Month: November 2019

After whipping the cloak off its eight-player autobattler mode last week at BlizzCon, Hearthstone has now made Battlegrounds available to select fans for a week of early access.

The mode is currently only available to those who attended BlizzCon in California, those who nabbed a BlizzCon virtual ticket, or players who own a Descent of Dragons pre-purchase bundle. Battlegrounds will eventually open up to all players as an open beta on Tuesday November 12, when the early access period finishes.

Battlegrounds takes place on an “ever evolving board” where players are pitted against randomly selected opponents in turn-based combat. Players choose from 24 heroes, then recruit minions in Bob’s Tavern that can be strategically deployed across the board between rounds until one challenger is left standing.

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With a couple of months to go before The Witcher drops on Netflix, the show’s visual effects supervisor has promised it will be more frightening than fantastical.

Julian Parry told SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar), “I definitely think it leans more towards horror. We’re definitely taking the fantasy out. I can honestly say we’re not fantastical. I mean, it’s fantastical but in a grounded horror sense.”

He used the example of Striga monsters – women who are cursed to turn into beasts – as the embodiment of “gnarly-looking” body horror rather than fantasy escapism. The new trailer also includes its fair share of creepy monsters, like what appears to be a necrophage of some kind (perhaps a ghoul or foglet).

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Curved monitors have come a long way. Here’s our pick for the best of the best.

Don’t forget to grab this new Destiny 2: Shadowkeep exotic.

The PS4 DualShock is great, but sometimes you just want something different. Here are our top picks for the best third-party PlayStation 4 controllers.

Welcome to IGN’s Black Friday 2019 central deals hub, your source for all the best deals in the UK. 

Black Friday is arguably the biggest shopping event in the UK, and consistently delivers shopping mayhem, dramatic headlines, and an onslaught of deals. This is likely to continue in 2019, and we’re going to be covering it all the way.

For a more comprehensive guide to the best Black Friday deals, check out Blackfriday.co.uk.

These are the kind of products we’re expecting deals on over the coming month

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Red Dead Redemption 2‘s release on PC did not go exactly to plan, with players reporting severe crashing problems that in some cases caused the launcher to fail to open.

Rockstar Games has now released an update that apparently fixes a handful of issues related to crashes and other problems. The November 5 update fixes problems related to the Rockstar Games Launcher and Red Dead Redemption 2 itself. There were crashing problems with Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Epic Games Store, too, and these have also been addressed.

You can see a rundown of the November 5 patch notes for Red Dead Redemption 2’s PC version below, as posted on the Rockstar Games support site.

Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Patch Notes [November 5]

• Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error “The Rockstar Games Launcher failed to initialize” on startup
• Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher preload decryption getting stuck and not completing
• Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error “The Rockstar Games Launcher exited unexpectedly” when launching Red Dead Redemption 2
• Fixed an issue that resulted in crashes when starting the Rockstar Games Launcher from the Epic Games Launcher
• Fixed an issue that resulted in the Rockstar Games Launcher returning the error “Unable to launch game, please verify your game data” when launching Red Dead Redemption 2 from the Epic Games Launcher

Crashing problems aren’t the only issues affecting Red Dead Redemption 2’s PC version at launch. People on Reddit have reported problems related to audio and FPS drops.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is available for PC now on Rockstar’s own launcher, as well as the Epic Games Store and other outlets. It won’t release on Steam until December, however.

The new 1.25 update for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 brings a raft of improvements and tweaks to the game, one of which is bound to make fans of a particular map very happy. In a post on Reddit, Treyarch has outlined the big changes and released their full patch notes for this update.

Nuketown is now a permanent fixture of the Featured Playlist tab, so you can jump into a playlist dedicated to the map–a recreated small chunk of suburbia on a nuclear testing facility grounds–at any time. Nuketown first appeared in the original Black Ops back in 2010, and has been reimagined for each mainline Black Ops game that has followed.

Going forward, certain featured playlists will also grant you double XP, with a new one being selected each Tuesday. 2XP Stockpile, 2XP Capture the Flag, and 2XP Prop Hunt weeks have been promised.

Treyarch has increased the maximum damage and speed on the Echohawk Dual Bore assault rifle, while the AN-94 has also received a damage boost to make it a more viable weapon. The Reaper specialist class has also been nerfed slightly, with the Scythe’s duration being reduced from 40 seconds to 30 and its ammo being cut down from 150 rounds to 100.

In other patch notes, Blackout’s matchmaking is being overhauled with LTM Moshputs being introduced, giving players four limited-time modes each week to make sure that players are experiencing some sense of variety in their game. Changes are coming to Zombies too–if you’re playing on PS4, the new Zombies Gauntlet “An Ice Day In Hell” is up now, while an outro cutscene error bug that had affected some players has been addressed.

This patch suggests that Treyarch will continue to support their latest entry in the series, and the community of players who have stuck with it, in the wake of the release of Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. This makes sense, as the two games are quite different–Black Ops 4 does not feature a campaign and instead released with Blackout, Call of Duty’s first battle royale mode–and they’re both developed by two different teams. Black Ops 4 scored an 8/10 in our review last year.