Get catchin’.
As part of the recent Pokémon Presents showcase, it was announced that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are getting yet another Tera Raid Battle event. Well, three, to be more specific.
Starting tomorrow (28th February, 2024), the OG starter evolutions will feature in separate Tera Raid Battle events, beginning with Venusaur. Blastoise will follow, and the final event will feature the return of Charizard.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has marked the 8th birthday of his farming sim phenomenon baby (also called Stardew Valley) by announcing the impending release of update 1.6. The PC version – the one we care about – is arriving on the 19th of March, and consoles and mobile as soon as possible after that. The actual content of update 1.6 is largely a mystery, but Barone has teased a few things here and there, including that it’s “mostly changers for modders” that’ll make it “easier and more powerful to mod”.
The Pokémon Company just held its first Pokémon Presents event of the new year, lasting nearly 13 minutes with news and information on the popular franchise for the foreseeable future. IGN has you covered with everything announced during the February 2024 Pokémon Presents below.
Today is not only the first Pokémon Presents event of 2024, but it also marks the anniversary of Pokémon Red and Green, released in Japan. To celebrate Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, players will have the chance to do a tera raid where they can catch one of the three final evolutions of the Gen 1 starters. The event starts tomorrow with the Mighty Venusaur event and will end on March 5. The next event starts March 6, and players will be able to catch a mighty Blastoise until March 12. On March 13, tera raids to catch a Mighty Charizard begin and will conclude on March 17.
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Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
While players have scoured and stained every inch of the Lands Between in the two years since Elden Ring launched, they might not have uncovered every secret just yet. With a June release now confirmed for Shadow Of The Erdtree, the long-awaited expansion, director Hidetaka Miyazaki has now hinted that we Tarnished may have missed something. One small secret may yet remain, assuming he’s not pulling another prank, or maybe not. Honestly, Miyazaki should say it has hundreds of undiscovered things. Keep everyone guessing. Communal Internet knowledge has ruined the mystique of video games.
Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in the Marvel’s Spider-Man games, has reflected on Spider-Man 2’s ending and where he sees the story going next.
Spoilers for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 follow.
The ending of Spider-Man 2 sees Peter Parker pass the Spider-Man torch to Miles Morales as the primary Spidey in a cutscene that suggests Parker wants to take an indefinite hiatus from web-slinging. The ending is seen by some as a sort of retirement for Peter Parker, but according to Yuri Lowenthal, Pete has more to offer.
“There have been some comments recently that were picked up to infer that that Peter’s out and Miles is in,” Lowenthal said in an interview with Variety. “While I think that Peter would love to believe that he can just turn it off and not be Spider-Man anymore and live a completely normal life, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen now.”
Lowenthal went on to say he has yet to read a script for the unannounced but inevitable Spider-Man 3, so isn’t sure what developer Insomniac has in store. “They’re probably still working on it,” Lowenthal added. “But I don’t think that’s the last we’re gonna see Peter. I think it’s a cool place to leave it. It’s a cool change for him.
“I think 100% he trusts Miles. Miles has really stepped up and he’s like, ‘Oh, maybe I can get a little break.’ And I did get a vacation to Symkaria during the Miles game. Not much of a vacation, but at least MJ got to learn to ride a motorcycle, which is awesome.” That motorcycle line is a nod to MJ’s newfound skill with a bike in Spider-Man 2 (and a cool Akira Easter egg).
PlayStation 5 exclusive Spider-Man 2 launched in October last year and has sold 10 million copies so far. Its New Game Plus update launches next month. But thoughts have already turned to what’s next from Insomniac. While it has a Wolverine game in the works, it seems likely it will also release a Marvel’s Spider-Man spinoff similar in scope to the hugely successful Miles Morales standalone, with Venom the potential focus.
To find out how Insomniac has set up its next sequel, check out IGN’s Spider-Man 2 ending explained.
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.
Last night I dreamt I had to review a Dragon Age DLC. I reviewed it poorly. I thought that it should not have been marketed as main game DLC instalment when it pivoted to being a magical girl dating sim. This serves to show how unrealistic dreams can be; in my waking hours I am, of course, of the clear-eyed awareness that a magical girl dating sim is entirely in-keeping with the rest of the Dragon Age oeuvre.
I’m worried about Dragon Age. I’m worried that so much cost has been sunk, team members changed and redrafting did that it’ll end up kind of a mess. But that’s the pessimism talking. What I’d like to propose is that all the big game companies have a crack at something similar to Amazon’s (hiliarious and abortive) attempt to officially license fan fiction, which was called Kindle Worlds.
Hotly anticipated city builder Cities Skylines 2 launched on PC via Steam in October and immediately ran into a number of issues developer Colossal Order has struggled to get on top of in the months since. Now, with player sentiment turning a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating into ‘mostly negative’ for recent reviews, and with the first Cities Skylines game with more players than its sequel on PC, the boss of Colossal Order has issued a message to disgruntled players designed to address chief concerns.
In November, Colossal Order confirmed a series of delays for planned DLC so it could focus on much-needed performance improvements and the already delayed Mod Editor. The console version wouldn’t be released until the PC version was sorted out, the developer insisted.
Now, in a new Steam post, CEO Mariina Hallikainen asked herself the question: “How do you plan to get out of this mess? / What is in the works to fix Cities: Skylines 2? / What will you do to set things right for the disaster launch of CS2?” In her response, she admitted the lack of modding support is Colossal Order’s “biggest regret”, but addressed all the main concerns.
“We’d much rather be in a different position than we are in at the moment, but we cannot change the past,” Hallikainen said. “We’re working very hard to catch up on the missing modding support, missing platforms, the content for the Ultimate Edition, and improving the performance and fixing bugs this year. The team is divided to work on different tasks so that we’re seeing progress on all fronts and while it might not feel that it’s fast enough I can assure you we are all doing the best we can. Only time will tell if this is enough to turn things around.
“There have also been many questions about the patch cadence and why we moved away from weekly patches. Weekly patches are too heavy for us to keep up with and the issues we are working on need more time than just a few hours or days to fix. We’re a small team of 30 developers and we have to plan the work in a way that creates the fastest results. So instead of spending a big part of the week working on the build deliveries and QA rounds, we can use that time to work on the fixes themselves. For the Ultimate Edition, the DLCs already have a rough schedule so we’ll have good opportunities to patch the game at the same time. This doesn’t mean that we never patch the game between the DLC releases. The goal is to improve the game as quickly as possible and when we have a solid patch ready and tested it will be released.
“We are aware we have a mountain to climb when it comes to delivering on the expectations but we have our ice picks ready and we are surely used to the cold. We’re going to keep on climbing and you’ll continue to see that progress in the game.”
Then, on the lack of modding support: “The biggest regret we have is that modding support is not yet available for the game. We have been working on it since the beginning of the project and the intent was to have it fully ready at release. Code modding support, map, and asset editing were all planned to be fully usable and mods shareable in one place. We still believe that offering modding support makes any game better and that the tools and mods should be available for all players to enjoy at no additional cost.
“During the project we faced, and still continue to face, technical difficulties that affect the speed and quality of the development, especially performance. We simply ran out of time as the focus had to shift from modding support to all hands on deck to fix the performance. All this work is still ongoing.
“We’ll be communicating more on the status of the modding soon. It’s not an ideal situation but we are committed to keep working on this part of the game because it means so much to you and to us. ‘A Colossal Order game is a moddable one’ is a promise we have made to ourselves years ago and work very hard to keep.”
Meanwhile, Hallikainen answered a list of questions, confirming more animations are coming to the game, bikes and bike paths are in the works, and more buildings both free and paid are in the roadmap.
Cities: Skylines 2’s problems began before its launch even arrived. Colossal Order warned players that it would release with performance issues a week before the game came out. Since then, players have been met with lower framerates and interesting dental glitches as the developer worked to create a better experience. In IGN’s Cities: Skylines 2 review, which returned a 6/10, we said: “Cities: Skylines 2 is an ambitious sequel that might have bitten off more than it can chew – be prepared to do a lot of terraforming if you don’t want your metropolis to look like a nightmare.”
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.
As someone who’s learning Japanese, I crave other methods of language acquisition that don’t feel like studying. Textbooks, flashcards, even watching Japanese media can all feel a bit too close to being back in a classroom. Shashingo, a game that helps you learn Japanese through taking cute photos, may be the study companion I’ve craved. And having covered it two years ago when it was first properly shown off, I’m very happy to see it’s finally arriving later today.
Over 100 artists contributed.
Remember the stunning Johto Redrawn project that we covered way back in 2021? You might also recall that the team behind this beautiful pixel art recreation of one of our favourite Pokémon regions, Retro Redrawn, was also working on a reimagining of the Kanto region. Today, Kanto Redrawn is finished, and it looks absolutely amazing.
Kanto Redrawn is a reimagining of the Kanto region, the world from the first Pokémon games, Pokémon Red & Blue (and Green and Yellow). It’s not a playable game but an incredibly detailed and beautifully crafted redraw of the world so many grew up with. The project started up in 2021 and took almost three years to complete.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Helldivers 2’s great war to spread democracy across the galaxy is being undermined by an unlikely source: farmers.
Arrowhead’s phenomenally popular co-op focused third-person shooter features a galaxy-wide war that pits the forces of Super Earth against Terminids (alien bugs) on one side and Automatons (alien robots) on the other (check out our Terminids and Automatons enemy list for more). The idea is to “liberate” planets from alien infestation by completing operations, which are made up of a variety of missions. If you start an operation then fail to complete all the missions within it, the operation counts as a loss for Super Earth.
You can see the effect your work has on the status of each planet’s liberation as you complete operations. And, taking a higher level view, you can see how the community is doing generally against each faction sector-wide. But it isn’t just bugs and robots who are fighting against Super Earth, it’s traitorous players.
Helldivers 2 is currently in the throes of a farming problem. No, cows aren’t shooting the place up. Rather, players who ‘farm’ resources such as medals (used to work through the battle pass), requisition (used to unlock stratagems), and XP (used to level up) from easy-going missions, like the fast-paced Automaton eradication missions that charge players with simply killing a certain number of enemies (mortal sentries held here), are then resetting the operation to rinse and repeat.
Completing eradicate enemies missions over and over again is seen as a more efficient way to farm resources than completing the operation via another mission type that takes much longer, so even though Helldivers 2 provides bonuses for completing operations, these rewards are not good enough to convince farmers to do the right thing.
The problem, of course, is that by failing to finish all missions in an operation, farmers are damaging the overall war effort. As Arrowhead has confirmed, quitting after only half the operation counts as a loss for Super Earth. So while democracy-loving Helldivers 2 are off sacrificing themselves for the greater good across the galaxy, farmers have already reset scores of operations by bursting through eradicate missions in just a few missions. “So it sounds like there’s three factions; Terminids, Automatons, and Farmers,” joked one redditor.
“People farming on defense missions are the reason why Super Earth will be taken eventually,” complained redditor SilentBoss29. “Yesterday I joined five different lobbies subsequentially because I was trying to defend an Automaton zone planet and the first four lobbies were just farming the ‘Destroy Automatons’ missions over and over, pretty much surrendering whole operations just to farm these missions and get XP and money, I would assume.
“I do not want to be dictating how you should play the game, but this is definitely not how devs design the game to play. I really believe that if at any point the community agrees with farming missions, and Super Earth gets taken because of it, the devs should make the game unaccesible so that humanity can ‘go find another Super Earth’ for a few days and reset our progress. I really cannot believe the amount of sweat that some players want to experience in a PvE game. It is a shame that they do not really appreciate the fresh air that this game brings in the shooter genre.”
There’s a little more nuance to this farming problem, though. Some players are put off certain types of missions due to their extreme difficulty, and would rather focus on more easy-going missions, such as the eradicate type, than soldier through nightmarish missions such as evacuations. Making a go of completing all three missions in an operation can take a lot of time and effort, especially on higher difficulty and with random teammates.
And then there’s the Helldivers 2 grind, which is long and painful. Progression can feel like it takes an age, and if you only have a certain amount of time to play, it perhaps makes sense to play as efficiently as possible if you’re struggling to unlock a certain stratagem or item in the battle pass.
And it is probably the case that a lot of players simply aren’t aware of the way operations work and how they contribute to the war effort. Unless you’re in the weeds with Helldivers 2 and keep up with the latest developments, you might not know that incomplete operations count as a loss for Super Earth. Helldivers 2 doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining how it works, so, especially for more casual players, ignorance may be bliss.
What can be done? The Helldivers 2 community has come up with a few solutions. For a start, the game itself could do with clearly letting players know that failing to finish an operation results in a hit to Super Earth. Another suggestion is that eradicate missions are locked as the final mission in an operation. But even that has its downside, as it limits player choice. Perhaps the best course of action is to issue exclusive rewards to players when a planet is liberated, which would theoretically at least, make the war effort a more tangible goal than simply role-playing.
Now Arrowhead appears to have sorted out Helldivers 2’s server issues, it has time to return to its original post-launch plan, so hopefully we’ll get an idea of what to expect in terms of new content soon. In the meantime, be sure to tell Super Earth if you suspect anyone of being a farmer. Do your part!
If you’re playing, be sure to check out IGN’s comprehensive Helldivers 2 guide.
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.
