Category: IGN

One of the big announcements from this year’s Pokémon Presents was a new, mobile Pokémon Trading Card Game, which comes as a big surprise, given Pokémon already has a game where you can collect cards and play online called Pokémon Trading Card Game Live.

Unlike the newly announced Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, TCG Live was released in 2023 on desktop and mobile, but its lackluster quality has earned it both a 2.8/5 star rating on Apple’s App Store (as of this writing) and the ire of Pokémon card players everywhere. But while Pokémon TCG Pocket does look attractive — with its gorgeous, immersive card art, and slick animations — it’s actually not the game the Pokémon TCG community needs right now. What we need is a functional digital client that fully captures the real-life tabletop game and not a watered down App Store game version emulating Marvel Snap.

Exhaustingly, up until 2023, the main way to play Pokémon TCG digitally was through an official client, Pokémon Trading Card Game Online, which was serviceable but showing many signs of its advanced age. (In hindsight, we didn’t know how good we had it.) Fans were initially excited when a replacement was finally announced in the form of Pokémon TCG Live, but it was so riddled with issues that it had us begging for the 12-year-old client back. It’s been a real Mankey’s Paw situation!

The digital card game space has evolved dramatically over the years, with Marvel Snap in particular setting a new standard that other developers appear eager to chase. Between Snap’s many awards and millions of dollars in revenue, it’s easy to see why. From the announcement trailer, Pokémon TCG Pocket seems to have been built in the same mold, a “free-to-start” game where you collect cards and challenge other players to quick and breezy battles. Given the Pokémon TCG is one of the most popular tabletop card games in the world, it seemed inevitable The Pokémon Company would get in on this trend, but it seems to have come at the expense of it’s pre-existing Pokémon TCG app that allows you to play the full game, or at least that’s how this competitive Pokémon TCG player sees it.

While we don’t know for sure whether Pocket was developed at the expense of Live, it would certainly explain the lack of polish to the latter. That kind of bad optics comes at a time when the competitive Pokémon TCG landscape is already dealing with a host of other issues. Top among them, the increasing popularity of the game has far outgrown its current capacity, leading to major tournaments selling out in minutes and leaving many players rightfully frustrated. If only there were a quality digital version capable of hosting tournaments online to help alleviate the issue…

Having a fully developed, high quality Pokémon TCG client is important for reasons beyond just being able to play the game online. It’s how many new players first discover the game, pro players rely on it to practice, and content creators stake their wellbeing on it because it’s how they showcase the game on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. But when the only option available is as underwhelming as Live, it only serves to drive people away to other, better online card games such as Magic: The Gathering Arena or Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel.

Speaking of Yu-Gi-Oh!, that’s a card game that has the best of both worlds. A flashy version of the full game in Master Duel and a simpler version in Duel Links. What Yu-Gi-Oh! has that Pokémon doesn’t is one of their games doesn’t completely eclipse the other in quality. They’re two different yet equally valid ways to enjoy the game.

Not all reactions to Pokémon TCG Pocket from the competitive Pokémon TCG scene have been negative. Pokémon TCG tournament caster and YouTuber Frosted Caribou posted on social media, “This app could be our TCG savior,” and later responded to a comment with, “Competitive players are sometimes way too quick to dismiss anything that isn’t ‘true TCG.’ If they supported bridging the gap between collectors and players more there are huge opportunities to grow the game and create fun and healthy playgroups for so many more people.”

That’s a fair point. At first glance, Pokémon TCG Pocket does seem like it’ll have a strong appeal to fans who aren’t necessarily looking to go pro, and it’s easy to see it has great potential to grow the casual, collector side of the hobby. Even if Pocket doesn’t let you play using all of the rules like with Live, its quality can still entice new players and act as a starting point before they dive into the full card game.

To be clear, I’m not knocking Pokémon TCG Pocket. Aside from issues with the “free-to-start” model, it looks like a fun, accessible way to enjoy the Pokémon TCG. It has an impressive amount of cool features, all executed with sky-high production value. It’s clear to see that it was made by people who love Pokémon cards, and that they put a generous amount of time, passion, and effort into it – and probably a Wailord-sized pile of money.

All Pokémon TCG players want is to be able to say the same thing about Pokémon TCG Live.

We probably don’t need to tell you this, but developing a game is hard, even more so when a ton of quality assurance work needs to be done. The remake of Resident Evil 4 was far from immune to those struggles, as a new documentary recently revealed.

The details came in a recent episode of the documentary series 100 Cameras (spotted by GamesRadar), which, true to the name, installs a hundred cameras to capture individuals in the specific episode’s theme. This particular episode focused on Capcom.

At the time of filming the episode, Resident Evil 4 Remake had one month left in development before its release date, with a slew of QA issues that needed to be addressed. One development team member disclosed that they found “around 70” bugs after finishing just one day of playtesting.

Resident Evil 4 Remake director Yasuhiro Anpo detailed several bugs, from the screen freezing at random points to Leon falling from the map. “At this rate, we won’t make the release,” Anpo said in the episode.

The episode goes into detail of the activities of QA testers during game development, delving into the extensive gameplay testing to ensure proper functionality.

Among other things, it highlighted the rigorous testing of elements like the “Game Over” screen, and revealed that one QA tester died 300 times in a day while testing the Resident Evil 4 Remake. At one point, the QA lead, frustrated with the number of bugs and questioning why the “fixes are so sloppy,” held a meeting with Anpo, worried that the team would be unable to finish the game before its release date.

One of the major issues was the fact that new additions, including those dealing with menu screens and lighting, were being tacked on during the final stretch of development, causing new bugs to surface and leading the QA team to pile more work onto their plates.

Nevertheless, we know how this story ends: Resident Evil 4 Remake hit its March 24, 2023 release date and did not encounter any game-breaking bugs upon release. The development team’s efforts did not go unnoticed, as Resident Evil 4 Remake was a critical and commercial success.

“The Resident Evil 4 remake is the series’ most relentlessly exciting adventure rebuilt, refined, and realized to the full extent of its enormous potential,” my colleague Tristan Ogilvie wrote in his glowing review of Resident Evil 4 Remake.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A was announced during Tuesday morning’s Pokémon Presents stream with a 2025 release date. One of the first questions on the minds of fans was, “Is Pokémon Legends: Z-A coming to Switch 2?”

The answer, for now, is “we don’t know.” Fans who pointed out that it’s coming to “Nintendo Switch systems,” with an emphasis on the plural, were reminded that the Switch has Lite and OLED versions. The timing does align rather conspicuously, though, with the rumored release date of the Switch 2, which is said to be be around March 2025.

The Ori games have always felt like something of a big deal. That’s in part thanks to the backing of Microsoft Studios, which published both The Blind Forest and The Will of the Wisps initially as Xbox console exclusives. The shine of that exclusivity drew people to Ori’s quality, and by the time the games were released on other platforms it was common knowledge just how talented developer Moon Studios was. It’s a reputation that somewhat betrays the reality that the first Ori game was built by just a couple of handfuls of staff. The studio is small. Or it was small, at least to begin with.

Today, Moon Studios is pretty sizable for an indie developer, and currently at work on its most ambitious project yet: No Rest for the Wicked, an action RPG with striking visuals, precise combat, and online multiplayer. It’s a huge leap for the company, and so as part of this month’s IGN First we caught up with Moon Studio’s co-founders to discuss moving forward from Ori’s success and into the challenging waters of sprawling worlds, fantastical lore, and early access development.

“I always saw Ori as our Mario,” says Moon Studio’s co-founder, CEO, and creative director, Thomas Mahler. “Because, even though it was a Metroidvania, the platforming focus was so big in that game. […] Then I was really excited about the idea of ‘What happens if Moon Studios, with our art style and all of that, would take on something like Zelda?”

That tantalising prospect is the genesis point for No Rest for the Wicked. Mahler and his team began working on it right after completing development on Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, but quickly realised that it wasn’t the right time to make their RPG Moon’s next release.

“We didn’t quite feel that we were ready to take on online multiplayer, PvP, a full-blown RPG in 3D,” recalls Gennadiy Korol, Moon Studios’ co-founder and its director of technology. “That is a very, very difficult thing to do as a studio, so we felt that we needed to grow a bit more. We needed to learn a little bit more.”

And so Moon went off to work on a sequel to Ori, the Will of the Wisps. Well, most of Moon. In the background, a very small group of creatives continued to tinker away on their epic fantasy project. And while they tinkered, Moon Studios grew. Ori and the Blind Forest was built by around 20 people. Will of the Wisps saw the studio grow to almost 60 staff. Today, it’s a group over 80 strong. “It’s a whole new era for our studio, for sure,” says Mahler.

Entering that new era meant that Moon Studios was finally ready to make its dream RPG. With the completion of Will of the Wisps’ Switch and Xbox Series editions, the entire company – with all its newly accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and experience – shifted across to No Rest for the Wicked. But while bigger, stronger, and wiser, this evolved version of Moon Studios still had plenty of challenges ahead of it. That began with the fundamentals.

“We built our own engine for [No Rest for the Wicked], for the networking of it,” explains Korol. “We had to re-envision all the art pipelines, all of the asset pipelines. Everything was basically redone from scratch in full 3D.”

Despite so much having to start again from scratch, Korol notes that there are many “interesting parallels” between Metroidvanias and action RPGs, meaning that much of what was learned making Ori was transferable to work on No Rest for the Wicked. Mahler points to Ori’s fully connected world, the philosophy for which also underpins Wicked’s level design. “We went through the paces on that twice,” he says. “We spent a decade working on the Ori games, and doing the really hard things to actually get us into the groove of how we now build a game like this.”

But things go deeper than just creative parallels. In one instance, Moon actually developed systems for Ori as something of a prototype for an idea it wanted in its forthcoming RPG. “We had this little metagame section [in Will of the Wisps] called the Wellspring Glades,” says Mahler. “There were NPCs there, and you could help them out. You could help them make the Wellspring Glades a nicer place. A lot of these things we, even back then, created because we knew we were going to do this in a much bigger way for No Rest for the Wicked.”

With that in mind, it’s clear that much of what fans loved about Ori will form the basis for No Rest for the Wicked, despite the change in genre. That will hopefully make for an action RPG that feels very different to its peers.

“There was always this unwritten rule that ARPGs needed to be procedurally generated, and I always doubted that,” says Mahler. “Because, if I looked at the results that we got, the worlds didn’t really feel that different. To me, level design is really important.

“I worked for a decade on the Ori games, where everything was about level design, and it feeling super fun to be in that world. I wanted to apply the same thing for No Rest for the Wicked. I want to handcraft everything.”

While No Rest for the Wicked’s world isn’t procedurally generated akin to vast stretches of Diablo’s Sanctuary, Korol promises an endgame where the experience feels “varied, and different, and challenging, even though you’re revisiting this handcrafted world.” It’s unclear what he means by that right now, but it’s easy to imagine repeated runs of areas that have been altered by varying parameters and remixed enemies.

But challenging and varied gameplay isn’t the only thing that keeps people coming back to ARPGs. As with any style of role-playing game, artistic design and worldbuilding are vital hooks, and Moon Studios takes this as seriously as any other part of the project. The trailer features a balanced mix of the fresh and familiar, from Soulsian horrors to strange new armour designs that encase its Inquisition soldiers. Running through all this is a believable sense of darkness – a visual tone that many will recognise from one of the best-loved fantasy book series of all time, plus its HBO adaptation.

“Song of Ice and Fire, I think, is the biggest inspiration,” says Korol. That much is clear from its cast of characters, who appear in shades of Cersei Lannister and Jon Snow. But this is also a story of dead kings and the war for succession, the same historically-inspired plot points that are the engine of George R.R. Martin’s tales.

Mahler points to a much older source of inspiration, though. “It was really about building this Shakespearean tale,” he says. “Because, with Ori, we already created these smaller, allegorical tales where we introduced these characters, and somehow still managed to make people really connect with those characters and feel emotionally attached to them.

“This time it was, ‘Okay, let’s go from this almost Disney-esque, Ghibli-esque thing to now let’s do an epic fantasy saga with humans,’ where there’s all these characters that have their own dilemmas.”

“I think worldbuilding is hugely important for us,” says Korol. “It’s also having these characters have interesting conflicts, and story arcs, and ambiguous moral questions that we’re dealing with. Actually challenge the players, and have them think about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

No Rest for the Wicked is a story of significant shifts for Moon Studios. The shift from Metroidvania to action RPG. The shift from 2D to 3D. The shift from Disney-like to Game of Thrones-like. These shifts even extend into the way the game will be released; this time around, Moon Studios is heading down the route of early access.

“I think we knew that this was how we wanted to make games,” says Korol. He explains how creating the Definitive Edition of Ori and the Blind Forest allowed the team to respond to and build upon player feedback gathered from the original launch. The studio had the opportunity to do this again with Ori and the Will of the Wisps, implementing feedback-informed changes into the Switch and Series X/S versions that were released several months after launch.

“For us as creators, that really is fun,” Korol says. “This is why we wake up in the morning, is to see how other people play these games. It’s to make them happy. If there’s anything that we can improve, we are optimisers at heart. It’s the process of optimization and constant improvement.”

With this in mind, it’s easy to see why Moon Studios has been attracted to early access as a development strategy. It’s currently unclear how it plans to implement it, though. Developers that have famously used the approach to great effect, such as Supergiant Games with Hades and Larian Studios with Baldur’s Gate 3, have used different strategies in the build up to a full launch. However, that full launch is typically always greatly benefited by months or even years of player feedback. We’ll learn how Moon Studios intends to go about that as part of Wicked Inside, which airs at 9am PT on March 1.

However it proceeds, it’s clear that Moon Studios has huge ambitions for No Rest for the Wicked. And while it’s a project that demands the team heads into uncharted territory, it appears that – at the very least – they have the right attitude towards this bold new swing.

“I’m a big believer in allowing the art to tell the artist where it wants to go,” says Mahler. “It just became really clear to me and to the rest of the team that, ‘Man, if we do this right, if we actually take all these things and put them together, this could become pretty incredible.’”

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.

EA has announced EA Sports F1 24, launching globally on May 31 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via the EA App, Epic Games Store, and Steam.

EA said F1 23 players can play Time Trial challenges with selected all-new 2024 team cars by pre-ordering F1 24. Owners of F1 2021, F1 22, or F1 23 get a 15% discount when they pre-order the F1 24 Champions Edition. As a bonus, players also get the McLaren and Alpine 2023 F1 esports liveries, which carry over to F1 24.

“For the first time, our F1 23 players can now connect immediately with the 2024 season with some of their favourite teams ahead of this weekend’s first Lights Out,” said Lee Mather, Senior Creative Director at developer Codemasters. “Our full reveal is coming soon, and we’re bringing players an overhauled Career mode, a new EA Sports Dynamic Handling System, and so much more.”

#F124 🟣📅 May 31

Pre-order today and get closer to the grid with immediate access to select 2024 team liveries in #F123 https://t.co/GmTjjE0Xvc

Full reveal in April. pic.twitter.com/0w7XqaPrr6

— EA SPORTS™ F1® (@EASPORTSF1) February 27, 2024

The digital-exclusive Champions Edition gives players two new Formula 1 Icons, 18,000 Pitcoin, and an F1 World Bumper Pack featuring resources for single and multiplayer gameplay events. Owners also get up to three days of early access starting May 28. All pre-orders come with one bonus VIP Podium Pass. Players who pre-order the Standard Edition get 5,000 Pitcoin and an F1 World Starter Pack.

EA said it will reveal more on F1 24 in the coming months.

F1 23 launched in June last year, and saw an 8/10 from IGN’s review. “With Braking Point 2 aboard, F1 23 is a far heartier package than F1 22,” we said. “However, while the new F1 World mode is packed with activities, its loot-based upgrade system may split fans.”

In December, IGN reported that Codemasters had suffered a round of layoffs following the launch of F1 23 and EA Sports WRC. EA bought Codemasters, best known for the racing franchises Grid, F1, and Dirt, in 2021 for $1.2 billion. At the time, EA boss Andrew Wilson said he wanted to let the company retain its identity without too much outside interference. Codemasters CEO Frank Sagnier and CFO Rashid Varachia left soon after, and Codemasters, including Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios, was made a part of EA Sports.

Then, in May last year, EA merged the development team at Codemasters Cheshire with Guildford-based Criterion Games to create one large development studio to work on Need for Speed Unbound, which struggled to find an audience but has since confirmed another year of support. Codemasters Birmingham continued to work on the Formula 1 franchise.

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.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants, the 2017 arcade game by Raw Thrills based on the 2012 Nickelodeon TV series, is coming to all home consoles (read: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam) on April 23. It’ll be priced at $29.99.

TMNT: Wrath of the Mutants is being developed by Cradle Games and Raw Thrills, and it includes the voice actors from the show (Seth Green, Sean Astin, Rob Paulsen, Greg Cipes) reprising their roles as well as four-player local co-op. Check out the reveal trailer above and the first screenshots of the home console version below.

In addition to the original arcade game’s six stages and 13 boss fights, this home release adds three all-new stages and six all-new boss battles. Don’t miss our review of 2022’s great spiritual sequel to the classic 1989 TMNT arcade game, Shredder’s Revenge.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in the Marvel’s Spider-Man games, has reflected on Spider-Man 2’s ending and where he sees the story going next.

Spoilers for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 follow.

The ending of Spider-Man 2 sees Peter Parker pass the Spider-Man torch to Miles Morales as the primary Spidey in a cutscene that suggests Parker wants to take an indefinite hiatus from web-slinging. The ending is seen by some as a sort of retirement for Peter Parker, but according to Yuri Lowenthal, Pete has more to offer.

“There have been some comments recently that were picked up to infer that that Peter’s out and Miles is in,” Lowenthal said in an interview with Variety. “While I think that Peter would love to believe that he can just turn it off and not be Spider-Man anymore and live a completely normal life, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen now.”

Lowenthal went on to say he has yet to read a script for the unannounced but inevitable Spider-Man 3, so isn’t sure what developer Insomniac has in store. “They’re probably still working on it,” Lowenthal added. “But I don’t think that’s the last we’re gonna see Peter. I think it’s a cool place to leave it. It’s a cool change for him.

“I think 100% he trusts Miles. Miles has really stepped up and he’s like, ‘Oh, maybe I can get a little break.’ And I did get a vacation to Symkaria during the Miles game. Not much of a vacation, but at least MJ got to learn to ride a motorcycle, which is awesome.” That motorcycle line is a nod to MJ’s newfound skill with a bike in Spider-Man 2 (and a cool Akira Easter egg).

PlayStation 5 exclusive Spider-Man 2 launched in October last year and has sold 10 million copies so far. Its New Game Plus update launches next month. But thoughts have already turned to what’s next from Insomniac. While it has a Wolverine game in the works, it seems likely it will also release a Marvel’s Spider-Man spinoff similar in scope to the hugely successful Miles Morales standalone, with Venom the potential focus.

To find out how Insomniac has set up its next sequel, check out IGN’s Spider-Man 2 ending explained.

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.

Hotly anticipated city builder Cities Skylines 2 launched on PC via Steam in October and immediately ran into a number of issues developer Colossal Order has struggled to get on top of in the months since. Now, with player sentiment turning a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating into ‘mostly negative’ for recent reviews, and with the first Cities Skylines game with more players than its sequel on PC, the boss of Colossal Order has issued a message to disgruntled players designed to address chief concerns.

In November, Colossal Order confirmed a series of delays for planned DLC so it could focus on much-needed performance improvements and the already delayed Mod Editor. The console version wouldn’t be released until the PC version was sorted out, the developer insisted.

Now, in a new Steam post, CEO Mariina Hallikainen asked herself the question: “How do you plan to get out of this mess? / What is in the works to fix Cities: Skylines 2? / What will you do to set things right for the disaster launch of CS2?” In her response, she admitted the lack of modding support is Colossal Order’s “biggest regret”, but addressed all the main concerns.

“We’d much rather be in a different position than we are in at the moment, but we cannot change the past,” Hallikainen said. “We’re working very hard to catch up on the missing modding support, missing platforms, the content for the Ultimate Edition, and improving the performance and fixing bugs this year. The team is divided to work on different tasks so that we’re seeing progress on all fronts and while it might not feel that it’s fast enough I can assure you we are all doing the best we can. Only time will tell if this is enough to turn things around.

“There have also been many questions about the patch cadence and why we moved away from weekly patches. Weekly patches are too heavy for us to keep up with and the issues we are working on need more time than just a few hours or days to fix. We’re a small team of 30 developers and we have to plan the work in a way that creates the fastest results. So instead of spending a big part of the week working on the build deliveries and QA rounds, we can use that time to work on the fixes themselves. For the Ultimate Edition, the DLCs already have a rough schedule so we’ll have good opportunities to patch the game at the same time. This doesn’t mean that we never patch the game between the DLC releases. The goal is to improve the game as quickly as possible and when we have a solid patch ready and tested it will be released.

“We are aware we have a mountain to climb when it comes to delivering on the expectations but we have our ice picks ready and we are surely used to the cold. We’re going to keep on climbing and you’ll continue to see that progress in the game.”

Then, on the lack of modding support: “The biggest regret we have is that modding support is not yet available for the game. We have been working on it since the beginning of the project and the intent was to have it fully ready at release. Code modding support, map, and asset editing were all planned to be fully usable and mods shareable in one place. We still believe that offering modding support makes any game better and that the tools and mods should be available for all players to enjoy at no additional cost.

“During the project we faced, and still continue to face, technical difficulties that affect the speed and quality of the development, especially performance. We simply ran out of time as the focus had to shift from modding support to all hands on deck to fix the performance. All this work is still ongoing.

“We’ll be communicating more on the status of the modding soon. It’s not an ideal situation but we are committed to keep working on this part of the game because it means so much to you and to us. ‘A Colossal Order game is a moddable one’ is a promise we have made to ourselves years ago and work very hard to keep.”

Meanwhile, Hallikainen answered a list of questions, confirming more animations are coming to the game, bikes and bike paths are in the works, and more buildings both free and paid are in the roadmap.

Cities: Skylines 2’s problems began before its launch even arrived. Colossal Order warned players that it would release with performance issues a week before the game came out. Since then, players have been met with lower framerates and interesting dental glitches as the developer worked to create a better experience. In IGN’s Cities: Skylines 2 review, which returned a 6/10, we said: “Cities: Skylines 2 is an ambitious sequel that might have bitten off more than it can chew – be prepared to do a lot of terraforming if you don’t want your metropolis to look like a nightmare.”

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’s great war to spread democracy across the galaxy is being undermined by an unlikely source: farmers.

Arrowhead’s phenomenally popular co-op focused third-person shooter features a galaxy-wide war that pits the forces of Super Earth against Terminids (alien bugs) on one side and Automatons (alien robots) on the other (check out our Terminids and Automatons enemy list for more). The idea is to “liberate” planets from alien infestation by completing operations, which are made up of a variety of missions. If you start an operation then fail to complete all the missions within it, the operation counts as a loss for Super Earth.

You can see the effect your work has on the status of each planet’s liberation as you complete operations. And, taking a higher level view, you can see how the community is doing generally against each faction sector-wide. But it isn’t just bugs and robots who are fighting against Super Earth, it’s traitorous players.

Helldivers 2 is currently in the throes of a farming problem. No, cows aren’t shooting the place up. Rather, players who ‘farm’ resources such as medals (used to work through the battle pass), requisition (used to unlock stratagems), and XP (used to level up) from easy-going missions, like the fast-paced Automaton eradication missions that charge players with simply killing a certain number of enemies (mortal sentries held here), are then resetting the operation to rinse and repeat.

Completing eradicate enemies missions over and over again is seen as a more efficient way to farm resources than completing the operation via another mission type that takes much longer, so even though Helldivers 2 provides bonuses for completing operations, these rewards are not good enough to convince farmers to do the right thing.

The problem, of course, is that by failing to finish all missions in an operation, farmers are damaging the overall war effort. As Arrowhead has confirmed, quitting after only half the operation counts as a loss for Super Earth. So while democracy-loving Helldivers 2 are off sacrificing themselves for the greater good across the galaxy, farmers have already reset scores of operations by bursting through eradicate missions in just a few missions. “So it sounds like there’s three factions; Terminids, Automatons, and Farmers,” joked one redditor.