Category: IGN

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Star Wars Unlimited TCG’s Twilight of the Republic Decks Spotlight Ahsoka and General Grievous

The upcoming Star Wars Unlimited TCG set, Twilight of the Republic, is almost here with the release slated for November 8. This is the third installment since the game premiered back in March. It’s still quite young, but there are already so many different types of decks that one can make. In fact, a two-player starter comes with every new set for anyone interested in jumping into SWU for the first time. The Twilight of the Republic starter includes a deck themed around the aggressive and heroic Ahsoka Tano and the Republic’s Clone Trooper army, as well as a deck led by the cunning and villainous General Grievous alongside the Separatist Droid army. With both decks in one package, it’s an easy way to kickstart a player’s venture into a new card game like Star Wars Unlimited with a friend.

When a card game is based on an existing series, we usually see game designers attempt to match what’s on the card with how the character or object is portrayed in their respective medium. It guides the playstyle and creation of other cards in the set, and we see some of that in both SWU starter decks. For instance, the Ahsoka Tano deck includes characters from the 501st Legion that she’s a part of, like General Anakin Skywalker and Captain Rex. The Jedi alongside the Clone army are known for skilled and organized combat, which brings us to one of the new mechanics in this set, Coordinate. This keyword or ability activates when a player controls three or more units on their side of the field. When its requirement is fulfilled, the player can then reap the reward of the newly activated action associated with the card’s Coordinate ability. In Ahsoka Tano’s case, she can command a unit to attack with a +1 power buff as long as her side of the field has at least three units. So if you’re playing with the Ahsoka deck, part of your goal is going wide on the board with units so you can always have more than enough to fulfill the Coordinate ability across all your cards that have that special keyword. That means your opponent will try to dwindle your numbers to prevent that from happening. Thankfully, the deck does include supporting cards to reflect the need to bolster an army like Batch Brothers or Jedi Master Shaak Ti, which can create clone trooper tokens to add to the unit count.

On the villainous side of this starter pack, we have General Grievou,s who leads the Separatist droid armies in their quest for dominance. Similar to the Ahsoka deck, the General Grievous deck has options to bolster the unit count as well with the help of Battle Droid tokens. Instead of the Coordinate ability, though, the Separatists rely on another new mechanic to the Star Wars card game: Exploit. Unlike Coordinate, Exploit does not buff or support the units already in battle. Instead, this new ability sacrifices units to play more powerful cards for a cheaper cost. For instance, if someone wants to play the Admiral Trench card, that player can defeat up to 1 unit they already control on the field to reduce his cost. Usually, this isn’t such a great trade, since you’re losing one of your units in the process, but cards like the Confederate Courier or Battle Droid Escort have a benefit from being defeated. If you combo the right cards, General Grievous can easily be joined by heavy hitters like the Separatist Super Tank or Hailfire Tank without losing too many units in the process. Of course, using the Exploit ability to its full effect means having units to sacrifice, so in a similar fashion, the General Grievous deck tries to go wide with units just like Ahsoka, but for a different purpose. Meanwhile, cards like Poggle the Lesser and Droid Deployment are a couple of notable options that can help the Separatist army stay in the fight.

Overall, both decks do a pretty good job of representing the two main factions of the hotly contested Clone Wars. Both rely on large armies, and you can see how different each deck plays with the lore in mind. For a dual starter deck package, it really showcases the new mechanics well, and they both seem pretty balanced right out of the box. In the end, these are starter decks and ultimately they are a jumping-off point to making unique and stronger decks with other cards in the new set, Twilight of the Republic. For more Star Wars Unlimited, check out both our review of the base set, Spark of Rebellion as well as a quick preview below of the Prerelease Box that will be available at your local game stores leading up to release.

The Star Wars Unlimited Two-Player Starter deck comes with:

  • Rules
  • Tokens
  • Two playmats
  • Two deck boxes

Ahsoka Tano and General Grievous pre-constructed decks lists:

Black Myth: Wukong’s Physical PS5 Edition Is Up for Preorder

Here’s some good news for collectors of physical games. Black Myth: Wukong is getting a disc version for PS5. Previously a digital-only game, Wukong’s physical edition doesn’t have a set release date, but it’s available to preorder now for $64.99 from most of the usual retailers (see it at Amazon) And for those who like physical editions to future-proof your ability to play games, the publisher has confirmed that the entire game is on the disc, with no download required.

Preorder Black Myth: Wukong (Physical Edition)

The physical PS5 edition of Black Myth: Wukong only comes in one edition, but it includes a code for the extra items included in the digital deluxe edition. Those include the following:

  • Bronzecloud Staff
  • Folk Opera Mask
  • Folk Opera Almsgiving Armor
  • Folk Opera Leather Bracers
  • Folk Opera Buskins
  • Wind Chimes
  • Selected Digital Soundtrack

What Is Black Myth: Wukong?

Black Myth: Wukong originally launched on PS5 and PC on August 19 (the game is also coming to Xbox at some point, though it’s unclear if a physical edition will be available for that platform).

The game, made by the Chinese developer Game Science, has been incredibly popular since launch. It’s an action-RPG based on Chinese mythology and the story Journey to the West.

In his 8/10 Black Myth: Wukong review, critic Mitchel Saltzman wrote:

“As GameScience’s debut action game, Black Myth: Wukong is mostly a great success, despite some major technical black marks and localization issues that are likely to cause some frustrations at launch. Combat is fantastic thanks to a great balance of careful resource management and lightning-fast, twitch-reaction gameplay that tested my skills as much as Elden Ring ever has, despite being a more traditional action game than FromSoftware’s style. Not only that, but there are a ton of exciting boss battles, a great variety of enemies, and the world they inhabit is an absolute treat for the eyes and ears. Its story has its moments but relies a bit too much on having prior knowledge of the events of Journey to the West, and it really could have used a map to make its rewarding exploration measure up to the strength of its combat. That said, its strengths more than carry it through, making Black Myth: Wukong a great action game that could be even greater if GameScience can squash the bugs.”

Other Preorder Guides

Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN’s board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Threads or Bluesky.

Throne and Liberty and Guild Wars Company NCSoft Suffers Layoffs Amid Significant Restructure

NCSoft, the South Korean MMO specialist behind the likes of Throne and Liberty, Guild Wars 2, and Lineage, has confirmed a significant restructure of the company amid a sweeping round of layoffs.

South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on comments from NCSoft co-CEOs Taek-Jin Kim and Byung-Moo Park, who blamed the incoming layoffs and reorganization on the company’s ongoing financial troubles. “We feel a deep sense of responsibility and offer an apology to all employees,” they said.

The co-CEOs added that “as a result of operating in a way that most of the manpower and functions are concentrated at the headquarters, financial performance has continued to deteriorate and we are at risk of becoming a chronically loss-making company,” and that this situation “is seriously damaging the creativity and challenging spirit that NCSoft originally possessed.”

NCSoft, established in 1997 and headquartered in Seoul, now plans to develop new video games in the form of independent studios, each with their own culture and process, it said. Throne and Liberty, recently published globally by Amazon Games to huge player numbers on Steam, is now its own game studio.

NCSoft is now split into four divisions: NCAI, Studio X, Studio Y, and Studio G. (Studio X is the studio behind Throne and Liberty.) It’s unclear at this stage what NCSoft’s troubles mean for ArenaNet, the Bellevue, Washington-based studio behind Guild Wars. Earlier this year, Guild Wars 3 was said to have been in development, although work continues on Guild Wars 2.

Some video games will be canceled, howoever, alongside layoffs via a voluntary retirement program, the co-CEOs confirmed. “Major changes are inevitable for the survival and future of the company, and we promise active support and compensation to those affected,” they said.

Earlier this month, Amazon Games announced that Throne and Liberty had seen more than three million players in just a week following its global launch. Originally billed as a Lineage sequel, Throne and Liberty is an MMO with PvE and PvP set in a dynamic and seamless world. It suffered numerous delays over the course of a development cycle spanning several years.

Throne and Liberty finally launched on October 1 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, and soon proved a hit on Steam with an impressive player concurrent peak of 336,300. Throne and Liberty remains one of the most-played games on Valve’s platform. Neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public.

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.

Kong: Survivor Instinct

If you’ve ever wondered what the arcade classic Rampage would be like if you had to play as a puny human rather than one of the skyscraper-smashing goliaths, then Kong: Survivor Instinct might be your answer. This 2.5D Metroidvania platformer takes place amidst a crumbling coastal cityscape while Kong and his kaiju combatants duke it out in the background, making it seem at first glance a bit like a Shadow Complex situated within Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a novel enough concept, but basic environmental puzzle design and uninspired combat mean that Survivor Instinct is unable to reach the towering heights of its ideas, and as I begrudgingly pushed crates and collected keys to make my way through each ruined urban rabbit hole I could never really shake the impression that Kong seemed to be having considerably more fun than I was.

Not that actually playing as Kong would be a guaranteed good time, of course – 2023’s Skull Island: Rise of Kong was such an unmitigated disaster that the aftermath of its self-destruction is probably still being studied by scientists from the Monarch organization. Kong: Survivor Instinct is a notably better game than that, but once the novelty of having the iconic angry ape messing about in the middle distance fades it just doesn’t have the level of creativity or player freedom that other superior games of this ilk released in recent years – such as Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown or Blasphemous 2 – have so expertly displayed.

It also doesn’t have much of a story beyond “Don’t get smashed by the monkey.” We play as David Martin, a single dad in search of his daughter who’s gone missing in the midst of the spectacular, city-ravaging royal rumble that’s currently sweeping along the west coast of the United States. The elevator pitch of David’s personality is basically a sort of middle-aged Nathan Drake who’s apparently forgotten how to be funny (almost every time he kills a labrador-sized spider he deadpans “I was never fond of spiders”), and the handful of survivors he meets along the way don’t even pretend to be real characters. There are also a couple of appearances from the villainous Alan Jonah, who was last seen in 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters – there he was played by a typically cold and ruthless Charles Dance (AKA Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones), but here he’s voiced by a somewhat subdued soundalike. None of these details really matter, though, since Kong: Survivor Instinct’s slight amount of story is stretched thin over its six-hour frame until it suddenly snaps apart during its jarringly abrupt and underwhelming conclusion.

Kong: Survivor Instinct’s slight amount of story is stretched thin over its six-hour frame until it suddenly snaps apart.

Surface Tension

The story may be weak, but the look and feel of its crumbling 2.5D environments is undoubtedly its strength. David’s quest leads him from smoldering suburban outskirts to devastated downtown areas and the mysterious subterranean facilities below, and each dilapidated diorama is rich with precise detail and convincing depth. Kong: Survivor Instinct does perhaps try a bit too hard to convince you that every structure you explore is an unstable one with the repetitive routine with which it collapses the floor beneath your feet or drops chunks of the ceiling onto your skull, and that does get old pretty fast. However, it also allows you to scamper along the roofs of cars suspended by the webs of a towering arachnid, and navigate your way through the slanted corridors of an apartment building that’s been violently upended by Kong, so there are some more interesting platforming sections among them.

It’s just a shame that so much of the exploration is built around the same pushing of crates and shooting of padlocked gates. The very best Metroidvanias – like Hollow Knight or Metroid Dread – gradually empower you with new tools and abilities that incentivise you to backtrack through the world and unlock previously unreachable areas, but Kong: Survivor Instinct is comparatively light-on when it comes to evolving the ways in which you interact with your surroundings. Here, by contrast, David is given a sledgehammer to smash through weakened walls and eventually a grappling hook to scale up to specific anchor points, but otherwise his progression is always painfully obvious and consists of the same rehashed circuit boxes to shoot or generators to repair, copied and pasted along the winding path towards each mission objective.

This general absence of ingenuity also drains the enjoyment out of its combat, which is primarily geared towards melee attacks since ammunition for David’s pistol is so scarce. There is some nuance to each scrap with Jonah’s soldiers – you can block or parry their blows to open them up for a counter attack or grab them to use them as a human shield when their more heavily armed comrades open fire, and I was pleased to discover that you can even shoot them in the leg to drop them to their knees so that you can deliver a series of finishing blows a la Resident Evil 4. At the same time, there’s a stiffness to each scrap, particularly when David finds himself surrounded, and since he’s unable to jump or climb while he’s locked in a combat stance there were times where I’d knock an enemy off a ledge, only to find myself unable to drop down and continue the fight. Annoyingly, the only way forward was to reload my save.

Furthermore, rather than introduce any interesting new enemy types that require you to adapt your methods of attack, Kong: Survivor Instinct just gradually ups the numbers of foes in each encounter while keeping your combat abilities exactly the same. David’s pistol can be upgraded to carry more rounds per magazine to help counter the swelling hordes, but there are no other firearms to find despite the fact that every other goon you come across in the story’s second half seems to be toting a pump-action shotgun. When you consider that outside of the human soldier types there are only a couple of small spider-like enemies to contend with – and absolutely no boss fights whatsoever – Kong: Survivor Instinct’s combat feels flatter than a kaiju’s couch cushion overall.

Raze the Roof

While there might not be any traditional boss fights, Kong: Survivor Instinct does feature a handful of sequences that could best be described as boss flights. At specific points during the story, Kong or one of his rival titans will spot you through the window of a structure and you’ll be suddenly forced to flee, with the monster punching wrecking ball-sized holes in your path that require some pinpoint platforming to evade. (Sadly, none of these titans is Godzilla.) These sections certainly inject a burst of excitement and urgency into the adventure, although they also involve a fair amount of trial and error to get around instant deaths, which did lead to some frustrating repeated checkpoint restarts at times. Still, watching one of these monolithic beasts unwrap the building you’re trapped inside of like a kaiju kid on Christmas morning is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular tricks that Kong: Survivor Instinct has up its sleeves – even despite the seismic impact these high-intensity moments seem to inflict on the frame rate while playing on PlayStation 5.

Unfortunately, those are the only times that Kong and company have a measurable impact on the action. Elsewhere, these goliaths are only ever glimpsed – either having an incidental tussle in the distant background, or when you summon one by collecting the requisite number of biowaves scattered around each level to clear a blocked path towards a level’s exit in a game of supersized simian Simon Says. It’s certainly a treat to watch Kong casually pick up a connected row of train carriages like they’re steel sausage links and violently wrench them apart, but the operative word here is “watch.” Once these path-clearing actions have been performed, it’s straight back to the same plodding puzzle-platforming and uninspired combat.

The Best Call of Duty: Black Ops Missions, According to the Devs

Call of Duty: Black Ops is often more overtly gung-ho and violent than Modern Warfare and other Call of Duty series. But for every Michael Bay-style blockbuster moment there are flashes of betrayal, psychological warfare, and plenty of undercover operations that skirt the grey zones of morality. But, of the 50-plus campaign missions across the Black Ops series, which is the best?

IGN sat down with senior Call of Duty Black Ops developers to ask them what their favorite campaigns are from across the entire Call of Duty: Black Ops franchise. Have your favorite missions made the cut?

Vorkuta (Call of Duty: Black Ops)

One of the most popular Call of Duty: Black Ops campaigns among the development team is Vorkuta. Three separate, senior Call of Duty devs named Vorkuta as their favorite campaign in the whole series, and for good reason.

A key mission in the very first Call of Duty: Black Ops, Vorkuta sees hero Mason attempt a daring escape from the Soviet labor camp of Vorkuta in 1963. The ensuing great escape sees Mason fleeing through the mines while fellow prisoners are dying alongside him and it culminates in an explosive motorcycle chase. As a single mission, it’s packed with action and heartbreak.

“It’s the great escape from the mine and the motorcycle chase,” says expert level designer and Nuketown creator Adam Hoggatt on why Vorkuta sticks with him after all these years.

“Vorkuta is an obvious choice,” says Raven Software lead audio designer Jake Harley. “It’s just an incredibly memorable map. Reznov leading you out from the mine, the sacrifices of the other Russian prisoners pushing the mine carts as you’re taking cover behind them. It was just an epic map that was full of a lot of action and big moments.”

“It had a lot of strong narrative and gameplay beat changes from beginning to end, especially the escape on the motorcycle. But I’m a big motorcycle guy…” adds Raven Software lead designer Damon Shubhastari.

Rebirth (Call of Duty: Black Ops)

Another popular campaign mission cited by multiple Call of Duty developers is Rebirth, also from the first Black Ops game. This mission, where a big plot twist reveals the character Reznov was actually a figment of your mind the entire time, highlighted Black Ops’ psychological thriller themes. The mission set the whole tone for the twisty, grimy world of the Black Ops in the years to come.

“That moment when you realize that Mason and Reznov are one and that Reznov was actually dead and in Mason’s mind is such an ‘Oh my god,’ moment,” says Treyarch associate creative director Miles Leslie. “It really cemented what Blacks Ops is internally, and you could feel that in the studio when we were developing it… I’d walk over to the team making it and we would talk [about Rebirth and I would just go], ‘you’re blowing my mind.’”

Judgment Day (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2)

Another of Leslie’s favorite missions is Judgment Day from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. A tense assault on a secret Haitian facility led by Mason, this operation eventually culminates in a player choice on whether to kill the game’s primary antagonist — Menendez — or capture him alive. The player’s choice determines which ending the player gets.

“I have fond memories of people [asking me],’ Oh, you killed Menendez? How could you do that? That’s not the way,’” recalls Leslie who’d respond by adamantly explaining that Menendez “had to die.”

“It was really cool that even internally we would have these debates on the branching story,” Leslie adds.

Break on Through (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War)

The branching paths would become a staple of the Black Ops series, with player choices leading to different scenarios. Take Break on Through, a mission from the recent Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, as an example. Unable to get the location of a nuclear bomb, Russell Adler drugs the player in the hope psychoactive chemicals will uncover the hidden location. The drug trip that ensues forces Bell to either obey or disobey Adler through a series of drug-fueled scenarios.

While the drug-fuelled interrogation was an exhilarating experience, Treyarch lead game designer Joanna Leung says that the level’s repeated use of the red doors to teleport the player through different vision quests was a personal highlight, having worked on a similar mechanic for the multiplayer map, ‘Deprogram’.

In Darkness (Call of Duty: Black Ops 3)

Treyarch senior level designer Matt Coutras fondly remembers the first campaign he worked on when he joined the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 development team.

“It was called ‘In Darkness’ and it takes place in Singapore during a bad storm. Singapore is partially destroyed and it was a cool location to go through,” he says. But as a designer, the real challenge with In Darkness for Coutras was how the map integrated the four-player co-op and how the large map allowed multiple players to explore different parts of Singapore. “You have a bunch of cool locations — from docs to a flooded subway to a downtown space.”

Brick in the Wall (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War)

One of the first missions developed for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and a favorite mission of audio designer Jake Harley, is Brick in the Wall, a spy-thriller stealth mission where Bell and his associates hunt down one of Perseus’ men in East Berlin, meeting with informants and sneaking past Stasi guards in the process.

“I love stealth missions to begin with and I really liked seeing how the team brought East Berlin to life and just sneaking through the ghost tunnels. It was a really cool experience.”

Karma (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2)

One mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 called Karma sees the player entering an opulent club and fighting on the dance floor with dubstep blaring in the background.

“As an audio person, that was so cool to me and memorable,” says Harley, who says Karma is his second favorite campaign mission behind only the crowd favorite, Vorkuta.

Those are the favorite Call of Duty Black Ops campaigns according to the developers. Let us know what your favorite Call of Duty Black Ops campaigns are in the comments and keep an eye out for all the latest updates on Call of Duty Black Ops 6 right here on IGN.

Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Smash Bros. Creator Masahiro Sakurai Quits YouTube With Final Video Teasing Mystery New Game

Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has ended his popular YouTube channel by teasing the upcoming announcement of a mystery new game.

In the final video from the Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel, Sakurai revealed that he received a video game development proposal in July 2021, as he was busy putting together the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Kazuya reveal video as well as DLC character Sora.

Sakurai added that, assuming this video game gets made, it should be announced “sooner or later,” though didn’t say anything more specific.

“I received a request to write a game proposal, which I finished at lightning speed,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t share more about this project, but assuming we’re able to get it made, it should be announced sooner or later.”

(Sakurai also revealed that until recently, all the footage of him for his channel was recorded two-and-a-half years ago, if you were wondering why he all of a sudden looks older.)

There’s little to go on, but it’s good news for Sakurai’s army of fans who had wondered what he’d do next having wrapped up work on Switch exclusive Super Smash Bros. Ultimate earlier this year. Some even speculated that Sakurai might have retired.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched in 2018 and Sora arrived as its final expansion fighter in 2021. The Kingdom Hearts character wrapped up an 89 character roster for the game, which includes fighters from The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Banjo Kazooie, Dragon Quest, Persona, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Minecraft, and many more.

Sakurai said in October 2023 he’s not sure where to take Super Smash Bros. next, because “it’s difficult to imagine an increase of this magnitude happening again.”

What might Sakurai’s next game be? Nintendo is preparing to announce its Switch successor console, and there will surely be more Smash Bros. games given the incredible success of Ultimate (34.66 million sales and counting). Perhaps yet another sequel is now in the works, but is Sakurai involved?

Image credit: Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games: Finale Special / YouTube.

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 Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Both Get PS5 Pro Support Patches

Naughty Dog has updated both The Last of Us Part 1 on PlayStation 5 and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered to add PS5 Pro support ahead of the mid-gen console upgrade’s release next month.

PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features.

Naughty Dog detailed The Last of Us Part 1 update 2.00 in patch notes published to its website. On PS5, the game has a new ‘Pro’ mode that renders at at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K “while maintaining a target of 60fps.”

Elsewhere, on PS5 Pro The Last of Us Part 1’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and “provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.” Naughty Dog failed to confirm what those framerates are, however.

The Last of Us Part 1 PS5 Update 2.00 Patch Notes

PlayStation 5 Pro

  • New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
    • New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
    • Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*

*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.

General

  • Fixed issue where New Game+ mode wasn’t being applied when using Chapter Select
  • Fixed an issue where a player’s Artifact collection could become desynced with their Save Data, preventing trophy acquisition
  • Fixed an issue where game could be locked at 40 fps on boot up when using a 4K, VRR monitor

Gameplay

  • Fixed an issue where players could become unable to swim quickly due to rebinding conflicts with a Custom control scheme
  • Fixed an issue where the speedrun timer could revert to the most recent checkpoint’s time if the player quit or the game crashed
  • [Bill’s Town] Fixed an issue where Ellie and Bill would not follow the player as expected
  • [Lakeside Resort] Improved Ellie’s accuracy with the hunting rifle while crouched
  • [The University] Fixed issue with library generator that could affect progression
  • [Bus Depot] Fixed issue where Joel’s flashlight would turn on when inspecting certain artifacts despite being in direct sunlight

Accessibility

  • Added additional support so that more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
  • [Pittsburgh] Fixed an issue where a generator could be pinged by ‘Enhanced Listening Mode’ before intended
  • [Tommy’s Dam] Fixed an issue on New Game+ where there was no prompt to turn the hand-wheel
  • [Left Behind – Back in a Flash] Fixed an issue where Navigation Assistance could become disabled unintentionally

Meanwhile, Naughty Dog has detailed The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered update 1.2.0, again in patch notes published to its website. The PS5 Pro features for Part 2 are the same as those for Part 1: a new Pro mode that renders at 1440p with PSSR upscaling output to 4K while maintaining a target of 60fps, with game’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes providing a smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Update 1.2.0 Patch Notes

PlayStation 5 Pro

  • New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
    • New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
    • Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*

*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.

General

  • Fixed an issue where some trophies would not unlock after importing PS4 save data
  • Fixed an issue where Abby’s torso could disappear when switching between her bonus skins

Gameplay

  • [The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where Dina could be grabbed an additional time while escaping in the subway

No Return

  • Fixed an issue where the stun bomb was not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Stun” stats
  • Fixed an issue where some weapon kills were not accurately tracking toward player’s stats when performing stealth kills in between those weapon kills
  • Fixed an issue where shiv kills were not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Shiv” stats

Audio

  • [On Foot] Fixed an issue where music tracks would not progress as intended when speedrunning

Accessibility

  • Added additional support so more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
  • [The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where code for the locked room could not be located using Enhanced Listen Mode
  • [No Return] Fixed an issue where enemies specified by a Gambit were not properly identified when using High Contrast Mode

Technical leads at various developers, including Naughty Dog, have already spoken about how on the base PS5 players would often have to choose between Fidelity mode, which offers better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30fps, or Performance mode, which raises the framerate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher framerates.

Last month, Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog’s head of technology, told IGN that the ability to play The Last of Us at 60fps in 4K is “a huge deal.” “It makes it so we don’t have to compromise, so you don’t have to pick between high fidelity and good performance.”

“The high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you’re on Pro,” McIntosh added. “And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the Pro.”

This week, developer Remedy detailed its approach to Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro update, explaining that Quality mode adds ray tracing at the expense of running at 30fps, but the patch also includes big improvements to Performance mode.

The Last of Us games join the likes of Blizzard’s Diablo 4 and Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok in a list of over 70 games with confirmed PS5 Pro Enhanced updates, according to eagle-eyed fans who’ve been keeping an eye on the PlayStation Store (IGN has a list of all the PS5 Pro Enhanced games so far).

PS5 Pro launches November 7 priced $700.

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.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

For most of us, the biggest penalty for making too much noise might be a scolding shush from the movie theater seat behind you, but in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you’re only ever one creaky floorboard away from getting snuffed out by an alien threat that’s always listening out for you like it’s the most sinister form of Siri. This instant fail stealth-heavy horror story does a pretty convincing job of recreating the breath-holding tension of the films, in addition to borrowing heavily from the likes of Alien: Isolation in the way it casts you as the reluctant rodent trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse. The result is a consistently stressful undertaking from start to finish, even though my careful creep down The Road Ahead moved at a relentlessly glacial pace and occasionally snagged on some slightly curious design decisions.

A standalone story mostly set around four months after the alien invasion seen in A Quiet Place: Day One, The Road Ahead casts us as college student Alex Taylor and follows her attempts to flee her abandoned hospital hideout in order to make a silent and steady pilgrimage towards an off-shore safe haven isolated from the threat of the monsters, known as Death Angels. It’s a straightforward setup, but tender early moments spent with her likable boyfriend Martin and kindhearted father Kenneth were enough to get me invested in Alex’s cause before inevitable alien-inflicted tragedy spurs her escape plan into action. It’s a bit of a letdown that, in spite of its strong start, the payoff for The Road Ahead’s plot in its dying hours is all too predictable, and its overall story comes up noticeably lacking in impact – particularly in the wake of the far more emotionally resonant tale found in Day One earlier this year.

Still, there’s no shortage of affecting human artifacts to comb through along the way. Outside of the story’s opening chapters and the odd flashback, Alex is alone with her own thoughts – which are appropriately represented via onscreen text since any spoken sentence is only ever followed by a death sentence – for most of The Road Ahead. In lieu of any interactions with other survivors, I got a strong sense of the history of each space I shuffle-stepped through by observing the heartbreaking family portraits handcrafted in a child’s crayon tacked to the wall of a deserted safehouse, or the hilarious note about a toilet paper-related riot left by a store owner in a seaside shopping strip. There are plenty of great worldbuilding touches like this in The Road Ahead, and I had ample opportunity to study every little detail since I moved through it in a constant state of slow-motion, desperately trying to keep my every movement on mute.

Creeping with the Enemy

It might be a first-person adventure almost completely devoid of combat, but The Road Ahead is no “walking simulator;” it’s a balking simulator. Every step you take or action you perform is a reluctant one, because even the lightest door hinge-squeak or stomped-on gravel crunch can alert an alien hunter to your whereabouts and end your slow-walk to safety in an instant. Thus, most of my progress through Alex’s adventure through empty houses, camping grounds, and trainyards was made with micro movements to my controller’s thumbstick; tip-toeing through rooms at a snail’s pace and incrementally tilting forward to push doors open or carefully pulling back to slowly open desk drawers to search through. It felt a bit like coming home late from a night out and trying to find your way to bed without waking your significant other, only in this instance your significant other is a spindly-limbed extraterrestrial who wants to rip your insides out rather than simply ask you to sleep on the couch.

Almost every environment you explore in The Road Ahead is purpose-built to test your coordination and fine-motor skills. Rooms are cramped and cluttered with beast-stirring booby traps to avoid and – if you’re not careful – simply brushing past hollow barrels or pulling open the cover of an air vent too eagerly can bring your swift undoing. Thankfully, Alex is given a homemade phonometer early on which, when carried in her left hand, indicates the decibel level produced by her movements relative to the overall volume of the ambient sounds around her. I basically spent the entire seven-hour journey anxiously trying to prevent its meter from lighting up as a result of each steady-handed interaction I performed, not unlike trying to extract the wishbone in a game of Operation without suddenly triggering the patient’s buzzer and blinking red nose.

Some of the ways The Road Ahead conjures up a life-ending crunch or clang do feel a little contrived, though. It makes total sense for there to be shards of broken glass lining the paths beside the shattered windows of an upturned train carriage, but the number of discarded paint cans to be found on remote forest hiking trails does seem a touch too improbable, like rolling out from under the Simpsons’ family car and finding yourself in a carpark that’s inexplicably full of garden rakes to step on. I managed to suspend my disbelief and just abide by the noise-making obstacle course that the developers have created, but I do wish they’d been able to disguise their monster-rousing trip-ups a little more organically.

The threats to blowing Alex’s cover aren’t only found in the world around her, though; they’re also within. Alex is an asthmatic, so actions of overexertion – like pulling herself up onto ledges or carrying heavy planks to use as makeshift bridges, as well as moments of heightened stress such as finding herself in close proximity to one of the alien stalkers – can push her into a state of noisy hyperventilation, which acts as a heavy-breathing beacon to any monsters in the area. This brings the welcome challenge of identifying when to best use the inhalers that can be collected along the way, even if it does seem a little silly that they’re single-use only, as though their previous owners huffed each of them right up to the limit.

Quiet Riot

The Road Ahead isn’t only about stalking around in silence like some sort of survival-horror street mime, and along with the phonometer you are provided with some other basic tools to keep the keen-eared killers at bay. Bricks and bottles can be picked up and lobbed to temporarily distract them in fairly standard stealth-game style, while some other items serve dual purposes, like the hand flares that can be sparked to either light up darker environments or tossed away to confuse your petal-faced pursuers with their crackling hiss. It does feel a bit arbitrary the way certain items in Alex’s inventory can only be wielded in certain hands, though. It may create an added layer of tension to be forced to choose between measuring sound with the phonometer and illuminating the path forward with Alex’s flashlight, for example, since they can each only be wielded in her left hand, but it hardly makes any logical sense. Where was this flashlight purchased, at Ned Flanders’ Leftorium?

Occasionally, I’d find myself caught in close quarters with a monster and not have any noise-making tools in either hand, which put me in the lose-lose situation of either trying to make a run for it and getting instantly slashed in the back, or standing perfectly still only for the blind beast to accidentally bump straight into my nose and strike me down on the spot. It didn’t seem to matter if I chose to stick or twist, since either way I was going to find myself stuck and twisted apart. Thankfully, The Road Ahead’s generous auto-save system meant I was rarely penalised too heavily each time I perished, so although the slightly scripted feel of its enemy encounters mean it’s never as outright terrifying as Alien: Isolation, it is at the very least more lenient and less likely to frustrate because you couldn’t reach a manual save point.

It’s never as outright terrifying as Alien: Isolation, [but] it is at the very least more lenient and less likely to frustrate.

The quarter-speed crawl along The Road Ahead does eventually run out of steam, though, even despite the fact that encounters with the aliens do evolve in some ways. There’s only ever one enemy type, but midway through they develop the ability to sense your movements even if the sounds you make are masked by the threshold of the ambient noise, effectively forcing you to simply take your hands off the controls and stand as still as a statue until the concussive effects of their scanning is completed, as an example. These modest changes help preserve the tension level throughout, but they struggle to completely disguise the fact that you’re otherwise mostly doing tedious tasks like turning valves and searching through drawers for supplies like any other survival-horror game, only at a considerably slower pace and without any combat sequences to release that tension in. There is one short flashback sequence that allows you to briefly blaze away with a shotgun out of the back of a speeding van, but The Road Ahead could have done with a few more of these dynamic detours to help break up the bit-by-bit crawl even more.

Alan Wake 2 on PS5 Pro Is 30 FPS on Quality Mode With Ray Tracing, But Performance Mode Gets Some Big Boosts, Too

Remedy Games detailed its approach to Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro update in a new post on its official site, explaining that Quality Mode will add ray tracing at the expense of running at 30 FPS, but that the patch will also include big improvements to Performance Mode.

According to the official post, Alan Wake 2’s Quality Mode will run at 30 FPS with ray tracing while outputting at 3840 x 2160 (4K). Its render resolution will be 2176 x 1224. In some ways it’s not surprising given Alan Wake 2’s hefty PC requirements, which recommend at least an RTX 4080 for good performance with ray tracing turned up.

That said, there are still meaningful improvements to be found in the PS5 Pro version of Alan Wake 2 without sacrifing frame-rate. Among other things, Remedy promises “significantly higher output resolution” roughly on par with the base PS5’s Quality mode by pushing the resolution to 4K, aligning it with Sony’s overall sales pitch for the console. It also includes overall improvements to “stability, fog, volumetric lighting, and shadow accuracy.”

“We did multiple experiments, including upgrading the 60fps Performance mode output from 1440p to 4k and adding PSSR (Sony’s AI-based upscaling method), which positively impacted image crispness and stability under motion,” Remedy explained.

“Increasing the internal rendering resolution consumes a lot of processing power, no matter how powerful your hardware is. However, in our experiments, even putting all the added power to increased rendering resolution provided a barely noticeable difference in the output image or its quality. Adding more pixels to gain visual quality is not straightforward with the new AI-based upscaling methods.”

Remedy’s post goes on to detail the ways that the console version incorporates ray tracing as well as its cost, noting how each ray must be “traced, and its hit evaluated and shaded.”

“In a game like Alan Wake 2, its complex light-material interactions and rich environments can make tracing, shading, and denoising even a single ray tracing effect too expensive to justify the cost depending on the hardware,” the post says. “Geometrically Alan Wake 2 is a very dense game. The usage of a GPU-driven rendering pipeline and its fine-grained culling with the skinning ran on GPU made it possible to create densely populated forest scenes with layers and layers of foliage and trees encountered during Saga’s gameplay segments taking place in the lush environments of the Pacific North-West.”

Ultimately, Alan Wake 2 is one of the best-looking games out there right now, so the results should be impressive no matter which mode you choose. It’ll join a handful of other games that are getting major upgrades on the PS5 Pro, including Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and several first-party releases. Go here to check out our full impressions of the PS5 Pro, which launches on November 7.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Vampire Survivors Gets Big Castlevania DLC With 20 Characters and 40 Weapons Just in Time for Halloween

Hit indie title Vampire Survivors is getting its biggest chunk of downloadable content to date in the Ode to Castlevania expansion releasing on Halloween.

Developer poncle revealed a trailer for the DLC on X/Twitter, below. It contains more than 20 characters and 40 weapons alongside one massive stage “and more” for $3.99. “There’s so much content you’re guaranteed at least another 10 hours of gameplay,” poncle said.

A stylish animated trailer shows a combination of Vampire Survivors’ pixel art gameplay with slick Castlevania animations showing off a handful of the characters arriving in the game. Ode to Castlevania will come to all platforms where Vampire Survivors is available on Halloween.

Vampire Survivors is a fast-paced and over the top gothic horror game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. It became one of the biggest surprise hits of the last few years as what launched as a humble indie game on Steam blew up in popularity and snowballed itself.

Poncle soon added layers of new content to the game and the core experience now offers 50 playable characters and 80 weapons to play with. That’s before the two major expansions too, not to mention the Ode to Castlevania DLC.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “Need a game to play while listening to podcasts? This is it. Vampire Survivors is outwardly simple but turns out to be an incredibly deep hole to fall down — though it’s not without extended dull periods when you get ahead of its curve.”

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