Amazon has just launched a brand new sale of some of the most popular board games available at the moment, including discounts on Azul, Catan, Ticket to Ride, and more.

Azul is undoubtedly the highlight of the sale, especially for those who might have missed the Black Friday discounts last month. It’s down to $15.99 when you clip the list voucher on Amazon, over 50% off its original list price of $39.99. It’s a brilliant board game, and quite rightly earned a spot on IGN’s list of the best family board games, and received a highly recommended 8/10 in our review.

But Azul isn’t the only board game in the sale, no matter how popular it is. Other top discounts include games like Pandemic, where players must work together playing to their characters’ strengths as they plan their strategy of eradicating the diseases before they overwhelm the world with ever-increasing outbreaks. It’s down to $18.39 when clipping the list voucher.

Then there are also absolute classics like Ticket to Ride or Catan, both also down to just $20.39 when clipping the voucher. While Azul is a couple of dollars more than the Black Friday sales, both Ticket to Ride and Catan are actually less, as each was listed for $25 over the past few weeks.

That makes this an excellent opportunity to stock on up on more board games ready for the holiday play sessions. For more board game roundups, check out the best roll-and-write games, and the best deck-building games.

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

Sony has added a handful of beloved PS2 games to its PlayStation Plus Classic Games Catalog such as those from the Sly Cooper and Jak and Daxter franchises today, December 10.

The three games previously announced by Sony are available to players with the most expensive PS Plus Premium subscription. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Sly 2: Band of Thieves, and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves can all be downloaded now.

Sony will announce the full collection of December’s games coming to not just the Classic Games Catalog but the regular Games Catalog tomorrow, December 13.

All three games were well-received when IGN reviewed them upon release in the 2000s. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy earned a 9/10, when IGN called it “really something special” and said “it has that magical feeling that not all games can possess and it’s just flat out a joy to play.”

Sly 2: Band of Thieves also received a 9/10. “The amount of creativity that is packed into the different quests and the various characters is nothing short of amazing and it all combines to form a mega fun adventure,” we said.

Finally, Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves is a touch lower but still well praised at 8/10. “It’s still a fun ride and many of the new additions work out well, especially the pirate sections, but there are enough rocky spots to make the game feel kind of awkward and hold it back from being truly great,” we said.

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

Changes are coming to action role-playing game Path of Exile 2 thick and fast following its huge Early Access launch, with a new hotfix out now.

In a post on the Path of Exile forum, developer Grinding Gear Games published a list of issues it felt needed to be “urgently addressed,” with other less urgent issues to be tackled later on. Chief among them is the feeling that Path of Exile 2 isn’t rewarding enough, something GGG acknowledged is a problem.

“One of the major problems that players have been experiencing is feeling that the game is not rewarding enough,” it said. “This is an area that we have to be very careful when adjusting because it’s very hard to reduce drops if we increase them by too much.”

Specifically, GGG felt that rare monsters were not rewarding enough, especially in the endgame where unique monsters are less common. GGG also saw that the reward players received for the increased difficulty of rares wasn’t lining up.

So, it’s doubling the rarity bonus per rare mod, increasing the quantity bonus per rare mod by 10%, and increasing the chance of rare monsters inherently having more modifiers as players progress through endgame.

“These changes will cause rare monster rewards to naturally scale up as you get to higher levels because the number of mods a monster can have increases throughout the campaign and into endgame,” GGG explained.

“In addition, many other forms of map juicing will indirectly cause rare monsters to have more mods as well, increasing the rewards of these other mechanics too.”

Meanwhile, GGG is changing the game to make sure each map has a minimum number of rares, which will also increase the average number of rare mods and thus increase drops further.

Another major issue GGG has identified is outlier “unlucky” drops. “A single unique boss dropping badly, especially early on can significantly affect your character,” GGG admitted. Changes here include no more than 50% of a unique monster’s drops can be gold, and act bosses and map bosses will now always drop at least one rare.

Elsewhere, GGG is making dodge roll changes after players complained about being trapped in by monsters. “While it is intended that monsters are able to trap and kill you, we felt that the frequency of this was a little too high,” GGG explained.

GGG has posted the first set of patch notes for these changes, with more to come as they’re rolled out. Check out the patch notes for 0.1.0c below (you will need to restart your client to receive the client changes in this patch).

GGG is already nerfing a number of Path of Exile 2 skills it’s deemed to have “unacceptable balance.” And in a fresh tweet, the developer said it plans to nerf Raging Spirits so it can only summon five Raging Spirits per cast at all levels. They will also no longer be able to be spawned from triggered Fire Skills. Players are already calling on GGG to give all a full character respec opportunity as a result.

In an upcoming hotfix, we’ll be making it so that Raging Spirits can only summon 5 Raging Spirits per cast at all levels. They will also no longer be able to be spawned from triggered Fire Skills.

After this hotfix, we will be making adjustments to other Trigger Meta-Gems. In…

— Path of Exile (@pathofexile) December 10, 2024

Here’s which class to pick in PoE 2 Early Access, plus an early Mercenary build guide and Sorceress build guide to help you get started. Beyond that, if you’re wondering how to get more Spirit, how to trade, and how to ascend, we’ve got you covered.

Path of Exile 2 update 0.1.0c Patch Notes

• Campaign bosses killed after the first kill will now drop less currency items, replacing them with other items.
• Increased the drop rate of Regal Orbs.
• Significantly increased the drop rate of Gemcutter’s Prisms.
• A single Gemcutter’s Prism also improves the Quality of a Skill Gem by +5% (previously +1%).
• Lowered the drop rate of Chaos Orbs and distributed it amongst the other more valued Currency Items (Like Regal Orbs, Exalted Orbs).
• Lowered the drop rate of Artificer’s Orbs and distributed it to Lesser Jeweller’s Orbs.
• Disenchanting Rare Items with 6 Modifiers now provides 2 Regal Shards (previously 1). The value displayed will still show as 1 until a later patch.
• Increased the values of all Prefix Modifiers that can roll on Waystones. We’ve also adjusted the chances of getting the more commonly powerful Modifiers such as increases to Rarity and Pack Size.
• Monster Modifiers now grant higher amounts of Item Rarity and Item Quantity. This is most common on Magic and Rare enemies, but also affects Unique Enemies if applied through various Endgame Mechanics like the Deadly Evolution Keystone.
• Increased the chance for Rare Monsters in Maps to have 3 or 4 modifiers.
• Rare Monsters in Map areas are now revealed on the minimap when there are 200 Monsters remaining (previously 50).
• Fixed a bug where some Persistent Buff Skills, such as Raging Spirits and Mana Remnants, were not working for the Infernalist when in Demon Form.
• Fixed a bug where you could sometimes be unable to interact with the Map Device in The Ziggurat Refuge.
• Fixed a bug where Monsters Shattered in a Blood Circle Ultimatum Encounter were not contributing blood.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the instance to permanently stop time (freeze) when trying to revive a Chronomancer.
• Fixed a bug where Rare Monsters could not be found within the Chimeral Wetlands.
• Fixed a bug where “Move only” was name-locking.
• Fixed three instance crashes.
• Fixed a client crash.

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.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Patch 5 is out now across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, and it makes a number of significant balance changes.

There’s a lot to pick through, but the highlight here is a complete rework of Blocking weapons, which were deemed useless by players ever since Space Marine 2’s record-breaking September launch.

Now, by blocking enemy attacks, the player accumulates up to three stacks of melee damage buffs. Attacking while having those stacks of buffs will spend them and will result in massive AoE Damage discharge. Check out the patch notes, below, for more detail.

In a post on publisher Focus Entertainment’s website, game director Dmitriy Grigorenko explained that Fencing weapons will remain good versus limited numbers of enemies, Balanced weapons will be good versus big crowds, and Blocking weapons are now “damage dealer” type weapons.

Accompanying this change is a buff to all melee weapons, with normal melee damage increased across the board. Developer Saber Interactive hopes this change will give combat less reliance on the Parry -> Gun Strike flow.

Here’s a big one: Space Marine 2’s Operations mode now has an Extermination Bonus, which increases the amount of XP players get in PvE missions “if they are zealously exterminating enemy waves.”

The idea here, according to Grigorenko, is to incentivise players to not skip encounters (Space Marine 2 Operations players have a habit of skipping entire chunks of the PvE missions to finish as fast as possible and get on with the grind), without punishing those who want to skip, and make the game less grindy in preparation for new features coming down the line, such as Prestige Ranks.

And I’d like to pick out this one change I am particularly happy about: Shielded Zoanthrope will now attack much less frequently. Praise the Emperor!

Meanwhile, Saber has said it’s happy with firearm balance, but promised minor tweaks in Patch 6. Importantly, a big rework of weapon perks is coming with Patch 7. “Weapons perks are underwhelming compared to class Perks right now, and the issues with some weapons are actually a result of them having a bad Perk tree rather than their basic stats,” Grigorenko explained.

Grigorenko admitted a lot of the Class perks are not as good as we wanted them to be, and some Perk tree choices are really more efficient than others.” Patch 6 will “massively rework” a bunch of lacking Perks to make more builds viable.

There’s also a big problem with the Grenade Launcher that makes it overpowered, so Saber will look to make changes there in a future patch.

It’s a big day for Warhammer 40,000 fans, with Henry Cavill’s Amazon film and TV series based on Games Workshop’s grim dark universe finally proceeding to production, and the release of the Space Marine 2 animation as part of Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series. Check out IGN’s Secret Level review for more.

In September, Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN how the breakout success of Space Marine 2 had “changed everything” for the company. Eagle-eyed fans have spotted the Space Marine chapter now all-but confirmed to get a cosmetic pack after the Dark Angels, too.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Update 5.0 patch notes:

NEW FEATURES

• New Operation: Obelisk

In this new Operation, you’ll be sent to Demerium and your mission is to rotate a replica of the obelisk to disrupt the flow of energy protecting the Aurora device. This operation takes place in parallel to the final events of the campaign.

To reach the console control of the obelisk, you’ll have to make it through a tomb plunged into darkness.

• New Enemy: Tzaangor Enlightened

A new Majoris enemy can spawn in all Operations featuring the Thousand Sons.

Note from our Game Director: “The Tzaangor Enlightened is a disk-flying, melee/ranged-hybrid unit. They are fearsome opponents, especially when met in greater numbers. However, catching them after parry or during a long animation makes them an easy target.

We strongly advise you to use Target Lock to face this enemy!”

• New Season Pass Content: Dark Angels Chapter Pack

Added: Dark Angels Successor Chapters cosmetics

Added: Dark Angels Champion skin (Bulwark)

Added: Dark Angels–themed weapon skins for:

• Auto Bolt Rifle
• Plasma Pistol
• Power Sword
• Bulwark’s Storm Shield

GAMEPLAY & BALANCING TWEAKS

Melee

Note from our Game Director: “The melee system has been our main focus recently. The issue that we saw is that, on higher difficulties, the melee combat relied too heavily on the “Parry -> Gun Strike” flow. This also made Fencing Melee Weapons a universal choice for almost all situations, and we want to give players more options. To try and achieve that, we’ve made the following changes.

First, normal Melee Damage has increased across the board, so there will be more options instead of just Parry -> Gun Strike.

Second, we are drastically changing how Blocking Weapons work. In short, by blocking enemy attacks, the player will accumulate up to 3 stacks of Melee Damage buffs. Attacking while having those stacks of buffs will spend them and will result in massive AoE Damage discharge.

With these changes, Fencing Weapons will still be great versus limited numbers of enemies, Balanced Weapons will be good versus big crowds, and Blocking Weapons will become ‘damage dealer’ type weapons.”

Perfect Block

All Block Weapons have been reworked with a new mechanic: Perfect Block and Adrenaline Surge.

Perfectly timed blocks grant up to 3 Adrenaline Surge stacks. Adrenaline Surge stacks greatly increase Melee Damage and are consumed after the next melee attack.

Attacking with 3 stacks of Adrenaline Surge deals massive AoE Damage, staggers enemies, and restores 1 Armour Segment.

Note that the right wrist glows in yellow after the Parry, which signifies that the Adrenaline Surge is ready to use. When used, a red explosion detonates on the enemy hit, deals AoE Damage, and regenerates an Armour Segment.

Fencing Weapons:

• Perfect Parry AoE stagger radius slightly reduced.

Balanced Weapons:

• Perfect Parry AoE stagger radius greatly increased.
• Master-crafted versions: Damage increased by 10%.
• Artificer versions: Damage increased by 10%.
• Relic versions: Damage increased by 10%.

Blocking Weapons:

• Master-crafted versions: Damage increased by 20%.
• Artificer versions: Damage increased by 20%.
• Relic versions: Damage increased by 20%.

Unarmed/Firearm Melee:

• Stomps can now be chained indefinitely.

Firearms

Note from our Game Director: “We are quite happy with recent updates to firearms. Pretty much all firearms are viable on the hardest difficulties now, and our win rate/pick rate data shows drastic improvements.

Still, there are a few weapons that are better than the others, and minor tweaks will be coming with Patch 6.

Further into the future, with Patch 7, we are planning to focus on reworking Weapons Perks. Weapons Perks are underwhelming compared to Class Perks right now, and the issues with some weapons are actually a result of them having a bad Perk tree rather than their basic stats.

The other big outstanding problem that we have is the Grenade Launcher. There are quite a few bugs/misconfigurations that make it the way it is.

1. Due to a bug, a certain Perk restores its full Ammo when it shouldn’t.
2. Due to a misconfiguration on our side, its Artificer and Relic versions deal 4x more damage than the Master-crafted version, which was not intended.
3. Due to a bug, Perks that increase Auspex Scan damage stack buffs inconsistently. Normally all damage stacks buffs additively, thus providing consistent and predictable results. This bug results in crazy damage numbers with Auspex Scan Perks depending on the order they were activated. This is why bosses get erased by Grenade Launchers with certain builds.

If we approach this directly and fix all 3 bugs, it will make the Grenade Launcher useless and will hurt the entire Tactical class. We will be very careful with how we address this issue. We do want to keep the fun element of destroying entire waves of enemies with the Grenade Launcher. At the same time, no other weapon can match a Grenade Launcher with potentially unlimited Ammo.

Because of these complications, we want to take the time to carefully analyse and make the best decision possible about the Grenade Launcher, so we’re not modifying it in this patch.”

Neo-Volkite Pistol

Note from our Game Director: “We unified enemy sensitivity to Volkite Damage with Bolter Damage. This means a massive damage buff to certain Majoris and Extremis enemies that were more resistant to Volkite Damage than others.”

Volkite Damage sensitivity has been increased from 1 to 1.5 for these enemies:

• Devourer Tyranid Warrior
• Barbed Strangler Tyranid Warrior
• Venom Cannon Tyranid Warrior
• Rubric Marine
• Flamer Rubric Marine
• Zoanthrope

Bolt Carbine:

• Max Ammo of all SMG-type Bolt Carbines increased by 1 magazine.

Extermination Bonus

Note from our Game Director: “This change simply increases the amount of XP players are getting in Operations mode if they are zealously exterminating enemy waves.

This aims to:

1. incentivise players to not skip encounters, without punishing those who want to skip, and

2. makes the game less grindy in preparation for new features coming down the line (e.g., Prestige Ranks).”

Added a new feature that increases the amount of XP players gain based on % of enemies killed during an Operation:

• Rank A: killing more than 85% spawned enemies grants +120% XP pre-patch value.
• Rank B: killing more than 60% spawned enemies grants +110% XP pre-patch value.
• Rank C: killing less than 60% spawned enemies grants +100% XP pre-patch value.

*The rank is common to the party, everyone gets the same.

GAMEPLAY QOL

• Dodge invulnerability logic is now client sided, meaning that Dodges will be responsive and more accurate with higher ping.
• Players are now invulnerable to new instances of damage while in Knockback animation.
• Added 10 frames of invulnerability at the start of Jump Pack launch animation (Campaign and Operations only).
• Dodge and Parry sound notification clarity has been greatly improved.
• Heavy’s Barrier can be activated in more player states (e.g., during stagger animation).
• Player controls are slightly more responsive after using Vanguard’s Grapnel Launcher.
• Added spawn protection in PvP.
• Added Neo-Volkite Pistol in PvP.

AI

• Zoanthrope:
  • Shielded Zoanthrope will now attack much less frequently.
• Enemy Spawn Director:
  • You will no longer fight Extremis-level enemies on your first encounter right after the start of a Mission.
  • Lots of minor animation fixes for various enemies.

CUSTOMISATION

• Added: Lenses colour customisation.
• Fixed shading of Balthasar Gold and Ushabti Bone colours.
• Fixed a number of small bugs with certain armour pieces not applying colours correctly.

OPERATIONS

Fall of Atreus:

• Made adjustments to scripting to make this level shorter and more in line with the duration of other levels:
  • The second sequence with the Dreadnought (Repel the Assault) is randomised now and may not happen.
  • The fusion battery needs to be charged only once in the final sequence.
• Large amounts of small fixes in level geometry collision and Terminus enemies getting stuck in some areas.

PERKS

Note from our Game Director: “In this patch, we are only fixing bugs with existing Perks, but trust me, we are seeing the issues with them. A lot of the Class Perks are not as good as we wanted them to be, and some Perk tree choices are really more efficient than others. With Patch 6, we are planning to massively rework a bunch of lacking Perks to make more builds viable.”

GENERAL FIXES

• Getting kicked out of a session will still grant kicked player XP rewards based on checkpoint completion.
• Exiting the Turret Charging Wheel in the “Termination” Operation is now quicker.
• Improved a few enemies counting for Purge Them All Achievement.
• Fixed a bug where Combat Knife charged attacks would occasionally Heavy Hit every time without charging.
• Fixed a bug where Heavy’s Primary Weapon was not shooting after joining in progress.
• Fixed a bug where party leader could get stuck on a loading screen in rare cases.
• Fixed Hierophant’s damage sensitivity to certain weapons (it can still be damaged by normal weapons, but the damage is reduced).
• Fixed a bug where Heldrake was not taking any damage from shots in rare cases.
• Fixed a bug where Heldrake could be knocked off its pedestal by shots from an under-barrel Grenade Launcher.
• Fixed a bug where Imurah would not take any damage from shots in the final mission in rare cases.
• Fixed a rare bug where players were shown a long black screen instead of death screen in PvP.
• Fixed a bug where players could not see each other’s customisation in rare cases.
• Fixed a bug where the Neo-Volkite Pistol would deal damage further than its actual visual FX.
• Fixed a bug where enemies were able to pierce Block stance with double attack.
• Fixed a bug with Bulwark’s Armour of Contempt Perk not triggering correctly and dealing friendly fire.
• Fixed an issue where the Neo-Volkite Pistol would sometimes trigger a chain of explosions and cause performance issues.
• Fixed a rare bug with Vanguard’s Zone of Impact Perk not triggering correctly.
• Fixed Perks that grant player immunity to Heavy Hits and Knockback during charging melee attacks not working with charged attacks unlocked via Weapons Perks.
• Combat Knife charged attack buffs from other Perks (e.g., Sniper’s Shadow Stab) are now correctly applied on both damage instances.
• Large number of minor fixes in Perks, how they stack, and how they trigger in rare cases.
• Minor UI fixes and improvements.
• Localisation fixes.

TECH

Added: PS5 PRO Enhancements:

Quality mode

Performance Mode

Added: FSR 3 / DLSS 3: Support of “Frame Generation” component for DLSS and FSR. For more details about FSR and DLSS, check our FAQ.

• Crash fixes and general stability improvements.
• General connectivity improvements.
• Slightly improved performance.
• Slightly improved texture streaming speed.
• Improved Anti-Cheat.

MOD SUPPORT Please note that starting from 5.0 update, mods will no longer be supported in public lobbies.

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.