Quick Play is Overwatch 2‘s most standard, basic mode — where players log in if they just want to hop into a few matches without worrying about their rank or an unwelcome ruleset. But for one weekend, Blizzard’s team-based shooter is shaking Quick Play up.
For a few days, Quick Play will be “hacked” by Sombra, who is turning it into something called Quick Play: Hacked – Quicker Play. As the name suggests, everything will be faster. By changing things like capture times, Blizzard is hoping that players will experience more team fights and potentially new strategies. Here are the patch notes detailing the changes:
Respawning times are now 75% of their original time.
Payloads in Escort and Hybrid maps will move 60% faster.
Taking control of the Objective Point in Hybrid is 40% faster than normal.
Taking control of the objective point in Control is 40% faster than normal, and scoring the capture progress percentage is 80% faster.
Taking control of the objective point in Flashpoint is 20% faster than normal, and scoring the capture progress percentage is 40% faster.
When you play an Escort, Hybrid, or Push map, the initial match time has been reduced to 70% of the original time, and any time extensions are also reduced to 70% of the total time added.
Quicker Play will be active until January 14, at which point the game will return to normal. But according to Blizzard, this marks the start of a larger shift for Overwatch 2’s core mode.
“We want to explore new and fun ways to change core Quick Play gameplay,” reads the blog post announcement. “Changes will happen periodically and only for a limited time.”
Special, time-limited modes are added periodically to Overwatch 2, but typically they’re offered as something separate from the basic queue. Since these are changes to Quick Play, it means that more players will experience an alternative version of the game. Players who dally in Ranked or Arcade modes will be unaffected.
“Testing new ideas with you for a limited time allows us to quickly understand what you like and possibly implement changes to improve gameplay,” the blog post says. “This also gives players of all skill levels an opportunity to try out new playstyles and strategies that wouldn’t necessarily work as well in a traditional game of Overwatch.”
The good news is that if you’re truly not feeling these Quick Play changes, you can start a custom game with the traditional rules.
Everyone likes bees. Brightly colored, fuzzy, industrious: what’s not to love? So if you wanted to make bees even more appealing or exciting, there’s only one way to go: make them into space bees! That’s the setup for Apiary, the new strategy game from first time designer Connie Vogelmann. In the far future, bees have evolved intelligence and taken their peaceable lifestyles to the stars. Players are rival factions, who must both cooperate and compete to demonstrate their philosophies are superior.
What’s in the Box?
Like a lot of modern strategy board games, Apiary starts with a lot of cardboard-punching. There are all sorts of building and upgrade hexes to push out of their cardboard sprues, along with waggle dance tracks, planet tiles and various other chits and counters. A deck of seed cards is also included, and there’s a big fold-out board with various tracks and action spaces on it. It’s all serviceable enough stuff, although the art is a little drab.
Fans of wood and plastic won’t be disappointed when they go rummaging in the deeper recesses beneath. There are shaped wooden tokens to track supplies of various resources, with the wax and honey tokens being painted a neat metallic sheen and a chunky bee miniature that serves as the mothership which flies around exploring the galaxy. Each player color also has four plastic worker pieces, which are bee-shaped but with a cubic center that rotates to show values between one and four. These are ink-washed so you can see the numbers and details clearly.
Player piece sets are rounded out with some wooden cubes in their color to record progress on various tracks and a docking mat to organize their pieces. Players also get a hive mat which has spaces for their growing colony and a faction tile which gives them some starting hexes for their hive and a condition for extra victory points. There are five different hives and 20 factions, so there are lots of possible starting combinations.
There’s a lot of stuff in the box and, at first, it looks like it won’t all fit back in. However, there’s a clever plastic organizer included which keeps it all together. How it all packs down isn’t obvious and there’s no guide in the rules, but a quick search online should show you how it works.
Rules and How It Plays
At first glance, Apiary looks like a classic worker placement and resource management affair. Most of your turns will be spent placing worker bees from your docking mat into action spaces on the board and gaining the benefits. Explore lets you move the mothership around, revealing planets and gaining resources. Advance lets you spend those resources to gain farm, recruit and development tiles to add to your hive, each of which grants additional bonuses. Grow gives you the chance to add empty cells to your hive for future building, or new workers to place on future turns. Convert does what it says on the tin, allowing you to change up basic resources for more advanced ones.
As ever in games of this style, the overall aim is to gain victory points, and there’s a bewildering array of ways to do so, in the interest of offering multiple ways to win. From this standpoint, it’s still a standout title that features a lot of nicely rounded and well-integrated mechanics. You need buildings on your hive mat to store resources, for example, but you also need the resources to gain the buildings. Not only is this circular dependency interesting to solve mechanically, but it prevents players from stockpiling. It also adds a fun spatial strategy aspect to what otherwise might be something of a spreadsheet game. The same goes for exploring the galaxy, a mini-game where you move the mothership on a grid in which empty spaces reveal a random planet which may, or may not, grant you the resources you want.
But the game has a novel trick up its sleeve to surprise you, and it’s a doozy. Not all workers in Apiary are created equal. Those numbers on the body of each worker indicate its level, and this has a critical impact on play. Most actions work better the higher the level worker is assigned to it. More resource conversions on the convert action, more squares to move on the explore action, and so on. Furthermore, explore and advance can hold two workers each, and when a second worker is assigned you get to use the sum of both levels, regardless of which player owns the other.
This sets up a fascinating dance of interaction. Going first lets you grab the action and results you’re looking for, but waiting may be beneficial, as you might get to tag along with a higher-level worker. Furthermore, workers don’t block each other from spaces in Apiary. If you want to use an occupied spot, you can go right ahead and do so, but the owner gets their bee back, gets to increase its level and can choose either to use it again on a later turn on “land” it. This means it can be used to gain income from farms along with other returning workers if you run out of workers to place, whereupon they all gain a level, too.
Positive interaction of this kind is very novel, and it leaves Apiary in the brilliant position of feeling like a highly interactive game without the zero-sum, “take that” bites that a certain kind of gamer hates. Rather, bumping players off spots is often doing them a favor, and you need to take that into account when deciding your moves. Some spaces will hold two workers, and you get the action at the strength of them both added together, so, again, you must be careful being first to the spot. You get the advantage of an early selection, but you’re handing a hand-up to the following player. It’s a lovely balance of competing priorities.
Worker leveling also feeds into the end game and becomes a major source of points. Level four workers, the highest grade, are very powerful. Not only do they lend the highest level to their action, but they grant an additional bonus. A convert action with such a worker, for instance, lets you “dance,” creating a custom conversion of your choice that other players can later pay you to use. They’re also the only workers that can use the Monument action, which lets you buy tiles offering big end-game points. But once used, these top-level workers have to go into hibernation, earning you a small extra bonus, and once a player has hibernated seven bees, the game ends.
This gives control of the game end to player choice in yet another layer of interlocking systems. Indeed, if anything, there’s almost too much going on at once in Apiary. While the core rules loop isn’t that difficult to learn, the sheer number of options can feel overwhelming to new players. And even for the more experienced, it can make it hard to understand how the mechanical levers you’re pulling are leading to you getting points, or lack thereof. The result is a feeling of disconnect that’s sometimes frustrating, especially if you’re looking to work out how you can improve your play.
Mechanical disconnect like this is often a sign of a game that’s divorced from its theme and, indeed, Apiary is semi-abstract. You can see echoes of the bee’s lifecycle in the way you need to construct cells to expand your hive and, of course, in the busy nature of the workers you place. But at the same time, the game uses its futuristic overtones to good effect. This is particularly clear in the different game factions, each of which has its own starting setup and ways to score bonus points, giving you a huge pot of varied strategies to try out.
Soon you’ll be able to play the latest and greatest hits from Night City’s top radio stations at home with the Cyberpunk 2077 Radio Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 vinyls, which are officially up for preorder. These bright yellow vinyls are set to release on April 26 of this year and will set you back $29.98 each. They’re well worth the investment as well given the artists included on them. Check out the links below to preorder a copy for yourself today.
Preorder Cyberpunk 2077’s Radio Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 Vinyls
If you’ve yet to jump into Night City and explore the world of Cyberpunk 2077 for yourself, there’s no better time than now to do so. Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultimate Edition released back in early December and features the game in its fresh 2.0 updated state alongside the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion. It’s well worth picking up if you’ve been looking to play it. We also gave Phantom Liberty a 9/10 upon release in our review, calling it a “more sophisticated level of storytelling with excellent performances, smarter insights on the cyberpunk genre and its dystopian themes,” and that it lands “on top of a much-improved gameplay experience thanks to its fresh 2.0 update,” so you know you’ll be in for a great time.
A demo for upcoming role-playing game Granblue Fantasy: Relink launches on PlayStation 4 and 5 at midnight tonight, January 11, publisher Cygames has announced.
Three modes will be available in the demo — Tutorial, Story, and Quest — with players able to earn rewards for the full version of Granblue Fantasy: Relink in each one. Story mode won’t be a prequel or separate part of the game but instead just offer “a small slice” of Granblue Fantasy: Relink’s main story.
Quest mode gives players an additional three quests to work through, playable either solo or with up to three others via online co-op. 11 characters are available in this mode: Gran, Katalina, Rackam, Io, Charlotta, Ghandagoza, Narmaya, Lancelot, Siegfried, Yodarha, and Zeta. Finally, Tutorial mode gives players a chance to get to grips with the basics. Progress made in the demo does not transfer over to the full game.
“Granblue Fantasy is set in Zegagranda Skydom, in the corner of the world where islands are guarded by primal monsters and winds,” its synopsis reads. “Players are tasked with discovering the web of intrigue reaching far beyond the borders of Zegagrande and will fight to determine the future of the Sky Realm.”
No matter your opinion on Bethesda’s latest game Starfield, which has turned out to be quite the controversial RPG, the game has still had over 12 million players and should be considered at least a moderate success for Xbox for the time being. Especially since more regular updates are coming starting in February this year, alongside the first expansion pack, and the highly anticipated launch of the Creation Kit and mod support for PC and consoles.
We can rattle on all day about the reception of Starfield, but here’s the crux of this latest offer available. Starfield’s Premium Edition Upgrade was notable for its ‘up to’ 5 days early access. While this early access period has since expired, there are still a few other goodies up for grabs at what is seemingly quite a reasonable price. It’s now down to just £14.99 at Amazon in the UK, a considerable drop from the RRP of £34.99 when the game launched in September 2023.
What’s included? I hear you ask. This is the physical edition of the Premium Upgrade, so you’re getting the following: Starfield Steelbook, Starfield Patch, Shattered Space Expansion, Digital Skin Pack, Digital Soundtrack, and Digital Artbook. For £15, that’s quite a steal (and a £20 discount), especially if you’re looking forward to trying out the Shattered Space expansion and what Bethesda might have in store.
Just so we are clear, this is the Premium Edition Upgrade for Xbox consoles, with ‘upgrade’ being an important phase. You’ll need to own Starfield or have Xbox Game Pass to take advantage of any of the digital content like the eventual Shattered Space DLC. Other notable UK deals right now, that you might be interested in as well, include a great discount on Steam Deck, PS5 Slim, and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 (among other games as well).
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
The Finals developer Embark Studios has released the popular shooter’s first update of 2024, and it makes significant changes to the way aim assist works.
Aim assist is one of the hottest topics within the game’s burgeoning community, which Embark Studios said it had paid close attention to as it worked to tone down the mechanic.
“Today we have a small patch that addresses community feedback on aim assist, fair play, and bug fixes,” the developer explained. “These changes are the result of an in-depth review of how aim assist works — something we’ve only been able to validate with a player base as large as ours (thanks so much for playing our game, yolks!).”
Here are the The Finals update 1.4.1 patch notes in full:
Aim Assistance
Zoom Snapping Angular Velocity now has a max cap, preventing unintended rapid 90-degree turns.
Camera Magnetism will be reduced to 35% from 50%, making player aim less sticky and lowering controller accuracy.
Zoom Snapping Time will be reduced to 0.25s from 0.3s.
Zoom Snapping will be removed from the SR-84 Sniper Rifle, Revolver, LH1, and all Shotguns, as it buffs them more than other weapons.
Aim assist will ignore invisible players, fixing a bug with the existing system.
Clients running key re-mapping programs on PC will not have access to aim assist.
Embark Studios said it has another bigger update in the works for next week, with a major security fix and some new content.
The Finals is a free-to-play competitive first-person shooter made by former Battlefield developers. It launched with a huge concurrent player count on Steam, where it’s still going strong and wowing fans with its impressive destruction tech.
IGN’s The Finals review returned an 8/10. We said: “The Finals is a fresh and exciting take on team based PVP shooters, featuring some of the best environmental destruction in any FPS.”
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.
Elden Ring has received a slim update on PC, bringing the game up to version 1.10.1, but neither publisher Bandai Namco nor developer FromSoftware mentioned the highly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in the notes.
Released on Bandai Namco’s website, the update specifically addresses the Steam version of Elden Ring, specifically updating its anti-cheating measures in accordance with a Steam operating system update. This obviously won’t change much for most players, but will be a relief for those still invading in Elden Ring, or engaging in its dedicated player versus player Colosseum areas.
This update was added more than a year ago now in December 2022, letting players face off in new competitive modes in the grand arenas scattered throughout The Lands Between.
The expansion was announced in March as a major expansion coming to Elden Ring. A single piece of concept art was released alongside the announcement but didn’t give much away, just showing a character atop a spectral steed looking towards the horizon that featured a dying Erdtree.
Future Press will be releasing a ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of the Dark Souls Trilogy Compendium, featuring the complete breakdown of every single minute detail from the legendary FromSoftware games. It will cost $59.99, with preorders now available via Amazon (see here).
For clarity, this is the 25th Anniversary of the first game guide published by Future Press, not the 25th Anniversary of Dark Souls (which was released on September 22, 2011). The original Compendium book is considered rare online and can be difficult to find or buy at a reasonable rate, which makes news of this reprint very welcome indeed.
Future Press describes the Limited Edition reprint as featuring, “The enemies, items, equipment, areas and NPC dialogue of each game are all presented in an easy-to-reference format. This beautifully laid out book is designed to make it easy to find what you’re looking for—each entry is color-coded by game, and everything is fully indexed.”
This is also a strictly limited one-time reprint, featuring “unique 25th Anniversary branding and some slight changes to the slipcase and cover” but otherwise the re-release will be identical to the original Dark Souls Trilogy printing.
The reprint features 480 pages that dive into the core story beats of the Dark Souls games, alongside a complete World Guide for each title and its DLCs, and even four unique bonus art prints “that show the beauty of FromSoftware’s character designs”.
D3 Publisher Inc. has announced the arrival of ‘Those Games’ on PlayStation 4 and 5 priced $9.99 / £7.99. It launched on Nintendo Switch and Steam last year.
Those Games, developed by Monkeycraft Co. and published by D3 Publisher, is short for YEAH! YOU WANT ‘THOSE GAMES’ RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!, a minigame collection filled with challenges based on the inscrutable mobile game ads no-one can escape from.
Mini games include the Pin Pull, Number Tower, Parking Lot, Cash Run, and Colour Lab. There are 250 levels overall set across the five mini games. You can collect coins and create customised nameplates, as well as compete with other players. Rankings are reset on the first day of each month.
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 listing, spotted by ResetEra user ezidro3, is for an $89.99CAD “PlayStation 5 V2 DualSense Wireless Controller – White”. While the controller appears to have the same dimensions as the existing model, it has what’s described as an “exceptional 12-hour battery life on a full charge,” which “supports long gaming sessions.”
If true, this would make for a significant upgrade on the existing DualSense, which offers a roughly six-hour battery life, depending on the game played. Elsewhere, a DualSense charging station is said to be included, offering “easy click-in charging.”
Best Buy’s full description reads: “Take the gaming action into your own hands when you play with the PlayStation 5 V2 DualSense wireless controller. With dynamic triggers, a built-in microphone and so much more, this gaming controller offers a truly immersive experience. The iconic comfortable design lets you play for hours and hours.”
Best Buy’s website published a number of images of this new DualSense too, which are below:
PS5 V2 DualSense Product Features
Compatible with the PlayStation 5
Wireless connectivity ensures you will never get tangled up in wires while gaming
Iconic comfortable design fits naturally in your hands
Haptic feedback replaces the traditional rumble motors for more realistic gameplay
Dynamic adaptive triggers let you experience different levels of force and tension as you interact with your game
Built-in microphone lets you engage with fellow gamers in online play
Headset jack lets you plug in your favourite headset, so you can tune in to your game audio easily
Dual Sense charging station (included) offers easy click-in charging
Exceptional 12-hour battery life, on a full charge, supports long gaming sessions
PS5 V2 DualSense Product Specifications
Product Condition: Brand New
Controller Type: Wireless
Specialty Controller: Yes
Rumble Vibration: Yes
Headset Jack: Yes
Colour: White
Width: 6.6 cm
Height: 16 cm
Depth: 10.6 cm
Width (Inches): 2.6 in
Height (Inches): 6.3 in
Depth (Inches): 4.17 in
Weight: 280 g
Sony has yet to announce such a controller, but IGN has asked the company for comment.
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.
