Carnage is joining Fortnite’s Battle Pass as part of its brand new Chapter 2, Season 8, which launches today.
The addition of the Marvel villain’s character skin is just one of a number of changes making their way to the Battle Royale as players set out to face a brand new threat attempting to bring about the destruction of the island.
…Strange things have been happening on the Island while you were asleep.
The end of Fortnite’s last season brought with it the destruction of the alien mothership in Operation Sky Fire. As a result, the cubes that powered the ship were sent tumbling down toward the ground, causing a new wave of terror to sweep the map.
Now crashlanded, Season 8 of the Battle Royale delivers further on that threat as the cubes have begun creating a range of anomalies across the map. At various locations across the island, the anomalies themselves open up gateways to a monster-filled dimension called, ‘Sideways’ – a name that certainly feels like it gives off huge Stranger Things’ upside down vibes.
As part of the game’s monster-filled season, a new character skin brings Kletus Cassady’s symbiote alternate Carnage into the game as a Battle Pass reward. While fans will likely be eager to enter the island as the famed Spider-Man foe, doing so will require a little bit of work. In order to unlock Carnage, players will need to complete quests and wipe out enough players to garner the XP required to reach the skin where it is positioned at the end of this season’s Battle Pass.
Carnage’s inclusion in the game comes just weeks before the theatrical release of Tom Hardy’s Venom sequel, in which Woody Harrelson portrays the alternate symbiote as the film’s formidable villain. The character also marks the latest in a number of Marvel-based collaborations to make it into Fortnite in recent seasons. In a list that includes Wolverine, Groot, Thor, Iron Man, and Venom, Carnage should feel very at home when entering the Fortnite map for the first time.
On top of Fortnite’s latest Marvel crossover, the Season 8 Battle Pass for Fortnite features a number of other character skins that fans can unlock including Imagined Order agent Kor; Fabio Sparklemane, a shredded anthropomorphic horse-like being with rainbow coloured hair, and a paintable cartoon version of the game’s iconic mascot Fishstick known as Toona Fish.
For more on Fortnite, make sure to check out our dedicated page for the game where you can read more on a range of the Battle Royale’s latest news. Alternatively, to catch up on the game’s story so far, you can check out more in the trailer for Season 8 below:
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Just like previous games in the series, Volition’s reboot of Saints Row will allow players to experiment with character customization. In an update post published to the official Saints Row website, developer Volition shared more details on how main character The Boss can be visually fine-tuned, adding that it had “built the biggest customization suite” of any Saints Row game to date.
According to Volition, players can choose to look like a “stone-cold killer or a fantastic-looking freakshow,” and there’ll be eight customizable voices–four male and four female– to choose from. Layered clothing is back, while the vehicular side of the game has a large array of customization options to go along with its revamped combat.
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One element of the new game that Volition addressed was the reveal trailer’s lack of purple, a distinctive and signature color of the Saints Row series. The setup of the new game, which reveals the origins of the Saints, is the reason why the new sandbox of Santa Ileso isn’t drenched in purple.
“We begin by showing the Saints at the start of their criminal journey, over the course of the game they form the Saints and rise to the top of the criminal underworld, reaping rewards and recruits along the way,” Volition explained. “The further they go down that path, the more you’ll see the purple ‘uniform’ come into play, and the more visually adorned with purple and fleur de lys the Saints, their HQ, and their recruits become.”
The last major point that Volition addressed was the seamless co-op that’ll be on offer, which will also be cross-gen compatible. Saint’s Row’s co-op is designed to have a drop-in and drop-out nature so that the game’s campaign can be played seamlessly with or without friends.
Saints Row arrives on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S in February 2022, a month that is starting to become very crowded with high-profile releases. In case you missed it, you can check out our Saints Row preview to see just how much of the madcap energy this new take on the classic series has.
The first trailer for Hawkeye is here. The upcoming Marvel show stars Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld, and it premieres on Disney+ on November 24.
Hawkeye picks up after the events of Avengers: Endgame, with Clint Barton putting down his bow to celebrate Christmas with his family. Unfortunately, a masked vigilante who is wearing the Ronin costume that Barton had in Endgame is stalking the streets of New York, leading him to investigate who has taken the identity.
Turns out it’s 22-year-old Kate Bishop, who wants to be just like Hawkeye, and the pair end up in a series of action-packed encounters with some bad guys from Clint’s past. The Hawkeye trailer suggests a holiday-themed mix of action and comedy–and it also includes an amazing-looking Captain America Broadway show titled Rogers: The Musical. Check it out below:
Hawkeye also stars Vera Farmiga, Fra Fee, Tony Dalton, Zahn McClarnon, Brian d’Arcy James, and Alaqua Cox. The series is helmed by Rhys Thomas (Saturday Night Live) as well as directing duo Bert and Bertie (Troop Zero).
There are several other MCU Disney+ shows in the works. Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke, is currently in production, with She-Hulk, Secret Invasion, and a Hawkeye spin-off series focusing on Echo all in various stages of development.
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s soccer team, Wrexham AFC will unexpectedly be playable in FIFA 22.
One of the more weird yet wonderful stories to come out of the world of Welsh sport this year arrived when Hollywood duo Reynolds and McElhenney became owners of Wrexham AFC, the oldest professional Welsh football club. The team, which currently plays in the fifth tier of the English football league system, has now become a surprise addition to this year’s edition of FIFA.
While the game generally only includes teams as far down as English Football’s League Two (confusingly, the fourth tier of the English football league system) Wrexham AFC has been added to the game under its ‘Rest of World’ category, among other teams that don’t fit into any of the other leagues that the game already includes. Following the team’s inclusion in the game, Reynolds and McElhenney took to Twitter to announce the news in a typical comedic fashion.
This is a statement from the press office of Wrexham AFC regarding #FIFA22
EA sports confirmed in a press release that the company’s partnership with Wrexham AFC will span multiple years, beginning in FIFA 22, with the team available for players to use in kick-off mode. Despite ‘Rest of World’ teams not typically available for use in career mode, previous titles have allowed players to move teams between leagues, meaning that it is likely that players would be able to move Wrexham into League Two should they wish to begin their journey into management with the Red Dragons.
The partnership between EA and Wrexham is set to extend off the pitch as well. According to the press release, EA Sports will begin work in the local community through an initiative with Wrexham Glyndwr University. The company will also provide a community lounge at the club’s stadium.
“It’s great to be partnering with Wrexham AFC and to support the club’s commitments to the Wrexham community and its fans,” said EA Sports VP of Brand, David Jackson. “We’re excited to launch innovative community projects in collaboration with the Club, and for Wrexham fans to experience playing with their side in FIFA 22 when the game releases later this month.”
In addition to the inclusion of Wrexham in its latest iteration, this year’s installment of EA’s FIFA series will also allow you to create your very own team that can be used in the game’s career mode. Player-created clubs will be available in Manager Career mode and can be added to any of the game’s many leagues. When adding a team to a league, your created club will replace an existing club. In an amusing turn of events, the replaced club will then be demoted into the ‘Rest of World’ category where it will join none other than Wrexham AFC.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Fortnite Season 8 has begun, which means there’s plenty to learn about another monumental shift in the Fortnite world. Fortnite NPCs move around every season, and Season 8 is no different. Whether you’re looking for any NPC in particular, or maybe you just want to see who’s hanging around the especially ravaged Fortnite Season 8 map this season, we’ll be updating this guide all season long to locate all NPCs that make their way to the island during the war with the cubes.
Fortnite Season 8 NPCs
In Fortnite Season 8, there are currently 15 NPCs with plans for at least two more to arrive in the weeks ahead. Each of them includes their own questline for the first time ever, making them hard to resist if you play for the quests. Here’s where you can find all of them:
Kor – Misty Meadows
J.B. Chimpanski – Weather Station (south of Catty Corner)
Torin – The Aftermath (center of the map)
Pitstop – Boney Burbs
Toona Fish – Viking Vessel (west of Holly Hedges)
Fabio Sparklemane – Apres Ski (southwest of Misty Meadows)
Penny – Retail Row
Dark Jonesy – Steamy Stacks
Madcap – Corny Crops
Dusk – Campground west of Lazy Lake
Scuba Jonesy – Coral Castle
Charlotte – Pleasant Park
Baba Yaga – cabin southwest of Sludgy Swamp
Kitbash – Dirty Docks
The Brat – Food trucks north of Lazy Lake
With each NPC offering a five-part questline, there’s more reason than ever to meet and greet everyone living on the island. You can see in the image below just how much XP you’ll get for completing these new NPC quests.
There’s a lot more XP on offer for players who need it.
Marvel Studios has released the first trailer for Hawkeye, the fourth live-action MCU show headed for Disney Plus.
The studio unwrapped the first full trailer for Hawkeye on Monday, offering fans a closer look at the Avenging archers in action, with Jeremy Renner returning as Clint Barton and Hailee Steinfeld making her MCU debut as Kate Bishop, a Hawkeye-in-training, in this episodic spin-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Check out the action-packed preview below:
The trailer sees Barton trying to get back to his family in time for Christmas, with the help of Bishop, a 22-year-old archer with dreams of becoming a Super Hero. As the footage teases (and per Marvel’s synopsis), the two are forced to work together when a presence from Barton’s past threatens to derail far more than the festive spirit.
Along with Hawkeye’s festive-themed trailer, Marvel also shared a brand new poster for the series, showing Barton, Bishop and Lucky the Pizza Dog walking the snowy streets of New York City. “This holiday season the best gifts come with a bow,” reads the tagline on the one-sheet that teases holiday hijinks in the six-episode season.
Vera Farmiga is starring as Eleanor Bishop, Kate’s mother, while Tony Dalton is in the mix as “The Swordsman” Jack Duquesne alongside Fra Fre’s Kazi and Zahn McClarnon’s William Lopez. In addition, Alaqua Cox is portraying Maya Lopez, aka Echo, a deaf Native American who can perfectly copy another person’s movements.
The new cast members will play supporting roles to Renner’s Hawkeye and Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop, who eventually takes on the Hawkeye mantle. Steinfeld’s role as Kate Bishop was confirmed at the Disney Investor Day presentation on December 10. Steinfeld has previously starred in True Grit, Bumblebee, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
It’s one thing to call a game “small,” maybe referring to its length or something about its quaint aesthetics. But TOEM, a game about the joy of photography, is small in the way a snow-topped winter cabin is small, or a sleeping cat is small, or a plate of cube-shaped cheeses and nicely sliced meats is small. It’s small in totality; pristine, complete, and precise. It’s perfect for snuggling under a blanket on a quiet evening with a scented candle and a mug of cocoa to finish in one contented sitting.
TOEM starts with smallness in premise: a young protagonist, equipped only with a camera given to them by their mother and a pair of clogs, is now old enough to journey through their little top-down, black-and-white world to see the sights, take photos, and finally witness TOEM’s titular phenomenon: a spectacle described in the opening minutes with awe-struck vaguery. After departing from their quiet hometown, they visit adorably diverse areas including a dense forest with a woodland hotel, a seaside town featuring both sunny beaches and stormswept coastline, a bustling city full of rushed business folk, and a snowy mountain peak, helping members of the community with their camera along the way.
The initial camera functions are simple ones: you can zoom in and out, or flip it to take a selfie. Later, it gets a little bit deeper when you get a tripod that lets you set up specific shots, and a horn you can honk to elicit goofy reactions from your subjects. Rain, snow, and mud can spatter your camera lens, though certain items or interactions will clear this problem up if you don’t like it. Beyond these, don’t expect more elaborate photo editing tools from TOEM — but of course, just five minutes with it is enough to know that fancy camera functions would be utterly beside the point.
TOEM doesn’t gamify its photography further than “take a photo of this” to solve a puzzle or progress forward. There’s no photo scoring and no Pokemon Snap-like rarity system. In a different kind of photo game, this simplicity might have been a disappointment, but for the most part I didn’t miss it in TOEM. The cute, humorous scenarios TOEM rewarded my curiosity with were almost always satisfying enough without having to try and set up some perfect shot, and even without a quest or a reward to motivate me, I often found myself framing goofy selfies with characters and places I liked just because I wanted to.
Good photos tell stories, and good photo-taking games tell many stories.
Good photos tell stories, and good photo-taking games tell many stories; therefore, TOEM is a very good photo-taking game. Though its bookend areas are short by storytelling necessity, the rest are densely packed, intricate, and diorama-like in their design, giving the feel of playing around with an exceedingly well-made set of paper dolls or a 3D comic book. Each map is stuffed with pleasant moments featuring characters like a grouchy newspaper boss who’s rightfully proud of his mustache, a balloon family celebrating a birthday, or a DJ moose performing one heck of a set to an audience of glow stick-waving fans. The busy-ness of one or two areas (specifically ones with intense weather) did start to noticeably cause the game to chug on the Switch, but this was limited to those locations and was only a brief, minor annoyance.
There are longer stories, too, like the investigator you run into in each town who’s after a shady character hiding in the scenery, or a series of ghosts tired of having to do everything for themselves. Most of TOEM’s encounters happily marry the ordinary with either myth or absurdity, elevating day-to-day moments by asking you to look a little closer through a camera lens and appreciate the ways in which an army of ants might be just as delightful as a towering snow monster.
Many of these little photographed stories are useful for moving forward, as community service is rewarded with free bus rides to the next area. You’ll have to help out a handful of folk in each area through photo taking, fetch quests, or exploration in order to reach your eventual goal. For instance, you might need to use your zoom lens to identify all the items gumming up the machinery in a power plant to get a bridge to lower, find a lost dog, or take photographs of a snowman’s scattered body parts for an upset snowman builder. You’re free to take on whichever tasks you want to reach the quota for moving on, so if you get stuck on one it’s simple enough to just swap your focus to something else. But TOEM’s humorous, grounded writing was so enjoyable and its characters so silly and pleasant that I was eager to try and finish every possible task presented to me just to see all its world had to offer.
And it was easy to go beyond even that, as TOEM also comes with a short list of achievements, collectible clothing items, a critter compendium you can fill with photos of cats, dogs, bugs, and other animals, and plenty of surprising photo interactions to stumble across as you go. You can also collect a number of catchy, soothing music tracks from composers Launchable Socks and Jamal Green, which will dip in and out as you wander through the world and offer both musical accompaniment and also, critically, occasional silence to appreciate TOEM’s superb sound design.
All together, I only spent about three hours finishing TOEM’s story and an extra hour after that finding every last secret. I could have happily stayed longer, but TOEM was such a precise, neatly wrapped little box of a game that I feel greedy asking for more. It’s complete in a way I feel games often struggle to be, like a rare TV show that ends exactly how the writers intended after just a season or two, or a tasty meal that’s filling rather than stuffing. I think there’s something brave and wonderful about wanting to make something that is deliberately small in an industry where padded length and grand scope and scale are often equated with value by many people. I love walking away from a game feeling this content.
Deathloop is out this week, and if you’ve been on the fence regarding Arkane’s latest first-person adventure, then maybe some reviews can help you make a decision. Groundhog Day with guns and a protagonist that’s much cooler than Bill Murray, outlets have begun posting their reviews, and the overall consensus hints that Arkane’s latest effort may be in the running for game of the year.
In our own Deathloop review, critic Tamoor Hussain calls the game a combination of beautiful art direction, excellent writing, and an absolute banger of a soundtrack that amplifies action.
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We’ve compiled some more reviews from around the industry below. Developed under Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios umbrella, Deathloop is a PlayStation 5 console-exclusive for at least a year.
For an even more detailed look, check out GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
Game: Deathloop
Platforms: PC, PS5
Developer: Arkane
Release Date: September 14
Price: $60
GameSpot – 10/10
“Perhaps the most laudable part of Deathloop is how it takes so many seemingly disparate things and creates harmony between them. Gameplay systems that feel isolated become pieces of a bigger puzzle, and when you see how they seamlessly connect together, you realize how special an achievement it really is.” — Tamoor Hussain [Full review]
VGC – 5/5
“Deathloop is slick and inventive, with a delicious sense of style and humor. It distills Arkane’s hefty systems into something more explicitly playful, then leaves its sparkling cast to run riot in its huge interlocking puzzle of an island. One of the smartest and most outright entertaining games of the year.” — Jon Bailes [Full review]
VG247 – 5/5
“Taken as a single-player experience, Deathloop feels complete and incredibly well-rounded. The extra injection of optional multiplayer action is a fabulous cherry on top. Basically, Deathloop is everything I wanted it to be. It’s confident both as a successor to many of the ideas of Dishonored while also expressly its own thing, with a tone and sense of style I absolutely adore. It’s one of my favorite games of the year – and one we’ll surely be talking about for months to come.” — Alex Donaldson [Full review]
Game Informer – 9/10
“Deathloop is a bloody, chaotic mess. A mess you will fail at over and over until finally, you succeed. And that success – the result of hours of experimentation, iteration, and knowledge – makes for one of the best games of the year.” — Blake Hester [Full review]
Eurogamer – Essential
“Appropriately for a game about time travel, Deathloop can be read as a game both for newcomers and old hands – an accessible introduction to Arkane’s grittier immersive sims, or a triumphant refinement of the Dishonored style. Where it feels most like a concluding act is in how it builds on a theme in Arkane’s work about games as means of both coercion and liberation, trapping you in order to empower and motivate you to break out of them, forever challenging you to think of some possibility that has escaped the developer’s calculations, to the point of sabotaging the illusion entirely.” — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell [Full review]
TheGamer – 5/5
“Deathloop feels like your first bite of a cheesecake after being stranded on a desert island and living off seaweed for six months. In a sea of shotgun-spread triple-A games that are all too familiar, Deathloop is a precision 50. cal bullet of originality right through your eye socket.” — Kirk McKeand [Full review]
Destructoid – 9/10
“Deathloop combines a classic Arkane stealthy-shooty foundation with a genuinely interesting and fun premise to aplomb. This is going to be on a lot of Game of the Year lists.” — Chris Carter [Full review]
In 2018, Payday publisher Starbreeze’s office was raided, with officials seizing documents and computers over suspicions of insider trading. Former chief financial officer Sebastian Ahlskog was convicted in 2020 for insider trading. Now, he has been acquitted of all charges.
GI.biz reports that Ahlskog was acquitted back on June 11, and the prosecution had until September 7 to appeal–but it did not do that. Additionally, the report said Ahlskog no longer needs to pay money to the “crime victims fund” after it was originally reported he was fined SEK 40,000.
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Now Playing: Payday 3 Presentation | Koch Media Primetime 2021
“The Court of Appeal does not believe Ahlskog had insider information that Starbreeze would fail to find external funding as it faced insolvency. At the time he sold his shares, the company was still in discussions with banks and other parties,” GI.biz reported.
Former Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson Klint was also cleared on charges after facing an investigation.
For more on Starbreeze’s future outlook, check out GameSpot’s interview with new CEO Tobias Sjögr. He discussed the new deal and what it means for Starbreeze and the Payday series, how the deal came together in the first place, the benefits of having Payday 3 now be fully funded, what Starbreeze has in mind for Payday 3’s games-as-a-service approach, and how involved Koch is in the day-to-day.
While certain WarioWare microgames have nods to past Nintendo titles, a new Luigi’s Mansion-themed one from WarioWare: Get It Together! actually contains high-resolution assets from the game’s E3 2001 demo that never made it to the final version.
As reported by VGC, these assets in question include chairs, sofas, and tablecloths that have more detail than what was found when Luigi’s Mansion launched on GameCube in 2001.
There are those, like @PortableProduc1, who believe the difference in the quality of these assets had to do with the file size limitations when developing a GameCube game.
Thanks @Beta64Official for the multiple retweets this week, you’re awesome! ♥
For that, here’s a furniture comparison shot for the E3 2001 chair texture and the Final build’s chair, notice the difference in quality, again, most likely due to file size limitations🙀 pic.twitter.com/eC5ologqMH
While this is a great find for fans of Nintendo’s past, this is especially exciting for a group of people working on a restoration of the E3 2001 Luigi’s Mansion demo. For those unaware, the first public demo of Luigi’s Mansion from E3 2001 featured significant differences from the retail version, including “new characters, gameplay systems, and scenery.”
A group of modders known as Portable Productions found these assets and have already added them to their Luigi’s Mansion Beta Restoration mod that aims to be a “1:1 recreation” of that E3 demo.
Last tweet of the day (MAYBE)😛
Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you, all of the ported asset pieces from the Warioware asset dump, models, and textures included, working in Luigi’s Mansion Beta Restoration💗enjoy!https://t.co/q0JTfgYxeC
In our WarioWare: Get It Together! review, we said that its “multiplayer modes are a bit of a letdown, but chasing high scores is still a lot of wacky fun.”
