Pokémon Concierge, the stop-motion animated series that launched on Netflix in December, is a total vibe. After spending time watching a lovely series about a Pokémon resort, I almost don’t want to go back to battling and training. I just want to hang out with all these little guys and take a neverending vacation. Unfortunately, that’s not the core of most Pokémon games, but it is nice to picture what a Pokémon Concierge video game could look like. Thankfully, we don’t have to imagine it, as some artists have already created a mock-up of it for the original Game Boy, though it’s unfortunately not a playable game. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
First introduced in 2022’s Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty currently features a nonlinear battle pass themed like a geographic map. While this allows players to choose what they want to unlock from the pass instead of going through a scripted path, it can be a little confusing to newcomers used to more traditional, linear sets of unlockables. What’s more, the “token” system that CoD uses to unlock stuff from the battle pass can be a little confusing as well, especially if you’re not sure whether you should just let the pass automatically unlock itself by spending tokens for you. – Claire Jackson Read More
Over the weekend, I downloaded Palworldon my PC. I was excited. After all the weird trailers and screenshots showing Pokémon-like creatures using assault rifles or being shot with handguns, I was ready to earn official Xbox achievements as I killed Pokémon facsimiles using modern guns. It was hunting time. And then, after playing for over six hours, I realized that I had been tricked into playing another goddamn survival crafting game that wanted me to punch trees and mine stone for a few hours before it got fun. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Rocksteady developers behind the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League—a DC villain-themed open-world co-op looter shooter—revealed some new details and thoughts behind the game’s battle pass, seasons, and endgame content. And while it’s still a live-service game that will likely have its own issues come launch, I’m feeling optimistic about it based on these recent answers that, at least on paper, sound good.
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First revealed back in 2020, Suicide Squad is the next game from Rocksteady, the devs behind the earlier Batman: Arkham games. And while this new shooter is set in that same universe, since its reveal, fans haven’t been terribly excited about the game. Whenever we see more of it—via trailers or leaks—it looks a lot like a live-service shooter, even if Rocksteady is unwilling to admit that. Mixed previews earlier this month didn’t help win over folks, either. However, in a recent Discord Q&A, the devs laid out their plans for Suicide Squad’s endgame and seasons, suggesting that this game is fully playable solo and won’t make you grind for weeks to play limited-time content.
On January 26, over in the official Suicide Squad Discord server, the devs held a second Q&A after the previous one was so well received. This time around, many of the chosen community questions and developer answers seemed focused on convincing folks that this game won’t demand you treat it like a second job.
“We all love playing games, but we also have lives,” said Axel Rydby, Game Director on Suicide Squad.
“That’s been a big part of our design philosophy making this game. We don’t want the game to feel like a life commitment or be a game where you have to sacrifice a lot to see all the content on offer, or feel like you’re not making good progress in the game if you can’t play hundreds of hours,” explained Rybdy.
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A good example of this is that seasonal battle passes—which Rocksteady reminded folks multiple times in Discord only contain cosmetics—and all the content that is added to the game with each new season, can be done at any time. All that stuff, like battle-pass-exclusive outfits, new locations, missions, and the game’s first new playable character, The Joker, will not leave the game once the season is over. According to Rocksteady, you can always go back and make progress in a battle pass from a previous season or even buy the premium version well after its release.
“We believe that our team has created some of the best-looking cosmetic items ever,” added Darius Sadeghian, studio director at Rocksteady. “We want those to be available for our players to enjoy without fear that they’ll miss out on anything.”
As someone who plays a lot of Fortnite, a game that is built on battle pass FOMO and limited-time items in its ever-rotating store, this sounds very nice.
You can play all of Suicide Squad solo
Another example of Rocksteady claiming the game will respect your time and not demand you spend every day playing it is that every mission and activity in the game, even the toughest endgame content, can be completed solo. This, Rydby pointed out, is part of the studio’s philosophy when developing the co-op game.
“We want this game to be generous, both with your time and with all the features we have to offer,” said Rybdy.
Adding to this, Rocksteady confirmed in today’s Discord Q&A that you will be able to go back and replay any and all missions from the game’s story. And if you play with friends, and move past your current point in your own game, the devs say you’ll be able to skip those sections when you hop back into your solo world. Another example of the team trying to respect players’ time, which I appreciate.
Of course, just because a game has great endgame and season pass plans, doesn’t mean it will be good. If Suicide Squad’s combat is bad, its traversal gameplay clunky, and/or its narrative boring, it won’t matter how nice the season’s cosmetics are or how generous the battle pass might be; people will stop playing.
We don’t have to wait long to see if the game will be fun enough to invest any time into future seasons, characters, or more, since Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launches on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC on February 2, 2024. If you pay the publisher-created ransom fee and pre-order the deluxe edition, you can play three days earlier.
Two weeks ago, news broke that actor Kaitlyn Dever was joining the cast for the second season of HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series—which is still floating along without a release date, with “some time in 2025” the best anybody in TV land can guess. But despite that mild ambiguity, Dever’s casting kicked off a small firestorm of speculation, because it was revealed that she’d be playing a character named Abby Anderson when she joined the Emmy-winning video-game adaptation’s second season—which means The Last Of Us is almost certainly diving whole hog into the story of 2020’s The Last Of Us Part II. And that means things are about to get … messy.
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[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for 2020 video gameThe Last Of Us Part II—and, likely, for at least some of the plot elements of the still-filming second season of HBO’s The Last Of UsTV show.]
Because while the critical consensus on Part II has mostly calmed down in the four years since its release—give or take some moderate consternation lately at the fact that Sony has already rolled out a “remastered” version of the hardly retro game, out last week–the game was something of a lightning rod when it first came out. Some of that wasn’t developer Naughty Dog’s fault. (A high-profile leak from the game’s development, showcasing several cutscenes and character models, fired up the kinds of chuds who get angry when female video-game characters aren’t “feminine” enough, to pick one of the more vitriolic examples.) But some of it was in direct to response to the game’s big narrative swings, which were, depending on who you asked, either “bold” or “super-aggressive and kind of manipulative.”
Many of which, we have to assume, will now be inherited by its TV adaptation: Excepting its critically heralded third episode, Craig Mazin’s adaptation of the first game into the show’s first season was almost overwhelmingly faithful–down to the season’s final scene almost exactly mimicking both the dialogue, and the staging, of the game’s famous ending. With game series creative director Neil Druckmann on board for the second season, as he was for the first, it would be shocking to see the series diverge more than a few inches from established canon.
What does that all mean? A few things—all of which could make The Last Of Us’ second season a very weird run of TV.
The Pedro Pascal “issue”
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
Anyone hoping to avoid spoilers for either the game series, or the show’s next season, should hop off this train now, because there’s really no way to talk about either without addressing the fungus-encrusted elephant in the room: protagonist Joel Miller’s sudden death, an hour or so into The Last Of Us Part II.
Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel on the show, has, understandably, hedged a bit when asked about this plot element–because how could he not? (Nobody wants the HBO Spoiler Squad on their ass.) But The Last Of Us Part II really doesn’t function as a story without it: Joel’s sudden death, at the hands of a group of survivors who come to the almost ludicrously idyllic community where he and Ellie (Bella Ramsay) have been living out their post-apocalypse, is rooted in both the aftermath of the first game and the narrative obsessions of the second. Everything The Last Of Us Part II wants to say about humanity–and it wants to say a lot—grows out of that early moment of sudden, shocking brutality, one moment of horrifying trauma birthed directly from another.
This was controversial, to say the least, in the games, where Joel was a beloved character played by well-liked voice actor Troy Baker. Applying it to a rising/risen star like Pascal—who did so much work to build a beautiful, broken human out of some fairly stock parts with his performance as Joel in the show’s first season–might be even more disruptive. Pascal and Ramsay both came up through Game Of Thrones, of course, so neither is unfamiliar with being on a series that jettisoned its “star” at a critical early point. But seeing the show’s most marketable star go the way of Logan Roy one episode into its new season is still likely to leave fans a bit discombobulated.
The absolute brutality of Ellie Williams
Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
If the above paragraphs didn’t clue you in, The Last Of Us Part II is an aggressively grim game. Even its genuine moments of love or levity come with the unavoidable knowledge that something truly awful is right around the corner—and rarely in the form of something as simple as a rampaging fungus monster. That goes doubly true for the character of Ellie, who came of age in the first game/season—and who spends the second game having her last few shreds of innocence sliced off of her piece by piece.
And really, we’re looking forward to seeing what Ramsay, who was excellent in the first season, will do with this material, as Ellie becomes harder and harder, and harder and harder to root for, the further into her need for vengeance she descends. But it’s going to be a lot for audiences, even by the standards of HBO: We’ll be curious to see if the TV show stays true to the moment that would, in a less ugly narrative, be Ellie’s rock bottom—i.e., the confrontation with Mel, for game players—or if it’ll back away from quite that level of character-alienating horror. But either way, we’ll likely depart the show’s second season with very little idea of who, if anyone, we want to see getting what they want out of this broken and miserable world.
A question of perspective
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
There’s also a question of structure to be addressed here, requiring us to spoil The Last Of Us Part II’s other big twist: the fact that only about half of the game is played from Ellie’s perspective, with the game rewinding at a major turning point to show what its three violent days in Seattle have been like for Joel’s killer, Abby.
On the one hand, this might actually be easier for the TV show to handle than the game; one of The Last Of Us franchise’s big tricks is adapting techniques from film and media, where they’re less familiar, to the medium of games, and this kind of perspective flip is far closer to old hat for television. That being said, the parts of the game where you play as Abby constitute a huge portion of the game, introducing new characters, stories, motivations, and problems, all to drill in for players that she’s just as much a person, a “protagonist,” as Ellie herself. A 24-hour-long video game can take that kind of time to make its points—a nine-hour TV series, not so much. It’s key to Druckmann’s vision of The Last Of Us Part II that Abby feel as “real” to the player/viewer as Joel or Ellie did. Building that kind of identification, without feeling repetitive or digressive, is going to be a fascinating struggle for the show to handle in a fraction of the time.
Is there room for another “Long, Long Time”?
Nick Offerman, Murray BartlettPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
As we noted above, the first season of The Last Of Us deviated from the game’s plot in only one serious regard—and was rewarded powerfully for it, with critics and viewers alike holding up that digression point, “Long, Long Time” as a series highlight. With Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett moving mountains to flesh out characters who were, in the game, an asshole and a corpse, respectively, the episode served as a necessary antidote to the grimness of the rest of the season, reminding viewers that there was still the possibility of life, even for “the last of us.”
Mazin, and writer Peter Hoar, could fit that material into the series in part because they were adapting a largely episodic narrative: The first Last Of Us plays out as a series of vignettes as much as it is a more cohesive story, and it was fairly simple to swap out the running and shooting of the game’s “Bill’s Town” segment for something with considerably more heart. Just as importantly, it demonstrated at least some justification for the entire show, dialing into quieter, more human moments, at a distance from Joel and Ellie’s story.
The Last Of Us Part II is a much tighter narrative ship, though, with a big chunk of its power coming from the way it buries you in first Ellie and then Abby’s head. And so it remains to be seen where Mazin and his team can find room for a bit of light to shine through. (Even if you zoom out of the Ellie-Abby conflict, the game’s background plot is about a brutal inter-clan war waged between military despots on the one hand and transphobic religious zealots on the other; there’s not a lot of room for gentler shading there.) We suspect that the Abby material will have to stand in for that kind of digression, but her story is so married and mirrored to Ellie’s that it’ll be difficult to get meaningful breathing room out of it.
All that being said: It’s worth stepping back and remembering that we’re talking about a TV show that hasn’t even been filmed at this point, let alone aired. Speculation can only go so far before it just becomes fortune-telling and just as useful. But The Last Of Us’ nature as an adaptation—and one especially beholden to its source material—invites these kinds of questions. The Last Of Us Part II landed like a bomb in 2020, detonating video-game discourse for months around it. We can only imagine what its adaptation to television will do when it arrives some time next year.
First introduced in 2022’s Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty currently features a nonlinear battle pass themed like a geographic map. While this allows players to choose what they want to unlock from the pass instead of going through a scripted path, it can be a little confusing to newcomers used to more traditional, linear sets of unlockables. What’s more, the “token” system that CoD uses to unlock stuff from the battle pass can be a little confusing as well, especially if you’re not sure whether you should just let the pass automatically unlock itself by spending tokens for you.
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This guide will demystify Call of Duty’s battle pass and help you decide whether or not you should turn on auto-unlock.
Call of Duty’s battle pass explained
The battle pass is made up of several “Sectors,” each of which contains five rewards. Claim all five and you’ll finish that Sector, letting you move on to an adjoining Sector from there.
As you play Call of Duty, you’ll gain XP for finishing challenges and performing well. As you finish matches, you’ll slowly gain tokens for the battle pass from XP (you can also spend real money on Call of Duty Points to skip the grind).
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
You can then spend tokens on each “Sector” of the battle pass, with each Sector requiring five tokens to complete and granting one reward per token spent (some, like the HRM-9 Sector added during Season 1 Reloaded, might unlock via challenges instead of tokens).
Once you’ve cleared a Sector by spending five tokens on all of its rewards, you can unlock a neighboring sector of your choice and start spending more tokens there.
You’ll notice that the battle pass allows you to either spend tokens manually or leave it on automatic, with the game unlocking Sector rewards in the background as you play. You can toggle this option on the lower right side of the battle pass menu.
Should you unlock Sector rewards manually or automatically?
While auto is a simple way to let your rewards from the battle pass unlock on their own, it’s really only a benefit if you play Call of Duty regularly—like every day regularly. But if you’re strapped for time, it makes more sense to manually unlock the Sectors, prioritizing the ones with XP bonuses and Call of Duty Points as rewards.
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
Each battle pass contains Call of Duty Points (CP) which can be used to purchase premium battle passes for future seasons. If you secure all of these points, you can sort of get away with only paying for one battle pass, using the points you’ll earn from one to purchase the next.
By manually charting your path through the battle pass sectors, you can prioritize unlocking Call of Duty Points (as well as XP boosts to gain Tokens faster) to spend on future seasons.
Call of Duty’s seasons can fly by if you’re not on top of the game every day. Making the most of your time by spending your battle pass tokens on CoD Points is the best way to prioritize your time.
According to new data, it appears that Valve likely made about $1 billion from digitalCounter-Strike 2 (previously Global Offensive) cases and keys in 2023. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”
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In Valve’s immensely popular free-to-play tactical FPS Counter-Strike 2, players can get cases by playing and earning them through level drops, or purchase cases from Steam’s community market. These cases come in different variants and can contain extremely rare and valuable cosmetic items like weapon skins. But once you have a case, you don’t just open it. You also need a key, which must be purchased either directly from Steam or from other players on the community market. And because CS2 is very popular, this lootbox system is making Valve a lot of money.
As spotted by Dexerto, third-party website CS2 Case Tracker recently released its 2023 year in review for cases. And the biggest stat is the estimated $980,000,000 that Valve earned from players buying keys to open cases. Because keys are just digital items that unlock cases, it’s not like it costs Valve all that much to make them or maintain them so the company likely absorbed almost all of that staggering figure as profit.
But wait, that massive $980 million stat is only how much money Valve likely made from the sale of keys. It doesn’t factor in the 15% cut they get from every case sold on the community market. When you factor that in, it becomes very likely that Valve made well over $1 billion on cases and keys in 2023 alone.
That probably is one of the reasons Valve isn’t in a rush to make new video games. They don’t really need to. Instead, they can sit back and let Steam and Counter-Strike fund all their virtual reality experiments and other hardware projects. Honestly, it’s a miracle we ever got Half-Life: Alyx.
One last stat for the road: According to CS2 Case Tracker’s data the most popular day to open cases was Wednesday. Why? I don’t know. But there you go. You can now likely win a bar bet with this weird bit of trivia.
In September 2011, I was a college junior very willing to waste away the early days of her fall semester playing Epic Games’ new third-person shooter, Gears of War 3. I pre-ordered the highly anticipated title so I could guarantee I got the gold Retro Lancer skin for my multiplayer battles, and threw myself into the beta earlier that year with more energy than I put into my entire undergraduate coursework combined.
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The following year, my fondness of Gears 3 grew and absorbed the place once reserved in my heart by the Halo franchise after the disappointment of Halo 4.
But, like all multiplayer games with finite resources trying to keep the attention of a fickle fanbase, Gears 3 eventually faded away. I focused more on Call of Duty releases, then eventually on Overwatch 2 and the battle royales that began popping up like lanternflies on New York City vegetation in the early fall.
Occasionally, my mind would wander to Gears of War 3 and its unique, somewhat disorienting camera angle, the satisfying crunchiness and weight of its gameplay, and all those gleefully gross executions. Nothing ever felt remotely like Gears 3, not even the sequels (which came after long-time game lead Cliff Bleszinksi left Epic Games) that followed in its wake. Recently, those occasional daydreams of Epic’s third-person shooter became more frequent and, finally, I downloaded it via Xbox Game Pass and booted it up again.
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
Gears of War 3 online is a 2011 time capsule
Several things shock me in the seconds after I start up Gears of War 3. First, the Xbox 360 online interface greets me, like I applied a retro theme to my Xbox Series S in a fugue state. When the old pop-up appears to let me know that I am, indeed, online, I do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme alone in my living room. My old profile picture is there (my Xbox avatar wearing an Optimus Prime helmet), and so is all the information about the 360-era games I played. It’s a lovely little detail that threatens to derail my Gears gameplay, as I get lost in the old menu for far too long.
Then, as Gears 3 loads up and the familiar horns of the opening theme fade in, I’m shocked by the memory that the score stirs in me. Suddenly, I am 21 years old and very stoned, likely wearing a pair of leggings and a t-shirt I’ve cut the sleeves off of to make a muscle tank—maybe I’m even wearing my Gears 3 one—and I’m waiting for my friends to meet me online so we can run a five-stack in Team Deathmatch. Time flattens into a circle, just like the one Rust Cohle warned us of, and I am briefly, blissfully unaware of how my rent will be going up in my Brooklyn apartment, because I’m in upstate New York, living off my student loan.
The final thing that shocks me is that I can actually play Gears 3 online. The menu says “0 players online worldwide,” but it’s lying—I load into a Team Deathmatch game in seconds, filling in for a bot Locust (the beefy, scaly bad guys of the Gears universe) upon its death. As I step into the huge shoes of this subterranean (and for some reason bipedal) beast, I realize I’m gonna need a second to get my sea legs.
Gears of War doesn’t feel anything like the games I play now—aside from when I choose one of the heavier, tankier Overwatch 2 characters, most of the time I’m playing as someone who’s lithe and lightning-fast. When compared to modern games like Apex Legends or Modern Warfare III, Gears 3 is gluey and clumsy, like someone mixed a shooter with Ambien and a glass of wine until everything got a little wavy. It takes several gory, squishy deaths (Gears of War 3 is probably best-known for its violent multiplayer executions which include swinging your gun like a golf club and taking off someone’s head in a spray of brain matter) before I remember how the controls work.
Once I get my active reload down (a mechanic by which your weapon damage or fire rate increases if you time your reload correctly), I really hit my stride. I split a snub-nosed grenadier in half with a Gnasher Shotgun, I pop the head off of a peeking Carmine brother with a Boltok Pistol from halfway across the map, I impale Marcus Fenix on the end of a Retro Lancer. I remember that the cover-based shooter has tons of movement tricks and hacks, and soon I’m gliding around the map like my character isn’t wearing a ton of heavy armor and boots that sound like they’re made of steel.
Gears 3 multiplayer’s visceral audio brings back the same intense wave of nostalgia as the starting menu’s soft horns. There are the gushy, mushy sounds of shotgun shells embedding themselves into flesh, the nerve-wracking rev of the Torque Bow winding up its shot, followed by the high-pitched, heart-stopping audio cue you hear when one of its arrows sinks into your leg. The horrid, wet gurgling that bursts forth from Locust characters stomping about the map and the metallic clangs of menu sounds whisk me away to a simpler era. For the entire time I’m playing Gears of War 3, I am in 2011.
But it is, alas, 2024, and the other people still playing Gears of War 3 are either newcomers who can’t tell their incendiary grenades from their Boomshots or seasoned veterans who are a nightmare to play against. Matches end fast, and there’s little room for the weak in them. Despite quickly remembering how to make the most of the game’s movement mechanics and gunplay, I am still repeatedly owned by players who have no problem picking up my downed body and miming humping me against a wall.
In that way, and in many others, Gears of War 3 is a perfect 2011 time capsule, full of blood and guts and badly behaved boys, and, of course, Cole Train expressions.
Halo Infinite is killing its seasonal model in 2024. Three years after its initial launch, the live-service multiplayer shooter is shifting toward more bite-sized, 20-level battle passes arriving every four to six weeks. Developer 343 industries announced the content change in its January update stream on January 19, along with several other major features, cosmetics, and more that are set to arrive on the FPS this year
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This guide will take you through everything you need to know about Halo Infinite in 2024—and it’s all looking rather exciting.
Halo Infinite in 2024: Goodbye Seasons, hello Operations
343 Industries didn’t mince words regarding the future of Halo Infinite’s content releases. As community director Brian Jarrard said during the stream, “we’re shifting away from seasons.” Seasons would arrive every few months, usually with some kind of theme and 100-tiers of unlockables through the battle pass. Instead, you can now look forward to regular “Operations,” starting with “Spirit of Fire” on January 30. Each Operation will have 20 levels of rewards to chew through, so while they’re not called “seasons” any more, things should still feel somewhat similar.
Operation Spirit of Fire isn’t the only thing arriving on January 30, however. You can look forward to the following additions once this update arrives:
Mark IV armor core (free for all players)
The ability to swap shoulders across different armor cores
A new 4v4 arena map named “Illusion”
Get hyped for Halo Infinite’s new map, “Illusion”
The new map, “Illusion” will have a symmetrical layout, making it great for competitive play as it ensures more even starts for each team. There’s even a super-narrow corridor running straight through the center with an uninterrupted sightline between opposing enemy bases, which will likely be a magnet for some serious carnage. If you’ve ever played Husky Raid, which has teams of Spartans face off against one another in a simple corridor, you know how deadly hallways can get in Halo. There’s also a lot of variable elevation from what we saw in the stream.
This new map is looking really promising and should be an excellent addition to the map rotation across various playlists.
Gif: 343 Industries / Kotaku
But that’s not all! Remember that corridor running straight through the map? Well, if you step in there, you go invisible. Objective based games like capture the flag or even king of the hill ought to see some interesting plays with a stealthy option like that so readily available.
The possibility that future maps might contain interesting augmentations like readily accessible invisibility or unique power weapons sounds like a welcome change from the usual rollout of standard arena maps that recycle the same guns and traversal methods.
Halo Infinite is leaning into nostalgia
Though there have been a few variations on Halo’s iconic assault rifle in Infinite, the stock assault rifle is reminiscent of the one that appeared in 2010’s Halo Reach. Joining this will be a new skin for the assault rifle that makes it look just like the assault rifle from Halo Combat Evolved, the game that started it all. As it’s just a skin, it won’t come with any change in stats (sorry, no 60-round magazine). The skin will be a part of the paid version of the January 30 operation.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
And the new Mark IV armor core, which is from the 2009 RTS spinoff Halo Wars, will also drop as a free cosmetic for all players.
Finally, in what seems like a cosmetic element pulled from the new “Illusion” map, there’s a square-shaped overshield that looks straight out of Halo Combat Evolved. It’s little things like this which help sell Halo as a cohesive world—and given the amount of stylistic changes the series has gone through, these unifying features are more than welcome.
Forge and playlist updates are on the way
If you’re into Forge creations, there’s some other fun headed your way on January 30, including Covenant-themed items in a nod to the series’ main antagonists and lovers of all things purple. Extra color customization options will also be available on January 30, which will add even more color options to choose from across the wide variety of in-game objects in Forge. Finally, “script brains,” which is a fancy term for code that lets complex objects t behave in unique ways, can be saved to game modes and used on multiple maps—previously script brains were inherently tied to a specific map.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
There’re also Flood-themed items coming to Forge, as well. Based on Halo’s undead enemy faction, these assets look particularly gnarly. Brian Jarrard referred to them as “moist” on stream. You’re welcome.
Finally, Big Team Battle will get three community maps added into the rotation in February, as well as refreshes to Husky Raid, Squad Battle, and Firefight. But most importantly, a new way of selecting matches is expected to arrive sometime in 2024 that is similar to Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s “Match Composer,” which lets you search across broad categories like player count, game type, and more (instead of mode-specific playlists).If you’re sick of playlists locking you into the same game modes over and over again, this should be a great way to customize what games you want to play. It works wonderfully in The Master Chief Collection.
If you’re looking to get some more time in with Halo Infinite, 2024 is shaping up to be a very good year for the iconic shooter franchise.
Clockwise from bottom left: Tom Hiddleston in Loki (Photo: Marvel Studios), Aramis Knight and Iman Vellani in Ms. Marvel (Photo: Disney+), Tatiana Maslany in She-Hulk: Attorney At Law (Photo: Disney+), Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in WandaVision (Photo: Disney+/Marvel Studios), Samuel L. Jackson in Secret Invasion (Photo: Gareth Gatrell/Marvel), Oscar Isaac in Moon Knight (Photo: Marvel Studios), Alaqua Cox in Echo (Photo: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios) Graphic: Jimmy Hasse
Updated 1/12: The MCU shows no signs of getting any smaller, does it? And now that Echois here, it’s time to see where it sits in our ranking, from worst to best, of the whopping 26 Marvel shows that have premiered since 2013. Prepare for some ambitious Netflix fare, sturdy star vehicles, head trips like Legion, and—hang on, Helstrom, we’re getting to you—those not-so-hot titles, too. Dig in and let the non-superpowered fighting commence. – Sam Barsanti Read More
It’s time for a second trip to Seattle in The Last of Us Part IIRemastered. Originally shipped in 2020, Part II amps up the scope of the series, as well as the violence. The result is a dynamic, stealthy survival horror romp that takes place decades after a world-ending pandemic. It can be a tough game to play, and Remastered also includes a new roguelike mode for those who want an even greater challenge. – Ari Notis Read More
Screenshot: Square Enix, James Lambert, Bethesda / Xbox, Naughty Dog / Kotaku, Image: Disney / Lucasfilm
After a couple sleepy weeks, the gaming hype train of 2024 is finally moving at full steam. We saw the first major showcase of the year with Xbox’s Developer Direct, dug into The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and oogled MachineGames flamin’ hot digital dupe of ‘80s Harrison Ford. These are the week’s most important previews, reviews, and takes.
Ubisoft Montpellier’s 2.5D side-scrolling Metroidvania Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is finally out on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s a long, challenging action-platforming game with lots of tough bosses and intricate puzzles. Here are a handful of essential tips to make your journey a bit easier.
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The Lost Crown follows the young Sargon, the newest member of the warrior clan known as The Immortals. He’s tasked with tracking down the kidnapped Prince Ghassan, who’s been dragged off to the cursed city of Mount Qaf. The game has plenty of paths to unblock, collectibles to find, and equipment to unlock. It’s easy to get lost or stuck, but I’ve got you covered.
Throw Your Chakram Often
About an hour or two into the game, you’ll unlock a new weapon: a bow. This weapon doubles as a throwable chakram that serves several functions, including calling down platforms and opening gates. The double-edged weapon can also be used in combat as a projectile that gets faster and stronger every time you parry it. More than that, though, you can use the chakram to reach those elusive resource caches without having to pull off a complex platforming feat. Be sure to use that chakram often, as it’ll make collecting stuff a little less frustrating.
Upgrade Your Gear Regularly
The fiery blacksmith—and absolute goddess—Kaheva opens up her forge to you not long after you reach the hub area of The Haven. But she’s not the only shopkeeper who can improve your equipment. While Kaheva can buff the damage of your bow and swords, The Mage, an elderly woman who operates an equipment shop in The Haven, can increase the number of health flasks you can hold and improve the potency of their healing. On top of that, both shopkeepers can power up the status effects of your Amulets, equippable pieces of gear that provide benefits such as increasing your melee damage at low health or reducing the damage of environmental hazards. It’s worth coming back to The Haven to upgrade your gear as often as possible. These bosses don’t play around, so you’ll need all the buffs you can get. Trust me.
Don’t Forget The Swordmaster
Speaking of The Haven, another person you should visit regularly is the swordmaster Artaban. Artaban is Sargon’s trainer throughout the story, teaching you effective ways to dispatch your foes in fights. You should also do his combat challenges to get Time Crystals, one of the currencies used for buying wares and upgrading gear. The challenges themselves are simple, and with enough practice and patience, will help you become more comfortable using all of Sargon’s abilities to kick serious ass.
Take Images Of Memorable Spots
With The Eye of the Wanderer, a true innovation within the Metroidvania genre, you can take screenshots that show up as icons on the mini-map, which helps make backtracking easier. Instead of trying to memorize where something is, you can use the upgradable resource known as Memory Shards to snap a quick photo to remember the spot. And when you’re finished with the image, you can delete the screenshot to free up space for more photos. Just hold down on the D-pad and snap away. Your brain will thank you for it.
Make Sure To Finish Those Side Quests
As you explore Mount Qaf, you’ll come across characters in need of help. It might be deciphering an ancient text or finding an old woman’s children. Either way, these side quests reward you with some good stuff, from currencies to use at the various shopkeepers to resources to upgrade your gear. Depending on the complexity and length of the objective, you might even get a Soma Petal, which increases your max health when you’ve collected four of them. Be a good Immortal and help some people out. It’ll be worth your while.
Take Advantage Of Guided Mode In The Settings
You’re presented with two game modes when you start: Exploration and Guided. Exploration mode is the default setting, giving you little direction for story quests and side errands on the mini-map. With Guided mode, you get much more assistance as the mini-map populates icons for mission objectives, doors and paths, and the upgrades you’ve unlocked. guessing game. You’ll still get lost, so don’t worry about that. Guided mode will just make it so you don’t stay lost. You can toggle this setting at any time—you’re not locked into what you chose at the beginning of your playthrough.
Tweak The Difficulty To Your Preferred Playstyle
The Lost Crown is a masterful example of accessibility in video games. In the extensive settings menu, you can make parries easier, extend the invulnerability you receive while dodging, skip challenging platforming sections, show markers for interactive elements in the world, and so much more. This game really lets you customize the experience to your liking, so you should do that. There’s bound to be a setting here that will give you the kind of Metroidvania experience you’re looking for.
Always, Always, Always Buy The Area Maps From Fariba
Fariba has extensive knowledge of the cursed city, and she’ll often have maps on her for sale. These maps reveal everything you need to know about that given area, including potential secrets and unexplored spots. Her location varies, and she’s usually a bit of a pain to find, often holed up in some room gated behind a complex platforming section. But picking up the area map from her will save you time in the long run. The best part? Unlike some of the other shopkeepers whose wares can be a bit more expensive, Fariba sells her services for just 50 Time Crystals. That’s a bargain in my book.
Don’t Do Much Backtracking Till You Get The Last Power
The Lost Crown is predicated on returning to areas you’ve previously visited with new powers, so it’s tempting to backtrack once you’ve acquired a new time-bending ability. But take it from me, you should wait until you’ve gotten the very last power, the Fabric of Time. You don’t get it until about three-fourths of the way through the story, but waiting to get this grappling hook of sorts will save you time and frustration. Before this point, a majority of your backtracking will be blocked by floating hooks that require the Fabric of Time to reach. There’s no clever way to get around these sections without it, so you might as well wait. Besides, by the time you unlock it, you’ll be so OP not even the toughest boss could stop you.
And there you go, nine tips to help you bend time and survive death in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Although I’ve beaten the story, I’ve still got plenty of collectibles to find and side quests to finish. So, good luck in Mount Qaf. Prince Ghassan needs us both.
Thursday’s Xbox showcase included some big games that I can’t wait to play. But if you tuned it right when the action started you might have missed the best part of the show: a series of fun pop-up facts and trivia about various Xbox-owned studios.
On January 18, Xbox posted its latest Developer Direct, showing off gameplay from a few big titles coming to Xbox and PC later this year and letting the people making these games talk about them in detail. (Hey, Geoff, take note.) It was a solid showcase and that new Indiana Jones game looks wonderful. But perhaps my favorite part of the event happened before all the trailers and gameplay. During a countdown before the Developer Direct started, Xbox flashed numerous fun facts about studios like MachineGames, Oxide, and Obsidian Entertainment.
I didn’t see a lot of people talking about these neat little pieces of trivia, so I wanted to take a moment and highlight some of them so we can all enjoy them after the fact. I love stuff like this. I also lovedPop-Up Videoon VH1 back in the day. Anyway, to the facts!
Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare III’s Season 1 Reloaded update launched midday on January 17—and almost immediately broke both FPS titles. The Reloaded update promised anti-cheat improvements, adjustments to the Zombies mode, new cosmetics, new multiplayer maps, and more, but the launch was plagued by server issues and visual glitches. In the time since launch, the dev team has deployed multiple fixes to right the ship, even appearing to work overnight into the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, January 18.
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Historically, ‘Reloaded’ updates come in the middle of Call of Duty seasons as a way to keep the game fresh between massive seasonal changes and adjustments. Notably, this is the first Reloaded update for Modern Warfare III, which launched back in November of last year (confusingly, every time a new Call of Duty title drops, the season count starts all over again, though the updates have remained tied to the free-to-play Warzone battle royale since Modern Warfare II). The update promised a massive new anti-cheat measure that automatically shut downs the Call of Duty PC application if aim assist is detected, MWIII ranked play, a new Rio-based map, an Operator based on The Boys TV series, new game modes, and much more.
Unfortunately, from the moment the Season 1 Reloaded update launched, players began reporting serious issues across both Warzone and MWIII. Streamer fifakill shared a clip on X/Twitter of the game glitching just under half an hour after the Reloaded launch, writing “If you try to go to ‘create a class’ in the menu your game will bug and you’ll have to restart. If you try to hit loadout in game this happens.” He also shared a clip showing a strange dent in the topography of the Urzikstan map, which was definitely not intentional. MWIII Ranked was delayed, some weapon attachments were broken, challenge progress was bugged, interacting with in-game loot crates was freezing the game, and more. Call of Duty site CharlieIntel called it “the worst Call of Duty update of all time” on X/Twitter.
In the face of the litany of issues, the dev teams (Raven Software, which works on Warzone, and Sledgehammer Games, which works on MWIII) have been rolling out fixes as soon as they’re ready to go rather than in one massive patch, so that nearly 24 hours after launch, many of the major problems have been fixed. Unfortunately, it also seems like the dev teams had to work overnight to ensure this, as some of the updates were shared as early/late as 3:40 a.m. ET. “I don’t think I can recall seeing updates going out in the middle of the night. Ggs,” wrote one commenter. While it’s great to see the dev teams responding swiftly to issues, I don’t think overnight work is ever worth a “gg.” Work/life balance is much more important than bugged loot crates, IMO.
Kotaku reached out to Activision for details on how/when the dev teams were working on fixes, but did not receive a comment in time for publication.
Updating live-service games like Warzone involves a ton of moving parts, and sometimes one little change can render the entire car undriveable. Luckily, if you’re a Call of Duty player, it seems that Reloaded is in a much better state just 24 hours after launch.
Harmonix, the Epic Games-owned studio behind the popular rhythm game franchise Rock Band, has officially announced that it is wrapping up its weekly DLC releases for 2015’s Rock Band 4. It will now focus on supporting Fortnite Festival, instead.
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Rock Band 4 was released nearly a decade ago in October 2015, and was a return for the franchise five years after the release of Rock Band 3 and the crash of plastic instrument games like Guitar Hero and DJ Hero. While Rock Band 4 wasn’t able to rebuild the once large plastic instrument genre of rhythm games, it ended up with a dedicated community of players who kept enjoying the game and buying DLC songs for it even as it became harder and harder to track down replacement instrument controllers. Now, eight years and nearly 3,000 DLC songs later, Harmonix is moving on.
In a January 17 post on the official Harmonix blog from Rock Band 4‘s product manager Daniel Sussman, the studio revealed that the DLC music released on January 25 will be the last ever for Rock Band 4. Sussman’s post did clarify that all other live services, including Rivals seasons and online play, will continue as normal. But there will be no new tracks coming to RB4 after this month.
Sussman also made it clear that all the songs players own in Rock Band 4 will not be going anywhere, adding that you’ll be able to keep rocking out to your previously purchased songs “for as long as you like.”
Fortnite Festival is the future
As for what Harmonix is working on now, well, that’s clear if you’ve been paying attention to Fortnite lately. Epic’s popular battle royale juggernaut expanded in December with the addition of three new games built inside Fortnite. One of those is Fortnite Festival, a controller-based rhythm game featuring popular songs from different genres. Harmonix is the team behind that game and it’s what the studio will be focusing on post-Rock Band 4.
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“Looking ahead, the Harmonix team has been hard at work over the last two years to develop Fortnite Festival,” said Sussman. “[It] brings rhythm action gaming (and more) to the Fortnite ecosystem. It’s free to play, we have a rotating selection of songs that you can play (for free) anytime. If you are a fan of the rhythm game category, Fortnite Festival is the place to be.”
“Working in support of the Rock Band community has been a high point in my professional life,” Sussman explained.
“We deliberated long and hard about how to frame the last blast of RB4 DLC of this era. The last two weeks will feature some tear-jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment. We thank you for your commitment to and passion for this wonderful game. Long Live Rock and Roll.”
Over the January 13-15 holiday weekend, a rumor spread about the cancellation of an untitled and unannounced Halo battle royale, codenamed Project Tatanka. It all started with a few off-hand comments on a January 13 stream of the XboxEra podcast, in which the three hosts (Jon Clarke, Nick Baker, and Jesse Norris) discussed speculation that the project was canceled. The story spread like wildfire, with multiple outlets pointing to Baker as a source, prompting XboxEra to publish an article clarifying the situation and reiterating that this is little more than a rumor.
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So what’s actually going on? Is a Halo battle royale in development? Is it canceled? Do we even need such a thing? Let’s get into it.
Is Project Tatanka a Halo battle royale?
The existence and development of this mysterious Halo battle royale is itself a rumor—back in April 2022, Halo support studio Certain Affinity (which has built maps for both the Call of Duty and Halo franchises, among other things) announced it was “deepening” its relationship with Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries. Certain Affinity did not announce exactly what that “deepening” entailed, but did say that the studio was “entrusted with further evolving Halo Infinite in some new and exciting ways.”
In a September 2022 interview with VentureBeat, Certain Affinity’s chief operating officer Paul Sams doubled down on the tease, saying “The biggest thing we’re doing that’s public right now, for more than two years now we’ve been working on Halo Infinite doing something that—they’re very prescriptive about what we can say. But we’re doing something unannounced, and we’re doing lead development on that unannounced thing, from conception and design.”
In January of last year, Bloomberg reported that the unknown project was code-named Tatanka and “started off as a battle royale but may evolve in different directions.”
Despite all of this, there has not been an official announcement regarding what Certain Affinity is working on, and no confirmation that Tatanka is a Halo battle royale. Xbox Era’s Clarke told Kotaku via email that the publication was “stunned it’s a story at all really. Kotaku reached out to Certain Affinity for a comment; they declined to supply one.
Some may wonder: Can you cancel a game that was never announced? But I’m wondering: Does anyone want a Halo battle royale?
Image: 343 Industries
Is a Halo battle royale a good idea?
There are already two Halo Infinite game modes that are reminiscent of a traditional battle royale: the now-defunct Last Spartan Standing, a free-for-all elimination mode featuring 12 players battling it out on Big Team Battle maps; and the latest game’s version of Big Team Battle, which ups the player count from 8v8 to 12v12. Last Spartan Standing gave players five lives before permanently eliminating them from the game, but it always felt too small for the larger Big Team maps, and the playlist was replaced with Team Doubles four months after its debut. It hasn’t been back since. And the Big Team Battle mode isn’t anything like a battle royale save for its size.
The features that make Halo games special are exactly what make them the anti-BR: incredibly strong weapons and subsequently strong player-characters, an impressive, bombastic sandbox with limitless potential, and absurd vehicles that can make or break a match. None of that is poised to translate well into a battle royale mode, which drops a hundred or so players into a massive map (far bigger than anything we’ve ever seen in Halo Infinite), with either their bare hands or a shitty pistol, and demands they scurry about like rats until they find any weapon to sustain them in the warzone. Imagine you drop into a Halo battle royale and immediately find the rocket launcher? It’s game over for everyone else.
So no, I don’t think a Halo battle royale is a good idea. Iterating on what makes Halo so special and consistently updating Halo Infinite is what will keep this franchise alive—not aping whatever is the hot commodity in gaming at the moment. But who am I, anyway? I’m just an adult woman who got hardcore into online gaming with Halo 3and who spends her spare time playing battle royales—how much does my opinion matter, right?
Xbox’s Developer_Direct stream returns this year, promising a close look at some of Microsoft’s upcoming titles, including actual gameplay and conversations with devs for various titles. If you’d like to get a sense of what to expect and when to tune in, we’ve got you covered.
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Watch the Developer_Direct stream on January 18 at 3 p.m. EST
The Developer_Direct livestream is expected to hit YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook at 3 p.m. EST, or 12 p.m. Pacific. You’ve got a plenty of channels to watch it on, including Xbox’s official YouTube channel, Bethesda’s YouTube channel, as well as both Xbox and Bethesda’s Twitch channels. For ASL, you can watch the stream on Twitch.tv/XboxASL. And if you’re on Facebook, you can watch the stream there too. If you can’t watch live, Xbox will upload a recap on the YouTube channels listed above.
Indiana Jones, Hellblade II, and more
Four games are expected to headline the stream: Obsidian Entertainment’s fantasy game Avowed, Ara: History Untold from Oxide Games (Ashes of the Singularity), Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, and Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones game.
Though leaks have suggestedIndiana Jones was expected to launch in 2022, not a whole lot more is known about Bethesda’s spin on cinema’s most memorable archaeologist (just don’t call him Junior).
Diablo IV and Elder Scrolls Online streams
Both Diablo IV and ESO will have dedicated streams on January 18 as well. Blizzard is expected to show off what’s to come for the next season of Diablo IV at 12 p.m. EST on its YouTube and Twitch channels, while Zenimax Online will show off what’s to come in 2024 for Elder Scrolls Online.
What games are you looking forward to seeing during Xbox’s dev stream?
With the pre-release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown started, Ubisoft has chosen this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services, and introduce a PC version of the “Classics” tier at a lower price. And a big part of this, says the publisher’s director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, is getting players “comfortable” with not owning their games.
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It’s hard to keep up with how often Ubisoft has rebranded its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club, and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics, all names used over the last decade or so. It’s also seemed faintly bewildering why there’s a demand for any of them, given Ubisoft released only five non-mobile games last year.
However, a demand there apparently is, says Tremblay in an interview with GI.biz. He claims the company’s subscription service had its biggest ever month October 2023, and that the service has had “millions” of subscribers, and “over half a billion hours” played. Of course, a lot of this could be a result of Ubisoft’s various moments of refusing to release games to Steam, forcing PC players to use its services, and likely opting for a month’s subscription rather than the full price of the game they were looking to buy. But still, clearly people are opting to use it.
But it remains strange why enough people would want to subscribe—and at $17.99 a month it’s not cheap—to a single publisher’s output. That’s not a diss of Ubisoft’s games—although you might want to apply your own—but something that would be as true were it Activision Blizzard or EA.
You can subscribe to Game Pass, or PlayStation Plus, and get a broad range of hundreds of games from dozens of publishers, or you can pay significantly more to only get the games made by one single publisher, and indeed a publisher with a very distinct style of game. TV networks and movie companies tried this, and those numbers are thinning out fast, with many already compromising by returning their shows to the larger streamers.
What’s more chilling about all this, however, is when Tremblay moves on to how Ubisoft wishes to see a “consumer shift,” similar to that of the market for CDs and DVDs, where people have moved over to Spotify and Netflix, instead of buying physical media to keep on their own shelves. Given that most people, while being a part of the problem (hello), also think of this as a problem, it’s so weird to see it phrased as if some faulty thinking in the company’s audience.
One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don’t lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That’s not been deleted. You don’t lose what you’ve built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
Tremblay goes on to say to GI.biz, “But as people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you’ll be able to access them when you feel like.” But…we know that isn’t true! We know how often services don’t continue, how many games are no longer available.
One of my all-time favorite games was published by Ubisoft in 2003, called In Memorium (Missing: Since January in the U.S.), and that’s certainly not on its Classics range, I’m sure because the company long ago lost any rights to it. Luckily for me, I own a physical copy of it. But any number of other Ubisoft games from the early ‘00s I stick in its Classics site have no results. There’s no reason on Earth to think the same won’t be true of Ubisoft’s current games in 20 years.
There are still plans for Ubisoft to add streaming access to Activision Blizzard’s games to Ubisoft+, as bizarre as that may seem given the publisher’s recent acquisition by Microsoft. It’ll also seem fairly redundant, given all the games will come to the far more ubiquitous Game Pass, where they won’t be behind the technical hurdle of streaming. And indeed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is already available to play via the Epic Games Store if you pre-ordered it there.
If, for whatever reason, you just adore Ubisoft’s output, then yes—for $17.99 a month you can play Skull & Bones, Avatar, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Anno 1800, and The Crew: Motorfest right now, which is a lot cheaper than buying them all individually. But you won’t own any of them, and you’ll need to keep paying that 18 bucks a month in perpetuity if you want to keep them, right up until you can’t any more.
The announcement that Nintendo Switch Online’s Game Boy Advance range is to receive RPGs Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age is incredibly welcome news. But there are still some absolutely colossal gaps, some all-time great GBA games that we’d love to play on our Switches. Nintendo! Hear our pleas!
