Category: Video Games

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s Steam page has revealed the game’s March 22, 2024 release date ahead of a planned announcement later tonight.

The release date visible on the Dragon’s Dogma 2 Steam page confirms a recent leak spotted earlier this month in which the PEGI rating for the game revealed it would release on March 22, 2024, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

The news comes hours before the Dragon’s Dogma 2 showcase, set for 1pm PT / 4pm ET. The showcase will be co-hosted by Dragon’s Dogma 2’s director, Hideaki Itsuno, and producer, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi. The pair will present new info, gameplay, and the release date. The stream will run for approximately 15 minutes.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the original Dragon’s Dogma, which launched in 2012. Before today’s stream, Cacom has not shared much information on what to expect. What we do know, however, is that Dragon’s Dogma 2’s map is four times the size of the original’s.

“Dragon’s Dogma 2 will offer up more of what we loved about that first game, and many of those minor elements have been improved upon. We couldn’t help but wish we walked away a little more excited about something new in the sequel, though,” my colleague Mitchell Saltzman said in his preview.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

A wave of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim players are getting a little sentimental and booting up their old Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s to “retire” their original characters.

Skyrim is now more than a decade old — 12 years, two weeks, and six days, to be exact — but remains in player consciousness as much as it did at launch. Bethesda’s beloved role-playing game lets players explore a vast open world, fight great evils, and become a living legend, not to mention build a house, get married, and have kids.

Several players are currently taking that role-playing one step further, however, by revisiting their now veteran adventurers and retiring them. Though this isn’t a particularly new concept for RPG fans, the current trend was triggered by Scutarior on Reddit.

“This is gonna sound cheesy, sentimental, and a bit much, but hear me out,” they wrote. “I recently found my old Xbox 360 where I first played Skyrim. My total first play through, no strategy, no game plan, no knowledge of lore, I just went for it.

“It occurred to me, this account that I spent hundreds of hours on was just sitting there waiting for me to pick it back up at any moment. This little Skyrim dude saw me through high school, and part of college, and I just left him sitting this whole time. So I decided to get back on the 360 to retire my old guy.

“I took him to his custom built house, put him in some emperor clothes, put all the weapons away, and sat him at the table. Saved the game and shut it off. Gave the virtual dude some closure and said goodbye to my first playthrough. It weirdly felt kinda nice. Before you laugh at the idea, give it a try.”

The post became very popular on Skyrim’s subreddit, with other players chiming in with similar stories and several pledging to do the same themselves. “Good idea. Gonna boot up my PS3,” said luigiknightx. “I’m gonna get super emotional, not gonna lie. That first save still feels like a second home to me. Even though i haven’t played on it in a long time, just the memories of my first playthrough make me feel emotional.”

Hbell-LarkbirdTO put their own spin on it. “This brought a tear to my eye,” they said. “I might do that, or I might put her to bed with her husband like that couple in Titanic who cuddles in bed while the ship sinks.” Plenty of other users agreed too. “This is beautiful and I will absolutely be doing this,” CantBake4S**t said. “Even my husband who isn’t a gamer said it’s brilliant.”

Many Skyrim players revealed they had done the same too, retiring their characters in their family homes or other significant places. “My first character is living happily as an alchemist on her farm, surrounded by friends, her children and her beloved husband who opened a shop,” said TiioK. “After saving the world a few times, they decided to stop with the fighting and said goodbye to the Companions.”

Though it’s a little less wholesome, AntiJackCoalition did something similar with their villainous character. “The account I did the most s**t on — like Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, Companions, civil war, Dragonborn DLC — vanilla playthrough ending I retired sitting in some big Bruce Wayne-ass mansion in the mountains with a lot of gold,” they said. “It does feel really nice to leave them to themselves after everything is over.”

With The Elder Scrolls 6 still five years away at least, fans have had to find their own ways, like this, to keep the ageing Skyrim entertaining. Another player recently accrued a 267,000 gold bounty murdering 5,000 NPCs in a quest to kill “everything that was killable”, while another fan recreated the game in Age of Empires 2.

In our 9/10 review of the beloved RPG, IGN said: “Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced.”

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

The Xbox Series X physical edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 includes Patch 5 on-disc, developer Larian Studios has confirmed.

Patch 5 was announced as launching this week, and, as IGN revealed, fixes slowdown issues with Act 3 caused by Patch 4, among many other things.

Fans had wondered if this latest patch would make it onto the physical edition, which is set to launch early 2024. In a post on X/Twitter, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse confirmed the Xbox Series X physical edition will indeed ship with Patch 5 on disc. However, Larian is still working on the exact version for the PlayStation 5 edition.

The Xbox retail version, which plays across 3 discs, will ship with Patch 5 on disc. Which is really good news. These things have lead times, as you know. Working on the exact version for PlayStation 5.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) November 27, 2023

While the Xbox Series X version of the Baldur’s Gate 3 physical edition comes on a whopping three discs, the PS5 version ships on two discs, and the PC version just one which hosts a custom installer and comes with a Steam key.

“This experiment is what we feel the future of physical media looks like, at least for us at Larian,” Douse said in a statement alongside the announcement. “We spent the last few months learning how to do it from scratch, and put everything we learned from the Collector’s Edition into what we hope is unbeatable value for what we’re considering our standard physical version going forward. If it works out, we’ll keep doing it this way.

“We understand the value of physical media, and while there are clearly increasingly significant challenges when it comes to the archiving of games, we truly believe it’s worth experimenting, even if it means a fuck ton of discs.”

The physical edition is sold exclusively on the Larian store, where it’s currently available for preorder. The studio notes that it’s not a Collector’s Edition, so don’t panic if you can’t get your hands on it right away and certainly do not buy from scalpers.

In addition to an “oversized exclusive game box” and all existing Digital Deluxe content, the physical Deluxe Edition will also include the following:

• Original soundtrack on 3 CDs
• Cloth world map
• Two fabric patches
• Thirty-two stickers
• Baldur’s Gate 3 art poster

Larian is currently on a victory lap following the breakout success of Baldur’s Gate 3, with seven wins at the recent Golden Joysticks and eight nominations at the upcoming Game Awards. Larian is set to announce Baldur’s Gate 3’s long-awaited Xbox release date at the awards show on December 7, and has even started to tease its “next big game”.

Baldur’s Gate 3, of course, has been a massive commercial and critical success since its official release on PC in August. IGN gave it a 10/10, praising its “crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity.”

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.

Bethesda has taken the unusual step for a triple-A video game maker of responding to negative reviews of Starfield on Steam.

As spotted by Project Zomboid developer Andy Hodgetts and flagged in a tweet, representatives of the Microsoft-owned company have been replying to negative reviews on Valve’s platform since early November, seemingly trying to tackle Starfield’s ‘mixed’ user review rating of 69%.

Many of the negative reviews echo common complaints with the sprawling space game, like this one posted on November 6 from a player with 56 hours in Starfield.

Boring and overrated. There is a wide universe to explore, filled mostly with empty planets. I understand. They have to do that to sell you on the idea that this is a whole universe, but that doesn’t make the game more fun. You can land on any planet and explore the copy/pasted locations. You will see the exact same locations from one end of the universe to the other and everywhere in between. A hodgepodge of messy, slapped together mechanics. Bloated skill trees, ‘exploring’, crafting, base building, an RPG, an FPS, a space opera. Starfield doesn’t know what it wants to be. As wide as the ocean and as deep as a puddle. You can explore everywhere but why would you want to?

This review sparked a response from someone called “Bethesda_Kraken [developer]”, who signed off their post as coming from Bethesda Customer Support:

Greetings,

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!

We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.

Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.” The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.

To provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here.

Never stop exploring!

Bethesda Customer Support

It’s a pretty stock response, and quotes Ashley Cheng, Bethesda’s managing director, who uttered the phrase “when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored” in a New York Times feature published ahead of Starfield’s September launch.

Here’s a more recent response, again from the busy Bethesda_Kraken, to a negative review from a Starfield player with over 76 hours on record.

The story is as generic as it gets and the gameplay gets boring. I wish there was a reason to even bother exploring planets and building outposts. Everything is fun until you do it once, then it’s all a repeating, soulless chore.

And here’s the developer response, posted on November 27, the same day as the review.

Greetings,

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!

You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!

Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter.

There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.

Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!

Never stop exploring!

Bethesda Customer Support

Here’s another example, but this time from someone called Bethesda_FalcoYamaoka, who also signs off as from Bethesda Customer Support:

Greetings,

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!

We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.

Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.” The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.

Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.

Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!

We are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. If you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E

We want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!

Best Regards,

Bethesda Customer Support.

While indie video game developers respond to Steam reviews all the time, big publishers like Bethesda rarely get stuck in, which makes these responses, however robotic, noteworthy. Why would Bethesda bother? It may be trying to steer the Starfield sentiment in a more positive direction, mindful of that ‘mixed’ user review. Starfield is currently the lowest-rated Bethesda game ever on Valve’s platform, and management will no doubt be keen to address that. Of course, there’s a risk that comes from responding to negative reviews, too, particularly when you use them to insist landing on empty planets isn’t boring.

I mean, you can reference that the actual moon is empty if you like and that astronauts who landed there did not find this emptiness boring, but there’s a big difference between landing on the actual moon and doing the same in a videogame 😉

— Andy Hodgetts (@CaptainBinky) November 8, 2023

Bethesda has updated Starfield a number of times since its launch, which saw 10 million players in three weeks. The latest patch, 1.8.86, added DLSS Support and the ability to eat food on sight. The studio already has a Starfield post-launch story expansion pack in the works, called Shattered Space, and development chief Todd Howard told IGN in an interview ahead of the Starfield Direct that Bethesda plans to release “a lot” of add-on content for the space exploration game.

“We’re going to be doing a lot of add-on content for Starfield,” Howard said. “We love doing it. Our fans love it. We’re going to do a story expansion pack that’s going to be coming. Our plan is to do things of varying sizes, and we’ve done a lot of that in our previous games, so it’s something that we really like doing, our fans like. So despite the size of the game, there’s still things we want to add as far as features in the future or stories and things like that. Hopefully it’s going to continue for a long time that way.”

For more, check out our complete walkthrough as well as our guide to all of the ships in Starfield.

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.

Did you just pick up a brand new PlayStation 5 console for Black Friday? Or are you a long-time console owner who has finally used up all 1TB of the PS5’s base storage? Cyber Monday is unquestionably the best time of year to score a fast and reliable PS5 compatible gaming SSD at the lowest price possible, but the sale is soon coming to an end. Don’t hesitate to pick up a 2TB SSD for only only $100!

Looking for more Cyber Monday deals like this? Check out the best Cyber Monday deals of 2023.

Cyber Monday Deal: Nextorage 1TB PS5 SSD with Heatsink for $99.99

There’s an interesting story behind Nextorage Japan. Nextorage describes itself as a company that was “created by a group of ex-Sony engineers and staff with over 20 years of experience in the development of memory and storage products”. Nextorage was actually originally created by Sony in 2019 as an SSD sub-division about a year before the PS5 was released. Presumably this was to be the basis for an official SSD sold by Sony themselves. For whatever reason, Sony decided to ditch that idea and sold this business to another stakeholder in the company, Phison, in 2022. Phison is another large reputable company that specializes in solid state memory controllers. You’ll find their controllers in name-brand SSDs like Seagate, Corsair, and Sabrent. Under Phison, Nextorage Japan eventually accomplished the goal of releasing an SSD catered specifically for the PS5 console in the form of this product right here.

Cyber Monday Deal: Seagate Game Drive 2TB SSD with Heatsink $149.99

Now here’s an SSD you don’t see discounted often. The Seagate Game Drive is only the second SSD to be officially licensed for the PlayStation console. What that means is this SSD is pretty much guaranteed to work with your PS5 with no problems whatsoever. It’s pricier than the other options in this list, but it’s still a hefty discount off MSRP and the lowest price we’ve seen. Seagate is a very reputable brand.

Cyber Monday Deal: WD Black SN850X 4TB PS5 SSD for $229.99

The SN850X is the latest generation of WD’s flagship Black series M.2 SSDs. It’s easily one of the fastest SSDs on the market. There are only a few SSDs out right now that can match its speed. Off the top of my head, the only SSDs I can think of are the new Samsung 990 Pro and the SK Hynix P41 Platinum. The SN850X also makes for an excellent PS5 SSD. It is identical to the SN850P, which is an officially licensed PS5 SSD. The only caveat is that this particular model doesn’t include a built-in heatsink. That is easily remedied by picking up a PS5 heatsink off Amazon for $7.

Cyber Monday Deal: Corsair MP600 2TB PS5 SSD with Heatsink $110

Corsair is a very well known brand for DIY PC builders. Corsair makes some of the best gaming products on the market, and that includes solid-state memory like RAM and SSDs. The MP600 Pro is Corsair’s fastest M.2 SSD and the “LPX” model is “optimized for PS5” because it includes a rugged preinstalled heatsink that is slim enough to fit in the PS5 bay without any issues. We rated it the best PS5 SSD for 2023.

Cyber Monday Deal: Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 SSD with Heatsink $119.99

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

All the Black Friday SSD Deals for your PS5 Console

What is a PS5-compatible SSD?

An SSD that expands your PS5’s storage is essentially the same SSD that goes into your gaming PC. However, because of the PS5 has certain requirements that must be met for full compatibility. These are:

• The SSD and its heatsink must fit in the PS5 drive bay (requirement)
• The SSD must have a PCIe 4.0 interface (requirement)
• The SSD should have a minimum read speed of 5600MB/s (recommended)
• The SSD should have a heatsink for proper cooling (recommended)

An SSD that is slower than 5,600MB/s should still work. In fact, if it’s close to the rated speed, you may never notice any difference. The reason Sony gives this recommendation is that the stock SSD that comes with the PS5 is rated at 5,600MB/s. If you add a slower SSD, you will bottleneck your stock SSD.

Likewise, you may not need a heatsink. SSDs are rated for higher temps than what you’d normally expect to achieve even inside a PS5 that’s running fult tilt. However, there’s no real airflow around the SSD bay and SSDs do get pretty hot. We’d recommend getting a preinstalled heatsink or installing one yourself for peace of mind and potentially to prevent thermal throttling and extending the lifespan of your SSD.

Can I use this SSD in my gaming PC?

Absolutely! PS5-compatible SSDs will work with any PC with an available M.2 slot that supports PCIe 4.0 M.2 solid state drives. In fact, if you get a PS5-compatible SSD, you’re essentially guaranteed to get an SSD that’s going to perform extremely well because of the higher rated speed.