Month: December 2020

Fortnite’s new mode, The Spy Within, recreates Among Us in the third-person shooter. It’s now available in-game as a special limited-time mode. A Twitch stream featuring Sarah Silverman will showcase the mode and Fortnite’s Houseparty video chat system today.

The mode is featured in a playlist with several different takes on the murder mystery formula, each made by a different Fortnite creator. The playlist will feature maps from DolphinDom, KKSlider, Bunni_, Wert, Blanky, jstKamui, MackJack, Ritual and Snownymous.

The mode has 10 players broken up into two teams: eight agents and two spies. The agents must try and complete their objectives before getting killed by the spies. The spies need to eliminate agents while remaining undetected. Sound familiar?

A handful of Twitch streamers, including big names like Ninja, Dr Lupo, Timthetatman, and Pokimane, will be streaming the mode using Fortnite’s new Houseparty video call feature. They’ll be joined by Sarah Silverman, David Dobrik, and few other streamers. The stream is live on Twitch at the time of this writing.

The stream is meant to showcase the new mode and Fortnite’s Houseparty video call system that lets players across multiple platforms connect for video chat. The system is currently available on PC, PS5, and PS4. Players who want to use it will also need an iOS or Android phone with the Houseparty app installed.

Fortnite also received a big update today that brought enhancements to next-gen consoles and a new performance mode for lower-end computers.

For most of Cyberpunk 2077, you’ll have free rein to take on activities in Night City in any order you please. Much of the main story is divided into parallel investigations as V tries to find people who might know about the biochip in their head, and at any point, you can wander off and work your way through a variety of side missions. At some point, though, you’ll hit the end of the road. From here, the main story continues on to its conclusion, leaving you with no opportunities to do any more side content until you’ve reached the end.

Cyberpunk 2077 politely marks this point in the story for you, flashing a big “Point of No Return” message on your screen so you don’t bumble into the game’s finale before you’re ready. But at the same time, Night City is absolutely overwhelmingly flush with things to do, from side jobs to Fixer gigs to question marks and NCPD scanner hustles. And if you’re not interested in completing everything, or if you find yourself impatient to know how it all ends, you might be asking how much of all that side material you absolutely need to do.

The good news is that there’s a lot of side quests you can ignore without consequence. The bad news is that a few of them can be pretty important to how the game shakes out, even having an effect on the ending. Here’s a complete rundown of everything you should scratch off your list before you pass the Point of No Return in Cyberpunk 2077 so you can be in the best possible story shape for the endgame. It’s worth noting, though, that you can continue to level up your character and earn some extremely powerful weapons through additional side quests, and pursuing that stuff might not be a bad idea. Although we tried to limit them, there are SPOILERS beyond this point!

We’ve got a whole lot more Cyberpunk 2077 coverage to help you through the game as well–be sure to read our Cyberpunk 2077 review, and check out our essential tips, character attributes and build guide, romance guide, life path guide, and where to find Iconic weapons and the best cyberware.

Side Quests You Should Finish Before The Point Of No Return

Panam’s Questline

Riders On The Storm, With A Little Help From My Friends, Queen of the Highway

Once you complete Ghost Town and Life During Wartime in the main story quest, you’ll eventually get a call from Panam asking for additional help from you. You’ll need to rescue a Nomad from a Raffen Scavenger camp for the first mission, then help Panam with a heist. Make sure you side with Panam in any arguments about what the right course of action is, or you can end the questline. If you stay on Panam’s side, you can eventually unlock the opportunity to start a romance with her–although she’s only attracted characters with the traditionally masculine body and voice types.

If you want to complete Panam’s romance quest, be sure to flirt with her during Riders on the Storm by recommending she remove her shoes and don’t tip off Saul to her plan in With A Little Help From My Friends. You should also avoid suggesting that you’re helping Panam for monetary reasons.

You’ll get your chance to consummate the relationship in Queen of the Highway, while also opening up a safe house in the Aldecaldo camp for your use. Completing Panam’s relationship quest (even if you don’t have a romance with her) is essential, however, thanks to the effects it can have on the endgame depending on your choices.

Judy’s Questline

Both Sides Now, Ex-Factor, Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution

You’ll have the opportunity to grow your relationship with Judy after you complete the main quest Automatic Love. The three quests concern Judy’s plan to free Clouds from the influence of its bosses and the Tyger Claws gang. To advance Judy’s quest, make sure you volunteer to help her and support her in her ideas.

Pisces, Pyramid Song

After you make a plan to liberate Clouds, you’ll head up to a Tyger Claws penthouse to try to convince them to leave the business alone. How you make your way through the missions is up to you, but the choices you make at the end affect where your relationship goes with Judy, who is a possible romance partner. Judy is only attracted to characters with the traditionally feminine body and voice options, so keep that in mind. You’ll also either need to buck Maiko’s plan and return control of Clouds to the dolls, or assist Maiko and resist her payment at the end of the mission.

Pyramid Song gives you your chance to romance Judy, while also unlocking her apartment as a safe house for your use from there on out.

River’s Questline

I Fought The Law

To kick off River’s series of character quests, you’ll need to complete Ghost Town and Life During Wartime and also raise your Street Cred, specifically in Heywood, City Center, or Westbrook. You’ll soon get a call from Elizabeth Peralez, which will give you the opportunity to take on the side job I Fought The Law. Taking on the quest will put you in contact with River, another major side character and possible romantic partner.

The Hunt

After completing I Fought The Law, you’ll eventually receive another call from River asking for your help on another job. You’ll need to help him with his investigation into an accused kidnapper known as Peter Pan. The goal of the mission is to track down Randy, River’s nephew, which takes you on a multi-step quest to gather information. The primary piece of info you’re trying to track down is Peter Pan’s hideout. You can do this just by putting together clues (you’ll eventually sift through several braindances) or by hacking Randy’s computer, if your Intelligence attribute is high enough. If you find the right clues, River will take you to the correct farm straight away; if not, you’ll have to guess. Picking the wrong farm, however, can lock you out of River’s romance option–if you have to guess, the correct farm is Edgewood.

Following The River

The final mission in River’s quest gives you a chance to solidify the romance, but he’ll only be attracted to you if you picked the feminine body type’ve got a female body type and only if you managed to save Randy’s life. The last mission is just story and conversations, but allows you to complete River’s storyline.

Johnny’s Questline

Chippin’ In

You’ll unlock Chippin’ In once you’ve completed four major branches of main story missions: Automatic Love (with Judy), Life During Wartime (with Panam), Transmission (with the Voodoo Boys), and Search and Destroy (with Takemura). The conversations with Johnny that take place after those missions compose Tapeworm, a side quest that opens a number of other missions related to Johnny’s life.

Chippin’ In is the beginning of Johnny’s questline, so you’ll want to knock that one out for sure. Head to the Afterlife to kick it off and allow Johnny to take control while you’re there. Completing the quest earns you Malorian Arms, Johnny’s extremely powerful power pistol, and can also get you his Porsche if you spare Grayson’s life toward the end of the mission.

To unlock the rest of the missions, be sure to choose friendly dialogue options with Johnny during the quest’s wrap-up. The rest of the quests in this chain depend on becoming friends with Johnny.

Blistering Love

Following Chippin’ In, if you’ve treated Johnny well, he’ll ask you for another favor: help in rekindling his relationship with Rogue from way back in the 2020s. Complete that mission and you’ll unlock more opportunities for Johnny to reconnect with his past.

You’ll absolutely want to complete this quest, as it can have an effect on the endgame depending on the choices you make.

Holdin’ On, Second Conflict, A Like Supreme

Johnny’s next few missions will reconnect you with his former bandmates. They’re pretty straightforward, but further develop your relationship with Johnny. You’ll also unlock another story questline specifically related to Kerry that’s worth taking to its completion as well.

Kerry’s Questline

Rebel! Rebel!, I Don’t Wanna Hear It, Off The Leash, Boat Drinks

As with the other side character quests, Kerry’s covers several missions and, if you meet the right requirements, can end in a romance (you’ll need to be a masculine V to be Kerry’s type). None of the missions is particularly difficult or involves much action–they’re primarily about conversations. In Boat Drinks, make sure to kiss Kerry when the opportunity arises, and then tell him to “Pencil me in” when you talk to Kerry on the beach. That’ll solidify the relationship.

This is another quest that can has the potential to have major effects on the endgame depending on your choices, and thus is another essential addition.

Fool On The Hill

This is one of the more grind-intensive quests to complete, but offers you a bit of interesting insight into the overall story. The quest requires you to seek out 20 pieces of graffiti scattered throughout the city, each representing a tarot card. Afterward, you can speak with Misty, who’s store is out front of Vik the ripper doc’s establishment, for more information about what the tarot might actually mean. The last two cards can be found during the endgame missions.

Completing Fool On The Hill isn’t essential, necessarily, but it does expand on the themes of the main quest to some degree. If you’re already out completing other quests, knocking out this one will add a bit to the overall experience.

Other Side Quests We Recommend

While some side quests should absolutely be on your shortlist to knock out before you hit the endgame, there are others that aren’t essential, but are pretty darn fun. These include quests that have some of the better stories in Cyberpunk 2077, offer some solid rewards, or are just funny and interesting additions to the world. These quests won’t have an effect on your ending or do much to change the overall story of the game, but they are worth spending a little time on, even if you’re streamlining your path through Night City.

Heroes

This side quest wraps up some of the threads left hanging in Act 1 of the main story. After the events of the heist, tell Delamain to return to Jackie’s family’s home. You’ll later receive a call from his mother, Mama Welles, to start the quest. (Telling Delamain to go elsewhere will still get you a quest called Heroes, but it’ll be much less involved.)

Heroes isn’t an essential quest–there are no major rewards (other than a nice motorcycle) and it won’t affect your ending. It will, however, close off the early portion of the story in a satisfying way and expand your relationship with key characters from Act 1 and early Act 2, who will be a part of the endgame missions later on.

Tune Up, Epistrophy

At the start of Act 2, if you head down into the parking garage of V’s apartment building, a rogue Delamain cab will slam into V’s car, totalling it. Wait a while and you’ll receive a call from Delamain asking you to come to the taxi company’s garage for restitution (your car eventually gets fixed automatically), which will lead Delamain to enlist you to help find more rogue cabs scattered throughout the city.

That gives you a series of quests under the Epistrophy title, all of which are fun and varied. They’ll take you all over Night City, so they’re worth doing relatively early, they pay pretty well, and they’re all pretty quick. The Delamain quest represents some of the funniest material in Cyberpunk 2077 (as well as a fun cameo appearance by a famous, villainous computer program), so if you want a little artificial intelligence levity, this is a good diversion from the heavier story material.

Happy Together

This mission gives you a good sense of what Night City is like for regular people living there. You’ll find the mission one floor down from V’s apartment, where NCPD officers are found knocking on the door of one of V’s neighbors. After trying to knock on the door yourself, head out into the city and return a few hours later. When you do, Barry will answer the door and you can converse with him.

Depending on how you treat Barry, how far into his story you go, and how much interest you show, this quest can shake out with some very different endings. Time is a factor once you start Happy Together, though, so don’t let this one linger. Seriously.

Send In The Clowns

You get a chance to meet one of Night City’s weirdest people, Ozob Bozo, in this side mission. You’ll need to complete the story mission Transmission in order to access it. There’s not a ton to it, but you do get a chance to hang out with and converse with Ozob for a bit. Ozob is a nod to a character created by Brazilian blog Jovem Nerd, and he’s a fascinating character as well as a nod to the CyberpunkRPG community. Later, you can fight (and maybe kill) him during one of the Beat Up The Brat missions.

Sinnerman, They Won’t Go When I Go

Among the sadder and stranger of Cyberpunk 2077’s missions is Sinnerman, and it’s best you just experience it on your own without any meddling from us. It does a great job of exploring the intersection of faith and technology in the Cyberpunk world, while adding in shades of criminal justice, vengeance, sacrifice, and self-aggrandizement. The mission is followed by a second one, They Won’t Go When I Go, which you can access so long as you don’t pick any dialogue options in which V opts out of the situation. Just wait a bit to get the call for the second mission not long after the first one ends.

Dream On

Once you complete I Fought The Law with River, you can get access to Dream On, a deeper look at the story of what’s going on with Night City mayoral candidate Jefferson Peralez and his wife, Elizabeth. This one has some unexpected twists and turns, while pushing you to use your investigative instincts to uncover a mystery. Unfortunately, your choices here don’t necessarily have lasting consequences, but Dream On does put you to some interesting questions about right, wrong, and what you choose to share with someone who trusts you.

After a long, slow rollout, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is fully available on PC–but it’s not done with major updates yet. Halo 1-4, plus 3 ODST and Halo Reach, will receive more features in 2021, developer 343 Industries has promised, with many big features currently in active development.

As part of the MCC December 2020 Update, 343 Industries’ “farn” has outlined some of the improvements coming to the six Master Chief Collection titles coming next year, including various quality-of-life changes and new options.

Here’s everything that the team is actively working on right now, with most of these updates planned for early 2021.

Master Chief Collection updates in active development

• View Model Adjustment for all games: On track for early 2021
• Steam Account Linking: On track for early 2021
• In Game FPS Cap/Adjustments: More options coming in 2021
• PC File Share: On track for early 2021
• Additional Video Settings/Options: More options coming in 2021
• Custom Game Browser: On track for early 2021
• Double Key Binds for all games: On track for early 2021
• Per Game Audio Options: This should be in flights in early 2021
• Bringing PC Features to Console (Like FOV Sliders): We will communicate more on this next year, no hard timeline for when these features could be making their way to console

Some of the armor players can earn in Season 5 of the game has also been shown off, and you can check it out below.

There’s still loose plans to implement “idle system improvements” and split-screen mode for PC, but right now these are in backlog, and not in active development.

Alongside the Halo 4 release on PC, the games in The Master Chief Collection also received an upgrade on Xbox Series X/S.

There are a lot of perks you can buy for your character in Cyberpunk 2077, allowing you to customize your version of V to fit your play style and the ways you want to approach the game. There’s one perk, however, that you should absolutely avoid–at least in the early part of the game when you’re trying to earn money. That perk is called “Scrapper,” and it will rob you.

You’ll find the Scrapper perk under the Technical Ability attribute, on the Crafting skill tree. At first, it sounds useful enough. Scrapper allows you to automatically break down junk items into crafting components. Cyberpunk 2077 is littered with things that are considered “junk,” like old vinyl records, ashtrays, packs of cards, lighters, and dildos. (It’s worth noting that a recent update seems to have drastically reduced the number of dildos appearing in the game. For a while, though, there were so. many. dildos.)

Most of the junk items you find in Night City really are junk, and if you check them out in your Backpack, you’ll find that they’re pretty worthless. Most junk items will net you about 3 Eurodollars (or “eddies” in Night City parlance), so they’re basically not worth the effort you’d expend in picking them up and lugging them to a vendor to unload them. Along that line, you might think Scrapper sounds great, since you can instantly break down junk you don’t actually want, and that way it’s not littering your backpack, weighing down your character (in a literal sense, because if you become over-encumbered by the stuff you’re carrying, you won’t be able to move quickly).

You’d be wrong, though, because Scrapper will steal money for you, especially during a time when earning money is very important.

Although it’s rare, you’ll occasionally find junk items worth a lot more than 3 eddies. Some pieces of jewelry that you can loot off enemies or find scattered in buildings are classified as junk, but they’re extremely valuable, going for 750 eddies if you can sell them. Since Cyberpunk calls those items junk, they get automatically disassembled same as an ashtray or a dildo, and all those eddies vanish for a handful of super-cheap crafting materials. Especially in Act 1 and the first half of Act 2, eddies are pretty important–you’ll need to save up quite a bit, as there’s a story mission that requires you to pay a hefty sum, more than 20,000 eddies, to advance it.

Most cyberware enhancements are also pretty expensive, and you’ll want the eddies for those. Cyberware changes how Cyberpunk 2077 plays pretty significantly–for instance, buying the ability to double jump opens up a huge number of otherwise-unreachable options throughout Night City.

Meanwhile, the Scrapper perk is next to useless. You can safely ignore crafting much of the time in Cyberpunk, unless you really want to lean into it. Even if you do, however, the crafting materials you get from junk aren’t really that useful. So this is a perk that mostly does more harm than good, but you wouldn’t know that until after you’ve unlocked it.

So save your perk points and get something better than Scrapper. It might sound like it’ll save you some time, but it’ll actually rob you of an easy way to earn some quick cash. The costs of this perk far outweigh the benefits.

We’ve got a whole lot more Cyberpunk 2077 coverage to help you through the game as well–be sure to read our Cyberpunk 2077 review, and check out our essential tips, character attributes and build guide, romance guide, life path guide, and our rundowns of where to find iconic weapons and the game’s best cyberware.

Hitman 3, the conclusion to the current Hitman trilogy, releases on January 20, and now the first cinematic has been revealed. If you didn’t finish the first two games, you might want to do so before watching it, though.

The trailer shows Agent 47 teaming up with Lucas Grey, the Shadow Client, as they go after Providence together. The organization has been pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes across the entire trilogy, and while Grey was an enemy for much of the first two games, things changed at the end of Hitman 2.

You can watch the full cinematic above, and get excited for Hitman 3’s release early next year. The trailer also gives us a brief glimpse of the outside of the Dubai map building, which will be the first mission.

Hitman 3 also recently received a new gameplay trailer, as well as some details about the PS VR options, which are exclusive to the PS4 version (meaning that you should buy it instead of the PS5 version, since you can get a free upgrade anyway–as long as you buy it digitally).

Hitman 3 is also coming to Nintendo Switch in the US via cloud gaming.