Author: Trafficblast

DC has unveiled the panel lineup for DC FanDome, a 24-hour event set to begin on Aug. 22, and among its lineup will be the first look at two long-awaited, rumored, and teased games based on DC characters.

As previously revealed via a single image featuring Superman in the crosshairs of the Suicide Squad, Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham follow-up will be featured in a panel on Aug. 22 at 5 p.m. PT. DC also confirmed the name for the game, a version of which has previously been leaked, to be Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

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The panel description currently reads: “Will Arnett hosts the highly anticipated video game reveal from Rocksteady Studios, creators of the Batman: Arkham franchise.”

Also confirmed to be at DC FanDome is WB Games Montreal’s currently untitled game, the studio’s first since Batman: Arkham Origins. The panel promises an announcement and first look at the game, which has long been teased and rumored to be a Batman game. The studio released teaser images for the game on Batman Day last year, followed by one additional tease of another logo and website earlier this year, only for silence to follow. After E3 2020 was cancelled, reports suggested that WB Games had been planning to show the alleged Batman game at a company-focused E3 showcase.

The Montreal game panel description for now only reads “Gamers! You won’t want to miss this first look at an exciting new game, and Q&A with its developers.”

For several years now, speculation and some teases from the studio have led many to believe WB Games Montreal’s possible Batman game will feature some form of Court of Owls adaptation, but the studio has yet to release any official details about the game.

You can check out the full schedule for DC FanDome – and how to watch it – right now.

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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and is glad that Barrett Courtney will finally know if we’re getting a new Batman game soon. Talk to him about it on twitter @jmdornbush.

The huge Brunhilde lumbers towards enemy lines, a walking dreadnought. Its dorsal mortar thunders before it turns and opens fire with a broadside. It’s commanded by the disciplined, honorable Gunter von Duisburg, who barks orders at his men and demands obedience above all else. I’ve barely spent a few hours with von Duisburg but I feel an attachment to him because his character has been precisely communicated by both action and dialogue. When he leads the naive Prince Wilhelm into combat at the dawn of the great war, I can’t help but be curious about the nascent conflict between the two and where it’s going to lead.

The single-player RTS campaign is a beloved thing, but has become rare in recent years. In Iron Harvest, King Art Games is doing their best to make a campaign that will appeal deeply to anyone who ever loved an RTS campaign. If the preview I played of the first three Saxony missions is anything to go on, Iron Harvest will have enough plot twists, nail-biting missions, and narrative drama to keep me engaged to the end.

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Iron Harvest’s setting, the 1920+ world of polish painter Jakub Różalski, is a roaring engine of diesel mechs and World War 1 themes. It’s an alternate history world where the problems that arose in our own are amplified by the powerful automachines and mechs that stride its battlefield. Fully industrialized warfare is sprung on the people of Eastern Europa and its nations, Saxony, Polania, and Rusviet, as a terrible thing. Saxony is a powerful nation with a proud imperial military tradition; My job was to be the fist of the nation.

The story seems written with a self-awareness of our own history. The characters that populate Iron Harvest know that the war they’re locked into is futile and horrible, but couldn’t be foreseen nor avoided. The Saxony campaign I played used a complex narrative structure of cutscenes, interspersed with flashbacks to the great war in the form of missions, to show how the war had changed the characters—including a hugely satisfying plot twist and a surprising character arc for Prince Wilhelm. I went into the campaign expecting some fun missions, but I got a more interesting and dramatically compelling story than I expect from most games, let alone an RTS.

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But story won’t carry a game on its own. The core of Iron Harvest is a mid-paced RTS similar to Relic’s Company of Heroes or Dawn of War. It’s really somewhere in between the two. It eschews out-and-out lethality in favor of combat that cares more about unit composition and positioning over split-second tactics. Some units very effectively counter others, but even the fastest times-to-kill in the game aren’t faster than you can click the retreat button. To put it bluntly, the plodding mechs aren’t asking you for Starcraft-tier reflexes.

And it works great in single-player. The missions I played had excellent level design that not only showcased the way the game works, but offered up some pretty fiendish challenge at times. Some segments gave you limited units, requiring you to be careful how much damage you took and how you deployed—and especially what weapons you brought to a fight.

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In Iron Harvest, infantry units can swap between roles by picking up new equipment from the ground. That can be weapons another unit dropped when killed or gear that you found in a supply cache. The levels with a limited number of units really shone once I figured out how to manipulate my units by changing gear. I swapped weapons as I went—units would grab shovels to build field defenses, defend them, then pick up grenades off the enemy dead to become grenadiers for a new offensive.

These more freeform mission segments would segue into base-building sections fairly often – either to build up and defend an area, go on the offensive, or both. Capturing resources was never too easy, and it was obvious that the AI prioritized both attacking my base and taking resource nodes for itself. In some missions, it was all I could do to survive waves of attackers as I clawed my way up the tech tree.

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Difficulty made the comebacks and victories all the more satisfying. I loved the final pushes in those games, as the towns I so desperately defended were literally crushed beneath the steel feet of my heaviest mechs going to obliterate the enemy’s stronghold, or capture the final objective. I’m looking forward to seeing more when Iron Harvest releases for PC on September 1.

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Jon Bolding is a contributor to IGN. Talk real-time strategy games with him on Twitter at @JonBolds.

Horizon Zero Dawn launched on PC earlier this month and the former PlayStation 4 exclusive hasn’t had a smooth ride on its new platform thus far. Some notable issues have held back the PC version, but developer Guerrilla Games announced last week that it’s trying to fix the crashes and other technical issues many players have encountered since launch. That begins today, as patch 1.01 is now live.

While the latest update doesn’t fix everything, Guerrilla has outlined some of the high priority issues it’s currently working on. For instance, patch 1.01 fixes some of the game’s start-up crashes but not all of them, so this is something the studio is hoping to address in future updates. There are also some GPU-related hangs during gameplay, performance issues on specific GPUs and hardware combinations, and graphical settings issues such as 4K not displaying correctly or anisotropic filtering not working, that are being worked on.

Aside from this, patch 1.01 does fix a number of issues related to functionality, improved diagnostic data, and more.

“We’re very grateful for all the reports and posts from our players so far,” Guerrilla said in a post on Reddit. “Some issues still need more investigation and testing, so our team is hard at work on the next patch which will go live next week. If you are experiencing issues, please continue to send us your crash reports; additionally, you can go here to report any other problems you might encounter.”

Horizon Zero Dawn PC 1.01 Full Patch Notes

Known Issues

In addition to the issues identified previously, we’re working on a number of high-priority issues:

• Some players are experiencing startup crashes. Patch 1.01 fixes a few, but not all, of these crashes.
• Some players are experiencing GPU-related hangs during gameplay. The improved diagnostic data collection added in Patch 1.01 is aimed at making it easier to track these down.
• Some players are experiencing graphical settings issues, such as Anisotropic Filtering not working, 4K not displaying correctly, or HDR not working correctly.
• Some players are experiencing performance issues on specific GPUs or hardware combinations.
• We’re aware of and continue to investigate all issues in this list on Reddit as well. Thank you to u/EvilMonkeySlayer for compiling this for us.

Patch Notes

Crash/Hang Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the game would crash if the SteamUI didn’t initialize properly on startup.

Functionality Issue Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Concentration and other slowdown mechanics wouldn’t work for everyone.
• Fixed an issue where Windows/Steam profile names containing special characters would prevent some players from saving the game. We are still investigating other saved game issues as well.
• Fixed an issue where Windows/Steam profile names containing special characters would prevent some players from saving screenshots in Photo Mode.

Other Fixes

• Added improved diagnostic data collection when submitting a crash report.
• Fixed several backend issues.
• Fixed a video corruption issue for specific hardware. We’re continuing to look at other hardware configurations as well.

Dying Light: Hellraid is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The latest piece of DLC for Dying Light–the six-year-old open-world zombie game–is actually a revival of sorts for developer Techland. The studio was working on a fully-fledged Hellraid game before it began development on Dying Light, but the project was ultimately put on hold as the team consolidated its resources to focus on the future of its zombie game.

Now it lives again like the reanimated corpse of a famished zombie. Hellraid begins with the discovery of a mysterious arcade cabinet in the basement of Dying Light’s first hub area. No one in the Tower knows where it came from, but it opens up a gateway to another realm that transports you from the familiar streets of Harran and into a demon-infested dungeon.

You’ll wield medieval swords, axes, and hammers to fend off the hordes of skeletons and otherworldly monstrosities out to kill you. There are bounties to pick up to earn additional prizes for repeated runs through the dungeon, and the whole thing can be played either solo or with up to three other players.

Techland initially began work on Hellraid after wrapping up production on Dead Island. The game was revealed and originally intended to launch in 2013, but was eventually delayed with a re-engineered version due to launch on Steam Early Access in 2014. That never happened and the game was put on hold in 2015 as it failed to meet the developer’s own expectations. There was, however, a mobile game called Hellraid: The Escape that launched in 2014.

As is par for the course with anything brandishing the Hellraid name, the DLC was actually delayed, too. Techland originally planned to release it in July, but delayed the launch after gathering feedback during its beta.

Hellraid is finally out now, though, and Dying Light owners can purchase the expansion for $9.99 / £7.99 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The full game is still on hold but it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing it anytime soon. Techland is currently working on Dying Light 2 and “a new, unannounced IP.”

Dying Light 2 currently has no release date after being originally scheduled to launch sometime in Spring 2020. Since then, however, the game was delayed indefinitely, with Techland writing, “We need more development time to fulfill our vision.” The studio also cut ties with writer Chris Avellone amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment.

Lazlow Jones, a veteran writer, producer and radio show host for the Grand Theft Auto series has left the studio after nearly 20 years.

As spotted by Grand Theft Auto YouTuber GTAMen, Jones’ LinkedIn profile details the split, noting that he left the company in April 2020 and is now working on a number of  in-development shows for Disney and Netflix and “consulting for a video game company.”

Lazlow Jones worked on many of Rockstar’s most popular franchises such as Red Dead Redemption, Bully and Grand Theft Auto. You may know him best from his in-game work, scripting and hosting many radio shows across the Grand Theft Auto series, lending his voice to V-Rock in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Chattersphere in Grand Theft Auto V.

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Jones’ writing partner Dan Houser most recently left Rockstar Games in March of this year, after founding the studio with his brother Sam in 1998. Sam Houser remains Rockstar’s company president.

In other Grand Theft Auto news, it was recently revealed that GTA 5 will be coming to next-generation consoles in “the second half of 2021.” You can also check out what exclusive content is coming to the next-gen versions of GTA Online. We also know from internal sources that a new GTA is in development at Rockstar.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter

After laying down a clunky but promising foundation with their first UFC game in 2014, EA Vancouver has done a respectable job of iterating and improving on each new entry over the last six years. That tradition continues in EA Sports UFC 4. It focuses on making its many complex systems a little less intimidating for newcomers without ever taking away from the depth of its multi-layered combat, thanks to a new grapple assist system and a much improved career mode that does a better job of teaching the basics of the many facets of mixed martial arts. Some of the larger ambitions of career mode fall a bit flat and the ground game still feels like it could use some work, but all things considered, UFC 4 is a win for MMA fans.

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Unlike UFC 3, which dramatically revamped the entire striking system, UFC 4 is more about small but necessary adjustments as opposed to grand overhauls. The biggest difference this time around is the clinch game, which no longer just feels like a stand-up version of the ground gameplay. Instead of having to navigate through clinch positions just to get to a spot where you can escape, all you have to do to break a clinch is move away from your opponent. You’ll likely still eat a few shots, but as long as you have room to back up, breaking a clinch is much easier to do. That said, if you get caught in a clinch with your back against the fence, you’ll find yourself in a very tough spot, especially against a fighter that excels there.

It’s a smart change, as it makes the clinch game feel like a natural extension of the standup combat rather than its own separate minigame. With this new system you can very organically go from strike to clinch, and from there decide whether you want to attack the head, attack the body, push the opponent up against the cage, or, for some fighters, even go for a standing submission ala Jon Jones vs Lyoto Machida.

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The other big change this time around is with submissions, which has actually been split into two different types of minigames: one for chokes and one for joint submissions. Both minigames are essentially a race to be the first one to either fill up the submit meter or the escape meter. For chokes, the attacker must fill the submit meter by using the left stick to move a bar around a circle in an attempt to cover the defender’s bar. The defender, meanwhile, fills their escape meter automatically as long as they’re not covered by the attacker. For joints the concept is basically the same, except you use the triggers to move your respective bar left and right. The big challenge for the defender is that your bar increases in size the more you move, so just wildly spinning the control stick or spamming the shoulder buttons like a wild person doesn’t work. That rewards a more careful, cat and mouse-style mind game when compared to the much more erratic gate submission system of prior games.

Another really cool addition is that some fighters that are especially skilled on the ground can even gain opportunities to counter certain submissions with either a slam or even a counter-submission, like a Von Flue choke. Not only is this awesome because it’s very true to the actual UFC experience, but it also balances the risk/reward factor of going for a submission when you’re not in a dominant position somewhat.

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Finally, EA Vancouver also introduced a grapple assist system for those that might not know their full guards from their half guards, their side controls from their mounts, or their rubber guards from their mouth guards. When using grapple assist, instead of transitioning to specific positions while on the ground, you can just choose to transition based on what it is you want to do. If you want to move to a position that allows you to get up, just keep on pressing up on the right stick until you’re able to get up. If you want to ground and pound, keep on pressing right to eventually transition to a position where you can do some ground and pound. And if you want to do a submission, just hold left and you’ll transition to a position that lets you perform a submission.

It’s not ideal, because sometimes you need that extra level of specificity to land better ground and pound or get access to better submissions, but for those who are just picking the game up for the first time, it’s a great shortcut to start having fun without having someone explain to them what all the different positions mean, which ones have submissions, and which ones you can get up from. Of course, there’s also the legacy control scheme along with a new hybrid control scheme that combines the two, allowing you to transition to specific positions with the right stick and use the more general assist transitions with the left stick, which is a nice compromise.

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Outside of those big changes and a couple of other small control adjustments, the gameplay in UFC 4 is largely the same, which for the most part is fine. UFC 3 already did a great job of revamping striking, but the ground game still feels largely unsatisfying in UFC 4. Ground and pound strikes still lack impact, despite having dis-proportionally loud sound effects; the guessing game of transitions and transition denials is still incredibly unintuitive without the guide arrows, which are removed in online play regardless of whether you’re playing casually or in ranked; and there’s still no feedback provided to let you know why you failed a transition, leaving you to guess as to whether it was because you were too slow, you hit the wrong direction, your opponent had grapple advantage, or any of the other factors it could be.

The Life of a Fighter

UFC 4 treats its career mode as an onboarding tool to get new players very quickly up to speed with the basics, and in that way, it’s very successful. After getting your ass kicked in your very first amateur fight, you’re taken under the wing of fictional former UFC fighter, Coach Davis. Davis serves as an extended tutorial that walks you through the various facets of MMA, and importantly, after every lesson you’ll have an amateur fight against an opponent that specializes in that discipline, allowing you to really soak in what he teaches you.

After you get through all of your amateur fights, UFC 4’s career mode settles into the familiar groove established in UFC 3’s career mode. You get a fight offer, you choose how to spend your 100 weekly points leading up to it, and then you fight. The best new change this year is in the fighter evolution system that allows you to improve specific moves simply by landing them in a fight or in training. The more you use a move, the better it will get, letting you craft a fighter that truly feels unique to you. Bumping a move up to the next level also awards you with evolution points that you can use to improve your overall stats and add powerful perks that further define your strengths.

There’s a lot of stat building and decision making that takes place in between fights, but thankfully it’s all good fun because you really do see the effects of your training paying off. It also helps that the training itself is fun since it’s mostly two-minute sparring matches – even if it’s a little too easy to knock your training partners out cold.

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Less effective is the emphasis on player choice in the story, which feels a little half-baked. Occasionally throughout your career, you’ll be given opportunities to choose how you respond to certain social media posts from fighters, or how you react to certain events, such as a fighter pulling out of a fight due to injury. The idea is that these decisions create rivalries and storylines between you and other fighters, but because all interactions are handled through short social media posts in a submenu, I never really cared about any of them. There is a gameplay element to it all, in that, if you have a bad relationship with a fighter, you won’t be able to invite them to your gym and learn one of their signature moves, but the trade off is that when you potentially fight down the line, there will be more hype to it. None of that ever really made much of a difference for me though, because there are already so many other fighters to invite to your gym, and the fighters that I did start a beef with early on never resurfaced once I started climbing the ranks.

A big historical problem for the UFC series was the huge difficulty spikes once you got into title contention, which thankfully are no longer an issue this time around. You’re able to set your difficulty right from the start, which stays pretty consistent all throughout as long as you’re being diligent about upgrading your fighter, though the moderate difficulty AI seems to not quite understand how to escape from submissions. You are also able choose whether you want to retry a fight, or accept the consequences of the loss and continue on with a blemish on your record, which is a nice choice to have, especially since some of your ultimate “Greatest of All Time” goals are tied to getting consecutive wins.

Mixed Martial Modes

UFC 4 thankfully removes the sleazy Ultimate Team Mode of prior UFC games, and though it doesn’t replace it with anything nearly as substantial, there are at least a couple of fun new stages that are refreshingly different. There’s a new backyard arena that feels especially fitting for cover athlete Jorge Masvidal, along with a very Bloodsport inspired Kumite arena, complete with over the top sound effects and cheesy music.

There’s also a new Blitz Mode that serves as a fun little distraction for online play. In Blitz, the rules are constantly changing every few hours. One ruleset might involve only having one round that lasts for one minute, another might have you playing a best of three game of knockout mode. It’s a cool idea, and one that I wish I got to spend more time with, though unfortunately there just weren’t that many people playing in during the EA Access First Trial period.

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UFC 4 also introduces Daniel Cormier to the commentary team who does a wonderful job and serves as an excellent replacement for Joe Rogan, even though I could probably do without him and Coach Davis repeating the same line about fighting being chess instead of checkers over and over again.

Lastly, while UFC 4 still looks pretty good, it’s a little disappointing to see that so little has changed in the game’s looks over the last six years. While there are a few new animations added into the mix, these are largely the same takedowns, slams, and strikes that we’ve seen before. There’s a little bit more face deformation this time around during slow-mo replays, but knockouts are still lacking a certain magic that the Fight Night series captured a console generation ago.