We’re live with Unlocked a day early to cover the massive news of Microsoft acquiring Bethesda and the rest of ZeniMax Media. Ryan, Miranda, Brandin, and Destin discuss what it means for franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Doom, and the upcoming Starfield to be under the Xbox umbrella, options for exclusivity, Game Pass, and more!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out the latest episode of IGN Unfiltered, featuring an interview with Geoff Keighley, the creator and host of The Game Awards.
It’s already been an incredibly fun year of Xbox coverage, and the best is yet to come. Join us! Oh, and feel free to leave us a video Loot Box question below using Yappa and you might be featured on an upcoming episode!
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Miranda Sanchez is the executive editor of guides at IGN. You can chat with her about video games and anime on Twitter.
While most of the Star Wars Expanded Universe isn’t canon anymore after Disney bought out Lucasfilm, there are plenty of characters and stories Star Wars fans love celebrating. And hey, they could all be reintroduced into current canon at some point, right? One of the most beloved Star Wars games of all time is none other than Knights of the Old Republic, and the game’s character–Darth Revan–is having their lightsaber made into a new collectible.
If your first worry is what color the blade will be on this lightsaber, don’t fret. You can change it between purple and red really quickly. Check out some of the photos of the upcoming lightsaber below.
The LED-filled tube changes between the two colors when you press both of the buttons on the hilt. Individually, one button turns the lightsaber on/off and the other makes a deflection sound when pressed or a wall-cutting effect when it’s held down.
Along with the lightsaber, you get a stand and a removable kyber crystal, if you just want to display the hilt and not the entire plastic tube on top–as the blade is removable. The lightsaber takes three AA batteries, which are not included.
The Black Series lightsaber is pricier compared to your average toy–as this is more for the collector market. It’s made of metal, not plastic, and is a bit weightier than Hasbro’s other lightsabers, which are geared more towards play. The Darth Revan lightsaber retails for $225, but right now, it’s available on Amazon for $250.
The only real drawback for the latest Force FX lightsaber is that it is a little tough to hold. The the decorative embellishments on the hilt are curved, and when it swoops out, it digs into your palm a bit. But this is more a lightsaber that hangs out on your desk rather than one you chase door-to-door salesman with. I recommend the Kylo Ren one for that–it’s weightier.
The Star Wars Black Series Darth Revan Force FX Lightsaber is available now.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
With no new Star Wars movie on the immediate horizon, all eyes are on The Mandalorian: Season 2 right now. And unsurprisingly, Hasbro is betting big on all things Mando and Baby Yoda for its upcoming toy and collectible releases.
As part of the first weekly Mando Monday event, Hasbro revealed a huge bounty of Mandalorian toys in the works for Fall 2020. From new additions to the Black Series and Vintage Collection lines to a Mandalorian-themed version of Monopoly, there’s a little something for every Star Wars fan here. Check out the slideshow gallery below for a closer look at everything:
Perhaps the coolest reveal in this new batch of figures is the Star Wars: The Black Series Credit Collection. While these various 6-inch Mandalorian figures have all been released as part of the regular Black Series in the past, the Credit Collection rereleases update those figures with new weathered paint scheme designed to mimic the stylish end credits of The Mandalorian. They also come packaged in vintage-inspired boxes (similar to the recent The Empire Strikes Back 40th Anniversary figures) and each include a different replica of an Imperial credit.
Similarly, while the 3.75-inch Vintage Collection series has seen several Mandalorian figures in the past year, the Carbonized Collection updates those figures with metallic paint jobs.
These weren’t the only new Mandalorian toys revealed as part of the first Mando Monday. Baby Yoda is getting his own LEGO set, and he still looks adorable in block form.
If you’ve been having a hard time trying to order the new Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, you’re not alone. Nvidia has issued a formal apology to those impacted by the overwhelming demand for the card.
Nvidia put the new card on sale last week, September 17, and production has been in full swing for the RTX 3080 since cards began shipping to retail partners in August and supply is being increased each week to meet the demand.
Nvidia revealed its next generation of graphics cards earlier this month and immediately had the internet abuzz, and for good reason. The RTX 3080 offers more than twice as much power as its predecessor at almost half the price.
The company reported more than four times the traffic on its website as compared to the 20-series launch, and stated that over 50 retail partners “reported record traffic to their sites, in many cases exceeding Black Friday.”
Many people woke up early hoping to secure their orders only to find the graphics cards were sold out almost instantly, with many taken by bots. RTX 3080s were being listed on eBay shortly after for thousands of dollars above the retail price.
Nvidia is aware of the many bots attempting to place orders and has assured potential buyers that it is doing everything in its power to reduce the amount of successful bot sales.
“This is the first time that we have seen bots at this scale and sophistication,” Nvidia stated in its blog post. “While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship.”
Additional security has been implemented on the backend of its website, as well. “We have been quickly working on numerous security upgrades, including CAPTCHA,” Nvidia said. “We will also continue to manually monitor purchases to help ensure cards get in the hands of legitimate consumers.”
Expect a similar demand for the RTX 3090 which is available to order beginning September 24, but hopefully this time Nvidia’s additional security measures will ensure those eager to purchase the card will be more successful this time around.
Despite premiering last year to critical acclaim, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance has just been canceled by Netflix. According to a report by Gizmodo, Lisa Henson and Netflix have confirmed in separate statements that the show’s first season will also be its only season.
“We can confirm that there will not be an additional season of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” Henson said. “We know fans are eager to learn how this chapter of The Dark Crystal saga concludes and we’ll look for ways to tell that story in the future… We are so grateful to Netflix for trusting us to realize this ambitious series; we are deeply proud of our work on Age of Resistance, and the acclaim it has received from fans, critics and our peers, most recently receiving an Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program.”
“We are grateful to the master artists at The Jim Henson Company for bringing The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance to life for fans around the world,” Netflix said in a statement. “We’re thankful to the executive producers Lisa Henson and Halle Stanford, and Louis Leterrier, who also directed all episodes, as well as the writers, cast and crew for their outstanding work and thrilled they were recognized with the Emmy this weekend.”
As Netflix states, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance won an Emmy over the weekend for Best Children’s Program. However, Netflix being Netflix, its programming and cancelation decisions are, at best, opaque. And as Age of Resistance indicates, Netflix pulling the plug on a program does not at all signal the streaming service is uninterested in continuing to work and collaborate with the talent involved: Henson is involved with the upcoming Guillermo del Toro Pinocchio adaptation, and executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach is working as a writer on Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop.
You can watch the sole season of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance here. The series served as a prequel for Jim Henson’s cult-hit 1982 film, The Dark Crystal.
It’s been a rough couple of years for the WWE 2K series, with the switch port of WWE 2K18 being a nearly unplayable mess and the buggy disaster (on all platforms) that was WWE 2K20, which has led to the mainline series taking a much needed year off. In its place is WWE 2K Battlegrounds, a cartoony and arcadey take on professional wrestling where wrestlers can jump 50 feet in the air, swing opponents like rag dolls, toss them into the waiting jaws of alligators, and so on. On paper, that sounds like an exciting departure from the simulation-focused main series in favor of something more akin to 2011’s underappreciated WWE All Stars… but there’s virtually nothing beyond the flashy animations. It may be easy to pick up and play, but it lacks any sort of depth to either its combat or its roster of 70 wrestlers, a large majority of which are locked behind a microtransaction-infested barrier.
The one thing that WWE Battlegrounds has going for it is that unlike many other wrestling games, it’s immediately intuitive. You don’t have to worry about chain wrestling, timing-based pin minigames, cat-and-mouse submission minigames, how to set up and climb ladders in ladder matches, how to place your opponent on a table in a table match, etc. To tell someone how to play, all you need to do is show them a controller and say “Here’s your punch button, here’s your kick button, this is how you throw, this is how you block, remember to press the button on screen when you get grabbed to do a reversal, and if someone tries to pin or submit you, just mash these buttons.” Done.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=The%20movelist%20for%20every%20character%20is%20extraordinarily%20short.”]This puts Battlegrounds in a unique position of being by far the most approachable wrestling game for complete newcomers in years, but it also comes with a pretty substantial sacrifice. Namely, any semblance of depth or complexity to its combat.
The movelist for every character is extraordinarily thin for a wrestling game, even an arcadey one, with each wrestler only having a small handful of basic combos and throws. Worse still, these moves are copied and pasted onto virtually every wrestler that falls within the same class of either Powerhouse, Brawler, All-Rounder, Technician, or High-Flyer. So Shinsuke Nakamura has almost the exact same moves as the Miz, Charlotte Flair has almost the exact same moveset as Stephanie McMahon, and Triple H has almost the exact same moves as Andre the Giant. There are some slight differences, with a few select characters having one or two moves that are unique to only them, and every character has their own signature and finishing move. But aside from that, these characters play exactly the same.
There are, at the very least, a few meaningful differences between each of the five classes. Powerhouses are slow, but have attacks that can power through their opponent’s strikes; Brawlers can create weapons like steel chairs and motorcycles out of thin air and have extra power on their strikes; Technicians have extremely powerful throws and can even cause limb damage, which will cause opponents to stagger around briefly; High-Flyers can jump off the ropes, use running throws, and get to the top rope faster than other classes; and All-Arounders can do a little bit of everything. It’s similar to what WWE All Stars did with its class system, but here it’s less about defining a style of play and more about defining what specific cool things you can and can’t do.
That said, my biggest gripe with the gameplay of Battlegrounds, aside from the poor hit detection, is the reversal system. It simply gives you way too much time to reverse throws and attempts to balance that by having throws cost a portion of your Heat meter, which is what’s used to execute your signature and finishing moves. As a result, many of my most competitive online matches of Battlegrounds were also among the most miserable: we just took turns reversing everything, with neither of us making much progress toward ending the match.
One final notable wrinkle on the arcadey nature of Battlegrounds’ combat is the powerups, of which you can select three before each match. These are temporary buffs that can either increase the damage of your strikes, give you some health regeneration, or make all of your attacks unblockable. Some are extremely powerful, with my favorite being a buff that adds another layer to the pin minigame, forcing your opponents to mash even faster if they want to break a pin. Of all of the mechanics Battlegrounds brings to the table, powerups are by far the best, and the one that fits best with its overall theme. What it all boils down to is that Battlegrounds’ combat is totally passable as a quick party game that you play for an hour or two and then move on to something else, but measured by any other sort of standard, it falls flat on its face.
To tie those matches together, Battlegrounds has an equally shallow campaign mode. The premise of the story is that Paul Heyman decides to create his own new brand of pro wrestling that has him traveling around the world, recruiting wrestlers, and having them fight in a ring on their own home turf. Thus the Battlegrounds brand is born.
It doesn’t take itself seriously and is fully aware of how cheesy and silly it all is, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it is incredibly cheesy and silly. The art style also lacks any flair or charm, and the characters you control are all as one dimensional as you’d expect, given the fact that they are only given two comic book pages worth of story at the beginning of each chapter to establish who they are and why you should care about them.
The gameplay of the campaign doesn’t do much to pick up the slack dropped by the story either. It’s just a long string of matches against various superstars, with occasional rewards such as new battlegrounds, new power ups, and – most substantially – new characters. Eventually, after hours of the same match types and having to use the same boring characters, I started to lose interest and just worked to mainline it towards the end, which took about eight or so hours to get through.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20currently%20an%20easily%20exploitable%20bug%20that%20lets%20you%20eliminate%20players.”]Things don’t get much better in the other modes, either. Battleground Challenge is basically the campaign mode minus the story, and plus your own created character that you improve via a microtransaction-riddled progression system. King of the Battlegrounds is conceptually a neat idea that challenges you to stay alive as long as you can in a battle royale, with new players being teleported in as others get eliminated, but the problem is that there’s currently an easily exploitable bug that lets you eliminate players without ever having to even go through the elimination minigame by pushing them through the ropes.
Then there’s the usual assortment of match types like steel cage matches, triple threats, fatal fourways, and the like. The problem with all of these is that the gameplay of Battlegrounds is tuned in such a way that characters get up super quickly after getting knocked down; this makes match types like traditional tag matches, Triple Threats, and Fatal Fourways, where the first player to get a pin wins a nightmare because it’s so dang hard to keep everyone down long enough for you to secure a three-count. The mainline WWE 2K series addressed this years ago by forcing you out of the ring and making you take a quick rest if you take too much damage, but Battlegrounds has no such mechanic.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=It%E2%80%99s%20just%20one%20flub%20after%20another.”]And finally, as much as I love Mauro Ranallo and Jerry Lawler, their commentary is brutal to listen to. Not because of their performances – they actually do a great job in bringing their on-camera energy to the voice over – but because their calls are so frequently off the mark. Whether it’s calling out the wrong moves, constantly reacting to something super late, repeating dialogue, or overreacting to a normal move, it’s just one flub after another.
Mobile streaming provider Quibi, or “Quick Bites,” is reportedly exploring options to sell the company just six months after its launch.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Quibi is considering “several options” to keep the company afloat, including going public via a merger, selling, or raising additional funds. THR goes on to say that while a Quibi spokeswoman declined to comment, she did release this statement:
“Quibi has successfully launched a new business and pioneered a new form of storytelling and a state-of-the-art platform,” she told THR, adding “Meg and Jeffrey are committed to continuing to build the business in the way that gives the greatest experience for customers, the greatest value for shareholders and greatest opportunity for employees.”
When the streamer debuted back in April 2020, co-founder Jeffery Katzenberg told the Los Angeles Times he hoped Quibi would become “the third generation of film narrative,” by combining the strengths of movies and episodic television into one cohesive force. The service launched with $2 billion in financial resources, however, the company has seen diminishing returns with 4.5 million initial app downloads and 1.6 million subscribers according to THR.
In our review of the streaming platform, we say, “Quibi checks all the boxes when it comes to its smooth user interface and reasonable pricing but lags behind Netflix and Amazon in terms of quality original series.”
Do you think Quibi still has a fight in the Great Streaming War? Let us know in the comments.
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David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.
Following the mass exodus at Indivisible and Skullgirls creator Lab Zero Games, a group of former developers has founded their own cooperatively structured games studio. Called Future Club and comprising of 15 ex-Lab Zero employees, the studio is worker-owned and committed to creating games with handcrafted 2D art and engaging gameplay.
In a press release, Future Club said it wants to “inspire kids and adults” with games that are “remembered long after their time.” The studio also said its goal is to create “games with handcrafted art and traditional 2D animation, engaging and responsive gameplay, and unique and memorable worlds.”
Lab Zero Games imploded a month ago. Studio director Mike “MikeZ” Zaimont came under fire for refusing to step down amid harassment allegations. As a result, many Lab Zero devs left the studio.
Future Club explained why the co-op structure, in which employees use products for the benefit of its members instead of earning profits for investors, was a necessity. Designer Earl Gertwagen said the model lets Future Club take advantage of game design’s collaborative nature.
“Games aren’t the sole effort of a single developer,” said Gertwagen. “We’re a highly diverse team of 15 developers, including artists, animators, programmers, and designers, and we shipped our past games as a group effort of teamwork and communication. A co-op structure lets us put that philosophy into reality, and gives us all an equal role in shaping our future as a company alongside the games we make.”
Future Club CEO and producer Francesca Esquenazi echoed Gertwagen’s sentiments. In addition to taking advantage of game design’s collaborative nature, Esquenazi noted that the co-op model reinforces the studio’s belief that teams are more than the sum of their parts.
“We wanted to start fresh with a company structure that was worker-owned and gave everyone a say in the future of our organization,” said Esquenazi. “Future Club is an employee-owned cooperative game development studio, established with the belief that strong teams are greater than the sum of their parts. We value open, honest communication with peers, partners, and players, and take pride in our strength as a team.”
Future Club has not announced that a project is in development yet.
Another Bug Off is just around the corner in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The bug-catching event returns for Northern Hemisphere players this Saturday, September 26, and it’s notable because it marks the final Bug Off of the year for Northern Hemisphere islands.
As before, the Bug Off will run from 9 AM to 6 PM. The event is hosted by Flick, who will be stationed in your town’s plaza throughout the day. As you catch bugs, you’ll earn points that can be exchanged for exclusive bug-themed items and furniture, and you’ll receive bug trophies when you hit certain point milestones. You can learn more about the event in our Animal Crossing Bug Off guide.
The Bug Off is a summer activity in Animal Crossing, so the next time it will return in Northern Hemisphere islands is in June 2021. However, Southern Hemisphere players will soon have a chance to participate in the event; the first Bug Off for Southern Hemisphere islands will be held on November 21, and it will return every third Saturday in December, January, and February.
While the Bug Off may be coming to an end this year for Northern Hemisphere players, autumn is just getting underway. Right now, two new seasonal crafting materials–pine cones and acorns–are appearing in trees, and they can be used to craft autumnal DIY recipes. There’s also still a little time left to grab September’s seasonal items, the grape-harvest backpack and moon rug.
The fall update for Animal Crossing is also on the horizon. Nintendo hasn’t yet announced when exactly that will arrive, but the company previously teased that it will introduce Jack, the pumpkin-headed czar of Halloween. And although we don’t yet know when the fall update will roll out, that hasn’t stopped some players from getting ready for Halloween.
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