Author: Trafficblast

After seven years, 2D, anime fighting game Phantom Breaker: Extra is getting a massive update. Titled, Phantom Breaker: Omnia, and it marks the fighting game’s debut in the west.

Phantom Breaker is a fighting game series developed by Mages, the Japanese studio behind visual novels like Steins;Gate. Phantom Breaker is set in Tokyo when a mysterious man known as “Phantom” appears and grants “Fu-mension Artifacts” to fighters he manipulates into fighting one another. The winner of the Phantom’s game will be granted a wish, but the use of the Fu-mension Artifacts threatens to destroy the very fabric of reality.

Check out IGN’s exclusive gameplay in the video below.

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Phantom Breaker: Omnia boasts a roster of 20 playable characters and guest characters, including Makise Kurisu from the Steins;Gate series. Mages is also introducing two brand new characters created for Omnia.

The battle system lets fighters choose between three different fighting styles: Quick, Hard, and Omnia, each with a unique focus that changes how a character plays, and whether their moves focus on speed, power, or mechanics.

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Phantom Breaker: Omnia will also support a complete English dub, or an option to choose the original Japanese audio.

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New publisher Rocket Panda Games is handling bringing Phantom Breaker: Omnia to the west. It’s slated to be released in 2021 digitally for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. A physical edition for PS4 and Switch is planned in partnership with Limited Run Games.

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Matt T.M. Kim is a reporter for IGN.

Big changes are brewing for DC Comics in the months ahead, both in terms of the stories being published and in the company’s response to recent layoffs and editorial restructuring. With many ongoing comics wrapping up over the next several months and the massive Dark Nights: Death Metal crossover steering toward its climax in January, it’s clear DC has something big planned for early 2021. That’s where Future State comes in.

Future State is a two-month event wherein most of DC’s regular monthly comics will be temporarily replaced by a new lineup of limited series and one-shot specials. There’s no one, core Future State comic. Instead, the entire event allows creators to explore the future of the DC Universe, with stories set anywhere from 2030 all the way till the end of time as we know it. And once Future State concludes at the end of February, DC’s ongoing plans for its comic book line will become clear.

While it’s too early to say what’s coming in March, we can shed much more light on the premise of Future State and the various comics involved. Read on to learn more and get the full scoop on how the Superman franchise factors prominently in this event, with plenty of insight from newly promoted Superman Group Editor Jamie S. Rich.

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What Is Future State?

Future State can basically be summed up as the bridge connecting Dark Nights: Death Metal and DC’s more long-term plans for 2021. Death Metal has been exploring the Justice League’s final battle with Perpetua, the dark goddess who birthed the DC multiverse. It’s probably safe to assume Diana and friends will ultimately triumph over Perpetua and her minion The Batman Who Laughs, and that the multiverse will be restored. As writer Scott Snyder discussed at NYCC, the goal of Death Metal isn’t to reboot DC continuity in the vein of previous Crisis events, but to highlight how all of DC’s history matters and carries weight.

That will continue to be DC’s guiding philosophy as the company moves forward from Death Metal. Though before readers see exactly what state the DC Universe is in post-Death Metal, DC is jumping ahead and exploring its future. Future State is a series of interconnected stories – many of them set in the year 2030 but some even further down the DC timeline – that shows us the more long-term ramifications of Death Metal. Again, there’s no one book forming the backbone of Future State. Readers are free to pick and choose which titles or creative teams interest them, but taken as a whole it forms a larger examination of what happens when a newer generation of heroes step up to replace Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

If that sounds familiar, that was also the basic premise of DC’s much-rumored but never formally announced 5G initiative. DC Publisher Jim Lee recently confirmed 5G has been canceled. As far as we can tell (DC declined to comment on this subject), many of those 5G stories and ideas have been repurposed for Future State. But while 5G was reportedly a permanent shift in focus to a new generation of heroes, Future State is a temporary flash-forward storyline. All of the books involved will span anywhere from one to four issues over the course of January and February. That doesn’t necessarily mean these stories and new characters won’t have a direct bearing on DC’s long-term publishing plans.

“There’s so much to do going forward, and so we want to give the readers a couple of months where you will see all these potential possibilities, all of these stories that could evolve out of the current DCU with the familiar characters getting older, finding themselves in new situations or new versions of the same characters as the DC legacy continues to evolve,” Rich told IGN. “It’s really just two months of us letting our creators go wild and be imaginative, while also laying some seeds and some groundwork for what you’re going to see coming.”

The Three Pillars of Future State

The larger Future State event is being divided into three core pillars – Superman Family, Batman Family and Justice League Family. The Superman Family books will deal primarily with Superman’s self-imposed exile from Earth following a disastrous international incident. While the Man of Steel joins forces with a ragtag band of New Gods and other heroes to liberate Warworld, his son Jon takes up the mantle of Superman on Earth. Wonder Woman is also included as part of the Superman Family line, with Future State focusing both on a new Wonder Woman named Yara Flor and returning Amazon heroine Nubia.

The Batman Family books will explore Bruce Wayne’s lasting legacy. Bruce himself is apparently dead in the era of Future State, with Gotham now ruled by a villain named The Magistrate and his vast surveillance network. Future State will introduce a new heir to the Batman name, one who rises up to rally Gotham’s heroes against this new foe. The previously announced Batman series from 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley and Doom Patrol artist Nic Derington is among the stories included in the Batman Family lineup.

Finally, the Justice League Family will take a wider look at the DCU of the near and far future. Readers will be introduced to a new Justice League whose members maintain secret identities even from each other, along with new incarnations of the Teen Titans, Suicide Squad and Justice League Dark. Characters like Black Adam, Swamp Thing, Aquaman and the Green Lanterns will also have their own Future State books.

Future State seems similar to 2015’s Convergence crossover in that it’s a self-contained crossover that allows DC to collectively regroup and prepare for upcoming new storylines and launches. While the Future State lineup will feature some familiar DC creators like Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Luen Yang, Joëlle Jones, Joshua Williamson and Nicola Scott, DC has also tapped a number of indie creators and movie/TV writers who don’t normally dabble in the DC comic book universe. In addition to the Ridley/Derington Batman story (which is one of five tales serialized in the anthology book Future State: The Next Batman), fans can also expect work from Meghan Fitzmartin (Supernatural), Brandon Easton (Transformers: War for Cybertron), Alitha Martinez (It’s A Bird!), L.L. McKinney (Nubia: Real One), Paula Sevenbergen (Stargirl), Siya Oum (Lola XOXO) and Jen Bartel (Blackbird).

You can check out the slideshow gallery below for a full breakdown of the books that make up Future State:

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Superman’s Exile From Earth

While Future State isn’t necessarily intended to be any more or less dark than the present-day DCU (a pointed change from most future timelines featured in superhero comics), it does seem as though the future isn’t terribly kind to Kal-El. For reasons that won’t be immediately revealed, Superman has fallen out of favor with the people of Earth, causing him to leave his adopted home behind and begin a new mission in the stars. The exact reasons for his departure and his newfound mission on Warworld will be revealed over the course of Future State, though Rich was clear all of this builds directly on what writer Brian Michael Bendis has been crafting in the pages of Superman and Action Comics. As he explained, the events of Future State are basically the inevitable result of Superman’s decision to reveal his secret identity and his shift towards defending the universe as a whole rather than just Metropolis or Earth.

“We’re looking at what Bendis has been doing on his books and Superman revealing who he is and starting to extrapolate – what does that mean?” said Rich. “In Future State, you won’t know exactly how Superman ended up on Warworld, but the story in Superman: Worlds of War that Phillip Kennedy Johnson is writing kind of balances that. So you will also see, on Earth, what it means to people to have him gone… does he create a space that inspires people?”

“The childish thing to do with Superman that every boy who wants to tear the wings off flies would do is try to tear him down or make him evil,” said Rich, revealing that some of the ideas being explored here were inspired by conversations with All-Star Superman writer Grant Morrison. “We want to just show that the symbol is greater than any one place or any one populace. Actually, that’s probably a good point to make too. We’re not imagining Future State as this horrible dystopian, ‘everything goes wrong’ [timeline]. Certainly there are books where things are bad and stuff has taken a turn for the worst cause that’s dramatic, but there’s also a lot of hope in this.”

With Superman now a pariah who’s left Earth behind, you might think Lex Luthor would be having the time of his life in the year 2030. But Rich teased that won’t quite be the case.

“We’re actually dealing with that in the Superman vs. Imperious Lex miniseries that Mark Russell and Steve Pugh are doing, who people know as the great team behind The Flintstones,” said Rich. “That has more of a satirical tone, more of a lighthearted tone as Lex Luthor. I don’t know if you remember back in the ’60s and ’70s, Lex Luthor had a planet called Lexor where he would go and hang out because people thought he was a hero there and he’d managed to con them into thinking that Superman was a villain. Now you see the future where Lex is trying to get Lexor into the United Planets and Lois Lane is now representing Earth, and she’s trying to stop him in and how Superman gets in the middle.”

Head to page 2 for plenty more on the strange landscape of Future State, including what happens when Jon Kent takes up the mantle of Superman.

The PS5 UI has been revealed by Sony.

The news arrives as part of a PlayStation blog post, which digs into the new console’s user experience and reveals a few new features coming to the PlayStation 5 when it launches next month.

One of the highlights of the new system is the Control Center, which provides “immediate access to almost everything you need from the system,” and can be summoned by pressing the PlayStation button on the new DualSense controller. From the Control Center you can see who is online, check the status of downloads, manage your controllers and more. A special 11-minute State of Play showcase launched alongside the blog post, providing an in-depth look at the PS5’s UX, which was designed with 4K TVs in mind.

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There’s also a brand new feature called Activities which lets players “discover new gameplay opportunities, go back to things you missed, jump directly into levels or challenges you want to play, and much more.” Activity cards can be accessed directly from the control centre, and some can be viewed picture-in-picture, meaning you won’t have to leave the game to see them.

An example is shown from Sackboy: A Big Adventure, where the user can open up an activity card relating to a level in progress to see objectives they still need to complete. From this menu, they can also find out the estimated playtime necessary to complete the level. If they wish to, players can press resume on an Activity to warp to the chosen level, and if the user is a PlayStation Plus subscriber, they can also get access to Game Help, where if they tap one of the objectives they can see screenshots and video clips that can be pinned to the screen and will guide them towards the solution.

Users will also be able to join parties and games hosted by their friends directly from the control centre, switching between games with pace thanks to the PS5’s SSD. A new media sharing system also allows you to dictate captions for screenshots before sharing them, and screenshots will be shrouded with a spoiler warning for players who may not have seen that part of the game yet.

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Sony also notes that they have “rebuilt the entire software stack form the console to the network” to make the user experience faster. “We believe the less time you spend waiting to interact with the system, the more time you will have to spend playing games,” the article explains.

In other PS5 news, we recently learned that the console’s cooling fan determined the size of the next-gen console.

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

I’ve been living with the Xbox Series X for a few weeks now, and let me bottom-line it for you before getting into details: everything about this console so far screams how serious Microsoft is about not repeating the mistakes of the Xbox One generation. It is definitively more powerful than its primary competitor on paper, it’s not force-bundled with an accessory the market is going to reject (and thus it’s priced competitively), and in practice its design is compact and quiet and it really does beat down game loading times with its SSD drive. To top it off, Microsoft isn’t hyping up any TV- or multimedia-enhancing features either. This is a games machine, full stop. My biggest complaint about it so far is that I haven’t seen anything that’s really put all 12 teraflops to the test just yet.

More specifically, I’ve played a total of four optimized-for-Series-X games thus far, two old and two new: upgrades to Gears 5 and Gears Tactics, the latter of which is new to console players, as well as new releases Dirt 5 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. That’s in addition to the handful of backward-compatible Xbox One and Xbox 360 games I threw at the machine during my first days with it. But for context, none of these are Xbox Series-only releases; all can be played on the Xbox One. That’s a running theme with the entire Xbox Series launch lineup, but I’ll get more into that in the proper Xbox Series X review in a few weeks.

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Dirt and Yakuza I covered separately, but in summary, Yakuza runs at a clean 4K, but it won’t wow your friends. Dirt, too, isn’t quite the showstopper you hope for out of a racing game launching with a new console. It hits 4K/60fps, but Forza accomplishes the same feat on the Xbox One X. Its next-gen trick is a 120hz option, which, while noticeable, isn’t as compelling of an upgrade as I’d hoped for.

As for the Gears duo, Tactics makes a nice transition over from PC, looking and running well at 4K/60fps with speedy loading times into missions. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to a new first-party exclusive at launch in Halo Infinite’s absence. Gears 5, on the other hand, has been continually updated since its release, and on Series X, it continues to shine. Versus multiplayer offers 120hz, and it feels more impactful here than in Dirt, presumably because you have more agency over the camera. To my eye, though, the difference between 60 and 120 isn’t as obvious as the difference between 30 and 60.

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Meanwhile, the Xbox Series X interface is nearly identical to what’s on Xbox One, albeit a bit quicker, snappier, and more animated. If you don’t like the Xbox One’s UI, this update is unlikely to win you over…until you try Quick Resume, which is literally a game-changer – a fast game-changer. Quickly hopping back and forth between several games, right where you left off, is absolutely fantastic, and a feature you’re never going to want to be without again.

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The same can be said of the Series X’s NVME SSD drive. It’s the biggest quality-of-life upgrade the Series X offers. It made an immediate and delightful first impression in my original preview of the console, and with more time, the best thing I can say about it is that you quickly take it for granted because it’s baked into everything. Don’t get the wrong idea – it doesn’t completely eliminate loading times – but they now seem to never get long enough as to be annoying anymore. And if you need more than the 820gb of usable hard drive space that’s left after OS and system files, the $220 Seagate 1TB expansion card looks exactly like memory card used to, but doubles your storage capacity while also giving all of the speed and performance benefits of the Series X’s fantastic internal SSD. It’s pricey, and you do have other options – notably, using a USB 3.1 external drive as a pack mule for games you’re not actively playing. It’s a cost-vs.-convenience tradeoff.

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The new Xbox Series X controller is a bit of a catch-22: it’s not a big change over last generation, but that’s because Microsoft has more or less already perfected their gamepad. I honestly don’t notice the slight ergonomic changes the Xbox team made, while nearly everything else is identical to its Xbox One counterpart. They’re a generation late with a dedicated Share button, but it’s here now, and the D-pad – long the Achilles heel of Microsoft’s controllers – is a hybrid of the standard Xbox One gamepad’s D-pad and the premium disc found on the Elite controller. It will be a net gain for owners of the former, while a step down for those who use the latter. And build quality seems fine, though mine has a spot on the right handle where the plastic gives and squeaks a bit. Just a one-off, most likely, but I’ll mention it anyway. Battery life seems every bit as good – make that fantastic – as the Xbox One gamepad with a pair of AA batteries.

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Finally, let’s talk about heat. I don’t have a laser thermometer to get actual numbers, but the Xbox Series X is definitely warmer than the Xbox One X under GPU load. I wouldn’t personally say it has a heat problem, though. To be fair, we won’t know for sure until these consoles start logging thousands of hours in thousands of real people’s homes, but so far I’m not worried. Does it exhaust warm air out of the top? Yes – it’s designed to. Cool air gets pulled in through the bottom, routed up through the chassis, and the warm air is released through the large vents on the top of the Series X. I pressed my hand into the top of the console and held it there after a long gaming session with Gears 5 and then Gears Tactics. It was warm, yes, and again, warmer than the Xbox One X, but it was hardly enough to make me want to pull my hand away out of discomfort. At idle, in fact, the air coming out of the Series X is barely lukewarm. It’s also whisper-quiet all the time.

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In my opinion, Microsoft’s hardware team has earned the benefit of the doubt here. Ever since the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death scandal, the company has substantially and continuously improved. The bulky Xbox One was arguably over-engineered by design, with its large top cooling fan making sure thermals wouldn’t be a problem. And since then, the Xbox One S and One X took those thermal lessons and applied them to much smaller form factors, with no overheating complaints to speak of.

In all, this console speaks to Microsoft’s focus on building a serious games machine. The Xbox One X also gave off the same vibe, but from a generational perspective, it’s a focus I haven’t seen from Microsoft since the Xbox 360. Now the focus must shift to getting back to something else Microsoft did well in the 360 days: building great exclusive games. The good news there, though, is that once the company does that, it’s got a great console to run them on.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

Microsoft has outlined the list of day-one launch games for the Xbox Series X and Series S, a host of new, next-gen games, as well as cross-gen releases spanning both Xbox exclusives and third-party, multiplatform offerings.

The full list, as revealed by Microsoft today, also denots what games support Smart Delivery, the process by which Xbox players can play the platform-specific versions of each game, even if they play across platforms, as well as what games will be available with Xbox Game Pass. The launch list includes:

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• Assassins Creed Valhalla (Smart Delivery)
• Borderlands 3 (Smart Delivery)
• Bright Memory 1.0 (Smart Delivery)
• Cuisine Royale (Smart Delivery)
• Dead by Daylight (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition
• DIRT 5 (Smart Delivery)
• Enlisted
• Evergate
• The Falconeer (Smart Delivery)
• Fortnite
• Forza Horizon 4 (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• Gears 5 (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• Gears Tactics (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• Grounded (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• King Oddball
• Maneater (Smart Delivery)
• Manifold Garden (Smart Delivery)
• NBA 2K21
• Observer: System Redux
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• Planet Coaster (Smart Delivery)
• Tetris Effect: Connected (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• The Touryst (Xbox Game Pass + Smart Delivery)
• War Thunder (Smart Delivery)
• Warhammer: Chaosbane Slayer Edition
• Watch Dogs: Legion (Smart Delivery)
• WRC 9 FIA World Rally Championship (Smart Delivery)
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Smart Delivery)
• Yes, Your Grace (Smart Delivery)

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While the list does not include any brand-new Xbox first-party games, it does mark Gears Tactics’ arrival on console after its launch on PC earlier this year. It launches alongside Series X and S versions of existing Xbox games like Grounded, Gears 5, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and more. Plus, Xbox players at launch will get some console exclusives like the enhanced Tetris Effect: Connected, as well as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which, while also on current-gen platforms, does not hit PS5 until March 2021.

And this list, of course, does not include the full list of games available for those who subscribe to Xbox Game Pass.

For more ahead of the Xbox Series X and Series S launches, be sure to check out our hands-on impressions of Dirt 5 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon running on Series X, as well as playing some backward compatible Series X games.

An ex-Sega developer has criticized the publisher following the announcement of a repackaged release of a prototype he helped create “under crunch conditions.”

Witch Beam co-founder Tim Dawson took to Twitter to point out that Golden Axed: A Cancelled Prototype – a game launching on Steam as part of  Sega’s 60th-anniversary celebrations – was initially coded by Dawson and a small team in 2012 in an attempt to revive the classic series. Dawson claims that Sega enforced very tough working conditions for the team.

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Dawson and his team were asked to make “a polished gameplay prototype for an internal Golden Axe pitch in about two weeks.”

“This project was my personal nexus of nightmare hours, inept management, industry realisations and heroics achieved with a small team under unreasonable conditions, so it’s an odd feeling to see it surface eight years later without context, credits and with a joke title sequence,” Dawson explained.

The prototype’s development was apparently mired by problems and criticism from upper management.

woke up to the surprising news that Sega is releasing the Golden Axe prototype I coded in 2012 under crunch conditions

At least I’m not alone – this appears to be a surprise to everyone I know who actually worked on it https://t.co/MRmuSFgMlA

— Tim Dawson (@ironicaccount) October 15, 2020

The launch of Golden Axed has surprised some of the prototype’s original developers, who worked on the project almost a decade ago and were not informed by Sega that it would be making a return.

Dawson mentioned that he was working on the game for “14-hour days” amid “7 day work weeks.” and called Sega “parasites” for the tongue-in-cheek description of the game originally featured on its Steam store page, which read as follows: “Golden Axed may be janky, may be buggy, may be an artifact of its time, but it offers a unique glimpse into the prospect of a project that could have been.”

Later, Dawson added to his comments, saying “If you’re excited to play an old prototype, that’s fine! Bunch of people including me worked hard on it. And obviously Sega owns it and any work I did, it’s just a bit weird they’re saying they reached out to the original team.”

IGN reached out to Sega for comment on this story, who provided the following response:

“SEGA Europe reached out to former members of the Golden Axe: Reborn dev team to produce this prototype of the game for Steam as part of our 60th Anniversary celebrations. We wanted to bring the work of the developers at the time to light and celebrate it as a part of our history. Something we didn’t get the chance to do first time around. We certainly didn’t mean to dredge up painful memories for Mr. Dawson and his former colleagues or appear disrespectful. We’ve removed the line from the Steam copy that could have been taken as a slur on the development and would like to reassure everyone that it was intended as a comment on the build we had ported to PC, not the quality of the original work. We’re hoping lots of fans play the prototype and can appreciate the work he and his colleagues put into this developing this prototype.”

Golden Axed is part of Sega’s 60th Anniversary Steam Celebration, which also includes a Streets of Rage/Yakuza mash-up game and a retro battle tank game based on Company of Heroes.

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

Full spoilers follow for this episode.

As Star Trek: Discovery begins its third season, there are several things at stake for the flagship CBS All Access series, both onscreen and behind the camera. For Commander Michael Burnham and the crew of the Disco, the world has been turned upside-down as they find themselves thrown 930 years into the future in a time where the Federation itself is in tatters. And for the Discovery producers, the show is now firmly entrenched in an era of Star Trek that has been heretofore unexplored. There will be no more banging into canon, no more shoehorning the Disco crew’s adventures into an era well-documented for Trek. No, now it’s time for this show to make its own history and to do so from what is essentially a reboot point. Season 3 of Discovery is, perhaps, where Season 1 of Discovery should’ve began.

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And I say that as a fan of the first two seasons of the show. But there’s no denying that placing Disco in the time period just a few years before Captain Kirk took command of the Enterprise (i.e. the years of the original Gene Roddenberry series) often made things awkward, not just in terms of why we had never heard of the Disco before or how it fit into that world, or why its tech looked so different from the finely attuned world of Trek of that era, but also in the show’s own mission statement. The Original Series was Wagon Train to the Stars, about strange new worlds. The Next Generation represented a new era of new worlds. Deep Space Nine took a long, hard look at one particular part of the galaxy. Voyager was lost in space. And Enterprise was about the birth of Starfleet and the Federation. So what was Discovery, when you boiled it down to its essence? I’m not sure even its creators quite knew the answer.

But now here we are, and Burnham and the Discovery have landed in the 32nd century, far from Klingon wars, Red Angels, Captain Pike, and any other Kirk-era distraction. The show now, finally, is on its own and positioned to expand the Trek world in a totally new way.

After a brief tease involving a lonely Starfleet type “searching for signals,” apparently to no avail, the season premiere kick off essentially where Season 2 ended, with Burnham blasting through the other end of the wormhole she created and landing in the year 3188. It’s almost a thousand years from where she originated, but this time period still has roguish, heart-of-gold space pirates, including new series regular David Ajala as Cleveland “Book” Booker. Burnham, in her Red Angel spacesuit, immediately collides with Book’s ship and the two go plummeting to the planet below in a crackerjack action sequence that requires Burnham to do that most fearsome of things… reboot her computer. Terrifying.

The first two episodes of the season were shot on location in Iceland, and the alien landscapes on display here bring the expected, and expensive, high level of production that Discovery has made a mainstay for modern Star Trek. Also expected is Sonequa Martin-Green’s one-thousand-percent approach to playing Burnham, which reaches one of several peaks in this episode when the character confirms with her suit’s computer that her mission from last season — and the reason she wound up in the future — was successful and that, yes, she and her comrades did save all life in the galaxy. Her screams of joy (and subsequently, grief at what she has lost) effectively sell what is, after all, a plot point from mid-2019.

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Unfortunately, the episode loses steam once Burnham and Ajala’s characters meet one another on the ground of this barren world and are forced to go to a nearby alien city-bazaar of sorts that feels better suited to a Syfy Channel also-ran than it does the rest of this hour.

The episode drags during these scenes. For one thing, the setting doesn’t feel particularly revelatory despite this being our introduction to life in the 32nd century. In fact, with its floating holograms and neon-signs, the place could just as easily have been one of the worlds visited in Star Trek: Picard earlier this year. And the tech doesn’t seem all that advanced, like the big guns that form around the bad guys’ hands like glowing vacuum cleaners. Give me a phaser any day of the week. Still, we do get a fun bit with Burnham during this stretch where she’s been drugged and acting very un-Burnham-like (and yet also somehow very Burnham-like).

Martin-Green and Ajala have good chemistry, but amid all their running around what’s really at stake for Burnham, and the season’s arc, emerges. The Federation and Starfleet are essentially kaput.

“You believe in ghosts,” Book tells Burnham. “That badge on your shirt. Sometimes you see a guy with one of those badges getting himself all worked up about the Federation, the old days. The true believers. They can’t handle that it’s gone.”

You see, a catastrophic event took place about a century earlier — no one seems to really know the specifics — called The Burn, in which a huge swath of Starfleet was wiped out in an instant when the chief fuel source used in starships, dilithium, exploded simultaneously, apparently everywhere. Starfleet and the Federation were crippled by the mysterious event and eventually fell apart.

And so Burnham, and the missing in action (for now) Discovery crew, have a new mission: Restore and rebuild the Federation — or at least maintain through their actions the ideals of the organization that they devoted their lives to.

That Book turns out to secretly be rescuing endangered alien species (see, heart of gold) only serves to make Burnham’s collision with him more fateful. With the Federation essentially wiped out by what could perhaps have been an over-reliance on a fuel source (we of course don’t yet know the full story here), and with Burnham’s new partner turning out to in fact be a conservationist, this season seems to be squarely aimed at the here and now of 2020, where our very own planet is burning and where, for many, the bright shiny future that many have hoped for seems further away than it has been in a long, long time. Star Trek: Discovery has positioned itself in Season 3 as a thinly veiled analogue for our own state of being, with Burnham and her crew now charged with not just saving the day, but also saving the very idea of Star Trek itself. Disco has finally found its calling.

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/star-treks-unsung-heroes-animate-this”]

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• The new tech seen in the marketplace on the planet wasn’t too impressive, but Book’s ship is pretty cool with its every-morphing control panels. Ditto the forever-waiting Starfleet figure, who even brushes his teeth with a laser or something!
• Book’s cat Grudge has a thyroid condition, but she’s a queen. (Is she an endangered species too?)
• “I have a friend with red hair-you-cannot-give-her-any!”
• The Gorn destroyed two light years of subspace?! What’s up with that?
• All time travel tech was destroyed after… the Temporal Wars? Quick, cue up Star Trek: Enterprise!
• And hey, where the heck is the Discovery anyway? And how long will Burnham have to wait for them to emerge from the wormhole…?

Ghost of Tsushima‘s huge free Legends update is right around the corner, and it’ll add four-player co-op to the game. Update 1.1 hits October 16, and now developer Sucker Punch has revealed exactly when you can try it out, and how to access it in-game.

According to Sucker Punch, the update will start rolling out at 8 AM PT, October 16. They expect the game to be available in all regions, worldwide, within an hour of this time. For some regions, this will be quite late: if you’re in the AEST timezone, for instance, it’ll arrive at 1 AM on October 17.

Once Update 1.1 has been downloaded, there are two ways to access the Legends co-op mode. You can either talk to a new in-game character, Gyozen, who will be marked on your map, or simply select “Legends” from the main menu.

Taking either of these actions will load up the PlayStation Store, where you can download a free piece of DLC to enable this mode.

From there, you can team up with friends and choose from the four available classes, so make sure you coordinate with some friends beforehand.

The update will also add a New Game+ option to Ghost of Tsushima, which will add some new gear–including a Charm that lets you befriend dogs.

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