Category: IGN

A viral Helldivers 2 gameplay clip seemingly showing Game Master Joel dropping into a random group’s game, spawning the unreleased APC vehicle, then leaving, set the cat among the pigeons within the shooter’s community this week. Was Joel, dubbed the Dungeon Master of Helldivers 2, really bestowing such gifts upon players of the game? Turns out, no, he wasn’t.

“Joel: Please take this”

WHAT?!!#Helldivers2 #HelldiversII pic.twitter.com/zoOSpd1I57

— Helldivers 2 Media (@Helldiversmedia) March 24, 2024

According to RPS, a source familiar with Joel’s goings on confirmed the player posing as ‘[AH] Joel’ in-game is in fact an imposter. So what’s going on? As IGN has reported, Helldivers 2 has seen a glut of gameplay leaks showing off officially unavailable stratagems, vehicles, and weapons (we saw a lot of the mech before it was officially released). They’re undoubtedly called in by players who are working around Helldivers 2’s anti-cheat to unlock the use of some of these normally unavailable features in live lobbies. Apparently unavailable stratagems such as unreleased vehicles are already in the game itself, but not officially enabled. Knowing this, some players are going into the files of the game to unlock their use in any lobby.

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has yet to directly respond to these allegations, but according to RPS, the real Joel doesn’t sound too bothered. According to the site: “Real Joel is, however, seemingly glad that the impersonator wanted ‘other people to have fun’ as it’s a goal that they ‘both share’.”

It looks increasingly likely that Helldivers 2 will get these so far unannounced vehicles at some point, which means players will be able to get around the map a lot faster. Players also expect a third faction, after hints from Arrowhead suggested a new arrival.

If you’re looking for more on Helldivers 2, check out IGN’s feature on the Let Me Solo Her of Helldivers 2, a player who has answered over 100 SOS Beacons as part of a mission to help others. Helldivers 2 has become one of the surprise hits of 2024 since launching in February, topping the charts on Steam and reportedly selling around three million copies. According to at least one analyst, it’s still growing. Check out IGN’s Helldivers 2 review to find out why it’s going down so well.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Sony has announced plans to release Community Game Help on PlayStation 5 later this year.

Community Game Help is described as a new “enhancement” for Game Help, “powered” by user-generated content.

Here’s how it works: in supported games, PS5 players will be able to contribute their gameplay, view hints from fellow gamers, or access Game Help hints created by developers. Game developers can also continue to create their own hint videos.

Players can currently press the PS button to open the Control Center and look for an Action Card with the “Hints inside” icon. Eventually, players will also see hints labeled “Community Game Help”, which indicates the clip was generated from other players’ gameplay footage. You can also rate the usefulness of these hints, which Sony said will let it curate informative help content for players.

In a PlayStation Blog post, Sabrina Meditz, senior director, product management, Platform Experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment, said Community Game Help will add to the current Game Help experience “by expanding the library of helpful game hints, incorporating videos that are automatically generated from gameplay footage of players who have opted in to contribute”.

“We hope to see many players participate in Community Game Help and share their amazing gameplay feats!”

Community Game Help will be available to all PS5 players, with or without a PlayStation Plus subscription, Sony added. You can opt in to contribute to Community Game Help from the Settings menu. You can also opt out at any time, which will remove all your published videos. Expect to see these settings in the next few months, Sony said.

Once you turn on the settings, your PS5 will automatically capture a video when you complete a certain activity in a game, Sony explained. Then, it will be reviewed by a moderator, and if approved, your video will be published as a Game Help hint for PlayStation players to watch and rate. Sony said your videos will be removed from the PS5 console once they are uploaded to its servers, so will not impact console storage. When your video is published, you will receive a system notification on your PS5 console.

This process will be done automatically, so you don’t need to edit or upload your clips for submission, Sony stressed. Only your raw game footage will be uploaded, so images and audio from your webcam, microphone, or party chat audio will not be shared with the moderator or the community. Depending on the game you’re playing, your video may include online IDs or chat messages that are shown on your game screen.

Community Game Help will start to become available in select games later this year, Sony said. The goal is to expand it to as many titles as possible in the future.

PS5 launched in November 2020 with the Game Help feature, which lets players access hints, tips, and walkthrough videos without having to leave the game. But it relies upon developers making the Game Help content. With Community Game Help, Sony is getting PS5 players to do the heavy lifting.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Activision has threatened to ban any Call of Duty Warzone player who uses so-called ‘boosting services’ to inflate their Skill Rating (SR).

Recent weeks have seen an uptick in reports of ‘bot lobbies’, or boosting lobbies. Boosting services, which have been a problem for competitive multiplayer games for years, create boosting lobbies in which cheaters can make significant gains in their skill rating and boost up the ranks.

This problem has hit Warzone hard recently, with some saying the top of the leaderboards are filled with cheaters who used boosting lobbies to achieve their rank.

There is a Chinese boosting service offering Resurgence Ranked bot lobbies. https://t.co/0SKDgCWekp pic.twitter.com/yeUXULUP29

— OMiT Brax (@Braxtvnn) March 25, 2024

Now, Activision has responded, issuing a statement that revealed its TeamRicochet had issued multiple ban waves that resulted in 29,000 recent bans. Then came a stark warning to those using boosting lobbies: “Artificially inflating SR won’t be permitted. Accounts engaging in this behavior will be banned.”

Activision also vowed to take down the people who provide boosting lobbies: “We will consider all available technical and legal options for shutting these illicit services down.”

Activision recently launched Call of Duty Warzone Mobile, which includes cross-progression with Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone on console and PC, but not cross-play. Season 3 launches alongside Rebirth Island on April 3.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Gameloft has announced Asphalt Legends Unite, an expansion to 2018’s Asphalt 9: Legends that marks the arcade racing game series’ debut on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

Asphalt Legends Unite, out July 17, 2024, is an expansion for Asphalt 9: Legends, which is already available on the App Store, Google Play, Microsoft Store, Steam, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Its launch on PS4 and PS5 alongside a unified cross-platform experience, an upgraded graphic engine, a “modernized” art direction “tailored” for console players, a reimagined garage that carries over game progress and previously unlocked vehicles, and a redesigned user interface. Social features and customization options are currently in the works, Gameloft said.

“We are committed to expanding the game to deliver the definitive Asphalt experience,” commented game manager Ignacio Marin. “Today, we take the first step towards a new era for the Asphalt series, and we will soon offer players a glimpse at its future via the release of a roadmap. Dropping the number in the title is our statement: this is Asphalt, uniting all our players, now and for the future.”

It’s a busy time for Gameloft, which developed and released Disney Dreamlight Valley, and is also now working on a Dungeons & Dragons survival role-playing game life sim.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has released a new patch for the game that makes arc weapons and stratagems safe to use again.

Last week, Arrowhead told players not to use the Arc Thrower, Arc Shotgun, and Tesla Tower because they caused game crashes. At the time, the developer promised a patch addressing this would be released early this week, and now it’s out.

In releasing patch 1.000.104, Arrowhead issued an updated list of known issues it’s working to address. The list includes various issues involving friend invites and cross-play, and a problem with Hellpod steering, which is currently disabled in a large area around large or important objects.

If you’re looking for more on Helldivers 2, check out IGN’s feature on the Let Me Solo Her of Helldivers 2, a player who has answered over 100 SOS Beacons as part of a mission to help others. Helldivers 2 has become one of the surprise hits of 2024 since launching in February, topping the charts on Steam and reportedly selling around three million copies. According to at least one analyst, it’s still growing. Check out IGN’s Helldivers 2 review to find out why it’s going down so well.

Helldivers 2 update 1.000.104 patch notes:

Fixes

Game no longer freezes when firing arcs from the following

• Arc Thrower
• Arc Shotgun
• Tesla Tower

Known Issues

These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.

• Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play:

🔹 Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab.

🔹 Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.

🔹 Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand.

🔹 Players cannot befriend players with Steam names shorter than 3 characters.

• Hellpod steering close to large or important objects is currently not functioning as intended, resulting in steering being disabled in a large area around the object.
• Online features are not functioning when console language is set to Ukrainian.
• Players may be unable to select loadout when joining a multiplayer via an activity card.
• Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
• Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state.
• Exosuits will sometimes be delivered in a damaged or broken state.
• Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
• Pink artifacts may appear in the sky when setting off large explosions.
• Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.
• Sometimes the player’s loadout customizations will reset after restarting the game.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

It’s easy to roll your eyes and say that MMORPGs are dead if you, ya know, don’t play MMORPGs. But 20-year-old World of Warcraft still seems to have plenty of spring in its step, according to Warcraft general manager John Hight. Its latest expansion, Dragonflight, has more subscribers now than it did at launch, and one intrepid content creator thinks they may have extrapolated roughly how many: over 7 million.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, Hight explained that World of Warcaft historically has a very predictable pattern of subscriber churn. When an expansion comes out, there’s a surge in subscribers that slowly declines over the course of an expansion, with small bumps at each new patch. It hits a low point at the end of each expansion, then surges again when a new one is released. World of Warcraft: Classic disrupted the pattern somewhat by creating another series of peaks connected with its own releases. Hight described it as a “constant inflow and outflow” with “almost as many new players coming in as other players going out.”

In July of 2011, Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and Vedran Klanac, a developer and CEO of Ocean Media, teamed up on prototyping a new version of Tetris that Pajitnov had dreamed up – and outlined in a PowerPoint presentation. Klanac programmed the game and Pajitnov provided feedback: They called it Tetris Reversed. In a panel at the Game Developers Conference 2024, they showed video of this prototype and described its gameplay. Very much a reversal of Tetris, the Tetrominoes (the universally recognized Tetris blocks) were used to eliminate a wall of blocks, not stack up.

A decade on, the creators said their game was stalled due to a collaborator, Martin de Ronde’s stymied efforts to move it along into full production. They didn’t elaborate, with Pajitnov saying, “We finished the job, but in this case production never started. The next stage never happened… Probably [de Ronde] had trouble with the Tetris company… At some point he gave up.” The Tetris Company, who Pajitnov is associated with, owns the rights to Tetris and associated things like Tetrominos. This game was created as a sort of side project and thus never found its way to a publishing track.

Reverse Tetris had many of the Tetris trappings, including the familiar blocks, a focus on score, and line deletion. Pajitnov is single minded and philosophical about his brand of satisfying game design: “I love so much line collapses. Such a pleasant effect in the original game,” he wistfully says. So he kept those. But it also differs in some key ways. For instance, you can hit a Reverse button to get yourself out of a pickle, which swaps all the completed blocks with incomplete ones, sort of like smashing the Hyperspace button in Asteroids. Also, according to Pajitnov, “Sometimes [clearing the field] is absolutely impossible,” so based on the roll of the blocks, a win condition is not guaranteed. They elaborated that an average game (for the handful of people that played it) is 10 minutes. The perfect game is possible with the right setup, where the entire board is cleared, but that has not been achieved by the devs.

Unfortunately, we were not able to obtain video of the demo that was shown at GDC, but it will be archived on the GDC website. However, after capturing the minutes-long slice of gameplay shown in the session, Klanac commented: “After I played this [10 minute demo], I played another two hours,” emphasizing how hard it is to put down Tetris Reversed.

Reflecting on Tetris Reversed, Pajitnov says: “The fun factor is higher in (the original) Tetris than here. [Reversed] is a more cerebral game. Tetris allowed different kind of styles. You can choose your own style. In this case it’s rather straightforward strategy.” Yet, he added: “The learning curve… In my feeling it’s shorter than original Tetris.”

Samuel Claiborn is IGN’s managing editor and a fixes/breaks ancient arcade and pinball machines in his garage. TCELES B HSUP to follow him @Samuel_IGN on Twitter.

Baldur’s Gate 3 players have gotten really silly with mods since the game came out, including creating a number of mods that allow otherwise unplayable characters to join the party. But according to Larian Studios head Swen Vincke, a number of those characters may have been considered for inclusion as companions early in development, including one particular villain.

Warning: Spoilers for Acts 2 and 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 follow. Read onward at your own risk.

Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week, Vincke elaborated on a number of topics from his talk, The Secrets of Baldur’s Gate 3. In the talk, Vincke revealed some things that were cut or changed during development, such as Astarion originally being a tiefling and the eventual need for the team to “kill their darlings” in order to get the game shipped on time.

We asked Vincke about other major changes to companions during development, which prompted him to suggest that there was “an entire roster of companions that didn’t make the cut.” Who was his favorite cut companion? A surprising answer: it’s Act 2’s major villain, Ketheric Thorm.

In the final game, players begin hearing about Ketheric Thorm throughout acts one and two, learning that the seemingly immortal Absolute cult head has been actively cursing the Shadowlands at the behest of Myrkul, god of death. Act 2 culminates in the player defeating Thorm and ending his immortal reign, but Wincke says there was originally another possible outcome to all this: convincing Thorm to come along on the party’s quest.

“If you play the game and there’s a moment where you can convince him and you can see that a moment where he breaks, that moment led to recruitment normally,” Vincke explains. “We cut that out when we were rescoped. It was part of the fixing of Act two when we were stuck on it. That was what happened in the rescoping. He was supposed to be in your camp while you were dealing with Gortash and with Orin. So he became a source of information on them, and he could trust, you could get him to his arc. You could then be convinced by him to go to his side. So it was a great story, but yeah.”

Vincke doesn’t stop there. He shares other “darlings” that were killed – Githyanki queen Vlaakith’s palace, the Gith Astral Plane, Candlekeep, (where the original Baldur’s Gate started out), and even a visit to Hell itself, were all in the game at some point.

“There was a moment where the maps were going to be smaller, and so we were going to be able to give you bigger diversity of locations that you would explore,” Vincke continues. “But then the problem with those massive is that the sense of exploration wasn’t really present. So that’s why we killed a whole bunch of them. So it was a very fine balance between trying to figure out what the right size of these things was, but we wrote a lot. I mean, you have no idea how many pages we have of story that takes place with all kinds…some of good, some of it bad, but there was a lot of stories before.”

Vincke’s GDC panel contained a wealth of new information about the development of Baldur’s Gate 3, concluding with the reveal that Larian isn’t going to make Baldur’s Gate 4 or any DLC for 3, but is instead moving onto a new project outside of the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Amazon is offering the lowest price we’ve ever seen on the officially licensed WD Black C50 1TB Expansion Card for Xbox Series consoles. Right now it’s only $124.99, a 16% off price drop from its original $150 MSRP. It’s currently $25 cheaper than the Seagate 1TB Expansion Card. The C50 is one of the best SSDs for the Xbox, which isn’t surprising since your options are pretty limited.

WD Black C50 1TB Expansion Card for Xbox for $124.99

The WD Black C50 expansion card is essentially a 1TB NVME SSD encased in a specialized Xbox-compatible shell. Unlike the more complex PS5 SSD installation process, which involves opening up the PS5 to access the SSD slot, the Seagate expansion card simply plugs into its dedicated port on the back of the Xbox.

This expansion card offers the same speed as the internal SSD, ensuring that you won’t sacrifice performance or encounter extended load times as you might with a regular USB drive. With a 1TB expansion card, you can double the storage on your Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S Carbon Black Edition console, and triple the storage on your OG (white) Xbox Series S console.

In contrast to the PS5, there are no alternative methods for adding high-speed storage to your Xbox console. Your options are limited to either the WD or Seagate expansion cards, underscoring the importance of seizing a good deal when one becomes available.

Looking for more Xbox accessories? Check out the best Xbox deals today.

If you thought a 1TB Micro SD card was big, think again. Amazon currently has a massive SanDisk Ultra 1.5TB Micro SDXC Card for only $87.99 exclusively for Amazon Prime members. This is the first time we’ve seen a 1.5TB Micro SDXC card drop below the $100 price point, and it’s fully compatible with the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, and ASUS ROG Ally portable handhelds.

1.5TB Micro SDXC Card (Switch Compatible) for $87.99

Amazon Prime member exclusive deal

If you’ve started compiling a collection of digital games, you probably already know just how limited the Switch’s base storage capacity. The Switch and Switch OLED consoles have 32GB and 64GB of internal storage, respectively, with some of it reserved for the OS. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom uses up 16GB and Breath of the Wild about 13.5GB. If bought digitally, those two games alone would take up all of your internal storage on the OG Switch console. There’s only one expansion slot in the Switch console so you want to make sure you get the biggest card you can afford.

The SanDisk Ultra Micro SDXC card is compatible with virtually any device that accepts the Micro SDXC card standard. That includes the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, any recently released smartphone that supports expandable memory, GoPros, cameras and much more. It has a UHS-1 A1 rating and supports read speeds of up to 150MB/s. That means it’s not the fastest memory card out there; you might want to consider the SanDisk Extreme if you need the faster speed. But most mainstream devices like the Nintendo Switch can only output UHS-1 speeds anyways; a faster card would simply be throttled.

Is 1.5TB too much space for you? Check out more of the best Nintendo Switch memory cards.