Our Favorite MicroSD Card for Switch and Steam Deck is On Sale for Prime Day

Prime Day is here, and the Samsung Evo Select 512GB MicroSD Cards are down to an all-time low of $29.99 for Prime members. This is another perfect deal for Switch owners, and one of our favorite Amazon Prime Day deals right now. Otherwise, our other favorite SD card choice the TeamGroup A2 Pro is also down to just $28.99 if you want to save an extra dollar vs the Samsung Evo. Both are great choices and well worth the current asking price on sale.

The deals don’t stop there either. Looking for the perfect power bank for your Switch, Steam Deck or ROG Ally? Then look no further. The widely popular and highly recommended Anker 737 portable charger has dropped to just $99.99 in Amazon Prime Day sales. This is the best price we’ve seen the power bank in a while, but it wasn’t long ago we were raving about the charger at $120, let alone $100.

With that extra $20 off compared to the last sale, this marks itself as one of the very best Prime Day deals of the shopping event, and well worth considering if you’ve been after the perfect portable charger for on-the-go gaming. For more deals, check out our full roundup of Prime Day gaming deals as well.

More Great Deals During Prime Day 2023

There are plenty of other great deals to already check out during the big Prime Day sale over July 11-12. This includes 3-months of Audible for free, 30% off the new Amazon Echo Buds (2023), and a whole selection of Amazon devices that have seen huge discounts.

Plus, we’ve even got 10 vital tips and tricks for you to follow to ensure you save as much as possible this Prime Day. If you’re trying to keep costs down while maintaining your favorite hobby, stay tuned for more incredible discounts, or follow @IGNDeals on Twitter for even more updates before Prime Day.

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

New Study Compares Classic Games to Silent Movies, Says Just 13 Percent Are Commercially Available

Spy shooter No One Lives Forever was critically-acclaimed when it released back in 2000, earning multiple awards nods and a sequel. We called it one of the best shooters of the year in our original review. If you want to play it in 2023, though, you’ll have to turn to one of the handful of digital archives available on the internet, because neither No One Lives Forever nor its sequel are commercially available on Steam nor anyone else.

No One Lives Forever is one example of a market where just 13 percent of games made before 2010 are commercially available, a new study conducted by the Video Game History Foundation revealed. For every remastered update of Metroid Prime, thousands of games are difficult or even possible to obtain legitimately, including games on popular platforms like the Game Boy.

Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it

“Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it,” the Video Game History Foundation’s Kelsey Lewin wrote in a blog explaining the study. “And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better — they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it.”

Like silent movies

That’s roughly the situation the video game industry finds itself in, says the new study, which compares the commercial availability of classic video games to the survival rate of silent movies (14 percent) and pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less).

The new study, which the Video Game History Foundation describes as the first of its kind, examined more than 4000 video games released in the United States before 2010, with a special focus on the Commodore 64, Game Boy, and the PlayStation 2. The Commodore 64, which was first introduced in 1982, is described as an “abandoned ecoystem with the lowest level of commercial interest,” while the Game Boy is described as “neglected” and the PlayStation 2 is called “active.”

It found that the overall availability of historical games is “dire,” with many held back by technical challenges, rights issues, and other problems. Goldeneye 007, which was finally re-released on Xbox and Switch earlier this year, has six separate rights holders, including director competitors Nintendo and Xbox. No One Lives Forever has three rights holders, and according to the study, none of them are entirely sure who owns what. It can also be prohibitively expensive to port games to new consoles, with Limited Run Games CEO Josh Fairhurst estimating that just one port can cost up to $350,000.

The result of all these challenges is that only the most popular retro games are re-released to modern platforms, with the rest being available at vintage gaming shops, emulation or digital archives. The struggle to obtain classic video games legitimately is mirrored in other mediums as streamers like Max and Disney Plus cull hundreds of shows in return for tax benefits.

Modern services such as Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, and Nintendo Switch Online offer access to vintage games in return for a norminal fee, as do retro collections like Digital Eclipse’s popular Cowabunga Collection. However, many more games remain tied to outdated hardware, and demand from collectors has driven up prices.

‘We’re hopeful that this study will incite change’

The Video Game History Foundation was founded by Frank Cifaldi in 2017 and is among the organizations leading the charge on game preservation as a culturally significant artform. It commissioned the study in part to advocate for making games available in libraries and other official archives, which the Enterainment Software Association has lobbied against through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, describing attempts to preverse games as “hacking” among other things.

The Video Game History Foundation notes that the next DMCA rulemaking proceeding is in 2014.

“We’re hopeful that this study will incite change,” Lewin wrote, “and that video game preservation will become stronger — before we lose more.”

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

The Boys’ Black Noir Returns to Reveal Details of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Crossover

Warning: The below story contains spoilers for The Boys Season 3.

The Boys’ Black Noir has returned from the dead – kind of – to reveal the details of the previously teased collaboration between the Prime Video superhero series and Call of Duty.

Black Noir confirmed (in his trademark silent fashion) that he’ll be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 along with Starlight (Erin Moriarty) and Homelander (Anthony Starr) with a press conference video posted by Vought International, the fictional corporation that oversees the superheroes within The Seven.

Of course, those who watch The Boys know that Black Noir died at the end of Season 3, which today’s video has an answer for. It says at the beginning in a text card that “the following press conference was filmed last year prior to Black Noir’s secret mission and Starlight’s betrayal of The Seven.”

The midseason update will start rolling out on July 12 as part of Modern Warfare 2’s Season 4 Reloaded. Each character will get their own Operator Bundle, with Starlight’s rolling out first on the 12th, Homelander’s on July 16, and Black Noir’s on July 20, per a Call of Duty blog post that revealed a few more details. Each bundle will cost 2,400 COD Points and include weapon charms, loading screens, weapon stickers, and emblems.

The initial news of The Boys collaborating with Call of Duty was teased in a Season 4 trailer for Call of Duty: Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 during Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest last month.

As for The Boys Season 4, we’re still awaiting an update on that, as showrunner Eric Kripke recently tweeted that a release date depends on how long the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike continues. But the crew behind Prime Video’s spinoff Gen V is planning a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, so details about that show should be coming within the next couple of weeks.

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

It’s Official: Sega of America Has Unionized

It’s official: Sega of America has unionized. More than 200 workers working out of the company’s offices in Irvine and Burbank voted today to unionize under the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega banner, which is represented by the Communications Workers of America.

The election took place on July 10, with 91 voting “yes” and 26 voting “no.” There were also 19 challenged ballots and three void ballots. It encompassed workers in departments including Brand Marketing, Games as a Service, Localization, Marketing, Product Development Ops, Sales, Quality Assurance, and others.

Sega of America workers announced the union back in April, with demands including higher base pay, improved benefits, and clear opportunities for career advancement.

The press release claims that the win makes the AEGIS-CWA the largest multi-department union of organized workers in the game industry. It joins the ZeniMax QA workers guild recognized by Microsoft back in January, with workers at Activision Blizzard also seeking to unionize. It will now head to the bargaining table to negotiate a contract with the Japanese publishing giant.

Katrina Leonoudakis, who previously worked for Sega as a localization specialist, was among those celebrating the election on Twitter.

“After months of organizing and weeks of enduring a brutal anti-union campaign by SEGA management, my friends at SEGA have done it!! So excited for everyone at SEGA to get the pay, benefits, and respect they all deserve,” Leonoudakis wrote.

IGN has reached out to Sega for comment.

Developing…

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Metal Gear Solid Voice Actor Paul Eiding Speaks Out on Fans, AI Using His Voice Work Without Permission

Paul Eiding, the voice actor behind Colonel Campbell in the Metal Gear Solid series, has spoken out about the use of his voice for AI projects without his permission.

Eiding tweeted yesterday urging content creators not to use his voice of Colonel Campbell and other characters from Transformers, Fallout, and other work involving him in an illegal manner.

“If you do not have written permission to use my voice, you DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION to use my voice,
including AI use,” he wrote. “Doing so is a violation of my legal rights and a real slap in the face.”

Eiding’s anger over the AI use of his voice comes on the heels of Erica Lindbeck, who voices Futaba Sakura in Persona 5, Hrist in God of War Ragnarok, and Blaze the Cat in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, speaking out on the same issue. According to TheGamer, Lindbeck asked fans on Twitter to report AI videos that use her voiceover work without her permission, including an AI-generated cover of “Welcome to the Internet” by Bo Burnham, which was sung by Futaba.

The AI creator then accused Lindbeck of inciting a harassment campaign against them over the video, which they deemed a “dumb but harmless Futaba AI cover”. The dispute forced the voice actress to delete her Twitter account without a word on if or when she’ll be back on the platform. Twitter has since suspended the AI creator from the platform for violating its media policy.

The impact of AI is an increasingly hot topic within the industry. In May, EA boss Andrew Wilson said the games industry would probably be “one of the greatest beneficiaries of AI”. He described AI as an “augment” to EA’s teams, as well as a way to allow players to create content within EA’s worlds. For more on the subject of AI, IGN recently held an AI Week of articles and video content all about the nascent technology.

Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.

Fortnite Creative 2.0 x 100 Thieves – Bank Heist Game Mode Explained

100 Thieves announced their new Fortnite game mode called “Bank Heist” coming to the community creator list July 11th at 11 AM PDT. Bank Heist will be available by searching the community pages or by using their island code that goes public tomorrow. I got a half hour of game time in so here’s what to expect going into Bank Heist.

Bank Heist is a 3v3 team-based game. You can queue in with a group of 6 if you want to face off against your friends and your teammates will be randomized when you enter the game mode. One team of three are the Defenders, and the other team are the Attackers.

There are four set classes you can pick: Muscle, Tank, Grenadier, and Sniper. Each has specific guns tied to their classes with the Tank having a shotgun, Grenadier getting throwable explosives, and the Sniper getting, well, a sniper rifle. There’s another class you can pick that randomizes your loadout every time you select it called Wildcard.

Each match is split into three stages: Bank Heist, Escort the Payload, and Extraction.

In the first stage, the Attackers’ goal is to infiltrate the bank and successfully drill into the underground vault. The Defenders have to guard the vault and hold off the Attackers until the timer runs out. If the Attackers succeed, stage 2 is launched.

Once the Attackers are through the vault, they’ll have to escort a payload to a designated endpoint. This stage plays a lot like Overwatch’s escort the payload concept where you have to be near the payload for it to move forward. Defenders must stop Attackers from getting the payload to its destination and run the clock down.

If Attackers get the payload to the drop point, a new building opens for them to run into, grab cash bags, and run to the getaway helicopter and drop money into it. You can choose to extract with as little or as many cash bags as you want as long as it’s within the time limit set. Defenders can destroy the helicopter before Attackers fly off with it and the helicopter will explode and respawn until the time runs out.

This is the base gameplay loop of Bank Heist and each team swaps sides to determine the winner. It’s a best of three game mode and if one team succeeds in winning two matches back to back, the game is over immediately without a third match.

It’s a fun team-based game but it felt very Attacker-sided. The timer runs a bit too long and seems to give the Attackers too many tries to succeed so it feels like if you’re on the attacking side, you can’t really lose. Your Fortnite MMR is supposed to carry over to matchmaking in Bank Heist so hopefully that’ll help with keeping team player balances from getting too out of hand.

Of course if you queue in with your friends then the balancing won’t be able to really work the way it should, but at least you’ll know everyone you’re playing with. The weapon balancing felt decent, especially with Wildcard being an option. However, only one person on the team is allowed to be a specific class so you have to choose wisely.

Bank Heist is just one of the many game modes available on Fortnite’s community hub created in Unreal Editor for Fortnite. 100 Thieves is set to release more updates for Bank Heist after it’s published and create more Fortnite Game Islands in the future.

Stella is a Video Producer, Host, and Editor at IGN. Her gameplay focus is on competitive FPS games and she’s previously reviewed Apex Legends, Hyper Scape, Halo Infinite Multiplayer, and Battlefield 2042. She regularly hosts and shoutcasts competitive Apex Legends and Halo Infinite tournaments when she isn’t streaming on her Twitch channel after work outs. You can follow her on Twitter @ParallaxStella.

Venba’s Delectable Cooking Puzzles Are a Labor of Love

There’s a beautiful scene in the second half of Venba where Venba, a mother with an adult son, spends all day joyfully cooking a veritable feast of different foods. The scene is wonderfully executed in so many ways – the context, the timing of the cooking and the music, and the way Venba’s confidence in the kitchen comes across through gameplay. But what had me in tears well before the actual emotional turning point of the scene was how clearly the developers managed to convey food as an expression of relentless love.

When I went to meet my fiance’s family in Georgia for the first time in 2021, I too was loved in this way. I didn’t grow up in a household where cooking happened with any regularity, so it wasn’t until meeting Amma and Moni for the first time that I learned what it meant to be loved intensely through food. I was loved through hot chai pressed into my hands first thing in the morning, through gazing daunted at so many plates of singara, and through hauling a massive suitcase of biriyani and spinach and lamb home that we ate effortlessly for weeks after.

Venba is a story about what was happening on the other side of that kind of love. It follows a woman named Venba, her husband Paavalan, and their son Kavin through a number of key moments in their lives. These range from Venba finding out she’s pregnant with Kavin in the 1980s, shortly after the family has immigrated to Canada from India, through Kavin as a grown adult in the 2010s. In each chapter, Venba and Kavin explore their familial relationships through food, which plays out in puzzles where the player guides them through a smudged, half-remembered, incomplete family recipe. The first chapter, for instance, goes through the process of making idlis, while later chapters involve more complex recipes such as biriyani and dosas.

I spoke with the Venba developers, creative director Abhi and art director Sam Elkana, earlier this year at GDC. The two are fairly new to the games industry, having just started their development journeys in 2020 with an action game called Balloon Man about a depressed superhero who can only make Balloons. It’s a very different game from Venba, but one day in the process of making it, Abhi came up with a different idea for a story about immigrant parents. He texted it in detail to Elkana, whose own experience being supported by his mother to come to Canada from Indonesia resonated with Abhi’s pitch. The two deliberated for two weeks before setting aside Balloon Man and proceeding with Venba.

Abhi is careful to tell me that the story, while derived from some personal experiences, is not autobiographical. He says that while he’s very different from Kavin, he did grow up in a Tamil community and watched many of his peers struggle to fit in.

Immigrant media always focuses on the children’s perspective…But I wanted to focus on the parents for once.

“And slowly the gap between the parents and the kids starts to grow and grow,” he continues. “And the parents who came here hoping to give a better life for the kids, they start regretting. Especially the ones who came in the ’80s, their only friends essentially are each other and their child. And so they start to live a very lonely life as they start to grow older. And to me the immigrant media, it always focuses, I feel like, on the children’s perspective, or, ‘Oh, it’s hard for them to have two lives, one at home, one at school.’ But I wanted to focus on the parents for once because I feel like their story wasn’t told enough.”

Abhi himself isn’t a parent, which might be surprising to anyone who experiences the empathetic perspective taken in Venba. He says he’s struggled to connect with a perspective shown in a lot of media of children frustrated with their parents as they try to assimilate.

“I think I’ve seen the life that the kids are leading here and they’re making stories about, it’s still a pretty good life,” he explains. “It’s the life that many people in India are aspiring for, like to get here, to move here. And that’s why the parents take a risk and they move. And they’re 40, 50, not an ideal age to forget everybody they’ve lived with and move here.”

Specifically, Venba is told through the lens of cooking and food, a decision Abhi says he made because cultural cuisine is something that will largely stay constant over the long period of time Venba covers (from the 80s to the late 2010s). While the relationship between parents and children will change over the years, he says, food remains a steady bridge that the two can use to communicate. The team did plenty of research into South Indian and Tamil food for the game, but the work proved to be quite challenging both due to the sheer smorgasbord of food types out there, and the lack of readily available information online.

“In the beginning, Sam and I were struggling quite a bit because I wanted to showcase a wide range of South Indian cuisine and be like, ‘Oh, if you play Venba you’ll understand what South Indian cuisine is,’” Abhi says. “But I quickly realized that’s impossible because it’s super diverse. Every state in India, I would say, has more diversity in its cuisine than a country in the European Union. People think all of India is one, but it’s not. And if you travel, every 10 kilometers the cuisine changes in South India even.

“So it was really hard. And I realized that I’m approaching Venba like a tour guide for people who haven’t had that before and I shouldn’t worry about making Venba encompassing. Instead, Venba should just be an introduction. Or maybe it inspires players to look up stuff on their own.”

Every state in India, I would say, has more diversity in its cuisine than a country in the European Union.

From there, Abhi and Elkana thought through what recipes made sense as “puzzles” for gameplay purposes, as well as what ingredients Venba would have access to in Canada in the 1980s through the early 2000s. Biriyani, for instance, appears later in the game because certain spices wouldn’t have been as accessible in the earlier years before more South Asian stores popped up in the country.

All of the food is lovingly depicted thanks to Elkana’s art direction. Elkana is inspired by older Cartoon Network animations including Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Lab, and Powerpuff Girls, which comes through in his personal work, though he admits he tried to veer a bit further away from those aesthetics in Venba. Venba is softer, he says, and has its own personality. With the food especially, Elkana worked to find a balance between a realistic and a more stylized look that would effectively capture the shapes, colors, and textures of the food but still fit with Venba’s overall tone. Elkana and Abhi both cooked and visited restaurants to try a number of different foods for inspiration – when we speak at GDC, their most recent conquest was cooking biriyani. Even separately, during the pandemic, Abhi would cook food and send photos of it to Elkana to try and replicate.

“It was very important to cook it, because if we are making it into a puzzle, if I’m changing anything about it, I need to verify,” Abhi says. “And the only way I can figure it out is by cooking it. And I would find the puzzle as I’m cooking it.”

Elkana tells me that what he’s proudest of in working on Venba is that he was able to make something sincere that “paid respect to the things that we went through.” And that sincerity comes through. The individual resonant pieces of Venba – such as the details in its food, relationships, and incredible score of homages to popular Indian music over recent decades – are topics for other writers with other experiences to dig into, and I hope they do. But as someone who has recently been deeply loved through food in a way not unlike how Venba expresses her love for Kavin, Venba truly moved me. I hope I get to have some of Moni’s chai again soon.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Tears of the Kingdom’s Mysterious Depths Is Still Sparking More Questions Than Answers

Over a month after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players have finally spent enough time in Hyrule, above, and below, that they’ve begun to form some seriously complex theories about what’s going on with the game’s lore. And one element appears to be puzzling the community more than any other: the Depths.

We’ve written before about the most interesting mystery of Tears of the Kingdom’s Depths, which is that it’s a dark mirror image of Hyrule above – a “dark world,” if you will. But even with that understanding, there are still tons of questions plaguing the minds of Tears of the Kingdom community about what the Depths really is, how it came to be, how old it is, and what it all means.

A recent thread on r/zelda highlights many of these questions, most notably because the community can’t seem to come to any kind of agreement on an answer for most of them. And boy, do people have theories. Some of them have more holes in them than others, but all of them speak to the deep curiosity of the community around this mysterious, dark Hyrule.

Here are a few of our favorites. Be warned: serious spoilers ahead for what’s in the Depths and what it means for the plot of Tears of the Kingdom.

The Depths are a pseudo-afterlife

u/huggiesdsc has a cool theory that, while unlikely, is still fun to imagine. They suggest that the Depths are a “pseudo-afterlife” that can be visited by living people similar to how characters from Greek mythology can visit the underworld. Chasms serve as portals to the underworld that connect the two realms thanks to Ganon’s magic.

Farfetched? Maybe – there are some holes in this theory, such as what this means for the Goron city of Gorondia or why the Zonai were able to mine materials in the underworld and then use them above ground. But it’s a fun thought experiment when you consider the Poes – lost souls that need to be guided to the afterlife via Bargainer Statues – and the ghost warriors holding weapons. One cool (or creepy) element of this theory is that it suggests Kohga, the leader of the Yiga that Link cast into a pit in Breath of the Wild, is actually dead. Link fights his vengeful spirit in the Depths, and Kohga is able to communicate with his living followers who descend to visit him in this way.

There’s a lot more to this theory, and the subsequent replies both debunk elements of it as well as add potential further support, but the idea of the Depths as having some connection to death is certainly a strong one regardless of whether or not it’s literally a Hyrule Hades.

The Depths are OLD. Real old.

This is less a theory and more an understanding many community members have come to based on lore directly from the game. We know for certain the Depths have been around in some fashion since before the Zonai appeared in Hyrule, since the Zonai found them already there and were able to build mines and extract Zonaite. So they’re definitely older than 10,000 years, likely significantly more so.

It’s not fully clear whether or not the Depths had anything resembling civilization down there at the time, though. While Gorondia being in the Depths indicates the Gorons either came from the Depths originally or at least dwelled there for a time, it’s equally possible that Gorondia was on the surface and just sank into a volcano at some point. Whatever the case, though, it’s clear that either the Gorons emerging or Gorondia sinking happened so far out of Goron historical memory that the legend of it has all but faded by the time of Tears of the Kingdom – again, we’re talking really old here.

Of course, this opens up a number of other questions. For instance, why is there a mine exactly where Tarry Town is? Did the Zonai somehow know Tarry Town would be built by Link thousands of years later, or did Tarry Town come into existence, subconsciously or otherwise, because of the mine? If that’s the case, why isn’t there a mine under what used to be the Hyrule Castle Town? No one seems to have a good answer for these questions. One theory, suggested by u/lolIiollie and u/MiddleNightCowboy, is that the Depths are actually an “ancient” version of Hyrule that’s been long-since buried, implying that the Zonai built the mines where they did on the ruins of ancient versions of present-day towns. Maybe there was a Tarry Town more than 10,000 years ago!

The Depths are at least somewhat magical

Several community members, including Ryon21_ and Iguanaught, have suggested that the Depths are a little bit magical, while also being a physical phenomenon, and other community members have suggested similar ideas. The gist of them all put together is that while the Depths is a real place – not an Afterlife, but an actual part of Hyrule, it exists in a world where magic is absolutely a thing, magical beings created the world originally, and magic has an influence on what happens in it. In that context, it’s completely plausible that an underground world could exist full of magical rocks and wandering spirits that’s over 10,000 years old but also perfectly mirrors the present day world. Maybe there’s no explanation beyond that.

That ties in with another thread many community members have pulled on – that the Depths are a concept we’ve seen in other Zelda games repeatedly. Multiple games have dark worlds, mirror worlds, or otherwise reversed or aesthetically dark versions of the main Hyrule that Link can visit and explore, and we don’t always get a full lore explanation for why or how any of those exist in the first place. So in that respect, maybe there is no answer for the Depths.

But that’s no fun. So let’s get really wild with this last one.

Demise originated in the Depths

Okay, this is absolutely a stretch, but enough folks mentioned it we have to share it. Several community members are suggesting that the Depths are actually where Demise – the primary antagonist of Skyward Sword and the demon that repeatedly reincarnates at Ganon – came from.

The evidence for this is flimsy. Skyward Sword states that Demise is an eternal entity who came out of a fissure in the ground to find the Triforce, and was eventually sealed away by the Goddess Hylia. Community members such as u/OSCgal have noted a canyon on the Tears of the Kingdom/Breath of the Wild map called the “Breach of Demise”, implied to be where Demise first came out of. But if that were the case, he could have conceivably been hiding out in the Depths prior to that.

There’s nothing else really to suggest this is actually the case, though admittedly if it were true any evidence he had been down there would have been long gone by the time Tears of the Kingdom rolled around given the rather convoluted Zelda timeline. But it’s a fun thought experiment to imagine that the demon king himself, the spirit reincarnating as Ganondorf, was Hyrule’s feet the entire time before.

If you read all of this very spoilery stuff before finishing the game and still need help in Tears of the Kingdom, take a look at our Tears of the Kingdom Walkthrough and Guide about making your way through Hyrule. In fact, you can start here:

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Never Mind the BioShocks, Clockwork Revolution Is the ‘Love Child’ of Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Recently-announced Xbox game Clockwork Revolution is the “love child” of Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

That’s according to Clockwork Revolution game director Chad Moore, who worked on both cult-classic role-playing games before joining Microsoft-owned studio inXile Entertainment.

Arcanum is a much-loved 2001 steampunk RPG developed by the defunct Troika Games. Both Moore and Clockwork Revolution principal designer Jason Anderson worked on Arcanum before moving on to Troika’s cult-classic 2004 RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Now, over 20 years later, the pair are back together making Clockwork Revolution.

“With deep world building, compelling narrative, crunchy RPG systems, engaging gameplay, and massive reactivity, I’ve always described [Clockwork Revolution] as the love child of [Arcanum] and [Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines],” Moore tweeted.

“In 1998, I started working on [Arcanum] with Jason Anderson – a unique game that took place in a deep and immersive steampunk world,” Moore said last month. “To return to the genre and be reunited with Jason (and [inXile boss] Brian Fargo) on [Clockwork Revolution] almost 25 years has been one of the highlights of my career.”

Moore’s tweet does not mention inspiration from BioShock Infinite. When Microsoft unveiled Clockwork Revolution during June’s Xbox Games Showcase with a reveal trailer some said looked remarkably similar to Irrational Games’ 2013 shooter adventure, Microsoft insisted any similarities between inXile’s upcoming RPG and BioShock Infinite were “unintentional”.

Clockwork Revolution is described as a “time-bending steampunk first-person RPG”. “After stumbling across an incredible invention that allows you to travel into the past, you discover the city you call home — the vibrant steam-powered metropolis of Avalon — has been carefully crafted through the alteration of historical events,” reads the description.

“By traveling back to key moments, your interactions and choices will have a butterfly effect on the deep, narrative-driven world and characters of Avalon, causing them to change and react in unprecedented ways.”

The similarity with BioShock Infinite became the top talking point for Clockwork Revolution in the wake of its reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase. In response, a Microsoft spokesperson told IGN: “Any similarities are unintentional. Players will be able to fully customize their own main character in the game.”

Character customisation was one feature highlighted by inXile boss Brian Fargo in a series of tweets that stressed the RPG-ness of Clockwork Revolution. Fargo called Clockwork Revolution a “deep RPG” with “full character creation”, a “branching dialogue system”, “awesome” steampunk weapons and “dark humour”.

These features are points of difference between Clockwork Revolution and BioShock Infinite, the latter of which is less a role-playing game, more a linear, story-based first-person shooter adventure. These features are also in-keeping with the types of games inXile has made in the past, including Wasteland 3, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and The Bard’s Tale 4.

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.

Want to Take a Break From Diablo 4 and Play Something Else? ‘That’s Fine,’ Blizzard Says

Blizzard has told Diablo 4 players who have reached all their goals that it’s fine to take a break from the game ahead of the launch of Season 1, dubbed Season of the Malignant, on July 20.

Diablo 4 launched big early June, becoming Blizzard’s fastest-selling game ever. It has only been out five weeks, but some players have already hit the level 100 with a permadeath Hardcore character, and are now repeatedly target-farming in a bid to obtain loot that increases their power in ever-shrinking increments. There are even reports of players completing Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons in Hardcore mode, considered one of the hardest challenges currently in-game. As a result, some players have said they are either getting bored with the Diablo 4 endgame after cramming in hundreds of hours in such a short amount of time, or feeling burnt out.

During a recent livestream, Diablo 4 associate game director Joe Piepiora said Blizzard staff take their own advice, and pointed to the launch of new seasons as a great time to return to the action role-playing game because they offer a fresh start to all.

“When you’ve reached all the goals and done the things you think are important, and you want to go take a break to play something else for a little while, that’s fine,” Piepiora said. “We do the same thing. But when a season rolls and there are new things for you to come out, that’s a great time to come back, particularly if you had a good time playing before, that’s exactly when you should come back and check out Diablo 4 fresh.”

“I’ll be honest, when the next WoW [World of Warcraft] expansion comes out, there’s a non-zero chance that I’m going to be playing WoW for a while,” added lead game producer Tim Ismay. “But it’s great to know there’s a point that I can come back to Diablo 4, and everybody’s on an even footing.”

Diablo 4 players must start a new character to play Season 1 content, which means players can safely take a break without falling behind. Diablo development boss Rod Fergusson said seasons “allow us to have a fresh start for everybody”.

It’s worth pointing out you need to complete the Diablo 4 campaign in order to engage with Season 1, which makes sense given the Season 1 questline takes place after the events of the campaign. But, if you’ve completed the campaign once, all subsequent characters can skip the campaign, meaning you can get stuck into Season 1 straight away. Check out our interactive Diablo 4 map to start tracking your progress as you play.

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.