and muted tones. Dungeons and cellars are suitably shadowy, while above ground the sun is kept at just the right height to maintain a constant sense of dusk. This canvas allows the fantasy side of Diablo to really pop; the elemental effects of a sorcerer’s magic lights up the gloom, rivers of blood form pentagrams that stand stark against stonework, and the glow of evil powers guides you through the darkest passages.
It’s the way the camera captures this returning art style, though, that really impresses. For the most part, Diablo 4 is played from the series’ traditional isometric viewpoint with a static, non-rotating camera. But during moments of dialogue, or when arriving at an important location, the camera will drop down from its perch and zoom in on the action. And if that action is really important, the camera fully descends into the world to showcase beautifully crafted cutscenes. Seeing characters and locations from this new, immersive perspective is akin to being able to shrink yourself and walk within a model town that you’d previously only been able to see from a towering height. From this new angle you can appreciate all the details that were once obscured by distance.
Blizzard said that Diablo 3’s stylization was a part of the studio’s philosophy. While Diablo 4 has done away with that particular approach to art, it has instead tapped into an idea established in one of the developer’s other games. The multiple perspectives offered – isometric gameplay, detailed cutscenes, and movie-grade CGI cinematics – calls to mind the incredible presentation used for StarCraft 2’s campaign. As a real-time strategy, StarCraft 2 largely plays out from the genre’s traditional isometric perspective. But between missions you spend time at your faction’s base – the Terran Hyperion, the Zerg Leviathan, or the Protoss Arkship – where the camera drops to human height, ready to capture detailed cutscenes. From this perspective we get to know the characters in greater depth, in part because their visual models are much more detailed than their tiny battlefield counterparts. You can see a furrowed brow, or the manner in which a cigar is chewed, and understand what that means for the character. And then, when the story hits its biggest moments, you get a CGI cinematic that turns StarCraft 2 into a Hollywood movie and emphasises the stakes.
Diablo 4 is not just a return to the series’ original art style, then, but also a revival of the multiple perspective cameras of StarCraft 2. And by adapting and advancing the directorial techniques established in another franchise, Blizzard is able to accentuate the horror. We get close-ups of cracking skulls, crazed eyes, and billowing blood. In short, Blizzard has once again infused Diablo with the learnings from another game, but this time used it to enhance its grimdark flavour rather than dilute it.
Diablo 4 has reclaimed its gothic identity, and it’s grislier than ever. It took over a decade, but the wishes of those petitioning fans from 2008 have finally been met.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.
It’s all about bucks, kid.
When you think back to being in middle school, staying up all night with your friends playing video games, what games are you playing? Is it Mass Effect? Maybe some iteration of Smash or Mario Kart? The big one when I was that age was Street Fighter II in all its iterations. But there’s another game that brings back the most vivid memories, and it’s incredibly stupid: Wall Street Kid for the NES.
My friend Russ and I loved JRPGs, and Wall Street Kid fit the bill, I guess. After finishing another playthrough of Final Fantasy II (now properly known as FFIV) on our brand-new SNES, we’d switch over to the older Nintendo system to engage in raw casino capitalism. This game was, frankly, much more challenging than levelling up Cecil, Rosa, and Kain, and I vividly recall tossing my rectangular controller when I failed to make a million dollars to buy a starter home, inadvertently toppling a two-litre bottle of Pepsi. It was three in the morning.
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Welcome to Dark Quest 3, launching on Xbox today! Let’s jump in to some game play tips!
Your First Run
Your starting heroes in Dark Quest 3 are the barbarian, dwarf, archer, and wizard. How you allocate your hero upgrades has a huge impact on how far you will get with each run. You should start by putting a point to one of the dwarf’s barrels. This a secondary action which means you can still perform an attack action after that.
The barrels will attract attention and monsters will attack them. All monsters have a preferred target (closest, lowest health, highest health, those in a line). The barrel must still obey these rules.
The barbarian throwing axe is essentially a free ranged attack. Make sure you put a point there soon after.
Next is the Archer with his surprise attack. The archer will shoot a random enemy when a battle starts. This attack benefits from all equipment and modifiers.
Finally, you will need some AOE, the wizard lighting storm is one of the strongest cards in the game and will kill multiple enemies when it reaches high levels, particularly if you have some rings of power equipped.
General Strategies
Heroes
Barbarian: A good all-around hero that can take some damage and also deal a lot of damage.
Dwarf: The best hero to keep enemies busy with barrels and keep your party out of harm’s way.
Archer: This is a heavy damage hero, perhaps the hero who can deal the highest damage on a single attack. Also has an underrated evasion card which allows you to dodge an incoming attack completely.
Wizard: Strong AOE and utility cards. Lighting storm will kill many enemies at once and so will tornado if you can line the enemies up. Do not underestimate the wizard’s default attack in conjunction with his invisibility card. His magic resistance will be very useful towards the end game.
Lancer: The first hero who can summon a “pet”. The extra character is always summoned at start of battle making that character a good meat-shield. The spear can damage two enemies in a line and together with break armor you can wreak havoc when many enemies are lined up.
Prince: This hero allows you to command an ally or enemy to attack another enemy. One of the most powerful and versatile cards. Having ranged allies around the prince will easily give them attack damage bonus without having to get the in front lines.
Savager: This hero is capable of wiping out the entire board with a single action. Allocate many points to bloodthirsty, which makes the Savager auto attack when she kills a monster.
Lady: A powerful defensive hero. She is the only one who can heal the party with a passive card. Her divine shield blocks all forms of damage.
Druid: This character can summon two “pets”. A large bear that attacks multiple enemies and a smaller fox that deals high damage to a single target. If your party needs additional defenses, you can also transform to a large tree to soak up damage while your other heroes deal the final blows.
Dwarf King: This hero also has a “pet” to help soak up some damage. In addition to that he has a passive card that calls for an ally to attack, when he gets damaged from enemies.
Knight: Just like the archer the knight can attack the lowest health enemy at start of battle automatically with Charge. If the enemy survives his Follow Me card will call for an ally to also make an attack on this target. A very powerful hero indeed.
Fire Mage: Devastating magic damage cards and a pet that can be summoned anywhere on the battlefield.
Closing Notes
A good party must have high damage dealers, ways to soak up damage without getting hurt and some form of AOE for battle with many enemies. Choose your party carefully and bring your lucky dice as you venture forth to face the sorcerer and his magic.
Good Luck my students!
Elder
Brain Seal Ltd
A message from the Elder
“Heed my warning well, friends. A new evil has risen in the East. A power-hungry sorcerer of chaos magic is laying siege to the realm. That is why I called you here. You are heroes, one and all. And without you, all hope is lost. You will face untold challenges you may not survive, and old alliances will need to be rebuilt to stand a chance. I will guide you as best I can, but the rest is up to you.”
What is it?
You start the game at hero camp where you must create your party and then go on journey throughout the world by choosing different areas. Choose each area based on your party’s strengths and weakness, draw adventure cards, roll dice, fight monsters and reach the chaos castle to defeat the sorcerer and his magic.
Features
• 12 heroes and over 60 monsters
• Procedurally generated adventures and combat
• Rogue-lite experience where you create a party of heroes and play until you win or die
• 13 areas to play with over 150 adventure cards
• Survive the skull of fate and the sorcerer’s magic
• Tactical based turn based combat with controlled random numbers
• 80+ combat cards ranging from spells, weapons, potions and equipment
• Unique art world that looks, feels and plays like a tabletop
• Voice over for the sorcerer playing the role of the Dungeon Master
The ultimate tabletop game, unlike anything you have ever seen before!
Dark Quest
It’s a game of your imagination
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The long Memorial Day weekend isn’t traditionally known for its great video game prices, but you can get discounts on first party games like Animal Crossing and Super Smash Bros. right now, among others. Best Buy and Amazon are running sales right now, so it’s a good opportunity to grab some games and save some cash.
The Nintendo Switch is a runaway success, now sitting at number three in the list of all-time best-selling consoles. Some of the most popular games of the last five years have exclusive homes on the Switch, and unlike Nintendo consoles of yore, first-party Nintendo Switch game deals are fairly commonplace.
TL;DR: Indie and first-party games
By far the most common Nintendo Switch deals we see are on smaller games. Games like Harvestella, for example, are perpetually on sale, but there are lots of times to save on some of the best indies on Nintendo Switch. In fact, I’d say the best chances to find deals are on indie games, and since they’re often pretty inexpensive anyway, you can load up storage with great Switch games for very little money.
The most popular Nintendo Switch deals have to be on first-party games, however. Several times a year, Nintendo will have deals on games like Breath of the Wild, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and more first-party Switch games, offering them up for $39.99 (or less).
The most common time to see these big savings on Nintendo Switch games happen during Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving, on Nov 24th 2023) and Nintendo’s annual eShop sale in the early summer. If there’s a first-party Nintendo game you want, and you’re willing to wait, you can almost certainly snatch it up for $39.99 at some point over the course of the year.
The Nintendo Switch itself rarely sees price drops. In fact, I can’t think of a legitimate time when we saw one. However, Nintendo skirts this by offering up bundle deals, usually with a game download included.
The Mario Choose One bundle lets you pick from Mario Kart 8, New Super Mario Bros. U, or Mario Odyssey, and it comes with a pair of “Mario Red” Joy-con. As far as a deal goes, it’s currently the best around on Switch, but you’re just getting a free game.
Black Friday is when Nintendo brings out its old faithful Nintendo Switch Bundle, the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Nintendo Switch bundle. In recent years, Nintendo’s added a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online. Nintendo Switch Online offers online play for games like Splatoon 3, as well as access to a selection of NES, Super NES and now original Game Boy games.
When my Sleeper escaped their ramshackle life on the fringes of Erlin’s Eye at the end of last year, they left behind a lot of unfinished business. I had to stop short my efforts to help Bliss make a go of her repair bay business, and Tala was left to finish making her brand-new distillery on her own. Yatagan agent Rabiyah probably has my name on an employment blacklist, too, after I upped sticks without telling them, and the spores of mushroom algae I’d been cultivating for Riko over in Greenway were no doubt left to rot and moulder somewhere. Instead, I jacked that all in to smuggle myself, my engineering pal Lem and his tiny daughter Mina onto a ship headed for some far-flung star out in the void. The Sidereal ship wasn’t going to wait. It was now or never.
Fortunately hitting an ending in Citizen Sleeper doesn’t mean the end of your save. Booting it back up again for this month’s RPS Game Club, I wanted to play out a different ending to my Sleeper’s story. Turning my back on Lem and Mina still brought its own kind of sadness, admittedly, but I wanted to dig into the game’s trio of free DLC episodes first and foremost, as that was another thing I never got time to start last year. I’ve only played through the first chapter, Flux, so far, but man alive, it was not an auspicious start for the refugee flotilla ship hoping to make a new life for themselves here. In fact, I don’t think it could have gone any worse, such was the monumental failure of my collective dice rolls and decision making. But despite absolutely beefing it in Flux, I also came to realise an important lesson. It’s okay to fail, and that failure can often make the consequences of your actions feel all the more poignant. Sure, it might not feel nice, and yes, I wish it could have gone better. But sometimes the odds really are stacked against you, and you’ve just got to roll with it.
Farmhands-off.
Being a farmer is a big job. You’ve got to water your fields, rotate your crops, and keep an eye on the market prices to make sure you’re able to pull a decent profit. If you’ve ever dreamed of trying your hand at this noble profession but don’t have hundreds of acres of land to play with, Farming Simulator 23: Nintendo Switch Edition is here to provide you with the realistic farming action that might be missing from games like Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons.
Simulator games are a tricky lot; they don’t necessarily need to have the best graphics, but they need to have a realistic feel when you’re behind the wheel of these machines. Farming Simulator 23 goes to a lot of effort to recreate farm equipment for you to ride around in. The tractors, tills, and plows all feel like something you might have been stuck behind while going down a country road. While we might not have driven them personally, most of us have seen them in action before and the vehicles in this game do a good job of replicating how they move and handle.
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