Category: IGN

Kingdom Hearts’ 21st anniversary in the U.S. has passed, and Kingdom Hearts 4 still won’t be out until next year at the earliest. You could play every Kingdom Hearts game to hold you over, but here we’re exploring six recommendations for games outside of the franchise that share gameplay and/or thematic elements with Kingdom Hearts.

Kingdom Hearts thrives on action-based combat, with each game employing different gameplay techniques than the last. Likewise, these games outside of the series, whether they’re published by Square Enix or not, have wild combat mechanics for players to experiment with and themes such as the power of friendship, the nature of memories, self-determination, emotional health, self-acceptance, and partaking in a cause greater than oneself — themes that are similar to the Disney-Square Enix franchise, no matter what circumstances the characters are facing. Here are six games that may be of interest to fans of the Kingdom Hearts series.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Modern Warfare III’s launch had “historically low crash rates” for a Call of Duty game, Sledgehammer developers say. They also hinted at changes that might be coming to Modern Warfare III in the future, and dropped some information on the upcoming Season 1 during an hour-long interview with content creator Repullze.

Sledgehammer’s Adam Iscove, Senior Development Director, and Greg Reisdorf, Multiplayer Creative Director on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, claimed the controversial sequel was “historically stable at launch,” but that they’re aware of ongoing server issues like packet bursts and will continue to work on and optimize them.

Perhaps more important for the Call of Duty community, however, was Iscove and Reisdorf’s willingness to talk openly about the state of Modern Warfare III, the feedback Sledgehammer is receiving from the community, and changes that will be coming to the game in the future.

One of the most substantial topics they touched on was how movement has changed from Modern Warfare III’s beta. In the beta, stamina started to regenerate while you were sliding. Now, stamina regeneration pauses while you’re sliding and only restarts once the slide has completed. Iscove and Reisdorf said that a stamina bar would be added to the HUD in the near future to help players manage it more accurately. They also said they’re looking to bring back bunny hopping “in some form” in Modern Warfare III, which is something the community has been asking for.

Iscove and Reisdorf also talked about several other features they’d like to bring to the game. The core issue, however, is time. Sledgehammer is trying to mitigate this somewhat with the experimental playlist, which allows the studio to “flip switches” and test and implement ideas quickly if they’re well-received by the community. It also helps the studio get an idea of what appeals to the different parts of Modern Warfare III’s playerbase.

Iscove and Reisdorf also mentioned that several aspects of Modern Warfare III are undergoing changes in the near future based on community feedback. Those include:

• Changes to the Firing Range intended to fix a glitch where dummies have 100 health instead of 150
• Tweaking or removing some of the aim assist options for better balance
• Changes in the way weapons, particularly SMGs, which the community feels are underpowered, are tuned
• Allowing players to bind dive and slide to different buttons.

In addition, they also addressed things like Weapon Prestiges and bonus camos, both of which Sledgehammer wanted to bring back but couldn’t due to time constraints, though they didn’t rule out bringing either back in the future.

All told, it was a remarkably detailed and open podcast, and both Iscove and Reisdorf expressed interest in doing something like it again so they can connect to the Modern Warfare III community more directly.

This level of transparency is probably for the best because Modern Warfare III is off to something of a rocky start. We described the campaign as “boring” in our review and didn’t think there were “enough content or novel ideas in play to justify a whole new Call of Duty” in the multiplayer. Zombies mode suffers similar issues. In our review, we said it was “undercut by way too much time spent grinding for gear needed to survive the intense enemies in the center of the map, busywork story objectives, and crashes that can kill any desire to play.”

Suffice it to say, fans haven’t been particularly happy with Modern Warfare III at launch. Activision has already had to pull maps due to fan complaints about spawns, and it takes nearly 76 hours to grind out Modern Warfare III’s most coveted camo. Even the patches trying to fix Modern Warfare III’s issues have had problems, with some fixes delayed to the next patch.

Sledgehammer clearly has their work cut out for them. If nothing else, though, this podcast proves Sledgehammer is taking accountability, listening, and open to implementing feedback. And based on the amount of Ws posted in Repullze’s chat once everything was over, the community is very, very happy about that.

Stay with IGN for more updates on Modern Warfare III as we head into the holidays. For more on Modern Warfare III, check out our guides for the Best Modern Warfare III Loadouts and Class Setups, our guide to Modern Warfare III’s Zombies Mode, and more.

Will Borger is a freelance writer at IGN.

Amazon is offering one of the best subscription deals we’re going to see for Black Friday and the holiday season. First time Audible subscribers can get 4 months of Audible Premium Plus membership for only $5.95 per month. That adds up to $23.80. You also get a free $20 credit that’s good for any audiobook at Audible, which means you actually only end up paying about $4 for your entire 4 month subscription. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re eligible, simply click on the link; if you see the promo then you’re eligible and if you don’t then you’re not. This deal ends on Cyber Monday, November 27, so you better hurry!

4 Months of Audible Premium Plus + $20 Audible Credit for $23.80

Audible is a subscription service that gives you access to hundreds of thousands of the best audiobooks without ever having to purchase them. There are two paid membership plans: the lower tier Audible Plus ($7.95/mo) and the higher tier Audible Premium Plus ($14.95/mo). The biggest difference between the two is the size of the audiobook library. Whereas Audible Plus only lets you listen to a selection of about 10,000 audiobooks, the Audible Premium Plus plan gives you access to a whopping 500,000 audiobooks. These include all-time classics like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire), Witcher, The Sandman Series, The Lord of the Rings, Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, and much more.

Although the seriously expanded library is the main draw of the Audible Premium Plus membership, there are some other nice perks as well. Every month Premium Plus members get to pick one audiobook to keep in their library indefinitely, even after the membership expires. Also, Premium Plus members can get 30% off any additional audiobooks they wish to purchase, in addition to exclusive limited-time discounts.

On a regular day, new subscribers are eligible for a 30-day free trial of either Audible membership. But why settle for one month when you can get four months? If you were planning to purchase a couple of audiobooks anyway, then it makes more sense to jump on this deal and enjoy the subscription at least for a little while.

Looking for more Black Friday deals like this? Check out our guide to Amazon Black Friday deals.

A huge discount on a popular Nintendo Switch game has hit Amazon and Best Buy for Black Friday. That game is none other than Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, the turn-based adventure that throws the characters of Super Mario together with the Rabbids. Sparks of Hope is available for $14.99, which is a 75% discount off of its standard price. If you’ve been waiting on a blowout sale, this is the lowest this game will probably get.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope On Sale for $14.99 During Black Friday

• Also at Best Buy

If you’ve never heard of the Mario + Rabbids series, it is a turn-based collaboration that combines the worlds of Super Mario and the Rabbids. The first game in the series, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, was released for the Nintendo Switch in 2017. Last year, Sparks of Hope was released for Switch as a sequel. You play as Mario, Luigi, Peach, and the familiar cast of Mario characters. However, you also have the ability to play as Rabbid versions of Mario characters, like Rabbid Rosalina.

Sparks of Hope took a huge step forward from Kingdom Battle with its open-level design. Here, you can freely explore and battle however you choose, whereas every level was linear in the original game. If you’re interested in checking out the game, it’s worth noting that you don’t need to play the first Mario + Rabbids title to understand the second.

Plenty of Nintendo Switch deals are now available ahead of Black Friday. Titles like Super Mario Party and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD are 50% off at GameStop. Additionally, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is only $9.99 on 4K UHD from Amazon. If you’re looking for the latest Nintendo Switch deals throughout the next week, be sure to check out our Nintendo Switch Black Friday 2023 roundup.

The words impossible port, punching above its weight, and even black magic are thrown around often when it comes to games on diminutive hardware. With Hogwarts Legacy, now launching on the Nintendo’s Switch, it could be another time to wheel out those tropes… but not quite. Hogwarts Legacy is not a miracle port, despite squeezing onto the Switch (quite literally, with a 7.4GB install size compared to 22.1GB on the Xbox One version). It manages to be better than feared, yet in places still rough as expected.

Hexed Objects

Hogwarts Legacy on Switch offers only a single performance mode, with few options to choose from. This is a step down from the Xbox One version, which has motion blur, film grain and even an unlocked frame-rate toggle. To be clear, this is a last generation game through-and-through, as we discussed in our original performance review. This already reduces the pressure on this Switch port, but further reductions are required in order to mitigate the drastic reduction in CPU and GPU power, as well as lower memory size and bandwidth. On Switch, we have similar levels of performance to the Xbox One version, though some areas are worse. These mostly seem to be memory and/or CPU-bound sections of data streaming, keeping the world fed with data and cleaning up behind as it goes. The result is a game that can run pretty well at 30fps in non-stressful areas outside of battles and loading sectors. But during these moments it is often closer to the 50ms frame time, meaning we see frame rate around 24-25 fps for prolonged periods. That’s not great, and the sluggishness can be felt without a frame analysis.

The biggest issues though come from general instantiation (creation) of objects and removal of others, which can cause huge 100-200ms spikes, resulting in lurching and pausing as frame rates drop into the low teens. Hogwarts Castle itself is the biggest culprit of these. Textures, objects, and walls pop in as you cut classes and explore the halls, causing stuttering and lurching. It’s worth noting that even the current-gen consoles and PC sometimes suffer from these same stutters and pauses, but the Switch is affected the most here, especially in dense areas, like among trees, in the castle, and when animating characters, with frame rates often below 30fps. The average across 10+ minutes of tested sections is still 28.3fps with a 95% frame time of 50ms, which is not great but certainly far from the worst game on Switch, and the amount being pushed here is impressive considering the hardware.

Stupefying Stutters

The single biggest challenge for this port is the tiny memory pool of the Switch. 4GB LPDDR5 RAM is all that’s available, and the game likely gets around 3.5GB, which is half that of the Xbox One, at most. Video capture is disabled in the game, highlighting the choices made to use all the RAM possible. The result is that the game has been redesigned quite extensively for this port. Loading is long in the last generation versions and by and large this is the same here. This impact is no more apparent than in the increased sector points exclusive to this port. Entering Hogsmeade used to be an open stroll up the main high street, whereas on Switch this is around a minute or so to load. Entering shops in Hogsmeade used to be seamless, whereas now we are met with a load for each door you enter and the same for the way out. All this, alongside the existing extra loading the last-generation versions added, means the Switch is competing with Starfield for the award of most Loading encountered in 2023.

As expected, resolution is a big cut, targeting 1280×720 in docked mode with very little to no anti-aliasing coverage, with dynamic resolution scaling giving a counted low of approximately 1024×576. This is a good result, as handheld mode is often 960×540. It may and likely does run DRS, but expect this as the best case or average result. Due to the small 720p screen it never looks bad here, although it is still very noisy with shimmer and blurry textures. Aside from the very low pixel counts, the other huge cut is texture quality.

The game can struggle with mip-map loading from its Unreal Engine 4 base, which means even with such a drastic cut to texture assets, we still see low quality mip-maps and incredibly low texture filtering, although the opening prologue is much better. When in the open map of the game, though, we see soft, soupy textures on everything. In addition, we also see massive light reductions – even the sun appears to have moved. Shadow maps are much shorter in cascade and quality, and interiors use less light and fewer shadow casting sources. The core physically-based materials are also largely gone now, with the layers reduced to base albedo and specular, giving us an Xbox 360/PS3 generational look. Supporting this is the massive reduction in object triangle count. Objects are less rounded and very hexagonal-looking compared to the Xbox One. Areas have also been changed to save on space and performance. Animated objects in windows are now plain textures, and views are walled off to save on geometry load and save precious CPU and GPU time.

Characters suffer the most, with faces and expressions being impacted by the reduced level of detail, which can change the look and movement of faces. The animated bone rigging underneath is also dramatically reduced, leaving much stiffer and more robotic mouths and expressions. Shadows are very low resolution and can flicker and pop on faces when talking. All these things add up to a stark difference between the Xbox One and Switch versions, with reductions in lights, shadows, details, hair cards, animation, textures, and world detail. In addition, we also see huge cuts to grass, tree quality, world clutter, and NPCs. Even motion blur and SSR are removed, along with many sections that had rain are now removed or reduced. Water bodies rely on projected cube maps only for reflections which is understandable as it can be a GPU-heavy effect.

Sound is better than I had feared. The quality and clarity is severely compressed as expected, with the volume increased on the Switch to compensate and you also get fewer sound effects and even miss music at times, although this may be a memory related bug. All the voices, music, sound effects are included, though with a decent TV setup you may notice more pop, fizzle, and compression issues than on any other version.

Shrinking the Magic

Hogwarts Legacy was always going to be an uphill battle trying to fit onto the Switch, but the team achieved it. Loading, resolution, and performance all take a hit, but generally they are on the right side of playable, especially compared to such big games as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet last year, with Hogwards certainly pushing much more demanding visuals, quality and scale. Although the world, detail, and quality has been drastically cut back, it has been done intelligently so, showing the extensive use of plain textures for details, more billboard trees, and blockier objects. Think more VHS copy than cinema film print. Fine detail, material accuracy, color clarity, scale, and overall quality are sacrificed heavily, but you can make out the same wonder if you squint and use your imagination… and a little magic.

PS5 Black Friday deals are in full swing, and we’ve already seen siginificant deals on PS5 slim bundles, 30% off PS Plus, DualSense controllers for just $49, and now we’re starting to see discounts on first and third party PS5 video games. Some of these discounts are great and likely the best we’re going to get, and others are good — but will likely be surpassed by Black Friday next week (November 24). Read on to find out what deals get our seal of approval, and what offers you should wait on.

God of War Ragnarok on PS5 for $34.99 – Buy

One of the standout games from 2022 was God of War Ragnarok. If you haven’t played this game yet, then you’re missing out — it’s truely incredible. We expected this title to pop up among the deals for Black Friday this year, and we’re just very excited that the 50% discount has gone live so early. Pick up your copy in the next week for the crazy price of $35. Walmart will have this for $40 next week, but we imagine that’ll be price matched before then.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor for $34.99 – Hold

While $34.99 is still a very good deal for one of the best Star Wars games ever made, $34.99 is not the best deal we will be getting on the sequel to Fallen Order. From November 22, Walmart will have Star Wars Jedi Survivor for just $30, which is a whole $4.99 less than every other retailer right now. So, if you have the patience, hold on that order and wait for the bigger and better Black Friday sales next week. If you simply want the game now, we’ll leave a link just below as well.

Final Fantasy 16 on PS5 for $39.99 – Buy

You can pick up 2023’s entry into the Final Fantasy saga for just $39.99, that’s a fantastic 43% off in Amazon’s Black Friday sale. If you’ve yet to play this game, then you should move fast to snap it up. We gave it a 9 back in June when it first came out, and we stick by that rating still. The 16th installment in the franchise is a little bit of a departure from what FF would usually expect from the series, but it’s absolutely worth playing. As far as we’re aware, this is the best deal we’re going to get on Final Fantasy 16.

Resident Evil 4 for $39.99 – Hold

In all honesty $40 for a Game of the Year contender is a great deal, it’s just not the best deal we’re going to get throughout Black Friday. Next week Resident Evil 4 will drop to just $30 at Walmart, and you can get early access to that deal if you’re a Walmart+ member.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage on PS5/ Xbox for $39.99 – Buy

You get a choice between consoles for this one, as Assassin’s Creed Mirage has dropped to just $39.99 in the early Black Friday sales across most retailers. This is the best deal we’re getting on AC, with Walmart not dropping it any further when their deals go live on November 22.

The Last of Us Part 1 for $39.99 – Buy

Let’s be honest, this is probably the price it should’ve been in the first place, rather than a whole — checks notes — $70? Well, at least it’s come down quite heavily in price now to $39.99. If you were hoping for any further discounts, you’re out of luck as this is the best we’re getting. Still, we think this is quite a good deal for the perfect version of one of the best games ever made.

Street Fighter 6 for $39.99 – Hold

Another good deal, but another hold for now. Just like its Capcom brother RE4, Street Fighter 6 is down to $39.99 at most retailers right now, but will fall to just $30 at Walmart when their proper Black Friday deals kicks off on November 22. So, for now, be patient and you can get an even better deal. Or, just ignore us and buy it now anyway cause you’re bored and want a game to play ASAP.

Metal Gear Solid – Master Collection Vol. 1 for $39.99 – Buy

Here’s another one where you get to go, hey it should’ve been that price in the first place! Well, we’ll let you have your fun. The MGS collection isn’t something to write home about, but it’s the best way to play the classic games on modern consoles right now, and it does come with a lot of content. So, at $39.99, you’re getting a reasonable deal here. It’s not getting any cheaper, either, so this is the best deal you’re going to get.

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

Ark: Survival Ascended’s publisher has declared its launch successful after the dinosaur survival game sold over 600,000 copies on Steam in the two weeks following launch.

Snail, Inc., owner of developer Studio Wildcard, said Arc: Survival Ascended’s Steam launch “is only the beginning of the journey ahead”. The game is set to launch on Xbox and PlayStation later in November, although fans are sceptical after a number of delays to previously announced release windows.

Ark: Survival Ascended is Studio Wildcard’s Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original Ark: Survival Evolved. (If you’re playing, check out IGN’s comprehensive Ark: Survival Ascended guide).

Ark: Survival Ascended quickly shot to the top of Steam’s best-selling games list upon release, but players ran into performance issues that marred the launch. The game currently has a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating of 56%. Studio Wildcard has acknowledged these issues, admitting to “a few bumps” since launch. But, it stressed, it’s working to address issues players report with patches. At the time of this article’s publication, more people were playing Ark: Survival Evolved than Ark: Survival Ascended.

It feels like only yesterday that we were wrapping up our Black Friday coverage last year, and all of a sudden here we are again bringing you the fledgling deals from this year’s event. We’re being spoiled this month as retailers are starting to offer huge discounts as far out as a week away from the big day itself.

We like to stay on top of these early deals and one thing we’re always looking out for is savings on a PS5 SSD. If you head over to Amazon, you can find the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB Gaming SSD with Heatsink for just £99.99. That’s the lowest price it’s ever been.

You might see us banging on about on SSDs for PS5s a lot, but you may have wondered why we go on about them quite so much? Well, if you’re used to constantly having to juggle space whenever you install a new game, then you’re going to want to get yourself an SSD.

It will free up space, improve performance, and enhance your overall experience. Now is the time to grab one at a great price. Plus, you you don’t want to drop £100, the 1TB version is also down to just £57.99 right now as well.

More Great Early PlayStation Deals For Black Friday

PS5 fans can be particularly smug today as Sony has decided to officially go live with all of their Black Friday deals today. The deals on offer right now are pretty amazing too. First of all, you can grab a PS5 for just £379, or you can get a bundle that includes two free games for just £400.

PS Plus is also up to 30% off right now for new and current members, but you can save even more with a ShopTo gift card deal. For example, new members can get 12-months of PS Plus for £83.99 (down from £99.99), but the ShopTo £84 gift card costs just £74.85 so you’re securing a total saving of £25.14.