Bandai Namco announced that One Piece: Odyssey’s Reunion of Memories DLC will release on May 25. In this upcoming expansion, the Straw Hats are approached by a girl resembling Lim and they are sent into another world.
Over on the PlayStation Blog, Bandai Namco explained how the Reunion of Memories has a new battle system called Limited Order Battles that emphasizes a more strategic way of fighting. In a battle with Rear Admiral Barricade, the Straw Hats must defeat him while avoiding knocking out his sailor allies. Defeating the sailors isn’t necessary to win the battle, and each sailor knocked out only makes Rear Admiral Barricade stronger.
While the Straw Hats can stun and confuse the sailors, the DLC adds an NPC ally that will try to defeat the sailors, boosting Barricade’s power level. The purpose of this ally is to make battles more dynamic.
Additionally, the DLC’s narrative has a branching storyline system where players can choose between two options. One choice potentially keeps the Straw Hats away from danger while the other will put them in it. When the Straw Hats are trying to save the mayor of Water Seven, they can either save the workers and ask for their help or take the streets back to the mayor’s house. Both paths result in a battle but the enemies will be different.
One Piece: Odyssey was released on January 12 for PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The Reunion of Memories DLC was teased back in April, but now it’s confirmed to release later this May.
In IGN’s One Piece: Odyssey review, we said, “One Piece Odyssey proves that a classic turn-based RPG is a good genre fit for the world and characters of One Piece, and that makes it rewarding despite a lack of tension in its all-too-easy fights and some frustrating quest design that pads out its length.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
Ask yourself this: what do you want from a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? More enemy variety? Better dungeons? Totally unexpected new ideas? Or is simply more Hyrule to explore enough for you? Thankfully, you don’t have to pick just one, because Nintendo’s response to all of those answers is a casual but confident, “Sure thing.” The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t necessarily revolutionize what already made Breath of the Wild one of the greatest games of all time, but it’s not a sequel that’s simply more of the same, either. This sandbox is bigger, richer, and somehow even more ambitious, with creative new systems like vehicle building, ridiculous weapon crafting, and a revamped map with a dizzying amount of depth further fleshing out the intoxicating exploration that made the original so captivating. Breath of the Wild felt far from unfinished but, inconceivably, Tears of the Kingdom has somehow made it feel like a first draft.
Before we dive too deep into Hyrule, a quick note about spoilers. I won’t spoil the (actually pretty great) story Tears tells, but these games are about so much more than the plot. That magic the first time you see one of BotW’s dragons soaring overhead is around every corner here too, and the last thing I’d want to do is steal the many moments that made my jaw literally drop from you. That said, there are some huge parts of Tears that are introduced fairly early on that I will be talking about because of how fundamental they are to why this game is so impressive. I am going to preserve as much of the magic as I can but, if (like millions of others) you’ve already decided you are going to play Tears, you should probably just go play it and then come back to share in the wonder with me later.
On top of that, you’ll likely want to have played BotW to fully understand much of what I’ll be discussing here – not to mention because it’s an incredible game and you’re depriving yourself by skipping it. Tears looks even smarter and more expansive when you know what came before it, but many of the recognizable basics shine just as brightly. Things that are as simple as being able to climb nearly any wall or glide as far as your expandible stamina will take you, or the concept of shrines acting as self-contained puzzle chambers you can solve to boost your abilities are things I don’t have time to get into here simply because there’s so much new to cover.
I can safely say people who enjoyed BotW will almost certainly like Tears, partly because of just how similar these two games are. The initial structure is a very familiar one: you start in a masterfully crafted introductory area where you learn the ropes and get a new set of powerful abilities, then dive into the open world with a main quest marker that quickly splits into four. From there you are free to do whatever the heck you want. You can even march right to the finale of the campaign if you know where to look, though that’s not quite as straightforward to attempt this time around (which is probably for the best, as I do not recommend it for anybody but the inevitable speedrunners, whom I proudly salute).
The story stands out from your typical Zelda plots.
The bulk of the cutscenes and big story moments are also once again collected at specific spots around the map, shedding light on the history of Hyrule and the source of the “Upheaval” – a bombastic event at the start of Tears that opens up menacing chasms, causes the ruins of an ancient civilization called the Zonai to appear floating in the sky, and peppers the surface with new structures and strange anomalies. This still might not be the best storytelling structure over the course of such a large game, as it leaves you without much direct interaction with its central characters for most of your time playing, but that’s very easy to forgive when the story itself is so dang cool.
Sure, it’s about stopping some evil jerk (welcome back, Ganondorf) and saving Princess Zelda as usual, but the direction that familiar shell is taken is buck wild at times in the best possible way. I’m still a bit amazed Nintendo decided to go the way it did, and the freshness that surprise provides helps Tears stand out amongst your typical Zelda plots. It’s not storytelling on the level of a game like God of War or anything, but it can be a legitimate high point instead of simply the entertaining background flavor it was mostly relegated to in BotW.
Exploration is the lifeblood of the recent Zeldas, though, and doing so is still an absolute delight in Tears – especially when the new building system empowers you to slap together custom cars, boats, and flying machines that truly let you navigate its world however you want. BotW has influenced countless other games since its release in 2017, but one of the most important lessons that very few of them seemed to learn is that a blank map can be more powerful than a full one. There is an enormous amount of stuff to do and see, and if you were handed a checklist of waypoints to methodically clear off right away it could easily feel overwhelming rather than exciting. Instead, you are given the bare minimum you need to complete the main quest, a pile of pins, and a blank map just begging you to fill it in yourself.
Marking down points of interest as you dive in from the sky, hearing rumors as you talk to townsfolk, or simply getting lost and stumbling by something interesting is so much more rewarding than following an arrow to your next destination. It comes from experience, but Nintendo has incredible confidence that we will seek out the map’s secrets without being led directly to them – and if we don’t see absolutely everything, that’s okay. It makes the whole adventure feel so natural, so much less “video gamey” than you might expect, which is particularly important when Tears basically doubles the size of this world.
This may be the same map, but it in no way feels repetitive.
While this is the same fundamental map of Hyrule, it in no way feels repetitive to explore – even as someone who’s scoured BotW for secrets. The story doesn’t give you a hard number, but it’s been a few years since the defeat of Calamity Ganon, and the people are rebuilding. The main town is a brand-new outpost that has sprung up in Hyrule Field just outside of the castle, giving you a hub that evolves in entertaining ways as you progress. It’s a ton of fun to recognize characters or locations and see how they’ve grown or changed, but even beyond those explicit differences, Tears simply sends you along unexpected paths and to unfamiliar locations. That made me constantly see parts of Hyrule I knew and loved from a different perspective, breathing plenty of life into a map that clearly still had more than enough to give.
And if that’s not enough for you, there are also more substantial changes. I’ll leave many of the fine details for you to find on your own, but I will say that whole areas have been drastically altered by the Upheaval, causing unexpected weather anomalies or creating brand-new terrain for chests and shrines alike to hide in. The main quest has you marching toward many of those areas head-on, but there are also plenty of examples off the beaten path that I’ve discovered across the more than 100 hours of playing (and I’m sure there are many more I’ve missed). For example, the beach town of Lurelin in the southeast didn’t play a huge role in BotW, but almost immediately Tears tells you it’s been attacked by pirates, putting both its rescue and its rebuilding in your hands.
And if that’s not enough for you, there are also dozens and dozens of caves, wells, and sky islands to explore. These are all largely self-contained little encounters to complete, ranging from hidden fairy fountains to expansive obstacle courses that put your cleverness and combat prowess to the test. I loved stumbling upon a new cave and fighting my way through winding halls full of monsters to find some hidden piece of armor at the end – or sometimes even a larger boss monster guarding a shrine. Meanwhile, looking up instead of down, using one of the new Skyview Towers to launch myself into the air let me easily find shrines on the surface before gliding to a nearby floating archipelago filled with its own challenges to take on.
And if that’s still not enough for you, then boy oh boy did I save the biggest for last – and let this also serve as a final warning that if you want to know nothing beyond what’s been shown in trailers and previews, turn back now (granted, this part is revealed to you very shortly after the introductory area). Even with all of what I’ve talked about so far, I can understand if someone might think Nintendo took a safe route by reusing the same (if altered) map, but it was when I dove down one of the angry, red chasms that dot the surface and into the Depths below that all my doubts melted into pure, joyous amazement. Rest assured that the generally small sky islands do not represent the entirety of the new area to explore, because waiting beneath is a dangerous, pitch-black map that is literally the size of Hyrule itself. It is massive. I have played over 100 hours of Tears and I have revealed maybe half of this wondrous new area.
Any doubt melted into pure, joyous amazement when I dove down my first chasm.
While roughly the same size as the surface, the Depths doesn’t have as much in the way of side quests or story moments but is full of treasure chests to seek out and plenty of surprises worth discovering for yourself, many of which are brilliantly hidden in plain (if very dark) sight. It acts as Zelda’s version of a “poison swamp”-style nightmarescape, too, thanks to a red substance called Gloom that coats both its terrain and enemies. When you take damage from Gloom, your max health is decreased until you either return to the light or eat a Gloom-removing meal, adding an enjoyable mounting pressure to every fight.
What do I mean by “return to the light?” That’s a whole different can of worms. The Depths is completely dark (like, Advanced Darkness dark), meaning you have to throw out collectable Brightbloom Seeds as you walk to see where you are going, which gives exploration a totally different and much tenser feel. There are no shrines in the Depths; instead, there are dozens of structures called Lightroots that heal your Gloom damage and illuminate a part of the map around them when activated, giving you another completionist goal that’s equal parts compelling and extensive.
Taken all together, the Depths and the sky islands act as brilliant complements to the more traditional surface activities, stretching a structure I was already intimately familiar with into beautiful settings and wild situations I very much wasn’t. Whether it’s lighting up the darkness below, flying a custom glider between floating rocks hundreds of meters up, or just seeing what’s down at the bottom of some random well, there is so much to do in Tears that it’s easy to spend hours upon hours completing tasks without ever once looking at your quest log. You might be heading to a point of interest only to get sidetracked by some cave worth exploring nearby or a citizen with a quest for you, and suddenly you’re off getting hopelessly distracted by a delightfully spontaneous activity that’s just as exciting.
That was part of the magic of BotW too – as well as plenty of other great open-world games – but now there are uncountable opportunities to end up wildly far away from where you thought (almost always incorrectly) you were going. One time I was making my way toward a tower hoping to chart a new section of the map when I stumbled upon a friendly drummer in need of some honey, so I promptly switched priorities and headed toward a nearby forest in search of bees… and of course, it wasn’t very long after that I was in the literal underworld being murdered by a giant robot as a result. I just wanted some honey. Nintendo had different plans for me, and I couldn’t be happier about that.
It’s hard to overstate how big this game feels, even in the context of Breath of the Wild.
In 2017, I had played just over 80 hours of BotW when I finally decided to beat the final boss, feeling content that I had done all of the side quests, shrine hunting, and other odds and ends that I wanted to do. Not quite all that existed, mind you, but definitely a significant majority and certainly all of what really tempted me. Similarly, I beat Tears’ main questline around the 82-hour mark, but this time I feel like I have barely done half of all the things I still want to. Even more than 20 hours after that, I still have dozens of Lightroots to find, plenty of shrines left to complete, two maps marked up with loads of unexplored points of interest, a laundry list of side quests waiting for me, and so much more.
I took my time playing through the main quest stuff, too, letting myself wander and get distracted as I so love to do. It’s hard to overstate how big this game feels, even in the context of a predecessor that made me say that exact same thing. The in-game tracker tells me I’ve barely passed 50%. Send help.
So much of Tears feels like a direct response to BotW and what people have said about it since its release, a fact that can be seen clearly across its bolstered enemies and weapons, but perhaps most obviously in its dungeon design. The Divine Beasts got a lot of flack for bucking usual Zelda dungeon trends, and while their equivalent in Tears doesn’t scratch that itch of collecting a compass, map, and key item like in older Zelda games either, they are at least a lot more thematically interesting and varied this time around. The tasks themselves aren’t actually very different from the Divine Beasts, but their flavorful new context and the epic paths that generally lead up to them are a thrill, making them all far more entertaining than the rather restrictive insides of those ancient machines.
The other huge improvement throughout all of Tears is the boss variety. No longer are you fighting four variations of the same Ganon-adjacent enemy; you’re now facing unique and often wildly entertaining foes that can occasionally stand with the greats of the series. I don’t want to give away too much about them, but a standout for me was certainly a gooped-up monster that felt like a Splatoon villain had somehow infiltrated Hyrule. New boss-like enemies abound all across this map, in fact, with the returning Hinox and Talus joined by leaping Frox and fearsome three-headed Gleeok.
It’s not just the bosses – enemy variety as a whole has been vastly improved, and it’s elevated the still rather straightforward but extremely satisfying combat as a result. At the simplest level, Bokoblins can now carry baskets of throwable items or wear armor you have to break specifically with blunt weapons, but they can also be led by a huge Boss Bokoblin that coordinates their attacks. New Horriblins menacingly crawl along cave ceilings, Constructs can shoot rocket arrows at you, Like Likes will devour you whole, and Little Frox will scurry out to eat the Brightblooms you’ve worked so hard to collect and plant in the Depths. It’s a wide and impressive menagerie that can genuinely push you to play differently depending on what’s in front of you.
The weapon fusion just says, “Yes” to whatever you throw at it.
That’s also true of the absolutely absurd new weapon fusion system, which lets you attach any item or object onto any other weapon, shield, and often even arrowhead. Monster horns now act as powerful blades or bludgeons to buff your base weapons, letting you do sweet things like replace the blade of a rusty sword with the katana-like saber of a Blue Lizalfos horn. You can also do extremely dumb stuff, like put a bomb on the end of a stick to blow both you and your enemies up the moment you jab them with it, or put a minecart on a spear because… I don’t know, why not? It’s a system that just says, “Yes” to whatever you throw at it, and then trusts you to figure out what’s good, bad, or incredibly funny.
Even though the somewhat controversial weapon durability system is back, so you should prepare for the heartbreak of your favorite sword shattering in your hands all over again, it’s been totally recontextualized by this new fusion system. Suddenly, you can essentially farm strong weapons simply by killing powerful enemies, because having a bag full of monster parts is the equivalent of having dozens of backup weapons just waiting for a handle to be attached to. You won’t find fire swords just lying around anymore – you have to make them, and any base sword will do fine if you’ve got the horn of a fire dragon to slap onto it.
There’s loads of room to min-max and build high-damage weapons that are tailor-made to take down the hardest enemies Tears can throw at you here, but so much of the power and playstyle of a weapon coming from the attachment instead of the base meant I was always excited to hunt down more powerful parts rather than hoard what I managed to find. (Or I would just stick a stick on a stick so I could poke an enemy from twice as far away, whatever sticks for you!)
Tears adds additional nuance to combat by giving you even more options to explore, too. Throwing items are now a key part of every encounter, letting you hurl everything from bombs (which are now an explosively powerful consumable item rather than a weaker but infinitely reusable ability) to special plants – like the excellent Muddle Bud that makes enemies attack each other, or the Dazzlefruit that causes them to drop their weapons. These items can be attached to arrowheads for the same effect from afar, and shields can even have objects like flame or ice throwers slapped onto them to transform them from a defensive option to an offhand weapon. The controls for throwing and attaching arrowheads started out a little tricky, since you have to select the items you want to use one at a time, but once I got the hang of it I found it to be a super-intuitive system that let me pull off cool mid-fight maneuvers I would never be able to do in BotW.
The building tools walk the line of powerful but approachable extremely well.
The complementary ability to weapon fusion is the boundlessly creative Ultra Hand building system. Essentially, BotW’s Magnesis power got a huge upgrade that now lets you pick up, rotate, and attach almost any object to another with ease. This is supported by dozens of special objects, called Zonai Devices, that you can pull out of your inventory at any time, giving you immense freedom in how you navigate the world around you. It’s amazing how often I would take a Zonai glider and a few fans out of my pocket to build a makeshift airplane and fly somewhere extremely far away extremely fast, and I loved experimenting with powered wheels to make cars that could take me from town to town faster than any horse. Your creations can even be effective in combat, with one Zonai device acting as a Roomba-like base that automatically drives toward enemies, waiting to be loaded up with whatever instruments of doom you can concoct.
These building tools walk the line of powerful but approachable extremely well, being fairly snappy and easy to use while allowing for a level of customization it’s hard to find the limits of. Why climb that cliff when you can just strap a hot air balloon to a log and ride it up? Why swim across that river when you could quickly assemble a speedboat instead? One time I was driving a little car I’d built, only to reach a dead-end mountain next to a deep valley – but instead of abandoning my creation to climb over, I channeled my inner Doc Brown and turned it into a flying car that was able to hover around the mountain instead. Did Nintendo mean for me to go that way? I have no idea. I didn’t earn anything for it, but that simple act might still be one of the most rewarding gaming moments I’ve had in a long time. “I’m not sure I was supposed to do that, but it worked” sort of feels like the unofficial slogan of BotW to me, and Tears leans even harder into that creativity.
These building tools are woven into every part of Tears, with most of its shrine challenges asking you to make use of them in inventive or inspiring ways. However, this isn’t The Legend of Zelda: Nuts & Bolts. That is to say, this system doesn’t warp Tears into something unrecognizably about building. In almost every scenario where a contraption would be the best or “intended” way to do something, you’ll find the pieces for a simple creation sitting nearby. There’s also an Autobuild ability that lets you save designs and hunt down schematics for developer-designed creations. That means Tears provides shortcuts if you aren’t really interested in this side of it while simultaneously empowering those of us who are to essentially play Kerbal Space Program within The Legend of Zelda.
I had tons of fun using these tools to find solutions to the problems put in front of me. A highlight is a recurring character who needs help holding up a sign at dozens of different locations around Hyrule, asking you to use nearby resources to prop it up in progressively more ridiculous situations. Getting from point A to point B can become an engaging puzzle all its own, whether that’s building a contraption to help get a Korok (yes, this world is once again full of them) to his far-off friend, or making a traveling band’s carriage fly to get them up a mountain side. Amidst all this cleverness there’s also a hysterical air of Looney Tunes lunacy, letting you strap literal rockets to anything and everything and then watch like Wile E. Coyote as your plans disastrously blow up in your face or simply drive off out of control. Sometimes failure is just as amusing as success.
It’s clear Nintendo was listening to feedback after BotW.
Your other two new abilities take a less prominent role, but they support the additions made elsewhere nicely. You can reverse time on objects with Recall, which is largely used either to ride rocks that have fallen from sky islands back up where they came from or to send an enemy attacks back at them in neat ways, while Ascend lets you warp through the ceiling up to whatever is above you. Given all of the caves in Tears, the ability to quickly get above ground again or climb certain mountains faster is essential, and it can even be used to find all manner of sneaky secrets. It took my brain some time to remember I even had this power, but once I started “thinking with portals” it became one of my favorite tools. Neither of these abilities are quite as exciting as Ultra Hand or Fuse, necessarily, but it’s notable that I never once mourned the loss of Stasis or Cryonis, which are completely gone since Link no longer has the Sheikah Slate from BotW.
There are also a million and a half little quality-of-life improvements that make it even harder to go back to BotW after Tears. That includes super-simple things like the fact that you are now given the option to drop a weapon, shield, or bow right away when you open a chest with a full inventory rather than having to back out first, open the menu, drop the thing, and open the chest again. But there are also more involved changes, like finally having a convenient recipe list that saves every meal and elixir you’ve ever made or found, which I actually specifically said would be a great addition just a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t even begin to round up all the little bits and bobs like this, and it signals loudly that Nintendo was listening to feedback, even if it didn’t always make drastic changes in response.
One place Tears hasn’t necessarily improved over BotW, however, is performance. This can be a beautiful game, especially when flying high above its gorgeous landscapes with a consistently incredible soundtrack in the background, but the reality is that even when running in docked mode it’s still at 1080p resolution and 30 frames per second, at best. Obviously, that does not technically compare to what games on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, or PC can do. However, unless you value resolution and frame rate above absolutely everything, including gameplay, that’s not really the point.
The majority of the time Tears runs just fine, but the frame rate will take noticeable dives any time there are too many effects on screen at once. It didn’t feel any worse than the same exact issues in BotW, though it is a little more noticeable in the simple but charming new raids you can do against enemy camps with a group of NPC monster hunters. I also infrequently noticed things could briefly freeze while diving down quickly from the sky (the same sort of freeze BotW speedrunners see when zipping across Hyrule a little too fast).
The frame rate still dips sometimes, but I saw essentially no bugs in over 100 hours.
But on the whole, just as before, these issues rarely interrupt the action in a truly detrimental way. The frame rate dips can certainly be distracting at times, but the only harm they really cause is the emotional damage of making me once again pine for a Switch Pro, as we’ve all been doing for the past several years. Would it look nicer on a more powerful, more modern system? Definitely, and I hope Nintendo makes one before too long. But does that mean I am going to touch my PS5 or Xbox again until I’ve finished exploring this new version of Hyrule? Not a chance.
It’s also really quite remarkable that I saw essentially no bugs across more than 100 hours of game time, positioning it far away from a mess like last year’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet or plenty of other recent games on other platforms. Frankly, the fact that you can jump from the very top of the sky and dive all the way to the surface, straight through a chasm, and down to the floor of the Depths seamlessly, with zero load screens, on a Switch made in 2017 feels like a miracle, and that makes overlooking the handful of moments I saw it hang for a second or two while doing so incredibly easy.
Phil Spencer’s recent comments about Xbox’s third-place standing in the video game marketplace have created quite a stir in the Xbox community. We play Phil’s quote and then spend a LOT of time reacting to and discussing it. Plus: it’s the First Annual Xbox Games Showcase Draft! We compile a list of the games we think are most likely to make an appearance at next month’s Showcase. Some of our choices might surprise you!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out our interview with Todd Howard, who answered all of our Starfield questions after the big reveal at the Xbox Showcase:
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.
As Diablo IV inches closer to its June launch date, Blizzard has revealed battle pass pricing and how the RPG will handle its seasonal content.
As detailed in its latest livestream developer blog, Blizzard outlined the Diablo IV season basics with a breakdown on rewards and progression. The first season begins in mid to late July, with four seasons planned per year–one per quarter, each set to last for three months.
Seasons aren’t meant to expand upon Diablo IV’s main narrative; that’s being left to its expansions. Instead, it’ll focus on separate, themed content iterating on the base game and introducing “fresh concepts and ideas into the world of Sanctuary.” Those concepts include new gameplay mechanics, characters, questlines, items, and balancing tweaks.
With each season, Diablo IV adds seasonal questlines and self-contained stories to the mix. Those quests walk you through new gameplay events tying into the RPG’s latest themed experience. During the stream, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson added this split from the core campaign’s story allowed the team to create quests and mechanics “not bound by the campaign.”
“You’re basically creating questlines in the open world that can be completely different and not constrained to it has to be about the narration level of story,” Fergusson said. “It can be about anything that’s interesting you want to play into in the open world.”
You’re basically creating questlines in the open world that can be completely different and not constrained to it has to be about the narration level of story
Diablo IV’s quarterly updates are for post-launch adventuring, so you’ll need to complete the base game before jumping in. After playing through once, every new character can skip the campaign and begin the seasonal update immediately. Seasons will require a new character, and though your older characters are still accessible, they can’t participate in these additions.
Every quarter adds a seasonal journey to support you through Diablo IV’s new additions, which include challenges and rewards that work towards completing the battle pass using its experience point system, Favor. Blizzard’s seasonal pass offers a free path to completion, along with paid routes and additional perks.
Blizzard reveals Battle Pass pricing
The free battle pass is available to everyone, adding 27 tiers with rewards like Smoldering Ashes and other cosmetics. Ashes can be redeemed for seasonal blessings (buffs) for experience points, gold, potion extensions, or Obols. Blizzard noted that paid pass rewards don’t include additional Smoldering Ashes, and you’ll need to hit certain character milestones before claiming goodies that affect gameplay.
As for Diablo IV’s paid battle pass options, additions include:
Premium Pass (~$10)
63 additional tiers
Two full cosmetic armor sets for each class
Weapon and armor cosmetics
Seasonal mount and mount armor
Accelerated Pass (~$25)
All perks from the premium pass
Immediately unlocks 20 tiers
Wings of the Creator emote
Since seasons only last three months, the accelerated pass is geared toward anyone who starts the season late, retroactively unlocking tiers for a boost. Some perks unlocked through the season, like unique items and powers, join you in Diablo IV’s base game after the events wrap up. Along with its monetized battle pass tracks, Blizzard also says it’s planning a rotating assortment of gear for Diablo IV’s cash shop. Items purchased in the shop are purely cosmetic, and class cosmetics are available for all characters account-wide.
Diablo IV Season 1 has yet to set an exact date, and Blizzard’s developer panel noted details around its theme would be discussed after launch on June 6, 2023. And while its debut is hardly a month out, you can still check out the final Diablo IV beta planned for May 12 through May 14.
Andrea Shearon is a freelance contributor for IGN covering games and entertainment. She’s worn several hats over her seven-year career in the games industry, with bylines over at Fanbyte, USA Today’s FTW, TheGamer, VG247, and RPG Site. Find her on Twitter (@Maajora) or the Materia Possessions podcast chatting about FFXIV, RPGs, and any series involving giant robots.
When Guerilla Games released the trailer for Burning Shores, the new expansion for Horizon Forbidden West, developers from other studios quickly took notice of a moment that might otherwise have gone unremarked upon:
“that hug at 0:45 is a technical flex like YOU HAVE NO IDEA,” wrote Strange Scaffold head Xalavier Nelson Jr. He was echoed in the replies by numerous other developers and fans, all of whom were struck by the realization of why we so rarely see two characters hugging one another in games. Turns out, it’s very, very hard for developers to make this happen while making it look normal and believable. And yet, Guerrilla has been making Aloy warmly hug her friends since Zero Dawn.
So how is Guerilla pulling off this technical feat? I spoke with Guerilla studio animation director Richard Oud, who admitted he was pleasantly surprised that anyone was noticing how impressive this was. Oud says that because Aloy is a hugger, Guerrilla’s gotten used to the extreme challenge required to get all these hugs to happen…and recently, it’s made some technical strides in the field of video game hugs.
WARNING: While this article’s text does not contain spoilers, the video content in this article shows cutscenes from the endings of Horizon: Forbidden West and the Burning Shores DLC. Watch at your own risk!
Solving for Hug
The challenges facing Guerilla – and other developers – begin with the motion capture [mocap] suits used to record motion and facial expressions, which have become a standard sight in the games industry. Mocap suits work through sensors dotted all over them, which software is able to follow and translate into recorded movement. But when two actors wearing mocap suits hug, their bodies are pressed against one another…and so are the sensors. This results in fully half of the sensors on each person simply vanishing from the view of the software.
Oud explains this means a human has to manually “solve” the movement data that’s been captured, meaning that the software has to know where a sensor should be at any given moment. In this case, they have to solve for every missing sensor over the entire time that the hug lasts. It’s a time-consuming task that Oud says machine learning may actually make faster in the future, but right now either has to be done by hand in-house or outsourced to another studio. Animators can’t touch the scene until this is done.
Once that’s taken care of, there’s a second problem: motion capture suits are basically just a fancy second skin, but the characters hugging in the game are generally wearing clothes.
“If you look at things like the armor, for example, that Aloy is using… all that kind of stuff is not to be taken into account with the motion capture,” he says. “So even with the solved data, you only have the base. So you still need to go in there and start addressing everything towards the fact that somebody’s actually reaching around a piece of armor, for example. So the whole animation after that point needs to be addressed so it doesn’t intersect with the cloth that that person is wearing that they’re hugging.”
If you’ve ever played the Horizon games, you can imagine this isn’t a simple task. Aloy and her friends all wear elaborate, detailed outfits, often with lots of decorations or other elements sticking out of them, and Aloy herself has multiple different outfits that all must be accounted for.
The Hair Tube Physics Problem
Even after that, the troubles aren’t over. Normally, as Oud mentioned, Horizon’s mocap actors wear head mounts to track their facial expressions and give the animators data to work from. But you can’t wear a giant head mount when you’re hugging, so animators have to fully animate the characters’ expressions by hand. Oud tells me that means all three different endings of Burning Shores were fully keyframe animated because of this.
Once the animators get their hands on the scene, still more problems arise. Oud explains that one problem is that scenes involving hugs actually need their animations to run at a higher frame rate, otherwise they end up looking ridiculous or wrong.
“You really want to feel that connection between people, and that means that we have to actually run those animations on a higher frame rate or a higher position rate, or else you will basically get a little bit of jitter,” Oud says. “[T]he engine actually interpolates between frames. Usually we actually animate at 30 frames per second, but we are running our game at 60 or 120 frames per second where those missing frames are usually just being calculated by the PlayStation in this case.
“And if we have too low of a refresh rate on it, things actually can start shaking, for example. And that basically means that it doesn’t look correct because then you still have a little bit of intersection or it doesn’t feel like they’re actually reaching and grabbing somebody steadily. So we actually have to up the compression on those types of animations to be super precise so we don’t have the jitter and they’re basically playing at their full maximum power that the machine can handle at that point.”
You really want to feel that connection between people, and that means that we have to run those animations on a higher frame rate.
Finally, there’s the gorgeous, flowing, red elephant in the room: Aloy’s hair.
Oud explains that in Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Guerrilla was working with a hair setup where the team essentially had eight different hair “poses” to accommodate the majority of Aloy’s moves and movement speeds. Her hair is made up of a bunch of “collision capsules,” which for non-animators you can imagine as a ton of tubes that would attract to one of the set poses, then release once the pose was done, making it look like fairly natural hair in motion.
But for Burning Shores, her hair got some upgrades. The team wanted to push Aloy’s hair further, but their ideas for doing so only came up near the end of the project, when much of the gameplay was done. However, because cinematics are normally done toward the end of a project, they were able to implement Aloy’s new hair features in cutscenes like a certain hug between Seyka and Aloy.
“The way Zero Dawn and Forbidden West were working was that collision, the collision of the hair was kind of locked, right?” Oud explains. “There was no way to actually override it unless we actually had an outfit change where that hair was posed into a new pose so it actually wasn’t intersecting with her armor.”
To solve this issue, Guerrilla introduced what Oud calls a “movable collider.” Oud explains it to me this way: if Aloy’s hair is made up of a bunch of small tubes, those tubes have a physics to them where if they come into contact with another tube, they just bounce off one another. But they aren’t movable in and of themselves. So the team introduced a new collision capsule that responds specifically to them, but is only available in the cinematic, and wrapped it around Seyka’s arm. The result was a hug where the hair appears to move naturally as the arm comes through it, rather than the arm sitting awkwardly on top or clipping weirdly through.
“So in this case, when Seyka reaches around and starts going through the hair right there, we actually animate a capsule like a movable collider,” he says. “We actually animate it at the same speed and the same position as the arm is actually going, which responds to the hair and it actually looks like her arm is moving away the hair to make room for the arm to hug around. I think that’s as simple as I can put it, hopefully.”
This change was made possible thanks to Jolt Physics, an open source physics engine that Guerrilla switched to for Forbidden West. Among its many other advantages, it allows there to be more objects with actual physics in a given scene, such as allowing for Aloy’s numerous hair strands.
“A static world is awesome, but once things actually start to move and actually have AI and they have reactions with a physics object, the more you have of that, the more calculation a computer application in this case needs to do, and the less you can basically put on screen at a certain point,” Oud says. “Which is also one of the reasons why we actually went for just PS5 only in this case. We were just able to put a lot more visual fidelity and a lot more objects on screen than we could have done with the PS4.”
Engineering Intimacy
Problems like the ones Oud describes impact not just hugs, but just about any kind of intimate interaction characters have. It’s one of the reasons why many games don’t often show the simple act of one character handing an object to another character: the rules, physics, and animations involved with getting a 3D object to detach from one character and attach to another, all while looking smooth and natural, is a “technical nightmare,” Oud says.
Kissing runs into similar problems as this and hugs, or basically any time two characters need to touch and then move in tandem in a way that feels like something normal people would do. It’s cheaper – financially, technically, and in terms of time – to not do these things at all, or to hide such interactions behind camera tricks or off-screen in the case of handing off items.
“But we’re a little bit more ambitious sometimes, you know what I mean? So that’s when we do one and see how far we can push those boundaries or how much we can actually have characters interact with each other, which is also the reason why we let Aloy hug so much maybe.”
Oud and I are both reminded of a similar discussion that cropped up in the gaming community over a year ago, where developers surprised many by explaining how difficult it was to do something as simple as make a door that opens and closes normally. Oud notes that things like hugs and doors are not just hard to animate generally, but grow even more challenging in the games space where players must also be able to pause the game, move the camera around, or do other things while the activity is taking place. “You have to get it right or else people just won’t believe it and won’t buy into it.”
But, he adds, Guerrilla finds such interactions – especially intimate ones, like hugs – important for the kinds of human stories they want to tell. After all, humans beings hug. Some hug often. It would feel strange for the studio’s characters to not be allowed to do that. He’s especially delighted when audiences – whether consisting of other developers or regular players – notice and call out when those interactions are done well. But, he adds, success is for players not to notice them at all. It’s supposed to feel natural.
“If we just bail out of those hugs or those intimate moments, the story just doesn’t come across,” Oud says. “So we have to find a way to actually do these things and still make sure the emotion and the connection is delivered to the player and they don’t really have to think about it. But as long as [the players] feel it, then I’m already blessed that we actually hit our target.”
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Ubisoft has laid off 60 people from its North Carolina and Newcastle, UK offices. The cuts seemed to have impacted Ubisoft’s customer service department the most.
“Ubisoft’s Customer Relation Center team is evolving its organization to focus on where we can have a significant impact while remaining steadfast in our commitment to consistently support our players anywhere in the world.” the company said in a statement.
Ubisoft continued: “We estimate that, due to organizational changes, 60 team members from our offices in Cary, North Carolina in the US and Newcastle in the UK could be impacted.”
Several now former employees have already taken to Twitter to confirm that they’ve been laid off by the company. According to these employees, they were not given advance notice about the cuts.
I (and about 60 other amazing people) were laid off today with no notice. I’m divorced, living alone with a mortgage, and have a daughter who I love and support, so if any of you have any leads, please reach out. Thank you so much. <3
I just got let go from my job at Ubisoft in a massive layoff out of nowhere. With no indication or preparation.
I really just don’t know how to feel. If anyone has any job leads on game audio stuff, or just game tech stuff let me know. I’m in a weird place rn lol
This news comes after a report back in January where Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot addressed a company-wide Q&A about an upcoming restructuring. Guillemot’s comments during the Q&A also prompted a call for a strike at the company’s Paris studio.
The company has faced several hardships over the past few years. Ubisoft delayed Skull & Bones for the sixth time and canceled three unannounced games. Additionally, games like Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023 underperformed. Back in February, Ubisoft admitted that all of the delays and cancelations were necessary because the company was making too many games at once.
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
Becoming a fashion icon can be hard work. It takes time, creativity, and an eye for perfectly crafted outfit composition. Not to mention a sense of design to create the perfect home in which to wear your new fancy clothes. It can take years to curate the ideal wardrobe and house.
Unless you have Life Makeover, the new social simulation game from Famous Heart Limited. The game already has over 15 million followers from around the world and over 4 million players from Southeast Asia, America, and Europe who have already pre-registered to unlock early rewards. Many people are looking to express their unique sense of style in the digital space. Life Makeover has already reached the top spot in the iOS store in China, Japan, and Singapore, with English, Russian, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese localization. It has quickly become a cultural hit because of its customization options, home designs, and social elements, putting the freedom of limitless creativity in the player’s hands.
Available Now For Download
Life Makeover offers a level of customization that may be overwhelming at first glance. However, their user-friendly interface allows new players to jump in and quickly get the hang of things to get to the fun of creating their perfect looks. Players, or “dream makers” as the game calls them, can make their avatar and control factors like skin tone, body shape, facial structure, eye color & shape, to the point that you can customize your upper and lower eyelid separately and even customize the twinkle in your eyes. Adjust your makeup, the length of your legs, and the pout of your lips. Life Makeover can help you make it if you can dream it.
Designing your avatar is just the beginning. After customizing your virtual avatar, it’s time to switch gears and choose what to wear. Players are put into full designer mode, able to craft their wardrobe looks down to each piece’s styles, colors, patterns, and materials! Thousands of items are currently available in game, from casual looks to elaborate gowns worthy of a photo shoot at the Met Gala; the latest fashion looks and vintage couture pieces are at your fingertips. You could even use the customization options to create the outfit you’re wearing right now! Re-create your favorite celebrity looks from the Met Gala or an iconic look from your favorite tv show. The use of Unreal Engine 4 means that the materials and clothing look precisely as they do in real life.
From Fashion Week Icon to Home Makeover
The creativity doesn’t end with your wardrobe. After all, the game is called Life Makeover. Players are able to create their dream homes from the ground up, choosing the perfect floor plan and decorating it as they see fit. Furnish every corner of your home, and insert lighting fixtures and conversation pieces as you like. What will your dream home look like? How will you create the perfect getaway and hosting space?
Once your home is ready, it’s time to invite your friends or players you’ve met in the neighborhood over and throw a house party to show off your creation. Host a tea party, combine the home and fashion elements, and host a themed costume party. It’s up to you. The game’s social aspect is just as crucial as the various design elements. It’s not just about customizing but also about interacting with others in this vibrant world that the team at Famous Heart Limited has created. Life Makeover is a blank canvas for you to paint your perfect picture with all the tools the game gives you.
What Will Your Story Be?
As if a fashion simulator, a custom home design game, and a social online multiplayer game where you can have your friends over for photoshoots weren’t enough, Life Makeover also offers a story mode. Yes, a story mode where players can become detectives to uncover the mystery of the main story and even experience some of the stories behind specifically unique costumes.
More than four million people have signed up for Life Makeover to get their hands on rewards and begin their journey from day one. You can download the game now and invite your friends!
If you get five friends to join you, you’ll get a few bonus customization items as a reward. There is also an ongoing SNS event with free outfits in-game and a luck draw on their Facebook page to win an iPhone and CHANEL lipsticks! So get your vision boards and lookbooks ready and check out Life Makeover on the Play Store and App Store!
After Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope and Marvel’s Midnight Suns last year, I’m champing at the bit for more of the fantastic and challenging turn-based tactics that not enough games offer. So when I recently went hands-on with Shadowrun developer Hairbrained Schemes’ The Lamplighters League, it was like stepping into a warm bath. The alternate-history 1930’s setting evokes an Indiana Jones-like adventurer’s charm filled with fedoras and tommy guns, and that felt like the perfect backdrop for the mix of diabolical stealth and strategic combat I overwhelmingly enjoyed in this admittedly small taste.
The Lamplighters League’s killer feature is how it blends realtime stealth hijinks with turn-based combat in the same vein as XCOM. Before fists and lead start flying, characters can move freely to gather recon, collect items, and take out enemies undetected, but once I was inevitably spotted, the action switched to the cover-based tactical combat you’d find in the likes of Gears Tactics. The advantage of this hybrid model is that I was allowed to sneak around, feeling like a roguish ne’er-do-well as I scouted ahead and set myself up for success in the upcoming bout. Then, by the time the turn-based shenanigans began, I was armed with the knowledge and tools I needed to win the day.
Another advantage of Lamplighters League’s realtime/turn-based hybrid model is that, because I was returned to infiltration mode after each fight, it gave me a chance to catch my breath before the next section, which meant levels were longer than your typical tactics game. It’s always bothered me that the levels in tactics games are far too short, and just when I’m getting into it I suddenly find myself back at base, customizing my squad to prepare for the next mission. By stringing together what amounts to a bunch of mini XCOM levels together with stealth sequences in between, I was able to enjoy missions for longer and spend less time looking at menus.
The Lamplighters League’s killer feature is how it blends realtime stealth hijinks with turn-based combat in the same vein as XCOM.
The tactics combat itself is about what you’d expect from genre peers, where moving from cover to cover, using special abilities, and sweating at the odds you have of landing a hit when attacking is the name of the game. A number of distinct heroes are available to rotate in and out of your party. Ingrid is a close-quarters bruiser who can kick enemies to the ground, causing them to skip their next turn, while Eddie carries two pistols and excels at controlling the battlefield from mid-range with a hail of gunfire. Meanwhile, Lateef, who is quite squishy and much more useful during the infiltration stage, can place a decoy on the battlefield to distract his attackers.
During infiltration mode, all characters switch over to a different set of skills than the ones used in combat. Lateef, who struggles in combat, suddenly becomes the MVP with the best sneaking skills and an ability that lets him knock enemies out silently before battle begins, sometimes avoiding it altogether. Meanwhile, Ingrid can punch through walls and help take out enemies not-so-silently before combat begins, and Eddie can lockpick doors and use shock mines to lure unsuspecting enemies into traps. While infiltration mode mostly serves as a break between combat sections where you’re healing up and doing recon, there’s some genuinely interesting stuff you can do during these intermissions as well, and it’s definitely satisfying to skip a combat section by setting off a particularly clever series of traps or stealth tactics to give you an edge in later parts of the level.
The charming art style and 1930’s setting is also a welcome change, as it’s something I haven’t seen in the tactics genre before. There’s just something about playing as a dolled-up femme fatale, sneaking through alleys as I prepared to get the jump on some gun-toting goons that feels very right. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a very good impression of the characters beyond their basic introductions, since I only had access to the first two levels, but if it manages to nail the story, The Lamplighters League could be something very special.
If you’ve come away from Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 and you’re looking for even more time with the beloved heroes, then look no further than the 2021 game. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2021) is a certified underrated gem, and well worth your time and money. It’s not connected to the MCU, but it’s still got some of the best video game writing and voice work of the current (and even the last) generation.
GotG is the perfect companion piece to the new movie if you’re looking for even more action, laughs, and emotional vulnerability from your favorite space-based heroes. Not only that, but that game is now 100% Verified on Steam Deck, so you can rest assured it’ll run perfectly on the magnificent PC gaming handheld.
To top it all off, it’s even 70% off at the moment on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, making this one of the absolute finest deals you could pick up in 2023. Guardians was even on Game Pass for a decent chunk of time, but for now, it is resting nicely in the libraries of anyone with a PS Plus Extra membership. We’ll leave some handy links below if you want to pick it up, or you could even check out our full Guardians of the Galaxy merch and gift guide, or our full 8/10 review of the game as well.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
Epic Games has announced a creative mode for Fall Guys that lets players build and create their own competitive stages.
Available today, May 10, the mode promises to bring “a comprehensive and full-featured level editor” that puts the developers’ tools into the hands of the players. Fans can sample other players’ creations in a dedicated mode but the most-loved levels will often be included in the main Fall Guys show selector too.
Other changes are coming to the game in the Creative Construction update too, including the Season Pass changing to the Fame Pass. Epic Games this change will bring “more regular and better value content drops” thanks to the new system, as each season now contains multiple consecutive Fame Passes lasting four to seven weeks each. The first Fame Pass will be available from May 10 to June 12.
Fame Passes consist of 40 rewards and still include both a free and paid progression path, with each one seemingly revolving around a certain entertainment franchise collaboration. Hello Kitty is the first Fame Pass star, and a special costume will unlock immediately for all players who purchase the pass.
In our 8/10 review of the game, IGN said: “A collection of exciting minigames and a burst of every colour under the rainbow makes Fall Guys a consistent delight.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
