Category: Games

Bungie is making big changes to the Destiny 2 reputation system in Season 15. In a blog post on Bungie’s website, rituals lead Alan Blaine provided details on the updates coming to the reputation system, aimed at streamlining the experience.

In Season 15, the reputation systems from Lord Shaxx, The Drifter, and Commander Zavala will be renamed Crucible, Gambit, and Vanguard ranks, respectively. The names Infamy and Valor are being retired, while Glory will continue to be used for the competitive Crucible reputation system.

The ranking progression system is being altered as well, to allow players to reset the reputation system faster on average. This is being achieved by removing ritual-specific rules that impede progress, removing win streaks in favor of activity streak bonuses, and standardizing reputation bonus weeks to double multipliers. Blaine said that currently it would take someone who consistently loses their PvP Crucible or Gambit matches three to four times as long as someone who wins consistently to complete their Crucible reset. The new changes in Season 15 will make that more forgiving, so it’ll only take you twice as long to reset if you find yourself on a losing streak. It is now expected that two-thirds of reputation will come from just playing the game but players can progress faster by winning.

Commander Zavala will be getting a full ritual progression similar to what’s already in place for Crucible and Gambit, with Vanguard Tokens being retired when Season 15 starts. Players will earn Vanguard reputation from completing Strikes, Nightfalls, and Battlegrounds, with Nightfalls offering bonuses based on high scores. Zavala will also have a full reputation reward line, like Lord Shaxx and The Drifter, offering powerful rewards every third rank and an Ascendant Shard on the first reset.

Season 15 will introduce activity streaks, which will award bonus reputation for staying in Vanguard activities. The streak also won’t end if you return to the Tower as long as you don’t become inactive for an extended period of time.

Seasonal weapons and ornaments are being moved to the reputation reward tracks for Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit in Season 15. Seasonal challenges are also being updated to include ritual weapon rewards.

Coming mid-Season 15 are some additional changes to the Grandmaster catch-up node. The catch-up node will be available to players as soon as the Grandmaster difficulty is available, as long as you have the Conqueror title but haven’t gilded yet that season. Each Grandmaster Nightfall will be available to select if the fireteam leader has not yet completed the gliding Triumph for that strike yet. Once your title has been gilded the catch-up node will no longer be available.

Season 15 of Destiny 2 launches on August 24.

Xbox head Phil Spencer belives the games industry needs to “come together” behind video game preservation.

This news comes by way of Episode 81 of the Kinda Funny Gamescast, which saw Spencer discuss his desire for the games industry to come together to preserve the history of gaming. He said he doesn’t want to lose the ability to go back and play older games.

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“I really wish as an industry we’d come together and help preserve the history of what gaming is about so we don’t lose the ability to go back,” Spencer said. “As an industry, I would love it if we came together to help preserve the history of what our industry is about, so we don’t lose access to some of the things that got us to where we are today.”

Spencer goes on to cite Xbox Game Pass as helpful in the fight for video game preservation. He discussed how “amazing” it was when Bethesda came in and added so many of its older games to the subscription service.

“It was amazing when Bethesda came in and we were able to put so many of the ‘old new’ games, or ‘new old’ games, into Game Pass, and go back with the legacy that we have with some of the IP,” Spencer said. “Even thinking about things like Rare Replay was a really interesting thing for us to go do, and letting people go and experience some of the old Rare IP.”

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The Xbox head said Game Pass would continue to add older games to the service for video game preservation.

Speaking of Game Pass, it’s easier than ever to access the service now that Game Pass games can be streamed to iOS and Android phones. Plus, Microsoft will bring Xbox Series X|S exclusives to Xbox One via Cloud Gaming.

Elsewhere in Episode 81 of the Kinda Funny Gamescast, Spencer said that Xbox will probably update its controller and it may learn from the PlayStation 5 in doing so.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Call of Duty’s Season 4 Reloaded update for Black Ops Cold War Zombies adds lots of new content with the launch of Mauer der Toten, including a powerful new Wonder Weapon. The CRBR-S Wonder Weapon starts off as an energy-based pistol with an orbiting repeater that fires an extra shot when you fire. To upgrade it into one of three additional variants, you’ll need special weapon Mod Kits that will attach onto the CRBR-S, modifying it into a completely different weapon.

How To Get The CRBR-S Wonder Weapon

There are a few ways to get the new CRBR-S Wonder Weapon in your hands:

While not a guarantee, your odds might be best with the Trials feature. Simply locate and activate the Trials computer terminal on the map, and keep activating and completing trials until your reward reaches the “legendary” rarity status. You might end up getting a different high-end gun or a perk as your reward, but this is going to be a more favorable approach than just getting lucky with the Mystery Box. Your odds are even better of getting at least one Wonder Weapon if you have a full team of four and everyone attempts the trials.

If you feel luck is on your side, you can gamble your points at the Mystery Box, but there are so many guns added into the weapon pool that this is best as a last resort.

The third way is by completing an Easter egg quest. This requires that you’ve first turned on power and activated Pack-A-Punch, as well as activated the robot named Klaus.

CRBR-S Wonder Weapon Quest

Once you have Klaus activated, guide him to the nearby Switch Control Room. There you’ll find a locker with the number 0 above it. Use your Tactical Equipment remote to target the locker. Klaus will open it. Inside, you’ll find a Blacklight flashlight item that you’ll need to grab.

Next, go to the Garment Factory. Shine your Blacklight around the area to discover hidden numbers that are unique to your game. This is completely random as far as where the numbers might appear in the room each map, and also what the set of numbers will be. Write them down.

This blacklight part can get tricky, especially if you’re playing solo. It’s easy to get cornered and killed by the zombies. I recommend using Decoy equipment to distract the zombies while you search. Sometimes the numbers are high up on the walls, and something you’ll get a sneaky spot low on the wall or in a corner.

The second location will be the Service Passage. Use your Blacklight item on the walls here to discover your next set of numbers.

Finally, take the Blacklight to the Grocery Store. Find your final set of hidden numbers.

Once you have all your numbers written down, head back to Hotel Room 305 where you collected the robot hands for Klaus. Inside the room is a safe. You’ll want to enter the numbers you found as the combination–do so in the specific order you retrieved them The safe will unlock and grant you the CRBR-S Wonder Weapon.

The base CRBR-S Wonder Weapon is a powerful laser pistol, and it has a rotating bullet orbiting it that will also damage surrounding enemies. It can be further upgraded with variant mods.

How CRBR-S Upgrades Work

Once you actually have the CRBR-S Wonder Weapon in hand, you can choose to add even more power with modifications. Zombies will randomly drop one of three variant upgrades to choose from:

• CRBR-S Swarm: The Swarm variant fires a swarm of lock-on missiles at targeted enemies when fired. The weapon mod uses 4 ammo per shot, but deals significant damage to offset the extra ammo cost.
• CRBR-S Blazer: The Blazer variant will transform your CRBR-S into a laser rifle, and this one is a pretty powerful upgrade as well.
• CRBR-S Diffuser: The CRBR-S Diffuser variant is more of a close-range weapon good for crowd-control. It fires in blasts similar to a shotgun.

TheGamingRevolution has a great guide that shows each variant in action.

You can also switch up the CRBR-S Wonder Weapon variant at any time, so you don’t have to worry about committing to one specific type. Try them all to find what’s best suited for your playstyle.

If you’re looking for more to do on Mauer der Toten, there’s a really wacky disco bunny Easter egg to unlock as well.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has performed over two-dozen flybys of Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, and now you can watch it from a “starship captain” point of view.

Juno performed the closest flyby of Ganymede that’s happened in more than two decades on June 7. Less than a day later, it performed its 34th flyby of Jupiter. It flew from one of the planet’s poles to the other and it did so in less than three hours, and you can watch that flyby from a “starship captain” point of view below.

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Now, the video is quite breathtaking but it’s important to note that it’s actually a collection of images taken by Juno’s probe camera spliced together with synthetic frames to create the video you see above.

“The animation shows just how beautiful deep space exploration can be,” Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonia, Scott Bolton, said. “The animation is a way for people to imagine exploring our solar system firsthand by seeing what it would be like to be orbiting Jupiter and flying past one of its icy moons.”

NASA says its three-and-a-half minute video animation “begins with Juno approaching Ganymede, passing within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the surface at a relative velocity of 41,600 mph (67,000 kph).” When viewing the animation, you’ll notice some darker regions and NASA says those are believed to be the result of “ice sublimating into the surrounding vacuum, leaving behind darkened residue.”

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You can also see the Tros crater, which is Ganymede’s largest and brightest crater scar.

“It takes just 14 hours, 50 minutes for Juno to travel the 735,000 miles (1.18 million kilometers) between Ganymede and Jupiter, and the viewer is transported to within just 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) above Jupiter’s spectacular cloud tops,” NASA says. “By that point, Jupiter’s powerful gravity has accelerated the spacecraft to almost 130,000 mph (210,000 kph) relative to the planet.”

According to NASA, the video showcases Jupiter’s circumpolar cyclones at the north pole and five of its “string of pearls,” which are eight large storms that appear as white ovals and rotate counterclockwise in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

For more about Jupiter, check out this story about a metallic asteroid flying somewhere between Mars and Jupiter that has an estimated worth of $10,000 quadrillion (don’t worry — that number hurts our brain too) and then check out these beautiful close-up photos of Jupiter revealed by NASA back in 2018.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer, science guru, and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

American Horror Stories premieres, with two episodes, Thursday, July 15 exclusively on FX on Hulu.

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American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s decade-running TV franchise, forever bubbling over with scares and snark, is now embracing the episodic anthology game with American Horror Stories, an earnest stab at shorter quick-bite horror and, even possibly, an attempt to solve some of the lingering woes the regular Horror Story seasons have been suffering from for a handful of years now. The end result here, after a two-part premiere — “Rubber(wo)Man” Parts 1 and 2 — is a story that starts strong but then undercuts its initial bite with a second half that feels too silly and sloppy.

Keeping things within the American Horror Story universe, which officially went full shared universe with 2018’s American Horror Story: Apocalypse, “Rubber(wo)Man” brings us back into Season 1’s Murder House (which also was a big part of Apocalypse and a bit player in other seasons) for a new romp through the ghostly halls of the most haunted manor on the West Coast. And while none of main players from the original Murder House tale are back (Evan Peters, Dylan McDermott, Connie Britton, etc), the story still makes good use of the unique ghostly physics of the place and the new doomed family moving in to try and capitalize on the dwellings’ diabolical history.

It’s not known yet whether or not the remaining Stories episodes will be as overtly connected to famous past American Horror Story seasons or if this is just an “introduction to the new format” deal in order to solidly tether it to the franchise right out of the gate, but the notion works. As American Horror Story grows longer in the tooth and more frequently offers diminishing returns, Murder House is still one of the series’ best regarded seasons. So it’s both an easy and efficient idea to kick off this anthology show with a dive back into this lore-filled landscape.

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When morose teen Scarlett (The Vast of Night’s Sierra McCormick) and her dads (Gavin Creel and returning AHS player Matt Bomer) move into the Murder House with intentions of flipping it into a spooky Airbnb, we’re submerged in a story about a high schooler getting corrupted by the dark forces of the dwelling (the Rubber Man, in particular). As the haunting unfolds, we discover that Scarlett herself comes with a uniquely traumatizing past as well as an attraction to the more violent aspects of BDSM porn. The first episode is then allowed to creepily morph into something less resembling tainted innocence and more embracing dark and dreaded spirits finding, and enabling, one another. Throw in a sprinkling of Stephen King’s Carrie and it makes for a mighty fun morsel.

Part 2 purposefully rocks the boat, though, and disrupts the terror elements, as AHS tends to do, by overcrowding the allegory and making things more ridiculous. It’s always a challenge to balance horror and humor and this franchise has, as the years went on, relied way more on sass and irreverence to assuage audience anxiety and fear. A little of this goes a long way and, sadly, the series tends to use too much of it. Horror can certainly have feel-good endings and moments of righteous redemption, but Part 2 dilutes the mix by propelling Scarlett and her new phantom girlfriend (played by “very obviously Cindy Crawford’s daughter” Kaia Gerber) forward as a pair of psychotic superheroes for a second half that plays more like a comedy.

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McCormick, however, is great and super engaging as the center of these two episodes. Regardless as to how “Rubber(wo)Man” Part 2 wraps up, this is definitely a character who could slip into a different story somewhere else in the AHS-verse and feel quite at home as a comfortable psychopath. There’s Dexter-style quality to Scarlett’s transformation and aftermath and if Stories is at all meant to flesh out the entire franchise’s tapestry, then she’s a very welcome new stitch. Part 2’s issues mostly reside with Bomer and Creel’s characters and their marital drama distracting from Scarlett’s more interesting arc. They’re not unimportant characters, but their relationship implodes somewhat predictably and it sidetracks the whole story. Then there’s other orbiting nonsense involving house ghosts that make the story feel like it’s taking a few steps backwards.

American Horror Stories still may hold the key, ultimately, to this decade-long property’s issues. Rarely able to sustain a full season’s worth of suspense and/or entertainment, American Horror Story feels strained in its middle episodes, even within its better seasons. Here, in short form, it stands a chance of avoiding this. As it also does with the upcoming American Horror Story: Double Feature (yes, there’s still a new season coming in August) where the run of episodes will be divided into two separate stories, thus eliminating some the excess. Even with these shorter takes though, American Horror Story will still be challenged by tonal footing and not having elements and themes unduly devour one another.

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The voice of Tommy in The Last of Us, Jeffrey Pierce, has been cast in HBO’s upcoming Last of Us TV series but he won’t be playing Tommy.

That’s due in part because Gabriel Luna was cast as Tommy earlier this year. Instead, Pierce will play someone named Perry, a rebel in a quarantine zone, according to Deadline. Murray Bartlett and Con O’Neil have been cast in the series alongside Pierce today, too.

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Bartlett guest stars as Frank while O’Neill guest stars as Bill, a couple that Deadline describes as “two post-pandemic suvivalists living alone in their own isolated town.” Anyone that’s played The Last of Us knows Bill is the man Joel and Ellie visit in the booby-trapped town of Lincoln shortly after leaving Boston.

In the game, he lives alone, although it’s clear he’s quite saddened by the death of his partner, Frank. It seems Frank is still alive in HBO’s Last of Us series considering O’Neill has been cast to play him.

Perhaps we’ll witness the events that lead to Frank’s death in the game in this series or perhaps, Frank will survive and he and Bill will live happily ever after (although the world of The Last of Us is not known for being so happily ever after).

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We’ll learn more about Pierce’s Perry when The Last of Us series hits HBO sometime in the future. Production for the series kicked off this month and it will see Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in the roles of Joel and Ellie, respectively. Luna will play Joel’s brother, Tommy, while Nico Parker will play Joel’s daugher Sarah.

While Pierce won’t be reprising his role as Tommy in the series, there is a Last of Us voice actor that will reprise their in-game role in the show. It was announced back in May that Merle Dandridge will repirse the role of Firefly leader Marlene.

For more about this Last of Us series, read about how the first season will be 10 episodes long and then read about how it will cover the entirety of the first game. Read about why The Last of Us movie fell apart after that.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Call of Duty’s Season 4 Reloaded update for Black Ops Cold War‘s Zombies adds the new round-based map Mauer der Toten, and one of the best parts of a new map is discovering all of Treyarch’s fun Easter egg surprises. Mauer der Toten lets you get your boogie on with a fun disco bunny Easter egg that works similar to the Coffin Dance Easter eggs found on the Die Maschine and Firebase Z maps.

There really aren’t any prerequisites for completing this disco Easter egg, other than you just need to have certain areas of the map opened up. If you’ve already followed our guide to opening up the map to turn on the power and activate Pack-A-Punch, then you’re going to be good to go for this quest. However, I’d recommend getting a Pack-A-Punch weapon before attempting this Easter egg, especially if playing solo. The zombies can become overwhelming for the final part of this quest.

Find The Bunny Parts

You’ll need to collect a total of six plushie parts that assemble the Mystery Box rabbit from various locations around Mauer der Toten. The bunny pieces can be found in the following locations:

In the Sewer Access area near some trash:

On a shelf in the Department Store, which is at the Wunderfizz perk location:

On an end shelf in the Grocery Store with some beer bottles:

On a booth seat in the Bar, near the Juggernog Perk machine:

On a desk in Hotel Room 304:

In the Alley near a pile of tires, which is just off East Berlin Street and near the rappel you access for the Garment Factory:

Survive The Disco

Once you have all pieces of the bunny, you’ll automatically be teleported to a new area of the map. You’re transported to a disco nightclub to face off against more of the undead.

You’ll need to survive three waves of zombie enemies, which include elite enemies like Manglers and Mimics. Afterwards, you’ll be able to head onstage where the assembled bunny is located. You can pick between doors 1, 2, or 3 for a reward. The rewards behind the door seem to be a random prize. Some players report getting a golden chest of loot, while others got the Juggernog perk. However, if you’re like me and try to attempt this without Pack-A-Punching first and don’t kill all the zombies in a certain amount of time, you’ll be teleported back to the map with just Power-up rewards like a Max Ammo. So, again, I’d recommend getting a Pack-A-Punch weapon before attempting this Easter egg, especially if playing solo.

If you’re looking for more quests to do on Mauer der Toten, maybe try using our guide to activate the robot ally named Klaus. He can protect you and help reach more areas of the map.

James Gandolfini, a.k.a Tony Soprano, was reportedly paid $3 million to not become the new boss in The Office after Steve Carrell departed the show.

Carrell played Michael Scott, a beloved character in The Office, and his departure left fans sad and anxious about who the new office boss would be. The Office introduced several potential replacements including Deangelo Jeremitrius Vickers, played by Will Ferrell.

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However, it almost went to Gandolfini, according to Gandolfini’s Sopranos co-star Steve Schirripa on Talking Sopranos, as reported by Dark Horizons.

“I think before James Spader and after [Steve] Carell, they offered it to Jim — I want to say $4 million — to play him for the season, and HBO paid him $3 million not to do it,” Schirripa said. “That’s a fact. Jim was going to do it because he hadn’t worked and it was a number of years removed from when the show ended.”

Podcast guest Ricky Gervais then joked that Gandolfini was essentially paid to keep the legacy of The Sopranos pure, according to Dark Horizons.

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We’ve heard of massive paydays to play a role, but a massive payday to not take a role seems a lot rarer. Three million will get you a lot of gabagool, though, so fair play. Maybe Gandolfini used this money in his attempt to recruit Lebron James to the Knicks.

For more Sopranos, check out IGN’s list of the 20 best Sopranos moments and then read this story about how Gandolfini’s son has been cast as young Tony Soprano in the upcoming Sopranos prequel movie. Watch this video to see who’s who in the Sopranos prequel after that and then read what the director of the Sopranos prequel says the movie is really about.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.