Author: Trafficblast

Whether you’ve been lucky enough to snag an Xbox Series X|S or not, you may want to check out this deal. The Microsoft Store has the Xbox Elite Series 2 controller on sale for $16 off. The controller works great on on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Series S.

Granted, a $16 discount doesn’t soften the financial blow of such a pricy piece of hardware all that much, but it’s better than nothing. And by nearly all accounts, the Elite Series 2 controller is worth the price even without a discount.

Save $20 on Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller

What makes this controller so elite? Basically, it’s a bunch of small touches that give it a premium feel, plus opportunities for fine-tuning the controller to your preferences. For starters, it has a wrap-around rubberized grip that makes it easier and more comfortable to hold than pretty much any other controller on the market. The battery lasts for up to 40 hours of gameplay on a single charge, and it comes with a carrying case, a charging dock, and a USB-C cable.

It’s highly customizable, much more so than a standard Xbox One or Series X controller. You can adjust the tension of the analog sticks to your preference, which can help improve your aiming and optimize camera control. It also offers hair-trigger locks, which can give you a real edge when you’re playing competitive shooters. You’ll be able to get the shot off a fraction of a second faster.

You can also swap out a number of the controller’s components. It comes with a set of six thumbsticks that let you choose between classic, tall, and wide-dome designs, each of which offers unique benefits for certain types of players. You can choose between a standard plus-shaped D-pad or the faceted one Microsoft is using on Series X|S controllers. Finally, you get four removable paddles that go on the back of the controller and can be mapped to any button for easy access.

The Xbox Elite Series 2 controller isn’t for everyone. But if you’re trying to maximize your competitive edge, it gives you lots of customizable ways to do so.

Other Xbox Series X and Series S Accessories

Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

Forza Horizon 5 will look and perform best on the latest Xbox console or a high-end PC, but no matter what platform you’re playing on, you should have a good experience. That’s according to Playground Games creative director Mike Brown, who recently spoke about the differences between the various editions of Forza Horizon 5. Brown also touched on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the development of the racing game.

“There are so many slight differences between the platforms, I think I would struggle to give you a fully accurate answer. The main improvements are through the power we have available thanks to the Xbox Series X and S … is just the phenomenal detail we’re able to pack into every scene,” he said during a recent event attended by GameSpot. “The quality of the assets is improved. The quality of the lighting is improved. The quality of the shadows is improved.”

In the Forzavista mode specifically, which allows players to examine their cars up close, Forza Horizon 5 supports ray-tracing for a further visual jump. “Everything is rendered with unparalleled realism,” Brown said.

The main difference between the Series X and Series S editions of Forza Horizon 5 will be its capability to output in 4K on the higher-end model and 1080p for the Series S.

“Other than that, it should be more or less the same. The visual fidelity should be the same. You’ll still get ray-tracing in Forzavista. Everything else should look as detailed and as glossy as it does on the Series X,” Brown said.

Moving further down the spectrum of Xbox consoles, Brown said he didn’t have information readily available regarding the specific graphics and performance statistics for older Xbox hardware. But overall, Brown said he feels confident that players will enjoy the game and its visuals no matter what platform they’re on.

“I will just say, whichever platform you’re playing on–whether it’s a base Xbox One, the Xbox One X, or a high-spec PC–you will have a really great experience in the game. It looks great on every platform,” he said.

Also during the interview, Brown discussed the impact of COVID-19 on Forza Horizon 5’s development. Thanks in part to the game’s three-year development cycle (as opposed to the normal two-year schedule), the team was able to send researchers to Mexico to capture and compile a database of assets to use as models for the game prior to the pandemic. But when the pandemic hit, the UK-based Playground Games shifted to work-from-home and Brown said the team was able to quickly and successfully pivot to this new environment.

“Obviously COVID-19 affected everybody. It affected everyone and everyone’s lives, and I don’t want to sit here and pretend that video games was the hardest thing to do during a pandemic,” Brown said. “We’re a team of problem solvers and we reacted really quickly. The team did a good job of getting everyone set up to work from home pretty much as soon as the pandemic hit. And anytime we ran into any production problems, we just instantly worked to try and solve them. The team did a really great job. It wasn’t something we planned for at the start. Equally, I don’t think it was something that massively derailed us or anything. COVID affected everyone’s lives in a ton of ways. I don’t think us transitioning to work from home was the worst of them.”

Forza Horizon 5 launches on November 9 for Xbox and PC, and it’s included with Xbox Game Pass. About a month after that, Microsoft will launch another big exclusive, Halo Infinite, on December 8, according to a recent leak.

For more on Forza Horizon 5, check out this piece, How Forza Horizon 5’s Extra Year Of Development Helped Make It A Better, More Accessible Game. Microsoft also recently announced a special-edition Forza Horizon 5 Xbox controller.

There’s plenty of great tech deals to check out at Amazon right now, including £200 off an LG 27-Inch Gaming Monitor, now just £299 (was £500).

There’s also an incredible introductory offer right now for new PlayStation Plus users, £25 for 12-Months. This is 50% off the regular list price for the PlayStation online service, and definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already got a PS Plus subscription with your new PS5.

£200 Off LG Monitors + Deals on Sony Earbuds, 4K TVs, and More

International VPN Awareness Month – NordVPN Deals

Access US Netflix and protect your data with this handy VPN deal.

12-Months of PS Plus for £25 (Save 50%)

Call of Duty Vanguard Now Available to Preorder

Best PS5 Compatible M.2 SSDs in the UK

For more information check out the Best PS5 M.2 SSD Options Currently Available.

Heatsinks

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

In Fortnite Season 7, Week 12, you’ll need to collect three alien devices, then activate the countermeasure device underneath Corny Complex to complete the final Legendary Quest of the week. This is a big one, as it relates to Doctor Slone’s master plan for defeating the aliens and saving the Zero Point. This quest will have you running around the center region of the map, in and around The Aftermath and Corny Complex, but with our guide, you won’t get lost.

Fortnite Alien Device Locations

As the quest indicates, there are three spots where you can grab alien devices, and you must do so before heading to Corny Complex for the final, critical step. You can find alien devices in regions with purple alien trees, but to be more specific, head to the following three spots:

• The group of alien trees south of Corny Complex
• The group of alien trees east of The Aftermath and west of the nearby footbridge
• The group of alien trees east of Pleasant Park, just after the river

Once you’ve grabbed all three alien devices, you’ll be ready to activate the countermeasure device underneath Corny Complex, so head there next and go underground to Slone’s headquarters. You’ve probably been here before, but in case it’s your first time, there are several entrances into this secret lab, but the easiest to spot is inside the large red barn in the center of the location.

Once inside, look for the room housing the massive countermeasure device. You can’t miss it really, but here’s what it looks like in case you’re unsure. After all, if Slone is still alive down there, things will be pretty hectic during the conclusion of this challenge, so you should be quick.

Once you interact with the countermeasure, your work for this week’s Legendary Quests will be complete, and Slone’s endgame will be in motion. After weeks of studying, sabotaging, and often taking heavy losses from the aliens, the IO leader may just have the upper hand at long last. The countermeasure is expected to be a bomb, and that means a season-ending event is likely coming in a few weeks too. For now, finish up your Week 12 challenges so you can finally unlock the Superman Shadow style.

Battleye, the new anti-cheat system for Destiny 2, has been added into the game and Bungie says that it could result in a reduction in framerates and performance for some players.

As part of the game’s 3.3.0 update, Bungie announced in a blog post that it had added its anti-cheat software Battleye to Destiny 2 in order to boost security and enable the developer to detect more active cheats within the game.

Bungie admits that Battleye isn’t a “silver bullet” that will wipe out cheaters in the game altogether but instead “another step in [its] strategy to combat cheats and improve [its] detection and banning methods.” The developer notes that the anti-cheat system requires additional system resources in order to run and that players may “see some reduction in frames and performance after Update 3.3.0 goes live.”

In addition to potentially experiencing drops in framerate during gameplay, players may also encounter increased start-up times when booting up Destiny 2. For now, Bungie is testing how Battleye performs at scale in the live game while the developer ensures accuracy, meaning that the system won’t be implementing automatic bans for the time being. However, the studio says that it hopes to allow the anti-cheat to automatically issue bans without a manual review before the game’s next Trials of Osiris event launches on September 10.

In addition to adding further components to the game’s in-house anti-cheat system, Bungie has also been attempting to tackle cheaters in the real world. In January, we wrote about a lawsuit being filed by Riot and Bungie against a cheat-making company alleged to have produced software hacks for Valorant and Destiny 2. In the recent blog post, Bungie said that it will continue to use similar strategies to combat cheating in the game before it invited other developers to join the lawsuits in order to make them more impactful.

It’s been a hectic week for Destiny 2 which not only launched into its new Season of the Lost update but also announced details surrounding the game’s upcoming Witch Queen expansion. The expansion, which is due out on February 22, across Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, and PC.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Nvidia has announced that a number of upcoming games, including EA’s Battlefield 2042 and Techland’s Dying Light 2, will receive a graphical boost at launch thanks to the company’s RTX effects. However, not every title will be given access to the same tech, with some simply receiving Nvidia’s DLSS technology and others receiving the full suite, including full support for ray tracing.

Announced in a post on Nvidia’s website, the company revealed a list of 13 games that will utilize RTX technology, either at launch or in an update at some point. Besides Battlefield 2042 and Dying Light 2, the list notably includes Black Myth: Wukong, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Chivalry 2.

Both Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Dying Light 2 will launch with DLSS and ray tracing, although the latter won’t have a full implementation of the lighting technique. Instead, Dying Light 2’s full day-night cycle will be made more realistic by ray-traced global illumination, shadows, and reflections.

While Battlefield 2042 won’t support ray tracing, Nvidia is giving competitive players an edge in the game with DLSS and Nvidia Reflex. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), in the simplest of terms, allows your PC to render games at lower resolutions in order to boost performance, but without significantly reducing image quality. Nvidia Reflex meanwhile reduces system latency, meaning actions like shooting or looking around happen almost instantaneously in-game.

Naturally, PC players will need one of Nvidia’s graphics cards to play with any of the company’s RTX tech enabled, but it remains unlikely that it’ll be easy to pick one up this year. This past April, Nvidia claimed that GPU shortages would be around until the end of this year. However, Intel’s outlook on the issue is more grim, projecting that the ongoing semiconductor shortage that’s affecting PC components and regular consumer goods alike could persist until 2023.

Spoilers follow for Episode 3 of Marvel’s What If…? For more, see our reviews of the first two episodes of What If below:

What If…? Season 1, Episode 1 – Review

What If…? Season 1, Episode 2 – Review

After two episodes that each remixed the plot of a single Marvel movie, to varying degrees, What If’s latest installment surprises with a genre I didn’t think we’d ever see in the MCU: murder mystery! For all the wanton death and sacrifice plays superhero movies celebrate, it’s rare to see those heroes killed off of the battlefield, and especially jarring here given the thick plot armor Marvel characters have (how many times has Vision “died” now?) Episode 3 may suffer from trying to do too much in too little time, but the intrigue at the heart of its plot keeps that from totally killing the fun.

First, let’s do a quick refresher on some relevant MCU history: this week’s episode of What If reinterprets the events of Fury’s Big Week, a seven-day stretch in 2011 which saw the SHIELD director attempt to recruit Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Thor, and the recently thawed Steve Rogers to the Avenger Initiative. In Marvel’s darkest divergence from canon yet, this foundational week for the Avengers is marred by murders most foul! Someone’s killing off Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) recruits before they can reach their potential, leaving him with more job openings than he’d planned on. What’s worse, it seems like his own agents, Black Widow (Lake Bell) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), may be implicated. The ways in which Stark, Banner, and Thor each go out are surprisingly grim (HULK SPLASH!) and yet feel totally believable, as each death leans on the struggles the heroes were going through at that time.

Voice acting continues to be a tough nut for What If to crack and this week, Lake Bell’s Black Widow is the odd lady out. What If has been wildly inconsistent in how it handles assigning talent to characters from the MCU. Why, in an episode where you’ve got voice actor Mick Wingert doing a perfectly serviceable Robert Downey Jr., do you ask a big-name actor like Bell to try to impersonate another MCU vet and expect the same level of fidelity to the original performance? The issue is compounded by Natasha’s personality feeling much jokier than she was in the films of this era. But on the other hand, when you’ve got a voice as iconic as Sam Jackson’s, if you can get him, use him, right? Alternate timeline though it may be, Jackson’s Fury is remarkably consistent with his live-action counterpart and that actually helps build the stakes for this story. Fury’s famously one step ahead of the game, so having him spend the whole episode on his back foot is a great way to test his resolve.

And we can’t spend a whole episode in Phase I without getting some quality time with Clark Gregg’s Phil Coulson! Gregg’s mix of professionalism and hero worship is as funny as ever, although how he’s characterized here feels a little more in line with his ‘90s Captain Marvel persona than his more buttoned-up style in The Avengers. This is probably the least action-heavy episode yet, but the visuals aren’t as distractingly bland as they were in the premiere’s dingy WWII-era. Culver University’s lush campus pops, and the sleeker, modern aesthetic of SHIELD’s various installations is far more palatable than the SSR headquarters of the 1940s.

Because of the truncated runtimes What If works with — arbitrarily, it’s streaming — this episode does bite off more than it can chew when it comes to stringing out the mystery killer’s identity. If you find yourself asking “why are we talking about Hope Van Dyne dying as an agent of SHIELD out of nowhere?,” the list of suspects shrinks (heh) to just two. Seeing as one of them’s in the Quantum Realm, that just leaves Hope’s father, a totally unhinged Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Pym being the killer may not come as a huge surprise by the time it’s revealed, but storywise, it feels like a logical progression from the opening of Ant-Man, where Pym leaves SHIELD over their intent to weaponize his Pym Particles. Seeing the MCU tackle a serial killer story, and even making it feel organic to established canon, definitely bodes well for the future of the series. You can only get so far by swapping characters in and out of hero mantles, so allowing room for different genres will be critical for keeping the show interesting and surprising.

This story in particular feels like it could’ve used more focus, even if it meant extending it into a two-parter. Episode 3 also solidly confirms that no character or paradigm introduced in What If can be safely considered a one-off, especially considering the familiar faces we see answering Fury’s call for some replacement Avengers by the end.

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EA’s upcoming multiplayer shooter Battlefield 2042 arrives in October, and there’s already a website advertising “undetectable” cheats for sale. As spotted by CharlieIntel, the website claims that not only can it provide aimbots, radar, and wallhacks to customers, but that it has done business with over 1.2 million registered clients who have never been booted from a Battlefield game.

The cheats-peddler has even gone so far as to claim that it already has an undetectable Battlefield 2042 hack, a bold claim considering the small number of players that have been granted access to the game so far in technical alphas.

It’s not too surprising to find out that cheat program manufacturers are interested in Battlefield 2042, as there’s money to be made in selling these hacks to players who are desperate for any advantage in online competition.

Using cheats does of course go against the End User License Agreement that most video games carry, and breaking the EULA rules will likely result in a player being banned if EA and developer DICE catch them making use of any hacks. The publisher has been more proactive in enforcing rules for Battlefield 2042, even going so far as to threaten that a full ban might be on the cards for anyone caught leaking footage of the technical alpha.

Other competitive games such as Call of Duty Warzone, PUBG, and Fortnite regularly have to deal with legions of cheaters wielding game-breaking advantages such as aimbots and X-ray vision, so it was only a matter of time until Battlefield 2042 caught the attention of this illicit market.

Battlefield 2042 launches on October 22 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The Battlefield 2042 open beta kick off in September and is available to anyone who preorders the game. For more info on one of the Specialists that will be available in the game, you can check out the recent reveal of Kimble “Irish” Graves, an Engineer-class character who first appeared in Battlefield 4.

It looks like Halo Infinite‘s campaign mode will release on December 8. A supposed Xbox Store listing is said to have revealed the date, and in the wake of that, noted Xbox insider and The Verge reporter Tom Warren has backed it up. “Yes, Halo Infinite is December 8,” Warren said in a tweet. [The Verge has subsequently ran a story saying campaign and multiplayer will launch on December 8]

Warren has accurately reported on unannounced Xbox projects and news in the past, but as usual, the December 8 date is officially unconfirmed at this stage. The product page on Xbox.com currently shows a December 31 placeholder date.

Some parts of the Halo community shared their disappointment over a release date in December for being later than they would have wanted. The 20th anniversary of Halo and Xbox is November 15, but there was never any indication or suggestion that Microsoft would launch Halo Infinite on or close to that day to celebrate the milestone.

A release date in December would be the latest ever in the year for a mainline Halo game. Halo: Combat Evolved launched in November 2001, Halo 2 debuted in November 2004, Halo 3 came out in September 2007, and Halo 4 launched in November 2008. Halo 5, which is the latest entry in the mainline series, premiered in October 2015.

The product page containing the December 8 release date mentions campaign only and not multiplayer, which is a separate, standalone package launching for free across Xbox and PC. The game’s campaign is included with Xbox Game Pass and can also be purchased by itself. The Verge subsequently reported that campaign and multiplayer will launch on December 8.

Microsoft’s Gamescom briefing on Tuesday did not include any news or updates on Halo Infinite. Some are expecting Microsoft to reveal Halo Infinite’s release date during Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event today, August 25, starting at 10:30 AM PT / 1:30 PM ET. But as of yet, Microsoft has given no indication or tease that it will share any information on Halo during the show.