Author: Game Infliction

2023 and 2024 have shown that 2TB PS5 SSD upgrades are actually worth the price. In 2022, prices for 1TB PS5 SSDs averaged around $150, whereas 2TB SSDs hovered closer to $300. Now, we’re seeing 1TB SSDs trickle below the $70 price point and 2TB SSDs can drop to around $100 or sometimes even lower if there’s a good sale. It’s worth noting, though, that you can’t use any old SSD and expect it to perform well on the PS5 console. You’ll want to pick up a PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 solid-state drive with at least a 5,500MB/s read speed to match the PS5’s internal drive.

TL;DR – The Best PS5 SSD Deals Right Now

Note that Sony recommends a heatsink attached to your SSD and not all SSDs listed here have pre-installed heatsinks. For the ones that do, we’ll be sure to mention it. For the ones that don’t, all you have to do is purchase your own heatsink (like this one for $9) and install it yourself. For our top recommended picks for 2024, check out our full breakdown for the Best PS5 SSDs.

XPG 2TB GAMMIX S70 Blade PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280 SSD for $149.99

For those looking to jump from a 1TB SSD, you can’t go wrong with this excellent deal on a 2TB SSD from XPG. Its price has dropped 28%, from $209.99 to $149.99, but you’ll have to grab a heatsink to go with it (which you can do here for $9). This SSD also has read and write speeds of 7400/6800MB/s.

Adata Legend Max 2TB PS5 SSD with Heatsink for $149.99

Much like the SSD listed above, this is one of the faster SSDs on the market with read speeds of up to 7400MBps and write speeds of up to 6800MBps. Alongside 2TB of storage, it also has a very slim preinstalled heatsink that can slot perfectly into your PS5. Right now, it’s discounted 25% to $149.99.

Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 SSD for $163.11

Samsung SSDs need no introduction. They’ve made some of the most popular and reliable PS5 SSDs on the market. The 980 Pro has been out for a long time, way back in January of 2020. A testament to its reliability is the fact that Samsung didn’t feel any need to release any newer flagship model until 2022. In terms of performance, it’s no longer the fastest SSD on the market (the 990 Pro is), but it’s still a very fast drive. It certainly more than meets the minimum 5600MB/s speed requirement to be used as a PS5 storage upgrade, with speeds of up to 7,100MB/s.

Samsung 990 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSD for $169.99

The Samsung 990 Pro is an excellent SSD for your PS5. From a purely performance perspective, it’s overkill; the stock SSD in your PS5 will be the limiting factor. You’ll want to pick up a PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 solid state drive with a rated 5,500MB/s read speed to match the PS5’s internal drive and the 990 Pro is much faster. This one does not come with a heatsink, though, so you’ll need to invest in one.

Silicon Power XS70 4TB SSD with Built-in PS5 Heatsink for $223.96

Looking for even more storage to have in your PS5? Look no further than this incredible deal on a 4TB SSD from Silicon Power. It’s currently discounted 25% to $223.96, so well worth taking advantage of before it goes back up to its $299.99 MSRP. It also comes with a built-in heatsink, so it’ll be ready to go right away, and has excellent read and write speeds of 7,200MB/s and 6,800MB/s, respectively.

What if the SSD Doesn’t Include a Heatsink?

Sony recommends you install an SSD that has an attached heatsink. If the SSD you purchase doesn’t include one, it’s simple enough to buy one for $9 on Amazon and add it yourself. Most of these heatsinks are just attached using an adhesive like thermal tape.

Budget to Best: PS5 SSDs

There may be other SSD deals out there, but these are the PS5 SSDs we’ve tried ourselves and highly recommend. They also double up as outstanding boot drives for your gaming PC, in case you don’t need additional storage for your PS5 console.

How To Install a New PS5 SSD

It’s extremely easy! Removing the case cover is completely toolless. In fact, the only screw you have to remove is the one that keeps the cover for the SSD bay in place. You don’t even put it back when you’re done. Sony has a quick and easy YouTube video guide.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.

Earth Defense Force 6 now launches in the West this summer, D3Publisher has announced.

The third-person action shooter, already out in Japan, was set for launch in the West this spring but will now release this summer. That’s for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam. There is no launch planned for Xbox or Nintendo Switch.

“Developer Sandlot and publisher D3Publisher have decided to extend the launch window to add finishing touches and finalize preparations for its Western launch,” reads a joint statement.

Here’s the official blurb:

“In the year 2025, humanity won the war against the unknown invaders known as Primers, and peace returned to the planet. As a result of the conflict, 90% of Earth’s population was destroyed, and civilization was on the brink of collapse. Earth Defense Force 6 picks up three years after the events of Earth Defense Force 5 in the year 2027. The survivors continue their efforts to rebuild but threats to the world’s safety remain persistent. The Primers left behind many alien colonists and the two species have become increasingly hostile toward one another. The number of invasive organisms nesting in the depths of the earth and its ruins continues to increase. The Earth Defense Force (EDF) is once again called upon to protect the planet from the aggressive extraterrestrial invaders and determine the true purpose of the giant ring-shaped object that has recently appeared in the sky. Will the EDF be able to pull humanity from the edge of defeat, or will this be the species’ last stand?”

IGN’s Earth Defense Force 5 review returned an 8.3. We said: “Even with dated graphics, EDF 5 is an energetic essay on action game design that is way too much fun to miss – especially with friends.”

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.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League dev Rocksteady has announced plans to create an entirely new leaderboard due to a Burn bug.

In a post on the game’s Discord, Rocksteady discussed the looter shooter’s upcoming patch, and in doing so said that it had noticed “some of our more dedicated players started reaching Mastery Levels beyond our wildest expectations.”

The root cause of this is a bug with the Burn status effect. This was supposed to scale across the Mastery Levels so it remains viable for damage dealing, but a “major” unintended bug made it scale incorrectly. “As Mastery levels increased, Burn’s damage also increased, which basically meant that if you used a Burn build, every Mastery Level had the same difficulty,” Rocksteady explained.

The developer said the bug “left us with somewhat of a conundrum.” “Our most dedicated players had now reached a Mastery Level far beyond what the game was balanced for at launch due to this bug, and weren’t getting the challenge or variety we wanted our End Game to provide. We had to ask ourselves, what can we do to fix this, and more importantly, should we fix it at all?”

In the end, Rocksteady decided the Burn bug had to go. Explaining its decision, the studio said: “While there is no doubt that the Burn build is a really powerful and fun build – it should be! – we didn’t intend for it to be the only viable End Game build for launch and beyond.”

So, the bug will be fixed so that it scales correctly with damage taken effects on enemies, as originally intended. But Burn’s ability to scale infinitely is not long for this world.

Unfortunately, the knock-on effect of this bug is that Rocksteady has been forced to reset the game’s leaderboards. “Since this change will be pretty fundamental to the leaderboards and your continued progression on them, we are committed to creating a new leaderboard for you all, so you can continue to explore the different builds in the game.

“All the entries on the current leaderboard will exist in perpetuity and will be a permanent record of all your achievements. We want to applaud you all for both your dedication on getting this high in the Mastery Levels (and also breaking the game). Kudos!”

Elsewhere, Rocksteady plans to stop combat Mastery levels 50 and beyond increasing enemy health too much, too quickly. “We’ve seen some comments suggesting that enemy health at later Mastery Levels was too high, which makes the climb too steep past Mastery Level 50,” Rocksteady explained. “For that reason, we’re adjusting our approach to Mastery Level balancing. Enemy health will now increase in a much less aggressive way, with the intent that more builds will crop up as viable options.”

The Heat Wave’s Molten Skin and The Turtle’s Shell will also be adjusted, so that they reduce damage taken by 90% rather than give immunity. Rocksteady, again: “At the moment, these items were too easy to trigger and it is simply a bit too easy to keep the buff up, especially at higher Mastery Levels, and we wanted skilled players to need to use their mastery of their characters’ traversal and the mastery of combat mechanics and mastery of build construction to survive.”

Looking further ahead, Rocksteady said it will provide players with a look into Season 1 in the coming weeks, and longer-term changes it’s thinking about.

There’s much we don’t know about Rocksteady’s long-term plan for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, although we do know Joker is set to appear as a playable character. Last week, we reported on how a Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League player had unearthed a hidden message that looked like a strong hint at the return of Batman. Datamining has shown strong hints that Flash and Green Lantern are set to return in some form. Other playable characters suspected to be on their way include Mrs Freeze (Nora Fries), Lawless, and Deathstroke.

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.

The boss of Doctor Who has moved to debunk various rumors that indicated the popular show would soon launch a collaboration with Fortnite.

As reported by Eurogamer, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies replied to a user on Instagram who asked about the reported Fortnite collaboration to say: “There isn’t one! It’s a complete myth, I’m afraid.”

The comment comes despite evidence pointing to the existence of a Doctor Who x Fortnite event, which was assumed to go live alongside the upcoming new season in May. There’s even a list of datamined Doctor Who content that may or may not have been scrapped, including skins for David Tennant v2 and Ncuti Gatwa.

Despite Russell T. Davies’ definitive statement, some still believe Doctor Who is coming to Fortnite in some capacity. Perhaps that stems from how long the Doctor Who rumours have floated around the internet. Nearly a year ago there were rumblings of a crossover to coincide with Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary episode. Those rumours then emerged into reports of a delay, and then a switch to coincide with the new season.

As Eurogamer points out, the reports of Doctor Who in Fortnite come from credible Fortnite leakers with proven track records of dishing the dirt on Epic’s battle royale ahead of time, which makes it all the more surprising that a collaboration is supposedly not happening.

It’s busy times in the world of Fortnite, of course, with the release of games Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival within the game itself. Last week, Disney announced it had bought a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games to create an “expansive” universe inside Fortnite. In September, Epic let go of 830 employees, or about 16% of its workforce, with boss Tim Sweeney saying: “We’ve been spending way more money than we earn.”

Image credit: BBC STUDIOS 2023

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.

Helldivers 2 has only been out for a handful of days, but already its community is working to establish the “unspoken” rules of engagement, with an etiquette for good co-op play.

For the uninitiated, Helldivers 2 is a co-op focused shooter in which players team up to defeat giant alien bugs and terrifying automatons. It’s a dangerous game, and I don’t just mean just because of the bad guys. In Helldivers 2, you’re as much a danger to your teammates as the big bugs you face. With friendly fire very much a part of the gameplay, Helldivers 2 is a game in which you need to watch where you’re shooting – and where you’re landing in a drop pod.

And so, across the Helldivers subreddit, Discord, and social media, players are setting down best practice for co-op play. There’s a great thread by redditor RhuanSqx in which the Helldivers 2 is essentially crowdsourcing this early-days rule list. There’s some obvious stuff in there, such as do not walk in the way of your teammate when they’re shooting and be careful where you place your strategems (that area of effect!). But there’s some less obvious stuff that’s really helpful for promoting positive play, too. For example, when someone calls in a resupply, share the ammo by only grabbing one cache. The more ammo everyone has, the merrier a time you’ll have. Oh, and reload your weapons before snagging that resupply.

Here’s a nice suggestion: don’t loot your teammates’ equipment without their permission, but feel free to loot their samples (extracted samples are shared equally at the end of a mission). In Helldivers 2, turrets are particularly useful, but they can also hit your teammates hard (friendly fire, remember!). Combat this by placing them on high ground, making the low ground as safe as possible.

Some of this etiquette is as much about avoiding griefing as it is promoting effective play. Helldivers 2, as I’ve said, is a dangerous game, and so it’s as much about what you don’t shoot as it is about what you do shoot. So, firing at an enemy off in the distance while the rest of your squad is focused on something else probably isn’t the wisest course of action. Lobbing a teammates respawn right at a titan isn’t smart, either.

Do not shoot the nuke in Helldivers 2… pic.twitter.com/YpUtJq1dDO

— Papa JoPa – King Shark Main (@JoPaWrites) February 11, 2024

Speaking of griefing, I’ve already seen some players report that they’ve encountered players who’ve engaged in a spot of teamkilling. Some are even orbital-striking the entire group as soon as they spawn onto the map, only to do it again seemingly just for a laugh. And teamkilling during an extraction, or kicking a teammate during extraction after a 40-minute mission? Yikes!

But in Helldivers 2, it’s not always clear when teamkilling is accidental or deliberate. Redditor PassageLongjumping24 shared an interesting experience in which they dropped the carpet bomb at their feet knowing they and a teammate were about to die, taking at least 40 bugs with them. “It was a success and saved the team,” they said. But the other two players in the squad were less than impressed.

“Friendly fire is part of the game, embrace it,” PassageLongjumping24 said. “Teamkilling is a different beast altogether. After being insulted for saving the mission, I blew the dissident away with my shotgun, which led to a brief but bloody teamfight in which no-one won.

“Know the difference. Don’t cry like a baby when you get nailed by a strat and happen to be in the blast zone. Or if you weren’t even in the area of effect, just laugh and move on.”

Griefing is of course as old as online gaming, and, tonally, it might even fit Helldivers 2. This is a game inspired by Starship Troopers, a game in which you really do need to learn to embrace the chaos. You will die. Over and over again. So will your teammates! Sometimes random silliness is just that. But, as Helldivers 2’s co-op etiquette shows, there’s a fine line between slapstick and frustration.

The most important thing, though, is to have fun, and Helldivers 2 is all about that fun. According to Arrowhead boss Johan Pilestedt, Helldivers 2 has already sold one million copies across PlayStation 5 and PC, smashing all expectations in the process. And despite various matchmaking issues, Helldivers 2 shows no sign of slowing down. Check out IGN’s Helldivers 2 tips and tricks for getting started if you’re jumping in.

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.