EA has temporarily disabled content granting–the ability for items to be directly given to a player’s account–as it continues an investigation into potential misuse of the feature in FIFA 21 Ultimate Team by an employee for personal profit.
The news comes a short time after the company started an investigation to see if one of its own employees had been granting access to rare cards in FIFA 21 to buyers online for hundreds of even thousands of dollars. The community has dubbed the scandal “EAGate,” and leaked messages appear to show someone–possibly an EA employee–explaining to a buyer how they can send these items to their account for the right price.
Because EA isn’t sure who is behind the black market sales yet, and isn’t even sure if it’s actually an employee or someone who compromised an employee’s account, content granting has been disabled for now.
Content granting is used to give out free items during testing and quality assurance phases, as well as for employees, partners, and athletes at certain periods. You likely don’t fall into those groups, but it’s also used in cases where someone accidentally deletes something or has it removed because of some other issue. Because the feature is completely disabled right now, that means these people will also be left waiting before their problems can be solved.
“We know that the trust of our communities is hard-earned, and is based on principles of Fair Play,” EA said in a blog post. “This illicit activity shakes that trust. We’ve also been clear since the creation of Ultimate Team that items cannot be exchanged outside our game, and that’s key to how we keep our game safe from manipulation and bad actors. This is a breach of that principle, as well–and we won’t let it stand.”
Modern Warfare has missing guns, Cold War is taking over Warzone with Zombies, and there’s a new Call of Duty and Battlefield releasing later this year. We’re dedicating this episode to your thoughts, feelings, and comments about what you want to do next.
When Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) launched it invigorated both a lapsed Call Of Duty fan base and pulled in people who used to play Battlefield. The Modern Warfare audience has recently felt pushed aside when Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War took over both the season pass and Warzone storyline. There’s also a rumored nuke event at the end of Season 2 that might finally erase Modern Warfare locations from the battle royale map. While Modern Warfare and Cold War do have their own fanbases, at least for now, it doesn’t look like Activision is accommodating both of them and is favoring Cold War. Players that own a base PS4 might not even be able to fit both games on their hard drive. In our previous, It’s Time To Say Goodbye To Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare episode a lot of you expressed strong feelings about the transition and what you’re doing next.
In this episode, we’re going to dive into your comments as a jumping-off point to talk about the three missing weapons of Modern Warfare, the CX-9, Raal, and Sykov as well as missing operator Soap. We’ll dive into how the Cold War takeover of Warzone is going, zombies event, and some of your fears about the engine. Finally, we’re listening to those of you who are waiting for the next Call of Duty game and why you may wind up back at Battlefield 6 at the end of this year.
People love Genshin Impact, and people love Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unfortunately, a crossover event in China attracted so many excited fans that it was forced to shut down over COVID-19 protocol violations.
As reported by Kotaku, Kentucky Fried Chicken in China was holding a special promotion with Genshin Impact to award special pins to customers who yelled out to employees when purchasing food.
In both the Shanhai and Hangzhou locations, the promotion had to be canceled soon after it began because of COVID-19 protocol violations. Due to the game’s huge fanbase and our collective desire to get exclusive merchandise, it’s easy to see how it could have gotten out of hand. Despite China’s relative return to normalcy–even at the virus’ starting point in Wuhan–the country is taking no chances.
Genshin Impact is one of the most successful games to ever come from mainland China. Studio miHoYo released the game as a free-to-play title on PC, PS4, and mobile, with PS5 and Switch versions on the way. It has received a steady stream of post-launch content and its gacha-style system for getting new characters has made it hugely profitable.
It isn’t the only impressive RPG coming out of China, either, as the action-heavy Black Myth: Wukong is also in development from studio Game Science. Based on Journey to the West–the same classic Chinese novel that served as the loose inspiration for Dragon Ball–its intense combat looks to be on par with what we’ve seen from studios like From Software and Team Ninja.
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Jonathan Ferguson, a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, breaks down the weaponry of Star Wars Battlefront 2, including Han Solo’s iconic DL-44 pistol, the T-21 heavy blaster, and the most quintessential Star Wars gun:, the E-11 blaster rifle.
There’s a lot to know about in Valheim, from crafting, to survival mechanics, to combat and exploration. We’ve compiled a whole lot of guides and walkthroughs that can help lead you through the Viking world of Valheim, and even help you cheat. Below, you’ll find information about everything Valheim has to offer, to help you find Iron, create Bronze, best bosses, and craft amazing gear.
Stay tuned, as we’ll continue to update this list with more and more Valheim guides, tips, walkthroughs, and information as we discover it.
The first thing you’re going to need to do in Valheim is jump into a game world, and if you want to play with friends, you’ll probably need a dedicated server. Here’s everything about how they work.
Console Commands And Cheats
Console commands and cheats will allow you to spawn anything you want in Valheim–but only in single-player.
While Valheim is a game that’s all about survival, it’s also very creative, allowing you to build and customize structures and bases in a way that’s similar to games such as Minecraft. There’s no creative mode in Valheim, but if you wanted to circumvent the survival components–or just cheat in general–we’ve got a guide for that.
Beginner’s Tips And Tricks
There are lots of ways for you to maximize your time in the early game to stay alive and thrive in Valheim.
Starting out in Valheim can be overwhelming, but these tricks will help you hit the ground running and survive in the new world.
Crafting And Armor Guides
There’s a lot you’ll need to know to make great armor in Valheim and survive its harsher climates.
There’s a whole lot to make in Valheim, and climbing the tech tree to make better gear and better bases is essential to staying alive. Here’s everything you need to smith metal and make yourself some awesome armor and weapons.
Animal Taming
Lots of animals attack and try to kill you in Valheim, but you can make a few friends, too. Taming and breeding animals can be a handy source of meat, and with the right animal companions, you can gain some help in combat, too.
Biome Survival Guides
Each of the biomes is tough to survive–here’s what you need to know to stay alive.
Each of Valheim’s biomes is dangerous in its own way, but with these tips, you can survive and thrive as you seek out new resources.
Boss Fight Guides
Your goal in Valheim is to take down its many bosses, like Moder, the frost dragon of the Mountain biome.
All this survival, base-building, and armor-crafting in Valheim has a purpose: You’ve been sent by the god Odin to dispatch his enemies. Each biome has a boss, and each holds key items you need to access new crafting materials and technologies to keep advancing. Here’s how to take them down, either with a team or solo.
First-Person Mod
If you’re not happy with Valheim’s third-person perspective, you can use this mod to give it a bit more of a Skyrim feel and change its camera to first-person.
The official Xbox Game Pass Twitter account is hinting at a new game that’s supposed to hit the service soon, and it seems to be People Can Fly’s third-person shooter Outriders.
According to an email from the imaginary executive senior vice president lieutenant of general video game communications “Melissa McGamepass,” “that new game has been confirmed and is officially coming to the service.” While it doesn’t explicitly state the game’s name, the references to “mysterious signal” and “anomaly” has people talking about Outriders.
In an Outriders story and world reveal from February 2020, a “mysterious signal” is what drives the superpowered militia group to face off against the “anomaly.” At the end of the Outriders demo, players end up chasing a mysterious signal in the distance. These two callbacks are seemingly enough for people to assume that Outriders will make its way to Xbox Game Pass.
This wouldn’t be the first time Xbox Game Pass teased a game coming to the service only for it to end up there later. The same sort of events played out with Control; “Melissa McGamepass” teased the announcement on November 30, 2020, then it dropped on the service on December 3. The service is brimming with all kinds of games and gets new ones frequently, so be sure to check out our roundup of all of the available titles on Xbox Game Pass right now.
Outriders launches on April 1 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Hit up our Outriders preorder guide to learn about what comes with buying early.
The landscape of digital art is being upended by NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to the point where it’s difficult not to have heard the term in passing. But what is an NFT? Why are people spending millions of dollars on JPEGs? And could it change how microtransactions in games work?
Just what is a Non-Fungible Token?
First and foremost, NFTs are intrinsically tied to the blockchain–an online ledger that is maintained by thousands of users globally through the process called mining. Transactions on the blockchain aren’t centralized, so it’s difficult (but not impossible) to edit the ledger to make fraudulent transactions. This is the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin ($BTC), Dogecoin ($DOGE), and Ethereum ($ETH) around the world. NFTs exist on various blockchains, but most being sold are found on the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike the currency, however, they’re non-fungible. That means that one NFT is entirely unique from the rest, unlike the fungible Ethereum, where one coin is identical to all others, thus allowing it to be used as a currency. NFTs, then, are one-of-a-kind in a way, which can explain why they’re being used to verify purchases of digital goods. The goods themselves are specifically unique to the token (an image sold as an NFT can still find its way online for anyone to see) but the token itself is an indicator of the purchase.
So what does an NFT actually give me?
This is where things get a little strange. For example, an artist can choose to mint a piece of digital artwork with an NFT and then sell the token through multiple auction houses. The token itself does not determine who can view the artwork, but rather who holds the rights to it. There’s some grey area here, where the artist can still govern overall ownership and distribution rights, but for the most part, the owner of the NFT is technically the owner of the artwork, even if the image is hosted on Google and available for anyone to right-click and save.
Although not a perfect analogy, you can think of it as someone owning the real Mona Lisa, or a cheap copy made at a novelty gift store. Both feature the same underlying work, but only one is the “real” Mona Lisa. With physical art, there’s more to an original than just being the first of its kind, but with digital art, the difference is almost negligible. A copy of an image, a song, a gif, or anything of that kind can be shared in an unaltered state, diluting the relevance of owning a token to the original.
Wait, why are NFTs valuable then?
Those who see value in NFTs might see the potential to make a profit in the future, as the exclusivity of the token takes on a collector’s status. Others might just want the bragging rights that come with owning the only minted NFT associated with a digital asset, whether it’s accessible to everyone else or not. Although it is technically possible to mint multiple unique NFTs for the same digital asset, it seems most artists aren’t doing this to help preserve the value of the single token that is generated.
Artist Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days is the first NFT sold by auction company Christie’s, selling for $69 million.
Mike Winklemann, an artist known as Beeple, started minting NFTs for his artwork last year, making several sales for thousands of dollars before reaching into the millions. His latest piece, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, was the first NFT sold by Christie’s, a major art auction house. It sold for $69 million, but if you want to save Everdays to your desktop, you can just copy the image tweeted out by Christie’s and do so. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of the difference between purchasing an NFT for an asset, and the asset itself.
Winklemann isn’t alone in the gold rush surrounding NFTs. Musician Steve Aoki sold an NFT to John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, for $888,888.88. The asset was a 36-second music snippet accompanied by a gif, part of which has been shared online. For nearly a million dollars the ownership of the gif will remain on the blockchain as Legere’s, even if the full gif eventually finds its way online and is experienced by millions of other people.
This is definitely finding its way into games, isn’t it?
NFTs aren’t exactly new, and their first big use case was actually in a game. Cryptokitties, which launched in 2017, allows players to purchase NFTs for specific digital cats, which they solely own. These cats can then breed with other digital cat purchases and produce entirely new cats that can then be sold as unique NFTs of their own. This market has generated millions since its inception, with some single cats costing well over a million dollars alone. A curious glance at the website shows that many cheaper cats are simply reskins of the same designs, but the ability to own one for yourself is part of the allure.
CryptoKitties is a game about collecting and breeding weird cats, but uses Etherium and NFTs to create a marketplace for buying and selling them.
If that makes you think about the possibility of NFTs to merge with cosmetic microtransactions in games like Fortnite, Overwatch, or Dota 2, I think it’s safe to bet that there is at least conversation being had over the potential around a system like that. There are already games using NFTs in novel ways, too. The Sandbox is a community-driven creative space that lets users create voxel-based assets or gaming experiences. You could say it’s similar to Roblox, outside of the fact that these gaming experiences all exist on finite virtual land that users can buy using NFTs. The tokens correlate to a piece of land where you can host game creations for other users to visit, with the value of the size and position of the land determined by simple supply and demand.
Mythical Games is planning to use both NFTs and the blockchain in its upcoming PC and console title, Blankos. The studio is designing another game driven by user-generated content, but where items such as cosmetics can be sold in finite numbers. In-game items are transferred to players using NFTs, which can then be resold on a marketplace where the value is determined by the buyers. Think of it as Steam Trading Cards and Valve’s Marketplace, except powered by blockchain transactions for items that come in finite waves.
Can an NFT be minted against anything then? That sounds dangerous
Given that an NFT can be minted for almost anything digital (Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is selling an NFT of the first tweet ever sent, for example) the ease of creating the token has helped give artists the ability to make money via a new platform. But it’s also led to a lot of abuse, which has already started dominating the conversations around NFTs. Artists are finding tokens minted against their art without their consent, letting someone else reap the benefits of a sale without any of the work. It’s also difficult to prevent this right now, given the way in which social media allows digital art of any kind to be shared. NFTs aren’t solving the root problem of copyright online, but they are giving those who would abuse it a lot of freedom to do so.
An official merchandise creator for Among Us recently stumbled upon thousands of NFT sales based on artwork from the game, none of which had been authorized by the studio. This is just a glimpse at the issue thousands of artists are facing, leading to a divide on whether NFTs are the future of digital art collection or a new problem for creators to fight against.
There’s also the environmental impact to consider, which isn’t so much tied to NFTs but rather blockchain technology. Since the blockchain is essentially a ledger maintained by users around the world, requiring computer processing power to authenticate transactions, each one takes up some unit of energy. Combined, studies are showing that the consumption of the overall system is incredibly high, with the Bitcoin blockchain consuming more electricity in a year than the whole of Argentina.
Maintaining the blockchain and facilitating all of the transactions that take place requires incredible amounts of processing power, which incurs large electricity costs. Given that electricity and its generation is still one of the biggest environmental impactors, this has brought the cost of cryptocurrencies to the environment into focus. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said he’s appalled by the harm that cryptocurrencies present to the environment, but also notes that the push towards greener electricity could mitigate it. “If it’s green electricity and it’s not crowding out other uses, eventually, you know, maybe that’s ok,” Gates told the New York Times.
Ethereum is far more efficient than Bitcoin (one of Ethereum’s founders similarly spoke out against the energy consumption of Bitcoin), which means that it’s using less electricity overall on its blockchain than the most popular cryptocurrency on the market. That still does not make it emission-free, however, and it is no secret that popular tokens like NFTs lead to more transactions, which lead to more energy consumption. This also ties into the scarcity of hardware powerful enough for processing the blockchain, which is a big reason why you might have trouble buying a GPU or power supply for your next PC right now.
So where do NFTs go next?
That is the state of NFTs currently, and it’s bound to grow even more now that it’s reached a point of public consciousness that helped propel Bitcoin a few years ago. It’s difficult to say what the future might hold for NFTs as a tangible collector’s item, but for now it’s a bit of a minefield, where you can either sell art to an entirely new, wealthy audience or have even more work illegally stolen from you. And there is no indication of how those problems might be solved just yet.
Haley Bennett (Hillbilly Elegy, The Devil All the Time) will play a new role in Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie, IGN has exclusively learned.
Bennett’s character is unnamed, but we know they will be “key to the past of Cate Blanchett’s character, Lilith.”
In the games, Lilith is a Siren, one of only a handful of people in the Borderlands universe to demonstrate magical abilities – it could be that Bennett’s character will be a part of her gaining or harnessing those powers.
Directed by Roth, produced by Avi and Ari Arad (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Erik Feig, and with the latest screenplay handled by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, HBO’s The Last of Us), it also has some major Hollywood names behind the camera. To shore up the gaming connection, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick are executive producers.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
An Arms graphic novel coming from Nintendo has seemingly been cancelled, if the author’s portfolio is anything to go off of.
Ian Flynn wrote an introductory Free Comic Book Day 2018 issue of what was set to become an entire Arms graphic novel, but as reported by Video Games Chronicle his portfolio now says the project was planned but “unfortunately canceled.” The free comic book’s cover literally reads “Graphic Novel Coming Fall 2018!” and when that Fall came without a trace of an Arms graphic novel, fans began to assume something was up.
Perhaps it had been delayed, but as the years passed by, the general read was that it had probably been canned. Reddit user, Dr-Richie-74, noticed that on Flynn’s portfolio page, it says the following under an Arms section: “Wrote the introductory Free Comic Book Day 2018 issue for a planned, but unfortunately canceled, graphic novel series based on the popular Nintendo fighting game franchise, ARMS.”
VGC discovered that on March 11, someone on Twitter reached out to Flynn to ask if the Arms graphic novel had been officially cancelled. Flynn said he doesn’t think he “can or should say anything in an official capacity.”
I don’t think I can/should say anything in an official capacity.
It seems there’s still no official word on whether or not this comic has been cancelled. Considering, though, that it’s been nearly three years since the free introductory comic book was released and the author behind it is calling it a cancelled project on his portfolio, it’s probably safe to assume this graphic novel is no more.
