Yes, Kingdom Hearts 3 has a wildly convoluted story, just like other games in the series. But the Disney and Pixar worlds are wonderful, the characters ooze charm, and the combat is a fast-paced spectacle. Despite releasing earlier this year, Kingdom Hearts 3 will be only $15 at Target on Black Friday weekend (Nov. 28-30).
With the Shadowkeep expansion to Destiny 2, developer Bungie made it possible to reach all-new heights in terms of players’ overall Power level–the measure of a Guardian’s strength based on their equipment. The addition of the Seasonal Artifact in the current season allows you to keep climbing beyond the gear Power cap of 960. Now, one player has reached another Power milestone, one that has some serious implications for Destiny 2’s ongoing story.
This week, streamer Bagel4k pushed his Power level up to 999 thanks to the Seasonal Artifact, which allows you to keep gaining in Power endlessly by accruing experience points from completing activities and turning in bounties. That’s impressive from a sheer gameplay standpoint–it takes 1.5 million experience points to gain one point of Power from the artifact, and the push to get your gear up from 950 to 960 is so tough, Bungie is patching the game later this week to make that final climb a little easier. (For context, it takes 100,000 points to unlock each new level of Bungie’s new Season system.) But 999 Power is also very significant to the story of the Forsaken expansion’s endgame area, the Dreaming City.
For context, the Dreaming City is currently cursed to continually repeat a three-week timeloop, thanks to the machinations of a powerful Hive leader called Savathun. Despite completing the Last Wish raid in the Dreaming City and its high-level dungeon, Shattered Throne, Guardians so far have been unable to break the curse. But there was some suggestion that hitting 999 Power would be the secret to ending the Dreaming City’s torment. According to one of Destiny 2’s lore books, Truth To Power, reaching 999 Power and completing Shattered Throne would allow players to finally kill Savathun’s daughter, Dul Incaru, and end the curse once and for all.
As Bagel4k discovered, however, that’s apparently not the case–at least, not yet. Despite Bagel4k’s efforts, the curse endures. Bungie acknowledged the situation in a blog post titled “On the Power Climb,” which not only pays some tribute to Bagel4k, it functions as a story point as well.
The blog post mixes Bungie’s voice in acknowledging Bagel4k with some secret messages from Savathun herself. Though there isn’t much in the way of details, the post suggests that perhaps Guardians’ efforts to break the curse are actually part of Savathun’s whole overall plan. That’s sort of Savathun’s whole deal–she embodies an ideal of cunning. And the lore suggests that everything players have done in the Dreaming City up to now hasn’t actually helped to stop Savathun, but were actually actions manipulated to help her achieve her goals of gaining ultimate power. All the enemies we’ve been killing over and over in the Dreaming City have been feeding Savathun, and that’s what the timeloop curse is all about.
Bungie has said that the four seasons that make up the third year of Destiny 2’s content will tell an ongoing story that started with Shadowkeep, but most of the threads from Year Two–concerning the Dreaming City, the entities known as the Nine, the enigmatic new character called the Drifter, and more–are still hanging. Shadowkeep advanced things a bit in a different direction concerning the Hive, but it all goes back to Savathun. We can guess from Bagel4k’s exploits that Bungie isn’t quite ready for the story of the Dreaming City to end, nor to tell us what it all means, just yet.
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The third episode of Vader Immortal, the Oculus Quest VR experience, is going to recreate the experience of facing off against Darth Vader in lightsaber combat. Previous episodes have brought you face to face with the Sith Lord, but now for the first time in the series you’ll be able to battle against him with your own weapon.
A new post on the official Star Wars website digs into the final chapter of Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series. The post discusses how the game–which was written by David S. Goyer (Terminator: Dark Fate, The Dark Knight, Blade II) and is considered part of the Star Wars canon–will wrap up.
The final chapter, which will release on November 21, follows on from the first two episodes, which saw the playable character (a Force-sensitive smuggler) get captured by Vader and learn how to wield their Force powers. This time players will be trying to prevent Vader from activating a powerful artifact that will destroy life on Mustafar; to do so, you’ll have to break into Vader’s castle and fight him.
Because of your new Force powers, you’ll be able to pull objects towards yourself, including Stormtrooper blasters. You’ll also be able to incite battles between Vader’s drone army and an Imperial battalion. And then, at the game’s conclusion, you’ll face off against Vader; but because the events here are canon, don’t expect him to die. You’ve previously been able to fight Darth Vader in both the first and second Star Wars: The Force Unleashed games, but those are now non-canon–this one counts.
It’s a big end-of-year for Star Wars, with The Rise of Skywalker finishing the new trilogy on December 20 and Star Wars Battlefront II releasing a major update and new content next month.
South Park’s 23rd season may not be over, but the era of Tegridy Farms may well be finished in “Season Finale.” This episode ties together several story threads as the town gets fed up with Tegridy and throws Randy in jail.
We’ll have our review of “Season Finale” up a bit later tonight. Until then, let us know what you thought of the new episode in the comments below.
Deep Down was first announced in 2013 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, but we haven’t seen or heard much from it since. The last news we heard was all the way back in 2015, when producer Yoshinori Ono said that the game would look “completely different” from the initial trailer the next time we saw it, and that the game was aiming for a very realistic experience.
But the game has not been seen since, beyond a trademark renewal in 2017 that got fans’ hopes up. Now, Ono has spoken about the game for the first time in years, and it sounds like the game is not being worked on, but could theoretically still happen.
In an interview with Eurogamer that primarily focuses on Street Fighter V (which he is also executive producer on), Ono briefly discussed the long-dormant dragon hunting game, admitting that he still has some hope that the game will be completed one day.
“The original team is clearly no longer together at this point, but people might have noticed that we’ve kept the trademark registered, and it’s not been completely given up on,” he told Eurogamer. “Every year we examine titles we’re doing in future, and we bring up projects to approve and move forward. There’s not much I can say about it, but if you’ve noticed we’ve kept the trademark it means we haven’t given up on the title completely.”
When asked about the TGS trailer from 2014, Ono said that the team had “the concept developed a bit further than that.”
This isn’t confirmation that Deep Down will still happen, but it suggests that the game’s eventual release remains a possibility. It certainly wouldn’t be the first major PlayStation title to take its time releasing: The Last Guardian was first revealed seven years before its eventual release, while Until Dawn was announced as a PlayStation 3 title five years before its eventual PS4 release. Then there’s Shenmue III, which will release on November 19, a full 18 years after Shenmue II.
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“City of Bane” is a maddening storyline in more ways than one, but the fact the titular villain has been all but completely MIA is definitely up there. For an arc that serves as the dramatic culmination of the entire series to date, “City of Bane” has been far too inconsistent in its pacing, its focus and its general quality. Finally, with Batman #82, readers are treated to the Bane/Batman showdown they’ve been waiting months to see. But with such a haphazard journey leading into this issue, it’s no surprise the payoff isn’t quite there.
This isn’t the first time Bane and Batman have battled one another in this series, but only in hindsight do we realize that none of those previous fights were to be taken at face value. In those previous battles, one or the other was playing an angle, essentially sacrificing a battle for the sake of the larger war. Only now do the masks come off (literally and figuratively) and the two men set about proving once and for all who is truly worthy of ruling Gotham. And because artist Mikel Janin is drawing this issue, that calls for a shirtless slug-fest.
While we still don’t have a date for the fourth season of Stranger Things, we now know the first episode will be titled “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club.”
Stranger Things on Instagram revealed the title via an image of the script for the first episode.
Alongside the title “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club,” the post also said “We’re starting a club. Wanna join? #StrangerThings4 #StrangerThingsDay”
According to Wikipedia, Hellfire Club was “a name for several exclusive clubs for high society rakes established in Britain and Ireland in the 18th century… Such clubs were rumored to be the meeting places of ‘persons of quality’ who wished to take part in socially perceived immoral acts, and the members were often involved in politics.”
Since it launched back in 2016, Overwatch has been incrementally expanding its universe, adding new characters and locations over the years, expanding the lore with each update. Blizzard refers to these past events as the Overwatch Archives.
Periodically, Blizzard drops new cinematics and comics, focusing on one (or a few) characters, adding context to who they are and what they’re fighting for in Blizzard’s unique world of heroes and villains. That said, while Overwatch 2 will feature story missions to tie things together, Blizzard has never outright given players a proper timeline of events. Sure, they might have released a short “previously on” trailer when OW2 was announced at BlizzCon 2019, but that glossed over a lot. To give you the fullest picture possible, here’s a look at the story of Overwatch (so far) prior to the events of the upcoming Overwatch 2.
The director of DC’s incredibly popular Joker movie has ended the debate about whether a certain character in the film lived or died. READ ON BELOW FOR THE SPOILER-Y DETAILS.
A significant plot point in Joker is the relationship that Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) has with his neighbor, Sophie (Zazie Beetz). Arthur and Sophie fall fast in love, or so the movie would you have think. In reality, Arthur’s entire relationship with Sophie was in his mind.
This comes to a head when, in the second half of the movie, Arthur visits Sophie in her apartment and she is alarmed, given they had no relationship in reality.
The movie then shows Arthur walking down the hallway with no resolution–and this is the last time we see Sophie. Some viewers wondered if Arthur killed Sophie. He did not, Phillips–who also wrote Joker–confirmed to IndieWire.
“He doesn’t kill her, definitively,” Phillips said. “As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘How crazy is he?'”
“Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong,” he added. “She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”
Phillips did not always plan to be ambiguous about what happened to Sophie. He revealed that an earlier draft of the movie showed Sophie– alive and well in her apartment–watching the interview that Arthur gave to Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), which would have confirmed she was still alive.
The fate of Sophie was already confirmed by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but this is seemingly the first time that Phillips himself is addressing it.
Joker has made almost $940 million at the box office, which makes it a tremendous success given it was produced on a $70 million budget. It is the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history.
Joker is expected to enter a new stratosphere of success soon, as box office projections estimate it will hit $1 billion over the coming weekends. If it can cross $1 billion, it would become just the fourth DC movie ever to reach that number, joining The Dark Knight ($1.004 billion), The Dark Knight Rises ($1.081 billion), and Aquaman ($1.148 billion).