Sony’s original PlayStation exclusivity deal for Grand Theft Auto 3 and the following two games in the series was in part a reaction to concern about Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox, a former executive has revealed.
“We were worried when we saw Xbox coming,” Deering said. “We knew exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of fields, like Sky TV with sports. Just as Christmas was approaching when Xbox would launch, a few of us went out to our favourite third-party publishers and developers, and we asked them, ‘How would you like a special deal if you keep your next-generation game on PlayStation exclusive for a two-year period?’ And one of the deals we made was with Take-Two for the next three Grand Theft Auto games. At the time, it wasn’t clear that Grand Theft Auto 3 was going to be as huge as it was, because it used to be a top-down game.
“It was very lucky for us. And actually lucky for them, because they got a discount on the royalty they paid. Those deals aren’t uncommon in industries with platforms. Including today with things like social media.”
As a result of this deal, Grand Theft Auto 3 released in October 2001 as a PS2 exclusive, a month before the original Xbox came out. The game released in May 2002 on PC, and then, two years after the PlayStation launch and after this exclusivity deal ended, in November 2003 for the Xbox.
As Deering mentioned, Sony’s Grand Theft Auto exclusivity deal was for three games, so included Vice City, which came out in October 2002 for the PS2 first, and San Andreas, which released in October 2004 for the PS2 first. Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City hit Xbox together as a pack late 2003, with San Andreas launching in June 2005.
The deal worked out perfectly for both Sony and Rockstar parent company Take-Two, as Deering suggests. Indeed, San Andreas ended up the best-selling PS2 game of all time, Vice City the third best, and Grand Theft Auto 3 the fifth best. Only Gran Turismo came close the the sales the Grand Theft Auto games posted on PS2.
The exclusivity deal also helped cement Grand Theft Auto as a PlayStation-first series, and while Grand Theft Auto 4 and Grand Theft Auto 5 launched on PlayStation and Xbox at the same time, Rockstar’s open-world crime epic is still strongly associated with Sony’s consoles, even now. In fact, a number of Grand Theft Auto games made IGN’s Top 100 Best PlayStation Games of All Time list.
But what about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6? It’s due out on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S at the same time in the fall of 2025, but marketing deals with either Sony or Microsoft have yet to be announced, if they exist at all.
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 developer of Path of Exile 2 has warned players to brace themselves for server queues this weekend, with over one million concurrent players expected to hit the Early Access launch.
In a video message, Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers spoke about anticipation for the action role-playing sequel surpassing the studio’s expectations, and expressed concern that its backend services could buckle under the weight of the Early Access release.
Path of Exile 2’s global release times set the launch for 11am PT today, December 6, and it’s at this point that the floodgates will open. Path of Exile 2 is already the top-selling game on Steam by revenue, suggesting Rogers’ concern is well-placed. Whether the game is up to the task of coping with what’s coming, however, remains to be seen, with sales still increasing, Rogers said.
“We’ve just reached one million Early Access redemptions,” Rogers revealed in the video message. “The support you have all shown for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is far beyond anything we could have ever predicted. However we want to be upfront with you all and let you know there may very well be queues over the weekend.
“There are probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend. Before our announcement, when we were ordering capacity, we really didn’t expect to have more than a million people online at the same time.
“We’ve already ordered way more cloud capacity, and those servers will be coming online very soon, but I do have some concerns about issues with the backend. We quite frankly don’t know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users.
“We’ve added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it will go. But we’re really not sure what kind of limits we might hit. We never expected things to go this big during EA [Early Access].
“So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you guys so much for believing in this project. If we do run into server issues at launch, just know that we’re going to be working as hard as we can to solve them.”
Path of Exile 2 is GGG’s hotly anticipated free-to-play action role-playing sequel set years after the original game. Players return to the world of Wraeclast and seek to end a spreading corruption, with six character classes, each with two Ascendancy Classes, available to play at the launch of Early Access later this week. There’s co-op for up to six players, but you can play solo. Check out IGN’s Path of Exile 2 preview, where we gave the Mercenary class a whirl and got a first look at the endgame, for more.
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.
Marvel Rivals enjoyed an immediate huge launch, with over 440,000 concurrent players on Steam alone.
NetEase’s free-to-play Marvel-themed hero shooter saw a peak concurrent player count of 444,286 on Valve’s platform. But the true concurrent figure will be much higher given Marvel Rivals launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S also (Sony and Microsoft do not make player numbers public).
It seems to be going down well on Steam, too, with a ‘mostly positive’ user review rating from over 5,700 reviews (76% of the reviews are positive). Check out IGN’s Marvel Rivals Review in Progress to find out what we think.
For NetEase, it will be hoping not only to keep Marvel Rivals’ player count as high as possible for as long as possible (something that’s proved particularly tricky for live service games of late), but to make enough money from players to meet the company’s internal revenue projections. To that end, Marvel Rivals sells a battle pass and premium skins. But is it paying off? The game is currently third in Steam’s top-sellers list, which is sorted by revenue, behind only the pricey Steam Deck and Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2. This suggests Marvel Rivals is already convincing players to open their wallets.
Marvel Rivals launched alongside Season 0, dubbed Dooms’ Rise. This month-long kick-off season starts with a total of 33 heroes, all available to play for free, eight maps for Quick Match and Competitive modes, a Conquest map, and a Practice Range. Dooms’ Rise serves as the opening chapter “for the chaos caused by each of Doctor Dooms’ time experiments colliding and unleashing the Timestream Entanglement,” NetEase said.
There’s a Twitch Drops event for Season 0, as you’d expect from a live service game of this type, an ‘Entangled Moments’ seasonal event to unlock spray rewards, gallery card rewards, and stories for completing tasks, and a global launch gift: a special code for a free Iron Man costume.
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.
Riot Games has announced Project K, the developer’s take on the physical TCG genre and a competitor to Magic: The Gathering. It’s based in the League of Legends IP and revolves around playing with friends in-person.
Riot said Project K is made by a “small” development team within the company led by game director Dave Guskin and executive producer Chengran Chai. It’s not publishing the game itself; rather, it’s found a publishing partner in China for an initial launch there in early 2025. A global launch is planned, however, and Riot is on the hunt for a publishing partner for the U.S. and other countries.
Riot said Project K is not a physical version of its existing digital collectible card game Legends of Luneterra, but “it does inherit some of the rich champion design philosophies of lore,” and also benefits from art drawn from other League IP games. Riot added that it wants to create “a thriving community with a competitive ecosystem,” and hopes for national and even global tournaments.
Project K appears to be Rune Battlegrounds, which was teased earlier this year by Riot’s team in China. A trailer showed off popular League characters such as Darius, Ahri, and Miss Fortune. At the time, Riot said it had no plans for a global release, but those plans have now changed.
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.
It’s been over 30 years since I wore out my VHS copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Since then the film franchise has been in a state of escalation. Where do you go after uncovering the literal Holy Grail? Aliens, then time machines, apparently. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the perfect antidote to all of this; one that uses its own figurative Dial of Destiny to propel us back in time to Indy’s prime. The result is easily one of the best Indy stories across both the games and the movies, with painstakingly detailed environments, wonderfully atmospheric tomb raiding and puzzle solving, a pitch-perfect score, and quite possibly the greatest punch sound effect in the business. While it does stumble occasionally as a stealth-focused sneak ’em up, The Great Circle is an otherwise grand and gorgeous globe-trotting adventure that left me giddy as a schoolboy. Yes, it’s true that bringing Indiana Jones back to the big screen (twice) after he literally rode off into the sunset was probably a poor choice. But having MachineGames craft an Indy experience inspired by all the best games in that development team’s past?
Bethesda chose wisely.
MachineGames’ most immediate legacy is the modern Wolfenstein series, and there’s certainly some of that on show in The Great Circle. Like The New Order and its excellent prequel and sequel, The Great Circle is first-person and highly story-driven, and I’d wager if there’s anyone who hates Nazis as much as Indy, it’s the Gestapo-gutting, SS-slaying BJ Blazkowicz. The Great Circle is not, however, a bloodthirsty exercise in double-fisted, lead-flinging fury. Unlike Wolfenstein, The Great Circle’s focus is patient and slower-paced exploration and stealth – where guns are rarely (and barely) a viable option.
That said, with the founding members of MachineGames all hailing from fellow Swedish studio Starbreeze, MachineGames’ DNA admittedly runs much deeper than Wolfenstein. For many of the team, it dates back to 2004’s outstanding and highly acclaimed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Riddick’s first-person fisticuffs and adventure elements appear to have been a huge inspiration on The Great Circle, and it’s refreshing to be playing a game like Butcher Bay again – particularly when it’s done with this much verve and commitment to a storied franchise.
For clarity, I doubt anybody would’ve been shocked to see an Indiana Jones game in 2024 arrive as a clone of the blockbuster Uncharted series. It certainly wouldn’t have been unprecedented. After all, both 1999’s Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine and 2003’s Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb both followed a fairly strict Tomb Raider template. Pivoting to pay tribute to the man who usurped Lara as the premier grave-robbing vagabond of modern video games would hardly have been surprising – particularly as games today have become increasingly homogenised overall.
The Great Circle isn’t an Uncharted clone, and it’s all the better for it.
But The Great Circle isn’t an Uncharted clone, and it’s all the better for it. It’s an Indiana Jones game I didn’t even know I wanted, and sometimes that’s the best surprise. I like highly cinematic, quality third-person shooters as much as the next man, but not every game needs to be one. And besides, you can do a lot worse than taking notes from Butcher Bay – another licensed tie-in with the extremely rare distinction of being even better than the film upon which it was based.
Genius of the Restoration
The first-person perspective blesses The Great Circle with a fantastic sense of scale. Looking up in awe of the Great Pyramid – or staring out at a giant Nazi battleship perched atop a mountain in the Himalayas – simply has a more pronounced effect at eye-level. It also does wonders for immediacy, with puzzle solving in particular benefitting greatly. Picking up and poring over documents and clues, directly manipulating and placing objects, and watching the results unfold in front of your eyes makes it feel like you’re personally inside some of the world’s most expensive escape rooms. Puzzles come regularly, and they’re mostly light lifting, but I’ve encountered at least a couple of slightly curlier ones that left me smugly satisfied that I wasn’t stumped. If you do hit a roadblock, there’s a baked-in hint system that will only interject if you take an extra photo of the offending puzzle with your in-game camera. It’s a smart and courteous way of offering aid only when asked that will keep players off their phones and in the game.
On top of this, it’s really the best showcase for the incredible amount of granular detail MachineGames has stuffed into seemingly every surface in The Great Circle. From streak marks on freshly wiped glass to the slow trickle of wax from a candle lighting your way down an ancient stairwell, these are things that wouldn’t be noticed from any other viewpoint. Are they entirely necessary to make The Great Circle a great game? Maybe not, but they do paint a picture of a project where no flourish is too small if they make the world look and feel even a fraction more authentic.
After beginning with a short flashback to Raiders of the Lost Ark as a tutorial – one that might’ve been a tad indulgent had it not been so utterly well done – The Great Circle’s second level is a wonderful (and equally nostalgic) trip through Connecticut’s Marshall College. It’s a magnificent rendition and draped in layers upon layers of bespoke details that distracted me constantly on my way to the objective. Busts and other paraphernalia related to the history of the school. Cabinets full of exotic items. Notice boards cluttered with handmade signs. If you’d shown this version of Indy’s famous school to the eight-year-old version of me who cut his teeth aimlessly point-and-clicking his way around Marshall College in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, I might have had you burnt at the stake. Or at least lowered into a sacrificial lava pit without a heart.
The eye-catching environments keep coming: The ornate Italian architecture and crusty catacombs of Vatican City; An ancient town and multiple Nazi dig sites in the shadow of the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Sphinx; Sukhothai’s winding waterways and flooded temples, which are being reclaimed by the jungle. It’s all excellent stuff, and bolstered by exemplary ray-traced lighting to boot. I love the huge contrasts between the levels, and “the great circle” as a fanciful archaeological concept is an admirably effective premise to justify Indy hopping all over the globe during a single story.
David Shaughnessy’s unerring version of Marcus Brody may go criminally unnoticed in Baker’s shadow.
The strength of that story here is one of The Great Circle’s true assets, and it’s been brought to life with some very impressive performances. For the most part, Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford impersonation is close to spot-on, and Baker’s otherwise distinct voice disappears in the role. Credit too must go to voice actor David Shaughnessy, whose unerring version of Denholm Elliot’s Marcus Brody may go criminally unnoticed in Baker’s shadow. This could have very much felt like a gimmick considering Elliot passed away back in 1992, but Brody’s small role feels meaningful and respectful, and not like a stunt. Marios Gavrilis also kills it as the slimy and sinister Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss; he spits his dialogue with such venom I imagine his microphone may have required a tiny umbrella. Most of the meaningful conversations occur in well-directed cutscenes, which are on par with those in modern Wolfenstein, albeit punctuated with an appropriate amount of slightly slapstick Indiana Jones humour when the fists start flying. There are basically two movies worth of cutscenes here, but it never felt like too much. This is Indy in his prime, and I’m on board for every extra minute of it.
As a rule, the Indiana Jones series is always at its best when it involves a desperate race to track down an artifact before the Nazis can nab it for what they believe will be an unbeatable, world-conquering advantage. Those movies were video game fetch quests before video game fetch quests, and The Great Circle naturally embraces it, immediately beginning on the right foot by setting its action in 1937 – directly between the events of Raiders and The Last Crusade, as the world simmers towards the Second World War.
It’s honestly quite remarkable how convincingly The Great Circle fits into the hole between those two impeccable films, successfully exploiting the odd chronology of the original Indy trilogy. That goes far beyond just providing a little extra context on Indy’s separation from Marion Ravenwood, too. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I can pay The Great Circle is that it may well be the best Indiana Jones movie you’ve never seen. The music, too, is a victory on all fronts, and I love how in sync it feels with Raiders and The Last Crusade. I was especially thrilled to see The Great Circle crescendo to a showdown that follows tightly in the footsteps of both of those films – yet still managed to knock me out with a brilliantly unexpected twist.
Aid our own resuscitation
On the topic of knockouts, combat in The Great Circle is satisfyingly brutal without being gratuitously violent, which is in keeping with its family-friendly, swashbuckling adventure serial roots. I love the deeply impressive sound design, which makes every strike sound like a golf club being slammed into a huge bunch of celery, and I love how visceral the fighting is in first-person. You block and parry blows with the correct timing, and deliver quick jabs and loaded up power punches. On top of that, Indy’s bullwhip can be used to quickly disarm enemies, and stun them long enough to either wade in and whack them or scoop up their dropped weapon and bludgeon them with it.
I enjoy how Butcher Bay-adjacent the fighting is but I’m a little unconvinced by the stamina system that rules over it, which depletes as Indy exerts himself climbing, sprinting, and throwing hands. It just creates pauses throughout the action where you’ll be compelled to wait for a beat, or jog backwards as a gaggle of goose-stepping morons march towards you with their dukes up. I can’t really detect what it adds other than something to be arbitrarily upgraded to the point where it’s no longer an inconvenience.
Combat escalates with your actions so, if you do grab a gun and start blasting, expect all armed enemies in your vicinity to respond with hot lead of their own. Indy can’t survive this kind of barrage so, for the most part, the best thing to do is forget the firearms. This does, admittedly, create a bit of silliness if you stir up a large enemy response and park yourself anywhere your attackers need to climb to reach. You can, for instance, stand at the top of a ladder and clobber the crap out of everyone who climbs it for some time, and no one will figure out that they have guns and can simply shoot at you (on regular difficulty, at least). But you’d be colouring outside the lines here, playing like this. Indy doesn’t mind leaving bodies in his wake when necessary, but he’s not some moustache-twirling mass murderer. You can always fire up Wolfenstein if you need to get some of that out of your system.
Indy doesn’t mind leaving bodies in his wake, but he’s not some mass murderer.
On the topic of guns, though, Indy’s personal revolver is sadly a big disappointment. I used it all of twice, but both were still total anticlimaxes. The first was an early boss battle where Indy’s pistol really should’ve been written out of the fight before the showdown began. After placing several bullets into a man’s unarmored head, it became clear that shooting this bloke wasn’t the way MachineGames intended me to clear this encounter. The second was late in the story, where I thought, ‘There’s no point rolling credits with revolver rounds in the cylinder!’ and figured I’d quickly plug two Nazis that suddenly appeared ahead of me in an open elevator. They simply took too many shots to go down. It seems like a weird fumble, when the scene of Indy actually using his pistol and taking out the Raiders swordsman in a single shot is one of the most memorable moments in the whole film franchise. Revolver rounds should absolutely remain exceedingly rare, but the pistol itself really should have shipped with the consistent stopping power of its cinematic counterpart.
It also rarely feels logical that high-ranking enemies within the levels can automatically see through disguises, particularly in Vatican City. It is a mechanic I’m accustomed to thanks to the likes of Hitman, which I’ll be clear is another game I love, but it’s definitely a little sillier here. It really is total nonsense that a random Italian officer would physically attack a stranger who is, for all intents and purposes, a visiting priest.
This is only a mild annoyance though and, to be fair, The Great Circle actually has a very smart approach to difficulty overall. There’s a lot more fiddling you can do than just adjust a single setting from easy to very hard. Enemy attributes are split into several categories, meaning you can tweak it so that there are tougher enemies, but fewer of them. Maybe you want to pump up their awareness, but make them weaker than wet newspapers. (This is something I think I may try for a second run.) It’s good that these options are here because, on regular difficulty, the stealth is quite basic; enemies have pretty limited vision and they’re easier to sneak past than I first assumed. I definitely became progressively less cautious once I realised I could sneak across seemingly dangerously open places as long as I did it fast enough.
That said, The Great Circle does allow us to return to previously visited locations to complete all the extra side missions, even after the main adventure is complete, so I may focus on that instead of starting over. I suspect I have many more hours of auxiliary objectives to keep me busy; I only got around to ticking off a handful of them on my first run through the story, which took me about 17 hours.
I’m at a loss for how to start this review, because I’m not sure I even believe what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 actually is. An absolutely disastrous launch made it literally unplayable for the first 24 hours, and the next several days saw bugs and glitches popping up thanks to an unexpectedly high server load. And in spite of all that, now soaring through smooth skies after 58 hours of exploring the planet, working on building my career, taking photos of famous landmarks, and just messing around in free-flight, I sat back in my chair this week and said to myself “I can’t believe it… they did it again.” No one was there to hear me, but all the impressive new features and improvements that Microsoft has built upon its predecessor’s already masterful groundwork made it worth saying out loud just the same.
Graphically, Flight Simulator 2024 is a step-up in a lot of ways. Perhaps the most noticeable is the change in the seasons. Since I live in Maine, I tend to explore it in-sim more than most other places, just because it’s cool to see how one-to-one the digital twin is compared to the Earth we’re living on now. This makes me an expert on what Maine looks like, which isn’t a very desirable trait to have in most situations, but for this review, perhaps no one is more qualified. We’re in late autumn now, and the trees in both the sim and in real life are devoid of foliage, wooden skeletons sat on the rolling hills and small mountains of this Northeastern state. The pattern of greyish-brown is broken by populations of dark green evergreen trees, like spruce and pines. And that sparse hibernatory period is reflected perfectly in Flight Simulator 2024.
In fact, all the seasons and weather are. Want to enjoy the famous fall foliage of Vermont? Turn the weather and date settings to October to see the vibrant hues of autumn there. Turn it back a little more and the trees settle into a nice leafy green. Or, if you’d rather go back to the winter, you can adjust the snow depth – and just like with mud and tall grass, if you taxi your plane through the snow, it leaves tracks.
Hey, remember that total solar eclipse that happened over the United States last April? I was fortunate enough to live a couple hours away from the path of totality and witnessed it firsthand, but if you missed it, just set the date to April 8, 2024 and adjust the time to wherever the totality was at your location, and suddenly you can fly through that astronomical event yourself. I saw this tip going around online and I expected it would just get dark and then bright again, but nope: the sun became an ever-smaller sliver until it finally vanished behind the moon. The lighting even had a similar eeriness to the real thing. Just unbelievable, and I think I’m going to revisit it again from a jetliner flying at 35,000 feet.
The lighting in the cockpit just hits in a way it didn’t before.
These seasonal differences are most noticeable when you’re on or near to the ground. However, that’s also where the GPU puts in the most amount of work. On the ground, my Radeon RX 7900XT GPU is running at 99%, and turning the graphical settings down a notch only takes the load down to 95%. When you’re flying, and the requirements to render all those trees is smaller, the load on my GPU dropped down to 80%, which is still crazy high, but obviously a significant improvement. I’m hoping this is something developer Asobo Studio is working to optimize as the sim matures, because one of the biggest new features of Flight Simulator 2024 is the ability to land your aircraft anywhere, get out, and walk around. It’s a bummer this awesome new option places such a burden on your hardware.
Shadows and lighting have also been improved, something that’s most noticeable inside the cockpit. The light just hits in a way it didn’t before, with each knob and soft key casting its own shadow realistically. The imperfections and scratches in the windows of your aircraft react exactly how you’d expect them to, even to the point where they can obscure your vision if you’re flying with the sun in your eyes. It’s another unexpected touch that adds so much more realism.
Career Path
Flight Simulator 2024 has a few new modes, including on-foot photo challenges and time trial races with leaderboards, but the one I found the most compelling was the Career mode. Whereas I primarily used the power of imagination to add tasks to my free-flights in 2020’s Flight Simulator, in Career mode you have actual missions to complete once you unlock the requirements to do so.
Your career starts simply enough: you choose an airport as your home base, and from there you go through training to get your Private Pilot License, or PPL. The PPL training is, unfortunately, the exact same training from 2020, but in the new engine and with updated instruction voiceover. It’s a little disappointing to have gone through the same training I did before, but then again, I didn’t mind it as a refresher. And if you feel confident in your piloting skills, you don’t even need to go through the lessons as you can just jump right into the exam.
You earn credits by taking on jobs, and the types of jobs available are dependent on your experience level, reputation, and which certifications you’ve earned. For example, when you have your PPL, you’re limited to “first flights,” where you take a passenger or two on a quick trip around a specified flight path. You need to have a few of them under your belt to get the necessary “hours” of experience needed to move onto your Commercial Pilot License, or CPL.
Once you get that, the experience and earning potential dramatically opens up, and only continues to become more lucrative as you unlock specializations for your CPL, like Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) certification, tail-wheel endorsement, and turboprop engine rating, to name a few. Right off the bat, you can start taking on missions delivering aircraft from one airport to another, and some jobs, like Search and Rescue, won’t open up until you’ve earned quite a few hours in the air and a slew of certs and endorsements.
It all plays out like a normal, old-fashioned video game skill tree. For example, you can’t get your turboprop engine rating without your high performance endorsement, which you can’t get without your CPL. If you want to specialize, you can focus your efforts on one path in the tree, or you can fill them out in whatever way feels right to you. And there’s a completely separate tree for helicopters that largely plays out the same way, just with different requirements and, you know, helicopters instead of fixed-wing aircraft.
Career mode was the first moment in Flight Simulator 2024 where I said, “Okay, this rules, actually.”
The exams are no joke: I failed my IFR exam the first time because I wasn’t giving it my all, but was able to swing it the second time. My final grade left something to be desired, but the gamer in me is glad to know I can revisit it at any time and try to improve. My one wish for retaking exams would be to make the introductory text skippable so I could just get right into the test and not have to listen to the NPC instructor give me the rundown on what I’m supposed to do.
Progress through career mode is slow. You don’t earn much as a new pilot, and you have to take on quite a lot of work before you have enough to do the later exams. It’s almost like grinding in an RPG, which, if you know me, is something I love doing anyway. And if you’re impatient, you can skip a lot of the parts of the mission. For example, you could jump from the ramp to the runway, take off, then skip directly to the final approach. To counteract this, there are bonuses for completing missions without skipping any of the parts and pieces – and if you’re wondering if I ever skipped a section, the answer is “no.” Bro, I go through the checklists from a cold and dark cockpit. I am here to simulate, not mess around.
Career mode was the first moment in my Flight Simulator 2024 experience where I said to myself “Okay, this rules, actually.” I mean, free flight is excellent, but I’ve been doing that since the last Flight Sim’s 2019 alpha. But Career mode? Requiring me to have a method to my madness? I love it. And eventually, once I’ve gotten enough experience, saved up enough Flight Sim Bucks, and earned the requisite certifications, I can start my own aviation business with my own fleet of aircraft. Needless to say, I find the prospect absolutely thrilling. But for now, I’m still grinding it out, delivering planes, taking skydivers to new heights, and becoming a better pilot with each successful landing.
Challenge League
Another one of Flight Simulator 2024’s new features is Challenge League, a competitive mode where you’re presented with a set of three challenges that are updated weekly. Launch week had a Grand Canyon rally race, a low-altitude F/A-18 challenge, and a landing challenge. I initially took on the Grand Canyon rally and really enjoyed it. I felt compelled to keep racing, to better my time, and to beat the next-best person on the leaderboard.
Challenge League is about as close to an “arcade” experience you’ll find in Flight Simulator 2024, and even though its all about fun, the flight model remains the same. In other words, the planes all act and fly exactly as they do in the wider sim. You’re completing fanciful challenges using meticulously simulated aircraft and conditions, so you can’t suddenly pretend like you’re playing Ace Combat.
While I did spend a fair amount of effort trying to better my time on the Grand Canyon rally, I wasn’t compelled enough to find this a stand-out mode overall. I’m going to revisit it each week and at least try one, perhaps two of the challenges out, but it’s not really why I play Flight Simulator. It’s a good inclusion for those who are interested, and the competitive part of me was riled up trying to climb the leaderboard, but it’s not going to be my go-to.
Slow walking aside, it’s really cool to be able to visit landmarks on foot.
World Photographer is another challenge-type mode, but it’s much more low-key and shows off just how detailed Asobo was able to make the Earth’s digital twin. You’re tasked with taking photos of various landmarks around the world, and to get the best possible score, you need to fulfill certain requirements.
For example, the first mission in the World Landmarks collection requires you to meet three conditions: take a photo of the Great Sphinx in Cairo on the September equinox with the sun setting over its right shoulder. Oh, and you need to capture that photo while on foot. To accomplish this mission, I picked an ultralight as my aircraft and landed in the empty area just south of the Great Pyramid complex. Then I hopped out and walked to a spot where I could fulfill all the requirements. The default aircraft is a helicopter, but since I turned off all the assists, I am still completely unable to land a helicopter without it falling apart, and I’m too stubborn to turn them back on, but using one would have allowed me to get even closer.
Graphically, it is pretty impressive. The sand looks exactly how you’d imagine it to look, with rocks and desert shrubs scattered about. That said, the renderings of the structures themselves vary widely. The pyramids and the Sphinx looked, appropriately enough, almost photorealistic. But the other ruins around them looked like they were from GoldenEye in some spots. To be fair, I did this mission pretty early on, when the streaming servers were still slammed, so that might have been a part of it. Regardless, I didn’t find it too distracting and actually thought it was really cool to be able to visit a place like this on foot.
The biggest problem I have with World Photography mode, and walking around in the sim-world in general, is that it simulates a real-world walking speed. If you’re used to first-person shooters, walking around at an actual, human pace inside a video game is painfully slow. I landed as close to the Sphinx as I could and it was still a long walk. This is one area where I wouldn’t mind an option to just toggle the realism off.
There are literally hundreds of different World Photography challenges, and I’ve only just scratched the surface. Since I’ve always loved the “sightseeing” aspects of Flight Simulator, this is a mode I will definitely be returning to time and time again. Being able to walk around changes it up quite a bit from the old photography challenges, and the addition of seasonal foliage and improved models also improves it greatly. I didn’t care for the challenges in 2020, but this edition, I’m actually pretty fired up about them.
Flight Planner
Probably the most incredible, interesting, and ultimately nerdy addition to Flight Simulator 2024 is the Flight Planner. It’s a web-based tool that does an excellent job of replicating the flight planning software and resources actual pilots use while planning their real-world flights. The concept itself isn’t new: there have been apps doing this for Flight Simulator for a while. But this one is free and completely integrated with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, developed by one of Asobo’s partners, Working Title.
Since it’s web-based rather than an iOS or Android app, you can fiddle with it on any device with a web browser. And friends, I have done just that. Logging into the site, there’s no fluff or extra welcome screens to get in the way. It’s essentially the same Electronic Flight Bag, or EFB, that’s already in-game, but you can use it anywhere and at any time and with even more features. It’s not without a few annoyances: the altitude always defaults to 35,000 feet regardless of which plane I’m planning to fly, and fuel doesn’t seem to load in properly.
However, I have to come clean here, as I’m not sure if this is my fault or just a bug that hasn’t yet been ironed out. This flight planner is so gigantic, so complex, and so full-featured that I’m not even sure what every option actually does. But while I can easily make and then upload a flight plan, it’s all the other features I don’t understand yet that excite me the most. I found myself happily Googling flight charts and 100 other things because I wanted to learn it all. I suddenly I find myself with an excuse to learn all this complex technical piloting stuff real pilots need to know before they can take to the skies.
The Flight Planner doesn’t feel like a gimmick. It feels essential.
I did find the process of loading the flight plan into my EFB in the simulator a bit frustrating at first, but I eventually sussed it out and immediately wrote a guide on how to do it, so you don’t need to suffer like I did. And holy cow – when I finally got everything sorted, I loaded the plan I’d made on my iPad into Flight Simulator 2024, sent the route to air traffic control, then sent it to my virtual plane’s avionics, and boom. My route was all there, ready for me to use to navigate either manually or in my plane’s autopilot system. That frees me up to tinker around and learn the ins and outs of flight planning and reading charts anytime I feel like on any device, but then also makes what’s already the most realistic simulation out there feel that much more real once I jump back in. I am a complete sucker for this kind of thing, and it doesn’t feel like a gimmick. It feels essential to the experience. It’s thrilling to me and takes my Dad Energy to new heights.
And there are finally airport charts you can use now, just like in real life! Gone are the days of 2020, when I’d land at an airport and just have the AI copilot take me to the gate. Now I can open up the kneeboard in Flight Planner and view the charts and facility maps as I would were I actually there. This is exactly the type of granular simulation stuff my body craves. And while it unfortunately doesn’t have a lesson plan to follow or any sort of tutorials, if you’re like me, you’re already Googling the difference between VOR DME and VOR DTAC (VOR DTAC is the military equivalent of VOR DME, obviously).
We’re past Cyber Monday, but Walmart is still pushing out brand new gaming deals for December. Right now, you can pick up the professional-grade Xbox Series X Elite Series 2 Wireless Controller for only $124.00 after a 30% off instant discount. That’s a great deal for the original Elite Series 2 controller that includes the component pack. The newer Elite Series 2 Core controllers in White, Blue, and Red do not include the component pack and they normally retail for $140. The component pack itself retails for $59.99.
Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 for $124
Includes component pack
The Xbox Elite Series 2 Core controller features better build quality and lots more customizability than the stock controller that comes with the Xbox Series X console. Some of the more significant pro gaming features include adjustable-tension thumbsticks, wrap-around rubberized grip, and shorter hair trigger locks. The component pack, which is bundled with this controller, includes an extra sets of paddles, thumbsticks, D-pad, and case.
I rarely see this version of the Elite Series controller for sale. The versions without the component packs are commonly sold for a lesser price, but one of the biggest advantages of getting this controller over the standard controller is the customizability. Without those extra accessories to modify the controller to your liking, there’s less of a reason to spend so much more when a regular Xbox controller can be often be found for under $50.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Far Cry is one of the most beloved series from Ubisoft, and for good reason. Over the last 20 years, Far Cry has challenged and twisted the shooter formula with all sorts of settings through 13 different games. This includes places like America, Cuba, the Himalayas, the dystopian future, and even a trip to 10,000 BCE. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series, you can pre-order the all-new Far Cry 20th Anniversary Soundtrack Collection on vinyl at IGN Store!
Pre-Order the Far Cry 20th Anniversary Soundtrack Collection on Vinyl!
This soundtrack collection includes 48 tracks from across three LPs. The music was selected from some of the biggest games in the series, including Far Cry 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, Blood Dragon, Primal and New Dawn. This includes music from composers like Tyler Bates, Pedro Bromfman, Marc Canham, Jason Graves, and more.
The front cover of this collection features five iconic villains from the Far Cry series, with unique 20th anniversary iconography placed on the back. Each LP comes in a spined and printed inner sleeve that slips into a widespined outer sleeve with spot gloss UV. It’s perfect for any Far Cry fan, with a vibrant cover that’s sure to strike up a conversation.
The Far Cry 20th Anniversary Soundtrack Collection Vinyl will ship out starting May 2025. Pre-orders are now open on IGN Store, so don’t miss your chance to grab this unique collector’s item!
About IGN Store
IGN Store sells high-quality merch, collectibles, and shirts for everything you’re into. It’s a shop built with fans in mind: for all the geek culture and fandom you love most. Whether you’re into comics, movies, anime, games, retro gaming or just want some cute plushies (who doesn’t?), this store is for you!
IGN’s Infinity Nikki map is here! Our interactive map tracks collectibles across the world of Miraland including Whimstars, Dew of Inspiration, and Treasure Chests for those who like to farm collectibles. It also displays the locations of Styling Challenges and Mini Games so you know where to go to spend time.
Our team of Stylists is hard at work filling out our Infinity Nikki interactive map, so make sure to check back often and track your progress across Miraland.
Locations, such as Warp Spires, which allow you to fast travel once activated. There’s also Caverns, Catapult Seals, and more.
Activities, including Box Games, Mini Games, and Styling Challenges.
Items, such as Treasure Chests. Opening them can net you Clothing and even Diamonds, which you can spend on the Resonance Banners.
Quests, including Main Quests and Side Quests, so you always know where to go to start your next mission.
Infinity Nikki Codes
While you’re using IGN’s Infinity Nikki interactive map to find loot across Miraland, make sure you check out the latest Infinity Nikki codes to get even more free rewards.
Infinity Nikki codes lead to rewards like free Diamonds and Revelation Crystals, and materials such as Threads of Purity and Shiny Bubbles to help you craft new clothes, accessories, and outfits. Combine those with what you can earn by exploring the map alone and you’ve got a ton of rewards!
The Game Awards 2024 is almost here – a night celebrating recognition of the biggest games released throughout the year. The event will take place on Thursday, December 12, and we’ll share below exactly how you can tune into the livestream and what to expect for awards.
How to Watch The Game Awards 2024 Livestream
The Game Awards 2024 will kick off on December 12 at 4:30pm PT/7:30pm ET and is expected to run for roughly three hours, according to The Game Awards.
If you live in the GMT or AEST timezones, this translates to 12:30am GMT/10:30am AEST on December 13.
IGN will be hosting a pre-show for The Game Awards that takes place at 4pm PT/7pm ET before the official festivities begin. We will also be back after The Game Awards for an IGN post-show to break down all the biggest moments, reveals, and winners from the show!
Where to Watch The Game Awards 2024 Online
We’re hosting the livestream for The Game Awards 2024 here, on IGN.com, and on our accounts across all major platforms including YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Facebook. Here are all of the links where you can watch the stream online:
There are 29 categories in total for The Game Awards 224, with the most anticipated category, “Game of the Year” having a handful of popular games. The contenders include Astrobot, Balatro, Black Myth: Wukong, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio.
The category for “Most Anticipated Game” includes biggies with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Ghost of Yotei, GTA 6, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and Monster Hunter Wilds.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown, Star Wars Outlaws, CoD: Black Ops 6, and Diablo 4 are all up for “Innovation in Accessibility,” with “Games for Impact” comprising of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Neva, Indika, Closer the Distance, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, and Tales of Kenzera: Zau.
You can check out the full list of The Game Awards 2024 nominees, where it shows Astro Bot and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth leading with seven noms each, and Metaphor: ReFantazio following with six noms.
