Star Wars: Outlaws developer Massive Entertainment has revealed more about the game’s open world and declared it isn’t going down the Starfield-esque procedurally-generated route.
“It’s a crude analogy, but the size of one planet might be [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,” said Gerighty. “It could be two to three zones. But it’s not this sort of epic ‘the whole of England recreated’ approach.”
These zones seemingly refer to the regions that make up Odyssey’s colossal map, which are still fairly large by themselves. Attika is one example, which encompasses the entirety of Athens and a significant portion of the surrounding area.
Buying new video games, hardware, and accessories for your preferred console doesn’t need to make a massive dent in your wallet. In fact, deals happen all the time for items like these, so you can save money while investing in your favorite hobby. These sales even occur outside of events like Prime Day, Black Friday, or publisher events like Nintendo’s eShop sale in the Summer or PlayStation’s Days of Play. And while we’ll always keep you up to date on those sales and what’s included in them, here, we’ll provide you with year-round deals that are worth taking advantage of. Whether you play on PS5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or PC, you’ll find the very best deals listed below.
TL;DR – Our Favorite Video Game Deals
Dying Light 2: Stay Human is Down to $24.99
If you wish to join the hunt to defeat Lilith and save Sanctuary, why not do it at a discounted price? This is the first time we’ve seen a price drop on Blizzard’s latest, and even though it’s a small drop to $65, it’s still worth considering at that price. Otherwise, Dying Light 2 has gotten an awesome discount and is down to just $24.99 at Amazon right now on both Xbox and PS5. And top things off, Tears of the Kingdom is just $57.99 right now at Amazon, which is a big deal.
How to Avoid Xbox Game Pass Price Hike ($39.99 for 3-Months)
To avoid thenew Game Pass price hike, we recommend securing your current subscription for as long as possible. You can stack up to a maximum of 36 months of Game Pass, meaning you have the option to accumulate 3-month subscriptions up to 12 times.
Admittedly, this approach might put a strain on your wallet, totaling $479.88 if you purchase the 3-month codes via thisenticing deal we’ve uncovered on Amazon. However, when you compare it to the new cost of Game Pass Ultimate for 36 months at $16.99 per month, amounting to $611.64, you’ll realize you’re saving a substantial $131.76 on your subscription for the next three years.
Could your PS5 use more storage? Prices have been plummeting since Sony started letting people upgrade their SSDs. Right now you can get a 1TB XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade SSD for just $54.99, which is a great price for so much extra space. It’s hard to beat the recent Prime Day we had, and we won’t like this doesn’t match the best 1TB deal at $50 during that sale, but it’s pretty close at only $5 more. Now’s a great time, in general, to pick up aPS5-compatible SSD.
Perfect Steam Deck or Switch SD Card for $27.99 (and More Deals)
The best Steam Deck SD card should be fast, reliable, and be as future-proof as possible. Therefore, you’re going to want to opt for the latest in SD card tech, which is an micro SDXC UHS-I U3 A2 V30 memory card. That’s a lot of random letters, so to save you a bit of time we’ve left our top suggestions and deals here for your convenience.
This is one of the most popular power banks out there at the moment, albeit it’s a premium purchase with a MSRP of $159.99. If you missed the Prime Day deal of $99.99, don’t worry we’ve managed to secure another discount. Check out the buy used or other sellers section on Amazon, and you’ll be able to spot the power bank for $89.99 ‘Like New’. This is a great deal for what is pretty much the power bank listed but with an open box. Don’t fear ‘Like New’ or refurbished listings, these are where the real deals are.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Official Guide for $26.99 (Save $18)
With these, you’ll have a detailed overview of Hyrule, a helpful walkthrough to get you through the game, and much more. Not only that, but they have gorgeous covers as well, especially the Collector’s Edition. The Standard Edition has an MSRP of $29.99 but is on sale for $20, and the Collector’s Edition normally runs for $44.99, but you can get it for $27. Plus, if you want to complete the set, the Breath of the Wild guidebook is also down to just $23 right now as well.
It’s not often that a first-person puzzle-platformer comes along with a new mechanic that’s as brain-breaking as Portal, but Viewfinder deserves to be put on that same high shelf. This game gives an inventive new meaning to the term ‘point and click adventure’ by arming you with an old-school instant film camera that doesn’t just allow you to snap a photo of your surroundings, but physically bend and break them to your will in order to forge new paths towards each level’s goal. It’s an ingenious, perspective-based puzzle-solving tool that constantly evolves over the course of the six-hour journey, and one that kept me hooked all the way through, despite the fact its story never developed quite as sharply as one of its freshly shaken Polaroid pictures.
Viewfinder’s unique method of using trick photography to transform its topography is so brilliant that I can barely even understand how it exists, much less fully explain it. You can take a photo of virtually anything you can see in each level’s floating island landscape, hold up that 2D image in front of another part of your surroundings, then magically superimpose the shot in full-scale 3D and thus seismically alter the space behind it. You might take a photo of an open door and slap it onto a wall so that you can then pass through to the other side in classic Looney Tunes fashion, or tilt a side-on picture of a bridge towards the edge of an out-of-reach rooftop in order to produce a handy ramp. It’s a canny piece of map manipulation that seems simple early on but soon scales wonderfully in complexity, and it’s one of those games where you’re never sure if what you’ve come up with is the solution or just a solution that you invented. In one late-game level I managed to reach the exit by crafting a collage of inverted staircases so seemingly impossible to navigate that it would have sent M.C. Escher fumbling with his phone in an attempt to open Google Maps.
Viewfinder’s unique method of using trick photography to transform its topography is so brilliant that I can barely even understand how it exists, much less fully explain it.
What’s really remarkable is how liberating and seamless the landscape-fracturing photography feels, for the most part. I never came up against an obtrusive ‘out of bounds’ message, and nor were any of my scenery-shattering shots ever implemented in a noticeably glitchy way. There are some important restrictions in place; the sense of challenge is preserved by limiting the amount of photos you can capture to the number of sheets of film paper in your camera, and you’re forbidden to place any pictures that will destroy the level’s teleporter exit and thus prevent you from completing it. Otherwise you effectively have free reign to experiment with layering your shots on the world at any angle, and this freedom is only further reinforced by the fact that any mistakes you do make are easily undone thanks to a snappy rewind function. It basically allows you to instantly hop back through your movements in each level like you’re CTRL+Z-ing your way back down through the added layers of a Photoshop document.
Viewfinder’s early puzzles are mostly concerned with repurposing simple things like walls and doors in your surroundings in order to construct a path to the goal, but new elements are introduced at a steady clip in order to present increasingly complicated conundrums to the use of each composition. A photocopier allows you to duplicate images and therefore any of the items in frame, which is handy for cloning the batteries used to power electrical circuits, while mounted cameras with timers can be used to snap a selfie, the result of which can then be employed to teleport yourself across gaps or through caged walls. Often there’s no photography required whatsoever; instead, identifying the way forward involves overcoming clever forced-perspective tricks disguising hidden tunnels or bridges that are right under your nose, like the leap of faith sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Viewfinder rarely relies on the same optical trickery for long, and this healthy puzzle variety kept me glued to each task and eying each puzzle arena from every possible angle.
Picture-in-Picture
It’s not just the images you capture yourself that can be used to manipulate the world – everything from iconic paintings to desktop screenshots can be collected in certain levels, then blown up and brought to life wherever you see fit. At one point I was delighted to suddenly descend through the bitmapped depths of a DOS-era dungeon crawler, while at another I found myself stumbling through a pencil-sketched vista that seemed straight out of the rotoscoped music video for ‘80s pop classic, Take On Me. (Not the sort of ‘a-ha moment’ in a puzzle-based adventure I had anticipated.) From asymmetrical, Mondrian-inspired art to crudely drawn houses crafted by a child’s crayons, the trip through Viewfinder can at times feel less like squinting through a camera lens and more like peering through an exciting and ever-changing kaleidoscope of creative ideas.
Some of these preconceived pictures seem like entertaining but entirely extraneous inclusions; I brought a Tetris screenshot to towering life purely to watch the life-sized Tetronimos tumble down to earth, and inflated a Tamagotchi-style toy to billboard-sized proportions just to briefly distract myself with the buttons to water the greyscale plant on its giant LCD screen. Yet elsewhere they can be used to directly solve problems, like the jump power-up that can be collected within a diorama of a Metroid-esque screenshot and then employed elsewhere in the level in order to leap to previously unreachable platforms. I felt consistently rewarded with almost every found image I transplanted onto the terrain, whether the result was practical or purely playful.
I felt considerably less of a pull towards investigating the plot of Viewfinder, however. The story is set in the future where climate change has reached its endgame, the planet is bathed in a Blade Runner 2049-esque orange hue, and natural vegetation is seemingly no more. The puzzle challenges you’re asked to complete are actually virtual reality constructs based on the research of a team of climate scientists, with a goal of discovering the design of a machine capable of reversing the Earth’s decline. It’s a premise that’s both intriguing and somewhat depressingly relevant, but the plot is a bit too nebulous because it’s effectively told via out-of-sequence audio logs and the odd diary page here and there, which didn’t give me a great deal to cling to. And thematically, nothing about this photography-themed game really resonates with the idea of a post-climate-apocalypse world.
There’s also the odd lighthearted interjection on comms from your research partner Jessie and the occasional word of encouragement from a Cheshire Cat-like feline friend that pops up as you explore deeper down the research rabbit hole, but neither are capable of conjuring the same sorts of laughs as GladOS, Wheatley, or even just the sentry turrets from the Portal series, and I ultimately tuned them out in favour of focussing on the next terrain-twisting task at hand.
Viewfinder’s plot may be underdone, but its puzzle solving is more than strong enough to shoulder that burden, and my enthusiasm for its mind-bending brain teasers never dipped, from its captivating opening moments all the way to the climactic timed-gauntlet run that serves as a frantically fun final exam for all the techniques you’ve mastered over the course of the journey. I even completed the handful of optional challenges, including one that was so perplexing it required about 30 minutes of attempts, plus a further hour or so of pondering while I washed the dishes and took my dog for a walk, before I finally coaxed the solution out of my subconscious. (In retrospect the answer was bleedingly obvious, as is so often the case.) Six hours is a relatively healthy runtime for a puzzle-based adventure of this type, but I would have gladly kept going if Viewfinder had featured even more quirky conundrums to complete.
Pikmin 4 is set to release exclusively for Nintendo Switch this Friday, July 21. The latest entry in this series about tiny plant-like aliens exploring a strange planet introduces several new elements, including Ice Pikmin and a roly-poly dog named Oatchi. Pikmin 4 is now available for preorder (see it at Amazon).
Available now in digital format and coming September 22 in a physical bundle are the first two Pikmin games. The first Pikmin originally released on the GameCube in 2001, while the sequel arrived on the same system in 2004. Now, the entire Pikmin series is available on Nintendo Switch. Kinda cool.
Pikmin 4 Preorder Bonuses
While there are no universal preorder bonuses for Pikmin 4, but a couple of retailers are offering free bonuses of their own.
GameStop – exclusive pin set, in-store pick-up only, but you can preorder online and just select in-store pick-up. The other caveat is it’s while supplies last.
Pikmin 4 Demo Is Now Available
If you want a taste of the new Pikmin before you buy, you can download a Pikmin 4 demo right now on the eShop. It’s also worth noting that your progress in the demo transfers over to the full game.
Pikmin 4 Trailer
What is Pikmin 4?
Pikmin is a series of real-time strategy games that date back to 2001, when the original title appeared on the Nintendo GameCube. This fourth entry has been a long time coming, with Shigeru Miyamoto saying back in 2015 that it was “very close to completion.” Seven years later, it’s finally set to release in July.
This installment introduces a new Ice Pikmin that can freeze enemies and the environment to help your alien flora navigate the strange planet they find themselves on. The plants aren’t alone this time around, either, as they get help from a rotund dog called Oatchi, who can smash through barriers and carry Pikmin on its back while swimming across ponds and puddles.
Overall, it looks like good fun for fans of the series or anyone interested in picking up a colorful, cartoonish strategy game.
Other Preorder Guides
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.
The PlayStation-exclusive rhythm and strategy series Patapon is getting a spiritual successor in Ratatan from some of the original’s developers.
As reported by VGC, Ratatan was announced at BitSummit and Patapon creator Hiroyuki Kotani and original Patapon musician Kemmei Adachi are both onboard. The game is being developed by Ratata Arts, Tokyo Virtual Theory, and pH Studio, and a Kickstarter campaign for Ratatan is set to go live on July 31 at 9am PT/12pm ET.
We still don’t know much about Ratatan, but the developers did tease it would include roguelike elements and multiplayer for up to four players.
“The three main game concepts are over 100 cute characters fighting it out on screen, four-player simultaneous battles, and more adventure and roguelike elements than Patapon had,” producer Kazuto Sakajiri said.
While it’s exciting to be getting a game that honors Patapon, Kotani isn’t ready to close the door on a new Patapon arriving in the future.
“There’s a possibility of maybe doing a Patapon sequel in the future, but for this we really wanted to make our own game, in our own style, with specific types of gameplay that reflect what we want. After that, if there’s a chance to speak to Sony about doing a Patapon sequel then we’ll go from there.”
Patapon was first released on the PSP in 2007 and was co-developed by Pyramid and Japan Studio. Two sequels – Patapon 2 and Patapon 3 – followed in 2008 and 2011. The first two games were ported to PS4 in 2017 and 2020, but Patapon 3 remains exclusive to the PSP.
The game starred the player as a god of sorts to these Patapon who could be commanded to act by using drum beats. In our Patapon review, we said, “rhythm game, strategy game, mini-game collection, action game, light RPG – Patapon is all of these and much, much more.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Xbox head Phil Spencer has revealed that Microsoft and PlayStation have “signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.”
Spencer took to Twitter to announce the news and share that he is looking forward to a future where players have more choice as to where they want to play their games.
We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.
“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard,” Spencer wrote. “We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”
No further details about the “binding agreement” were shared by Spencer, so it’s unclear exactly how long it is for or what it entails. It does, however, follow Microsoft’s FTC trial where Spencer said he will “do whatever it takes” to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation.
“I’m making a commitment standing here that we will not pull Call of Duty – it is my testimony – from PlayStation,” Spencer added. “As you said, Sony obviously has to allow us to ship the game on their platform. But absent any of that, my commitment is, and my testimony is that we will continue to ship future versions of Call of Duty on Sony’s PlayStation 5.”
In December 2022, it was reported that Microsoft’s offer to Sony was to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years and the Sony had the rights to put Call of Duty on PlayStation Plus if it desired. It remains to be seen if that is the agreement these two companies agreed on or if things have changed since then.
Fable narrative lead Anna Megill has announced she will be leaving Playground Games in August and that a “heroically talented team” will continue working on the much-anticipated reboot.
Megill became the narrative lead on Fable in July 2022 and has been with Playground Games since February 2021 when she joined the team as Fable’s lead writer. Working on Fable has been a “dream come true” for her, and she had nothing but positive things to say as she announced her departure.
“Friends, I have news,” Megill wrote on Twitter. “In August, I’m stepping away from my role as Narrative Lead on Fable. I’ve had several wonderful years scribbling away in my fairytale cottage, but the time feels right for new challenges.
“Working on Fable was a dream come true for me, and it’s wrenching to leave it behind. But Playground has assembled a Heroically talented team, so I know it’s in good hands. I’m excited for what’s coming next—for them and for me.”
Shortly after her announcement, she responded loudly to those who were “being silly” and immediately assumed something was wrong with Fable or that her breakup with the studio was anything but amicable.
“Some folks are being silly, so let me be clear: I reached a good stopping point to jump off the project, so I did,” Megill said. “And I decided to take a small break before jumping into my next gig. That’s it. I have nothing but fondness & respect for Playground & my colleagues there.”
For a game with “Dino Forecasts” that warn of thousands of dinosaurs raining out of portals in the sky, what’s surprising about Exoprimal is that it’s somehow even stranger than that premise would suggest. It’s a competitive hero shooter – that’s also occasionally cooperative – which pits two teams of five players against each other in dino-hunting war games, where they compete indirectly – but also occasionally directly – in separate parallel universes to see who can complete a grab bag of objectives faster. It takes a lot of familiar elements from team-based multiplayer games like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2, and combines them with wave-based survival elements to create an experience that feels wholly unique, and a lot of fun if you’re able to find a well-balanced squad.
After about 10 hours, my initial impressions of Exoprimal are mostly positive. The twist of competing to become more efficient at slaying literally thousands of dinosaurs is a fresh and fun take on the competitive hero shooter genre, the 10 exosuits all fill satisfying roles and have fun abilities with some great synergies, and there have been some nice surprises in the way the campaign’s story has bled into the multiplayer space.
If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Exoprimal is a multiplayer-only game. There is no single-player campaign, even though there is an interestingly woven albeit somewhat convoluted plot that contextualizes each multiplayer match. Essentially, you and your crew are stuck on the mysterious Bikitoa Island – an island that has been shrouded in mystery since dinosaurs first rained down from the heavens upon it three years ago – and are forced to participate in data-gathering war games for the sake of a malevolent AI named Leviathan.
Instead of focusing on hyperprecise accuracy and twitch reflexes, you’re mainly concentrating on efficiency.
Every match consists of a series of rounds with a variety of objectives, ranging from simply killing X number of dinos, to capturing control points, to defeating an extra beefy dino that tries to run away from you. Two teams compete in separate instances and try to complete their objectives faster than the opposing team can finish theirs, with the team who does so first getting a head start in the final round. I actually really like this twist. Instead of focusing on hyper precise accuracy, twitch reflexes, and map knowledge, instead you’re mainly concentrating on efficiency. Things like making sure you’re staying on top of your cooldowns, using your special techniques so that they deal the most damage to the most number of enemies, and supporting your teammates so that they’re able to do their jobs as well. It’s taking the same skills that you’d use in other hero shooters, but applying them in new and interesting ways.
In the final round, provided you’ve opted into PVP, the two parallel universes converge and you’re able to directly interact with the opposing team as you try to push your payload to the goal. At certain points throughout the match Leviathan will also allocate a ‘dominator’ to one of the teams, giving them the ability to transform into a giant Carnotaurus or Triceratops and wreak havoc on the opposing team for a limited period of time.
Each match you complete unlocks more nodes on the Analysis Map, an enormous chart that chronicles Exoprimal’s story. The idea is that the more matches you play, the more data your squad receives, and the more they’re able to learn about the various mysteries at the heart of the story. These mysteries include: what happened on Bikitoa Island three years ago, why is Leviathan running these war games, why are there even dinosaurs raining from the sky in the first place, and the central plot point, how to escape the island. As of this moment, Exoprimal has not made me actually care about any of these mysteries, its characters, or its world, so heading to the analysis map after every match feels more like a reviewer’s obligation than anything else.
What is kind of neat is how occasional story events will take place during otherwise normal multiplayer matches. In one match an uninvited exosuit crashed the game, which caused Leviathan to introduce newer, deadlier dinosaurs to try and eliminate the intrusion. My only wish is that these events would occur with more frequency, as one of my biggest issues with Exoprimal right now is that five hours in the repetition of fighting the same dinosaurs in the same modes on the same maps is starting to take its toll.
Tyrannosaurus Rexosuits
Exoprimal’s 10 exosuits currently available are divided into three categories: Assault, Support, and Tank. Assault suits tend to focus on maximum damage per second, Supports are naturally the ones you’ll look to for heals and crowd control, and Tanks are out in the frontlines with abilities that make them uniquely suited to soak up damage and aggro. Within those classes, there’s a great variety of playstyles as well. My favorite Assault exosuit is Zephyr, which can only attack within melee range, but makes up for it with lightning fast speed and mobility options that make the other exosuits seem downright slow in comparison. Contrast that with Barrage, which utilizes all sorts of area of effect attacks from stun grenades, to fire grenades, to remote mines, to even turning itself into a human missile as its ultimate.
There area lot of parallels with Overwatch characters, some a little more brazen than others.
If that last one sounds a lot like Junkrat from Overwatch, well you’re right. There are a lot of parallels with Overwatch characters, some a little more brazen than others. And while I wish there was a little more originality in some of Exoprimal’s exosuit designs, they are generally different enough to never feel like straight up carbon copies.
The teamwork-focused design of Exoprimal’s multiplayer matches also leads to the very familiar issue of it being a blast when you’ve got a communicative and well-balanced team, and a very frustrating experience when you don’t. It’s an issue that’s made worse by the progression system, which encourages you to stick to a single exosuit by assigning each one its own level progression. The more you play with an exosuit the quicker you’ll unlock the advanced modules that can dramatically affect its power, but this feels at odds with the hot-swappable nature of the actual mode. If I want to focus on unlocking modules for Zephyr, but my team already has three other assault characters, I’m then put in the uncomfortable position of either having to beg someone else to change, change myself and slow down my progression with Zephyr, or stubbornly refuse to budge and just play the match with a poor team composition. It’s not an ideal situation at all, and I wish there was a system that allowed me to continue progress on an exosuit’s level without being forced to play as that exosuit.
I’m still a ways away from rendering a final verdict on Exoprimal, with my analysis map completion percentage at about 51% and 27 matches played. I’m very curious to see how the Dino Survival mode continues to evolve as the story progresses, and to see what other surprises await, like the one that happened to me earlier with the uninvited exosuit that suddenly crashed an otherwise normal game. Exoprimal is full of interesting ideas, but the real question is whether or not I’ll be interested in sticking around once it shows all of its cards.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
Back in 2021, we released an IGN Inside Story about the PlayStation Home fans refusing to let it die, where we took a look at a few different homemade recreations of the short-lived, but much-loved social space for PlayStation 3.
In the piece, we met Nagato, a content developer working on Destination Home, a non-profit project attempting to revive PlayStation Home and restore the social hub for future generations to experience.
The restoration of PlayStation Home was extremely ambitious. After the original social space was closed, not only was the service lost, but so was its data. Home wasn’t on a disk or a cartridge and you couldn’t play it offline. It lived completely within the servers that are now gone, forever. That didn’t stop Nagato and the Destination Home team from dreaming big though.
In 2021, after cobbling together their cache data, the team built a working version of Home, but it was purely a single-player experience, serving more like a walking museum than a thriving social hub. In its infancy, the idea of having an active and public server –you know, the whole point of Home– was simply a pipedream.
Two years later though that dream has made significant progress. The Destination Home team have created a working online experience and are several step closers to fulfilling their thriving, social hub fantasies. I reached back out to Nagato to not only talk about the development journey since we last spoke but to also test out the playable version of PlayStation Home restored by its fans.
PlayStation Home Lives
“I just remember just spamming hello on the controller, and I’m like, this is insane.” Nagato says. “I remember being in a Discord with the development team and it was just a resurgence of emotions that happened. That gave us even more drive I would say.”
In October 2022, Destination Home finally launched its first closed beta for its biggest supporters and contributors. Allowing PlayStation Home to be played online with other fans for the first time in seven years. It’s by no means a complete package, but it is a landmark achievement for Destination Home.
“What’s functional now for the closed beta is our ability to have cross-region compatibility.” shared Nagato. “We have found a way where we could take European spaces, US, or Japanese and put it into one massive server.”
“We’ve enabled purchasing features,” he adds. “[you’re] not really purchasing store content though, that is still to come. We’re looking into how people can purchase free clothes and stuff through RPCS3 and PS3, but if you had original clothes and stuff like that, we inputted that in.”
I just remember just spamming hello on the controller, and I’m like, this is insane!
To be clear on this point; Nagato uses the word “purchasing” as a substitute for freely acquiring items from the old purchasing system. Destination Home has always, and will always, be a non-profit project. There are no microtransactions, at all.
“If you have your original PSN account and you bought stuff on Home, all your items –as long as it’s been donated to us, or we’ve archived it– will basically be alive.” explains Nagato. ”The clothes that are on my avatar I purchased way back in 2012.”
Destination Home is religiously committed to the idea of recreating the entire experience. This is simply their first toe being dipped into the central plaza pond, but their plans for a full recreation are big.
“We are currently preparing for closed beta 2, where we have thirteen spaces that we’ve hand selected from feedback from our members.” Nagato says. “We have a good hundred-plus spaces right now that are good to go, and ready to be deployed.”
Back in 2021, The Destination Home team’s data pool was limited. Collectively they combed all of their consoles for all the stored data they could find, soliciting whatever local or cache files any Home fans had left on their dusty PS3s with the goal of being able to reverse engineer and restore the code.
We have a good hundred-plus spaces right now that are ready to be deployed.
“At that time we were on 1.00 client and we went through many iterations to get the last client working, both on PlayStation 3 and RPCS3 emulators.” explained Nagato.
“During that time as well, we successfully obtained about 300 plus unique caches through various means of data capture.” he added. “After your video on IGN, we just had an influx of people just coming into the Discord or DMing me through Twitter, Reddit, even PSN -they found my PlayStation network!- just donating data. All of these things combined have really advanced the project to a point where we are ready for closed beta two.
The Aftermath
By Nagato’s own admission, the coverage on IGN helped. More eyeballs were now on the project and with that came more hardcore PlayStation Home fans generously offering their cached data.
“I would say after the IGN coverage, it was really a big, big boom.” recalled Nagato.”Right now there are at least 8,000 people in the Discord alone. Even guys like Wario64 retweets my stuff sometimes. It’s [been] really useful because now I’m able to restore data faster, and people are wanting to donate. It really just sent us to the moon.
I saw this love and support first-hand in the comments sections. Overwhelming nostalgia and support for the thought long-lost social platform. However, not everyone was convinced that PlayStation Home needed to return, with plenty of the audience pointing out the existence of modern alternatives. Primarily, VR Chat.
After the IGN coverage, it was really a big, big boom.
After bringing this sentiment up with Nagato, he immediately began to make a passionate defence for PlayStation Home.
“Home has a nostalgic factor.” Nagato says.”People remember Home based on their events, like FIFA Arena where they had the 2010 world soccer events. They had E3 stuff. Whenever they played Home, they were like, ‘Oh man, I remember when I was in middle school and E3 came out and I won this award.’ The thing I did was play Dance Dance Revolution and try to beat all the developers. We have a big nostalgia factor.”
“Virtual worlds now are going more into the NFT, cryptocurrency sphere, which is a turnoff for people who may be not technologically inclined or into cryptocurrency,” he adds. “So, for me, when a lot of social worlds bring in that element, it obfuscates and minimalizes their player base, when Home is like: Here. If you little Big Planet, we got stuff for you. If you like MotorStorm, we got stuff for you. If you’re like Nagato and just want to play Dance Dance Revolution all day, this is for you.”
Also filled with a similar level of nostalgia, I – perhaps naively – could see Nagato’s point. PlayStation Home always felt like it had a level of sincerity. Whether that was true or not, it always had the feeling of a place built purely to bring fans of PlayStation games together. Modern metaverses can feel cynical from the outset, appearing to use your love of franchises to manipulate you into spending more money. As I say these words the logical part of my brain tells me there was no doubt intent of this kind from Sony, but at least in terms of what it presented, PlayStation Home always felt a little more wholesome and cleaner than that, and a good chunk of the audience -perhaps looking through their rose-tinted, PlayStation Home nostalgia goggles- tend to agree.
Seeing the community’s respect for the project overall is something that gives me the drive to do it.
“I see many people leaving nice comments about how Home changed their lives.” Nagato shared. ”I know people who literally met up on Home and have kids now. I know people who have long-term friends on Home, I still talk to some long-term [Home] friends here and there. Just honestly seeing the community’s respect for the project overall is something that gives me the drive to do it.”
“You have companies like Facebook probably dropping billions of dollars on certain projects to emulate what Home did.” he continues. “Sony for me that was too far ahead for that time, the same thing with the Vita. You had these really extensive, cool projects that now have a big market.”
The Next Step
With a successful closed beta in the can and a second on the horizon, it feels like it’s only a matter of time until PlayStation Home is once again accessible to the world. So I had to ask; can they see the end of this restoration project in sight?
“I would say no,” he definitively states. “With a project like this, of course, we would want a hundred per cent snapshot of how Home ran. Will I feel like there will be a time when Home has become so stable that It’s been running fine for one or two years after the closed beta test? I would say yes. But overall, it’s just one of those things where the ball is always rolling.”
Inevitably with any online project – particularly one developed by fans in their spare time – there was the elephant in the room we’d yet to discuss. Safety.
“For me, I do not want my project [to feel unsafe].” Nagato says.”I know a lot of fan projects go through that… I want everyone to have fun on Home the way they [remember] it. I don’t want anybody to experience any form of bullying. That takes the fun out of gaming and honestly, people game for one reason: To have fun.”
I want everyone to have fun on Home the way they [remember] it.
Nagato reassures me the team is working hard to make sure moderation will exist in Destination Home. But after working so hard on a restoration project, do they ever think they’d be tempted to expand the platform and maybe even develop their own content for it?
“Yeah, no Last of Us mini-games. No Gran Turismo.” jokes Nagato. “That’s not the true sense of Home. If it came out [originally] then that’s our model and we put it in. It’s really not about [us adding content] unless it’s quality-of-life fixes. If Home actually had bugs and glitches that broke the game, that stuff will be fixed, but that’s it.”
When I last met Nagato, I asked him what his ultimate goal was. What would be the moment he could pause, reflect and be proud of what they achieved? His answer, that simply seeing another person in a lobby and saying hello, was sweet and surprisingly modest.Considering they’d since achieved this and beyond, it felt like it was time for a new ultimate goal.
“When we actually have non-developers and regular people play our game, and we see them taking screenshots and posting it on Twitter and literally seeing that resurgence of happiness, that’s when I would say will be the day.” explains Nagato.
“We already had it on a small scale, we had maybe 10 people in this lobby,” he adds. “But seeing a ton of players go to Sodium [and seeing] there’s like 44 players in there. [Seeing people in] Konami, [playing] Dance Dance Revolution, and you see me and I’m trying to beat everybody in the game. Seeing people with their original clothing items. To have people enjoying that, that’s the day.”
Dale Driver is an Executive Producer of video for IGN and a PlayStation Home fan/apologist. Be thoroughly bored by following him Twitter at @_daledriver.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost here, launching on August 3 for PC, after a couple years in early access. The game looks like a true next-gen PC RPG, combining the classic turn-based gameplay Larian Studios is known for with absolutely stunning visuals I’ve never seen in an isometric CRPG.
Because the game has been out in early access for a while now, we have a pretty good idea of how it will run, and even though the game looks way better than Divinity: Original Sin 2, the system requirements aren’t actually that steep. Instead, this will be a game that’s all about scaling from low-end hardware to the very best graphics cards on the market right now.
Baldur’s Gate 3 System Requirements
Baldur’s Gate 3 has had official system requirements for both Windows and Mac for a while now. The minimum requirements are extremely reasonable, requiring only an Nvidia GTX 970 (an 8-year-old graphics card) and an Intel Core i5-4690. Both of which were mid-range parts nearly a decade ago, which means all kinds of budget gaming PCs will be able to play the game with ease.
The only thing really stopping old budget builds from playing the game is the hard requirement for an SSD. But, with how cheap the best SSDs are getting on a daily basis, it shouldn’t be much of a big deal to grab an affordable drive for your PC.
The recommended specs are a bit more intense, but even these requirements are tame for 2023. Larian recommends an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super or an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT for graphics, and an Intel 8700K for CPU. Both parts have been around for a while, and current-gen equivalents are dirt cheap. For instance, you can get roughly the same CPU performance out of an Intel Core i5-13600K, and the same GPU performance from an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will also run on the best MacBooks, though you’re going to need quite the machine to handle it. The developers recommend at least a MacBook Pro 15 (2016) with an AMD Radeon 460 – and that’s the minimum spec. If you want to run it at recommended specs, you’re looking at either a MacBook Pro 16 (2019) or a MacBook with an M1 and 16GB of RAM.
The Best PC for Baldur’s Gate 3
I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC since early access began back in 2020, and the recommended system requirements are perfect – if you’re playing at 1080p. But because all of those parts are discontinued at this point, you’ll need equivalent performance from whatever you can find on the shelf in 2023.
Right now the closest graphics card to the RTX 2060 Super is the Nvidia RTX 3060. Because that graphics card has been replaced by the RTX 4060 and is on its way out, you can actually get it for pretty cheap right now, like this $289 version from MSI on Amazon. If you want to go team Red, the best 1080p graphics card for Baldur’s Gate will probably be the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, which is a bit cheaper at $279.
If you want to step up to 1440p, you’re going to need a bit more graphics horsepower. We’d recommend going with the Nvidia RTX 3070 (if you can still find it in stock). Failing that, you should get about the same performance from the RTX 4060 Ti.
However, if you’re looking to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on one of the best gaming laptops, a good rule of thumb is to go up one tier to get similar performance. So, a gaming laptop with an Nvidia RTX 4070 will perform similarly to an RTX 4060. So, if you want to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on the go, you’re going to want at least an Nvidia RTX 3070 or RTX 4070.
As for the CPU, Larian Studios recommends at least an Intel Core i7-8700K, but you won’t find that for sale anywhere. For reference, though, that was a 6-core, 12-thread processor with a turbo boost of 4.7GHz. The best way to get similar performance is actually on Team Red. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X will only set you back about $160 these days and is a 6-core, 12-thread processor just like the older Intel chip.
To round out the build, you’re going to want an AMD B550 or X570 motherboard, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and at least a 256GB SSD. The game only requires 150GB of storage space, but you’re going to need some space for Windows 11, too.
You’ll also need a power supply that’s up to the task. Luckily, because none of the components in this build are especially power hungry, you don’t have to go too crazy here. A solid 700W power supply should be more than enough to handle everything I’ve mentioned. Try to find one that supports PCIe 5.0, as that’s more likely to have the 12VHPWR connectors modern Nvidia graphics cards have.
To save you a bit of time I went ahead and gathered up links to all the parts to build the perfect Baldur’s Gate 3 PC build for either 1080p or 1440p down below.
Should You Play Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC?
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that’s designed for PC first, even if it’s getting a PS5 release a month later. Not only will it look better on PC, at least if you have the hardware to push it to max settings, but it will likely control better with keyboard and mouse. In fact, while the game will be playable with a controller, Larian Studios haven’t added controller support to Early Access on PC, and the global launch is just a couple weeks away.
Not only is the game built for PC first, but it’s actually releasing earlier on PC, coming August 3 instead of September 6 on PS5. Getting the game running on a gaming PC means you’ll get a month jump start on this massive RPG.
