Author: Game Infliction

Diablo 4’s troubled history with microtransactions has grown more grim after Blizzard began selling class-locked portal reskins.

“Portal through Sanctuary in style,” begins the description for the $29.99 Dark Pathways pack, as noted by PC Gamer. The pack includes the Hell and Back bundle containing the Tempest Gate Sorcerer Town Portal, Transit Artery Rogue Town Portal, Netherworld Threshold Necromancer Town Portal, Wildroot Way Druid Town Portal, Warpath Barbarian Town Portal, and 1000 Platinum (which is itself worth $9.99). There is currently no way to buy the portals individually.

As you’d expect, players have reacted negatively to the existence of the cosmetic pack, and not just because the price of the thing is equivalent to some other hugely popular PC games, such as Palworld, but that the price of the bundle is needlessly raised by the inclusion of premium currency, a standard tactic to make virtual bundles appear more valuable in customers’ eyes. but

Dungeons & Dragons has announced the release dates for its new Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, though they won’t all arrive in 2024 despite that expectation set by publisher Wizards of the Coast.

After more than two years of teasing a major update to the tabletop role-playing game known as One D&D, Wizards of the Coast revealed it will officially kick off on September 17, 2024, with the updated Player’s Handbook.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide will arrive a little later on November 12, 2024, but despite Wizards of the Coast itself suggesting the One D&D refresh would kick off fully in 2024, the Monster Manual has slipped into 2025, launching on February 18.

“The new core rulebooks are expected to be released in 2024,” reads a frequently asked questions post still available on the Dungeons & Dragons website.

The publisher didn’t share much about the contents of these new core rulebooks, but as previously announced they will revamp core elements of the current fifth edition without making it redundant to address player feedback.

While some fans will be frustrated with the delay, especially as One D&D was expected to launch fully as a celebration of the game’s 50th anniversary, which is in 2024, Wizards of the Coast still announced a handful of other events to tide players over.

An adventure campaign called Vecna: Eve of Ruin will be released on May 11, letting players engage in “a high-stakes adventure in which the fate of the entire multiverse hangs in the balance.” The heroes begin in the Forgotten Realms and travel to Planescape, Spelljammer, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk as they race to save existence from obliteration by the notorious lich Vecna who is weaving a ritual to eliminate good, obliterate the gods, and subjugate all worlds.

A book called The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970 – 1977 is being released on June 18 too. Wizards of the Coast described it as “the ultimate book showcasing D&D’s inception, including Gary Gygax’s never-before-seen first draft of D&D written in 1973.”

The Quests from the Infinite Staircase adventure anthology will be released on July 16, weaving together six classic D&D adventures while updating them for the game’s current edition (which will be compatible with One D&D). Exactly which adventures these will be hasn’t been announced, but it will be targeted at characters between levels one and 13.

Wizards of the Coast announced the biggest miniature booster set ever in January, also in celebration of the 50th anniversary. The game is growing more popular than ever before, helped by the likes of its appearance in Netflix hit Stranger Things, the Hollywood film Honor Among Thieves, and one of 2023’s most beloved games, Baldur’s Gate 3.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

While co-op third-person shooter Helldivers 2 has gone down well with players and become Sony’s biggest ever PC game launch, it has continued to struggle with login issues and rewards not tracking, even forcing its developer to roll back a patch due to performance problems.

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios released patch 01.000.005 for the game on Steam yesterday, January 12. The update was designed to tackle the main issues impacting players’ ability to log in, but it caused performance problems, which in turn caused Arrowhead to roll the patch back.

“We have rolled back the patch due to some users experiencing significant degradation in performance,” Arrowhead said in a note on the Helldivers Discord. “The mission reward fix will not be affected by this.”

In the patch notes for update 01.000.005, Arrowhead promised to compensate players for lost rewards via an increased reward event. Much of Helldivers 2’s progression is gained from mission rewards, which makes this a particularly bad problem for players trying to grow their avatars more powerful.

Meanwhile, today, February 13, Arrowhead rolled out a patch for the PS5 version that addresses server capacity, login capacity progression, and mission rewards. It’s the same as the PC patch, but Arrowhead said it does not anticipate performance problems on PS5. “We are currently investigating that issue with the PC build from yesterday,” the developer said.

Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt had previously issued an apology to players and explained how the servers had struggled to cope with the onslaught of players following last week’s launch. Meanwhile, Helldivers 2 players have already established an “unspoken” co-op etiquette.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Atomic Heart’s Trapped in Limbo DLC is colourful and eye-catching, and I hated every minute of it. I certainly felt trapped; trapped in a mobile game-inspired expansion that’s repetitive, frustrating, and a chore to complete. As someone who enjoyed Atomic Heart itself a great deal last year and found several things to like about the previous DLC, I am genuinely baffled at how actively I do not want to play Trapped in Limbo ever again.

While Atomic Heart’s first dose of DLC, Annihilation Instinct, explores what happens after the shorter of the main game’s two unfulfilling endings, Trapped in Limbo picks up in the aftermath of the longer one. Respecting and expanding upon both endings is an interesting and commendable approach, even if having these add-on DLC chapters flip-flopping from one ending to the other before anything is resolved makes playing through them feel like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book from front to back.

In this conclusion, P-3 is left in limbo – a dream world for the subconscious that P-3 was previously sent to during the main campaign while the Kollektive network controlled his body. Unfortunately, unlike the visits to limbo during the core campaign – which were creepy, quirky, and used in brief bursts – Trapped in Limbo drastically overstays its welcome and goes all in on just a couple of gameplay mechanics that are repeated ad nauseam until I was thoroughly nauseated. For clarity, it only goes for a few hours – which is entirely fair for a low-priced add-on. The levels are just not enjoyable, so they drag. Everything here really could’ve been edited into a short prologue level to illustrate P-3’s return to the real-world. The majority of what’s here is just padding.

The first – and worst – are the sliding levels, which function similarly to Counter-Strike’s “surfing” (which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a long-running mod scene for Counter-Strike that embraces a physics quirk and is based around sliding down sloped platforms). Trapped in Limbo’s sliding levels are finicky, trial-and-error affairs, and they go on and on and on. I can see no other reason for the “percentage complete” bar at the top of the screen other than to reassure us that there is, indeed, an end to this torment – if we can persevere to it.

There’s just something off about the way it feels, and I was never able to get a good gauge on how to consistently get the right amount of air off the end of each slide segment. It has nothing to do with jumping, because you can’t. It’s all about the angle – and yet getting it right is not always possible thanks to the huge spiky obstacles. It’s like playing Tony Hawk with a broken ollie button, and the half-pipe is mined. I didn’t feel a sense of satisfaction getting to the end of these sliding levels – only relief that they were done and I wouldn’t have to do them again. That’s not a sensation I associate with having a good time.

Accompanying the two sliding levels are a pair of climbing ones, which focus on first-person platforming (although they also include aggravating sliding sections of their own). These levels are a lot more in line with the moments of first-person puzzle-platforming present in the main game, and they’re certainly a little more straightforward. For instance, it’s quite forgiving when it comes to landing on tiny cubes and detecting clambering opportunities. That said, I still had times where I was cursing the sloppiness of the jumping on a timing-based trap, or reloading my last save after falling into an area it didn’t appear I was supposed to have been able to get into. Like the sliding levels, I have no desire to play these again, either.

If you’re wondering why we haven’t discussed combat yet, it’s because there really isn’t much of it beyond a few arenas. Enemies are largely edible reskins of the ones in the main game but, despite the small cache of sugar-coated candy cannons at your disposal, the combat is anything but sweet. I get P-3 is living in a dreamland here, but it just has none of the punch or metal-rending mayhem of the main campaign. It’s plain.

The fifth and final level of Trapped in Limbo is the weirdest of all, and that’s saying something in a universe where the main character’s dead wife is actually two eight-foot-tall ballerina robots. It’s… an endless runner. The level actually does have an end, but it’s long enough to feel like it doesn’t – and not in a good way. I get that this version of Limbo is a weird place where anything’s possible, but an endless runner as Atomic Heart DLC is a little like having a band you like coming out for their encore and humming a nursery rhyme.

Not quite what you’d expect – and you’d probably walk out.