Month: March 2021

Scrubs’ Donald Faison has been cast as Dr. Utonium in the live-action reboot of The Powerpuff Girls for The CW, which is now simply called Powerpuff.

As reported by THR, Faison joins the cast that is led by Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, and Yana Perrault as Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, respectively.

This new Professor Drake Utonium is described as “the quirky, debonair and narcissistic scientific genius who is immensely proud of the three extraordinary girls he created in his lab. Staring down a midlife crisis, he is determined to repair his relationships with his now-adult daughters.”

The live-action reboot of Cartoon Network’s The Powerpuff Girls is set years after the events of the original and follows these three girls who are now “disillusioned twenty-something-year-olds” who resent the fact that they lost their childhoods to crime-fighting.

The pilot for the show, which was ordered last month, is being written by Diablo Cody and Heather Regnier. Regnier worked on the Veronica Mars revival and iZombie, while Cody is perhaps best known for writing Juno, where she won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 2008.

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Faison starred as Dr. Christopher Turk in all nine seasons of Scrubs that ran from 2001 to 2010. Faison is also known for his roles in Remember the Titans, Kick-Ass 2, Clueless, Waiting to Exhale, and much more.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Warning: Spoilers follow for the first three episodes of Invincible and aspects of the comics.

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The first three episodes of Invincible, based on the early 2000s Image comic, are now streaming on Amazon Prime. The adult animated show was greenlit in 2018 (with a separate live-action film en route) and it arrives in a media culture dominated by superhero adaptations. Its bright palette clashes wildly with its unapologetic gore — according to comic creator Robert Kirkman, the point is to depict “the consequences of [violence] in a very real way” — but the series often struggles with this depiction, a flaw which can be illuminated through comparisons to its source material and the comic landscape of the time in which it originated.

The show’s first episode ends with a major twist borrowed from the comics’ second volume: The Superman-like alien hero Omni Man/Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons), father to teen protagonist Invincible/Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), breaks bad and murders the show’s parody Justice League, the Guardians of the Globe. It’s a grizzly, drawn-out sequence where each member of the team meets a vicious end, and it’s also a definitive statement about the show’s tone moving forward. The next two episodes unfold in the massacre’s gloomy aftermath, though Mark doesn’t yet know about his father’s involvement. But where the show stumbles is in its use of several satirical ideas and concepts from the comic, which it reconstructs into a mostly dour depiction of the superhero. Invincible arrives just two years after Avengers: Endgame, which saw half the world reduced to dust, just weeks after WandaVision, a show steeped in grief and anguish, and mere days after Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a Wagnerian saga about parents and children. Whether by accident or by design, the show fits perfectly into the current superhero landscape and its weighty overtones.

This wasn’t the case for the original comic series, which began in 2003.

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The Birth of Invincible

To talk about the Invincible comic is to talk about the dreaded industry period that was the 1990s. The medium saw a major boom at the start of the decade, with X-Men #1 selling a record 8 million copies, Superman #75 (The Death of Superman) selling 6 million, and X-Force #1 not far behind, with 5 million. But success brought with it a growing speculation bubble, and a glut of re-numberings, gritty relaunches, headline-grabbing events and alternate covers aimed at collectors. It sounds incredibly similar to the 2010s, which featured line-wide comic reboots every few years, only in the ’90s the risks often outweighed the rewards; major publisher Marvel, for instance, didn’t yet have Disney money behind it, and filed for bankruptcy in 1996.

The aesthetic of the time tended towards the “eXtreme,” led by muscle-bound, creator-owned titles at Image, like Bloodstrike and Youngblood, with Marvel and DC following suit. The “big two” publishers focused not only on bloodshed, but on adolescent angst aimed at the teenage crowd. Among the most popular characters at Marvel and DC were hulking eyesores like X-Force and the moody, leather-jacketed teenager Superboy. Even if you weren’t an avid reader at the time, you know exactly what a ’90s comic looked like.

Invincible began in January of 2003, and it felt not only like a response to the ’90s, but a response to the industry’s own response, as the major publishers attempted to shed their juvenile and convoluted baggage — like DC’s Green Lantern becoming evil and destroying his home city in 1994, or overstuffed X-Men events from the same period whose very names evoked eXcess, like Onslaught or The Phalanx Covenant. The turn of the decade marked a departure from these kinds of stories; in 2000, DC introduced prestigious Justice League stories like Tower of Babel to imbue their characters with a lost gravitas, while Marvel kicked off the Ultimate Comics universe, rewriting its long-running lore with an eye towards realism (relatively speaking).

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If the ’90s were messy and violent, Marvel and DC’s early 2000s revamps varied from grounded to grandiose. For both companies, each decade was serious in its own unique way. However, neither company was particularly tongue-in-cheek about its own lore and iconography — meta characters like Deadpool were rare exceptions — which is where Invincible came in, a comic that treated both excess and mythology as mundane, and mined humor from treating superpowered burdens and expectations like puberty or a history class test. Even once the series had been underway for nearly two years, it continued to feel like a sharp contrast to the major comic events which followed — like Avengers: Disassembled, i.e. the basis for WandaVision’s story about world-altering grief, and DC’s grim, sexual-assault-centric Identity Crisis, both in late 2004.

In Invincible’s first few issues, major superhero goings on were mere background noise to Mark’s humdrum high school life, and the series was unafraid to knock the more serious comic tropes of the time. For instance, a page in which characters comment on the repeated use of still panels for dramatic effect plays out in the form of — you guessed it — a still panel repeated numerous times.

More than just taking jabs at industry conventions however, the series’ humor lay in the contrast between the fantastical and the mundane.

Adapting the Comic for Amazon

The comic’s superpowered plot often sprinted forward at breakneck speed, but the characters’ personal lives felt much more languid. Mark’s mother Debbie, for instance, was resigned to spending quiet time around the house as she anticipated Nolan’s return from adventure. When he zipped through the living room and arrived at the dinner table faster than a speeding bullet (like in the comic’s early pages), the couple immediately settled into a domestic rhythm and a “How was your day?” conversation, as if Nolan had just returned from a regular nine-to-five. His antics may have involved fighting aliens, dragons and interdimensional beings, but the emotional aftermath was always Nolan and Debbie’s fraught, smiling acceptance of their respective roles in society — a suburban dynamic which would eventually shatter once Nolan’s true nature was revealed. Until that happened, things felt simple and familiar.

The show, meanwhile, opens by presenting this world of superheroes as grandiose. It begins in the point of view of a White House security guard talking about his relationship with his stepson, but this more “mundane” emotional context isn’t connected to the super-powered events which immediately follow (conversely, Debbie and Mark’s home lives in the comics were entangled with superheroism right from the get go). Instead, the security guard is caught in the middle of an assault on the Presidential household, which is eventually thwarted by the Guardians of the Globe: Darkwing (a Batman riff), War Woman (Wonder Woman), Green Ghost (Green Lantern), Red Rush (The Flash), Aquarus (Aquaman), Martian Man (Martian Manhunter) and so on. In the show, the human and the superhuman elements are presented as opposing forces. The violent and fantastical are sudden interruptions to normalcy, rather than an intrinsic part of it, and Debbie doesn’t have quite the same withheld objections to Nolan’s absence. In the show, she’s married to a capital-S “Superhero” and all the gravitas that comes with that identity (J.K. Simmons ends up oddly monotone in the process). In the comic, she’s married to a regular suburban dad who just so happens to be a superhero. The difference is palpable; the show’s Nolan often comes off as brash, like he’s annoyed with human beings, leaving little room to explore his deception and duality.

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Even the comic’s more absurd and satirical elements are presented with self-seriousness in the Amazon series. For instance, the comic makes a big to-do about shadowy government suit Cecil Stedman — a Nick Fury type —gleefully and intentionally wasting millions in taxpayer money by teleporting from place to place. It was a wry look at the actual mechanics of SHIELD-like organizations in superhero comics, and the actual power they wielded. The show adopts Cecil’s use of teleportation, but treats it as a mere background detail and doesn’t seem to comment on it. It may in a future episode, and it may only seem like a minor logistical difference in the interim, but it’s also emblematic of the show’s general framing of its many concepts and ideas. In its first three hours, Invincible’s version of Cecil (Walton Goggins) comes off as two-dimensional, rather than darkly amusing like his comic book counterpart, because several of his actions are robbed of their sardonic context without being replaced by any other interesting tone or motivation.

Similarly, the show’s second episode features an inter-dimensional invasion by the alien species the Flaxans, and in the comics, the reveal of their major “weakness” is presented with a wink to the audience. The Flaxans, it turns out, age significantly faster in our universe than in their own — their lifespans come to an end as only a few minutes pass on Earth. It’s an amusing take on inter-dimensional conflicts, which are common in modern cape comics but which rarely take advantage of the idiosyncrasies posed by breaking the laws of physics. When the Flaxans return a second time in the comic, having now prepared for this temporal difference, they’re defeated just as easily once a solution presents itself, with almost comedic timing. For superheroes like Invincible and the Teen Team, it’s just another day at the office, and the world is used to these kinds of Earth-shaking events.

The show, however, drenches the entire Flaxan invasion in bloodshed, with bystanders’ heads being lobbed off mid-battle. Bodies devolve into pools of blood as the heroes search high and low for solutions. Rather than being just another everyday incident for the heroes to quickly dispense with, the attack feels like a major and unique event in this world, on par with invasions in the Avengers films. The major difference is that the show hopes to center the carnage wrought upon civilians — only the heroes rarely seem to react to this human toll. The show is married to gore as an action aesthetic, but it rarely roots that gore in any character’s point-of-view. It feels more like window-dressing far in the background, even though the frame often stops to focus on it. Invincible never mines this disconnect for its comedic potential either (like DC’s animated Harley Quinn series) or for any dramatic commentary on these godlike beings and their place in human society (à la Alan Moore’s Miracleman).

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Which begs the question: what is Invincible even about? The plot is easy to describe — a teenager discovers his superpowers, but is unaware his superhero father is secretly a murderous villain — but in a broader sense, the question of its relationship to the existing superhero landscape, and to superhero history, should be of primary importance.

Back to Basics

The ’90s and early 2000s were a far cry from the early days of Marvel Comics, which introduced the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Avengers in the early 1960s and gave them feet of clay. Their everyday problems appealed to readers more than the goofy Silver Age antics of DC’s pantheon — who often behaved more like detached, mischievous gods than real people at the time — the kind of everyday problems the Invincible comic would eventually return to, after most mainstream comics had moved on from them after various evolutions in the following decades.

In the late’60s and early ’70s, DC began the transition towards more serious storytelling, with the likes of writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams ushering in the Bronze Age through their more grounded and often socially minded takes on Batman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern. Not long after, Marvel also shifted towards real-world commentary with stories like Demon in a Bottle, in which Tony Stark wrestled with alcoholism, and Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, a Blaxploitation riff and the first title headlined by an African American superhero, which came a few years after the Civil Rights movement. This serious tone soon evolved into all-out deconstruction, with authors like Alan Moore and Frank Miller pushing these bright and colorful heroes to their grim, violent, hypermasculine limits for the sake of political commentary in the 1980s (with books like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns). However, after this penchant for political allegory faded, the aesthetic still remained, giving rise to the various bulky rosters of the 1990s, and all the bullets and bloodshed.

The Invincible comic deflated these more grand, edgy, overstuffed and somber elements of the comic zeitgeist in an effort to once again bring down the wall between the fantastical and the relatable. The comic’s setting may have involved large teams and inter-dimensional battles, but in terms of its character-centric story, it was back to basics — a return to the simple, everyday struggles that re-cemented the superhero in the public consciousness in the 1960s.

When the comic series did eventually dip its toes into the ultra-violence of the ’90s, it did so sparingly, and with an understanding that in order for this violence to feel “realistic,” it had to be rooted in a recognizable emotional reality. And so, the comic used moments of gore and blood spatter as a shock to the otherwise bright and sunny status quo, reserving the carnage for characters we cared about, rather than chopping up nameless civilians and establishing such blood as the norm in a manner that’s hard to take seriously after a while. A mere three episodes in, the show’s violence already feels numbing, because it’s violence without real meaning — which ironically makes the show feel like it never grew out of the juvenile ’90s comic ephemera.

In the present, the superhero landscape is dominated by Marvel films and shows, and while they don’t have nearly the same penchant for blood and guts, they tend to root their action in realism (for instance, the grounded, hand-to-hand combat of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which takes after the Captain America films). One might say the gore in Invincible adds more stakes, compared to the MCU’s sanded-down edges, but that gore is rarely used to comment on the actual consequences of super-heroism. It’s merely a flourish — and the modern zeitgeist does, in fact, feature several other major properties whose use of over-the-top violence has a definitive point, like the aforementioned animated, zany Harley Quinn show on HBO Max, and Amazon’s own bleakly comedic The Boys.

Where the Invincible show feels most at one with the existing zeitgeist is the reverence it seems to have for its own lore. Crossovers and ever-expanding shared universes aren’t just the lingua franca of superhero films, but of mainstream genre cinema in general (everything from Star Wars to the Fast and the Furious to the MonsterVerse). Between blockbusters, network TV and streaming shows, the superhero landscape is bursting at the seams the way it was in the ’90s (and really, to a larger degree). But rather than subvert, deflate or satirize this landscape the way the comic did, the show apes it unironically, and ends up just like the existing glut of superhero properties. It’s no different from some of the recent X-Men films, like Apocalypse or Dark Phoenix, where the whole world was at stake, but nothing felt fresh, and the characters rarely had any fun.

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Superficial Changes

In terms of updating the comic, the show at least does some due diligence by subverting a few unsavory elements in ways that feel like a response to changing social tides. The comic’s backward depiction of Africa in later issues, for instance, was particularly distasteful, in a story where it was a mere prop to three white main characters: Mark, Amber and Eve. One of those characters, Amber, is Black now, which at the very least stops the show from being largely white for no rhyme or reason. Similarly, Mark and his best friend William would often use “gay” as a pejorative, which may have been realistic when the comic was being written, but likely wouldn’t fly today — so the William of the show is openly gay. It’s a nice corrective on the surface, but the new William also doesn’t feel like a fully formed character yet whereas in the comics he did from the get-go.

Beyond these cosmetic changes, the show doesn’t have that much to say about the evolving depiction of superhero stories and their evolution alongside broader society since 2003. Eve’s superhero costume in the comics featured a female gender symbol surrounded by atomic imagery — several revolving electrons — which matched her superhero name, Atom Eve. The show changes this slightly, and instead of featuring atomic imagery, it simply crosses out the gender symbol on her chest. This would make for intriguing commentary on the changing gender roles within cape stories, were it not for the fact that the show also keeps her skimpy, tight-fitting, all-pink costume intact. It still feels outdated, so the crossing out of the gender symbol is practically meaningless in context, at least so far.

On one hand, the show’s first season isn’t even halfway through, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement. But on the other, a full three episodes have elapsed, each nearly an hour long. Despite an entire feature film’s worth of story thus far, Invincible has yet to find its footing. It shouldn’t necessarily be beholden to the comic’s themes and general tone, so discarding them isn’t inherently a problem. However, in doing so, it also discards certain fundamental tenets of each character — like Debbie’s quiet resignation, or Nolan’s generally easy-going presence (which makes his impending betrayal cut all the more deeply) — and it doesn’t substitute any of these personality traits with new or workable alternatives. Similarly, the show also fails to introduce any pointed or intriguing outlook on the modern superhero genre as a substitute for the comic’s biting satire. Ironically, the only superhero property it deflates by playing things straight is its own source material.

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While Cyberpunk 2077 was removed from the PlayStation store in December 2020, it looks like the game could be on the way back to the digital storefront–provided Sony deems the game fit for a return.

In an investor call, SVP of business development Michał Nowakowski shared (via Kotaku), “We have published several patches. We have just published a really big one yesterday and we have published several hotfixes. Each and every one of them brings us closer to going back to the PSN store. However, the final decision, you have to understand, belongs to Sony. We do believe we’re closer than further, but of course, the final call is theirs, so let’s wait and see.”

It’s a vague statement that doesn’t put a firm timeline on when we can expect to see Cyberpunk 2077 back on PSN. But at the very least, it seems like CD Projekt Red is hopeful about Cyberpunk 2077’s future presence in Sony’s digital storefront.

In the same earnings call, CD Projekt Red also committed to releasing Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 next-gen patches before the end of 2021. Previously, the company hadn’t put a timeline to when patches for Xbox Series X|S and PS5 would roll out, only stating that they would arrive after it was done improving Cyberpunk’s performance

CD Projekt Red also recently released a massive Cyberpunk 2077 patch. There’s a lot in it, from a new delay on police arrival time in Pacific City to timing adjustments of certain voicelines. Driving too received a tweak in patch 1.2. A new Steering Sensitivity slider allows players to adjust how fast or slow the vehicle handles. The new patch should also improve performance on lower-power consoles and PCs.

For those interested in CD Projekt Red’s future plans, the company announced structural changes in a strategy update. The company also acknowledged the communication issues around Cyberpunk 2077’s launch and promised “much shorter” marketing and PR campaigns. The studio also plans to showcase its future games on all platforms that it will be available on, ostensibly to avoid a repeat of Cyberpunk 2077’s situation where heavy focus on next-gen and PC editions lead to misunderstandings about the game’s performance on current-gen consoles.

Patch 1.2 is the latest update in CD Projekt Red’s long roadmap for fixing Cyberpunk 2077, and fans should expect a free DLC to be released as well before the end of 2021.

You’ll need to stock up on a variety of materials to forge weapons and armor in Monster Hunter Rise, but one of the more elusive resources in the early part of the game is Machalite Ore. This ore is required to forge several pieces of low-rank armor, making it a valuable commodity in the early going. Fortunately, there are a few areas you can reliably find it, so if you need help tracking some down, here’s where to mine Machalite Ore.

Where To Find Machalite Ore

Machalite Ore is one of the materials you can potentially harvest from mining outcrops around Monster Hunter Rise’s different maps. The ore will be available in a few different areas in HR2 Hub Quests, so you can find it in a few places with some persistence (and a little bit of luck).

The materials that mining outcrops produce are generally random, so you’re not guaranteed to get Machalite Ore from a specific outcrop. However, it’s common enough that it shouldn’t be too difficult to find, so make sure you mine any outcrop you come across during a hunt to increase your chances of getting it. You can also increase your chances of finding it by equipping armor with the Geologist skill. At level 3, that skill lets you gather one additional time from a mining outcrop.

We’ve harvested Machalite Ore from mining outcrops in the following areas:

• Flooded Forest
• Sandy Plains
• Lava Caverns

Which Armor Requires Machalite Ore

As previously mentioned, a few of the first armor sets you can craft in Monster Hunter Rise require Machalite Ore, making it a hot commodity as you’re just diving into the game. Here are the armaments that require Machalite Ore (among their other materials) and how much you’ll need to craft them:

Alloy Armor

• Alloy Helm – 2 Machalite Ore
• Alloy Mail – 2 Machalite Ore
• Alloy Vambraces – 2 Machalite Ore
• Alloy Coil – 2 Machalite Ore
• Alloy Greaves – 2 Machalite Ore

Wroggi Armor

• Wroggi Helm – 2 Machalite Ore
• Wroggi Vambraces – 1 Machalite Ore

Aknosom Armor

• Aknosom Mail – 1 Machalite Ore

Barroth Armor

• Barroth Vambraces – 2 Machalite Ore

Tetranadon Armor

• Tetranadon Vambraces – 1 Machalite Ore

Ingot Armor

• Ingot Mail – 3 Machalite Ore
• Ingot Greaves – 3 Machalite Ore

Basarios Armor

• Basarios Mail – 2 Machalite Ore
• Basarios Vambraces – 3 Machalite Ore

We’ve put together a few other guides to help you out in Monster Hunter Rise, including a buddy explainer, some beginner tips, and how to kill every monster. We also have a weapon explainer to give you an overview of the game’s many different weapon types, as well as a guide on how to use Amiibo.

Destruction AllStars is getting a physical version. Following its run as a PlayStation Plus freebie, Destruction AllStars will go up for sale as a digital game on the PlayStation Store beginning on April 6. A physical version will launch a day later, on April 7.

This will be just in time for the release of Destruction AllStars’ first piece of major post-launch content. In April, Destruction AllStars Season 1 will begin, adding a new playable character, battle pass, competitive 3v3v3v3 mode, and more.

Developer Lucid Games announced Destruction AllStars’ physical version in a PlayStation blog post that detailed how the studio used PS5’s tech to bring its game to life. In the blog, Sony xDev senior producer John McLaughlin revealed that Lucid turned to SIE Japan Studio for help in getting the most out of the PS5’s DualSense controller.

“We had a chat with [Astro’s Playroom creative director] Nicolas Doucet,” McLaughlin said. “He’s always approachable, was always very helpful. He [and his team] were coming to the end of their dev cycle, because they were wrapping up a bit earlier. So we sent them a build over for them to take a look. They gave a ton of hints and tips about where and how to use haptics, use it in conjunction with the speaker and the triggers and things like that. I think overall, we got a really compelling control scheme because of that.”

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut adds a lot to the RPG, including four new quests that flesh out the experience: the “political vision quests.” These four quests act as a culmination of the story of your character’s personal politics in the game, but if you don’t meet the right prerequisites, you can miss them entirely. Here’s what you need to know to trigger each of the quests so you can make sure to get the most out of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut.

First, you should know that the political vision quests are optional, but they play a big part in the ideology your character can espouse throughout the course of the game. There are four quests in total, but you can only access one per run through the game. Each quest corresponds to one of the four major ideologies you can gravitate toward based on dialogue and choices you make in the game: Communism, Moralism, Fascism, or Ultraliberalism.

Unlocking Political Ideology

You’ll need to lean into at least one of those ideologies in dialogue throughout the game. When an ideology takes route enough in your character because of your choices, you’ll unlock a related Thought in the Thought Cabinet. As long as your dialogue answers are mostly pretty consistent in their politics, that should be enough. These are the thoughts tied to each ideology.

• Mazovian Socio-Economics (Communism)
• Revacholian Nationhood (Fascism)
• Kingdom of Conscious (Moralism)
• Indirect Modes of Taxation (Ultraliberalism)

Those Thoughts are a key element in activating the political vision quests, so make sure you choose one.

Starting The Political Vision Quests

Political vision quests don’t become active until Day 4 in the game, but you’ll actually need to have your ideology ready to go by the end of Day 3. Work your way through Day 3 until you’re ready to go to sleep, where you’ll activate a dream sequence. During that portion, your Ancient Reptilian Brain will ask you what you’re doing all this for.

The game then checks if you’ve got any of the above ideology Thoughts in your Thought Cabinet. You only need one to get access to the quests, and you’ll get a choice as to which quest to take on. You’re not locked in to a single quest based on your ideology in your Thought Cabinet, but once you make a choice, that’s the only quest you’ll be able to take on.

Depending on how many of the ideology Thoughts you have, up to four different Skills will offer answers:

• Communism: “For the working class.” (Rhetoric skill)
• Fascism: “For Revachol. Always and only Revachol.” (Endurance skill)
• Moralism: “For the greater good.” (Empathy skill)
• Ultraliberalism: “For the money, baby.” (Savior Faire skill)

At that point, you get to choose your quest, with an option for each Skill that chimed in with an answer. So the more ideological Thoughts you have, the more quest options you have. You can only do one political vision quest, though–once you’ve made a decision, you’ll be locked out of the others.

After making your choice, you’ll wake up from the dream with a new Skill, determined by which quest choice you made. You’ll also receive instructions about how to start proceeding on your political vision quest.

And that’s it–just make sure to develop your political ideology enough that you have at least one of the Thoughts listed above in your Thought Cabinet in order to access the new content. Check out our preview on all the other changes in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut for more information on the new version of the game.

Hearthstone‘s new expansion, Forged in the Barrens, is now live. The new expansion launch means you can purchase packs a la carte, buy into the new Tavern Pass to start earning towards the rewards track, and try out new cards and new deck combinations.

The expansion launch isn’t going off completely without a hitch, however. Blizzard has acknowledged a bug that is preventing players from queuing into games, and it says it is working on a solution. The company has only acknowledged the issue for ranked games, but players have reported it in other modes as well.

The company temporarily disabled opening Classic packs, due to an apparent bug that was still giving out cards that were added later, and were not part of the original Classic set. However, that issue has been fixed, so an update has once again enabled the feature.

Forged in the Barrens also marks the start of the Year of the Gryphon, and a new year means certain cards cycle out of Standard play rotation. This year Blizzard has made that an even larger change than usual by implementing a new Core set system. This curated set of cards replaces the Classic and Basic sets, letting Blizzard swap which cards serve as the foundation of Hearthstone every time it begins a new year of content. You can earn the entire Core set by simply leveling up the various characters, and if you’ve already leveled them up you’ll automatically have access to the entire Core set from the start.

Other changes include some tweaking of the Tavern Pass including new Diamond card rewards, the launch of Classic mode which reverts cards to their 2014 state, and an upcoming Mercenaries mode. For more on Hearthstone’s big changes, check out our interview with Blizzard designers on how they reimagined the iconic dragon cards for the new Core set launch.