Category: Games

Destiny 2‘s Presage Exotic mission will earn you Dead Man’s Tale, a new Exotic scout rifle. But if you want to further improve the gun with its Exotic catalyst, you’ll have to take on a much tougher version of the mission, while also seeking out a whole lot of secrets aboard the Glykon. Here’s how to get the Dead Man’s Tale catalyst, what it’s good for, and how to unlock it quickly.

Earning the catalyst requires you to complete Presage at least twice, but you’ll get faster progress on the catalyst if you’re willing to run it several times. There are a lot of moving parts involved with the new Exotic quest, however. It seems that you’ll want to run the mission at least once a week to get the maximum speed out of your catalyst progress.

We’ve got plenty more coverage of the Presage mission, including a complete guide of how to access Presage and how to uncover all of its secrets, and a rundown of all of the hidden lore found within it so far.

Step 1: Get The At Your Fingertips Exotic Quest

Once you’ve cleared Presage once and unlocked Dead Man’s Tale, Zavala will have a new quest for you, called At Your Fingertips. The Exotic quest sends you back to the Glykon, where Presage takes place, to explore it more thoroughly. It also unlocks the Master difficulty version of the mission, which has a suggested Power level of 1320. You’ll want to make sure you’ve geared up to handle the more-difficult enemies found within.

Step 2: Complete Presage On Master Difficulty

This is where the fun beings. Presage on Master has a suggested Power level of 1320, making the enemies found within drastically tougher to defeat than in the standard version–which is already no picnic. The tougher mission also includes a bunch of new modifiers, including Match Game, which makes it almost impossible to destroy enemy shields unless you hit them with the same element type. Finally, Master difficulty Presage includes a 25-minute timer, so you’ll need to sprint through it as quickly as you can; make sure you know the route through the mission very well or you’re going to fail a lot.

Master Presage also includes the Champions: Mob modifier, which suggests the mission will spawn extra Champion enemies throughout. At least in its first week, this doesn’t seem to be the case–the mission actually includes no Champions right now. It’s not clear if the inclusion of Champions: Mob is a mislabeling and the mission is not supposed to include Champions, or if it’s bugged and no Champions are spawning. Either way, you might want to complete it as soon as possible, before Bungie has a chance to patch it and make it even tougher.

We highly recommend you bring a full three-player fireteam for Presage on Master difficulty, especially if you’re not at max Power level. The mission is tough primarily because it’s easy to get overwhelmed thanks to Match Game and because the timer can end your run even if you’re doing well. Having three players also allows you to bring a variety of weapons to bear in the mission.

As far as loadout, we recommend bringing along powerful boss-killing weapons. We had the best luck with at least one Anarchy, which allows you to do sustained damage to the Locus of Communion boss even after you escape from the lower section of the boss room during the fight. Ticuu’s Divination can also be highly effective for clearing out weaker enemies with massive explosions. Hard Light is an obvious choice for knocking out enemy shields, and sniper rifles such as Succession from the Deep Stone Crypt raid can be very effective for taking down distant enemies who can make your life difficult.

Note that the final fight is almost all enemies with Solar shields on the top floor, and Arc shields on the bottom floor, so plan accordingly. You only need to defeat the boss within the time limit.

Finish the mission and return to Zavala to complete At Your Fingertips and earn the catalyst. You’ll now need to fully progress it in order to unlock its benefits.

Step 3: Search For Hidden Caches In Presage

There are two ways to complete the Dead Man’s Tale catalyst. First, you can rack up kills with the weapon–but that’s likely to take a while. Another method (arguably even slower, though) is to advance the catalyst by finding secret caches hidden throughout the Presage mission. This is a bit of a process in and of itself, but each cache you find will give you approximately 12.5% completion on the catalyst, allowing you to make significant leaps in unlocking it.

How To Unlock Presage Caches

There are seeming a lot of hidden caches aboard the Glykon, and you can find them in the Presage mission, but you can’t always access them. They’re marked by small datapad consoles you’ll find on the ground near locked doors; interact with the datapad, and the door opens, revealing a chest. The thing is, you can’t interact with the datapads until you accomplish a specific goal that seems tied to the lore book that drops from Presage completions, called Captain’s Log.

After the first time you complete Presage, you can re-run the mission to unlock new versions of Dead Man’s Tale with different perks. Completing the mission once per week after your first run also unlocks a page of the Captain’s Log lore book. At the end of each lore entry is mention of a hidden cache, so it seems like you need the lore page before the cache will become accessible to you. It appears that you can get one new lore page per week, per account.

Here’s where you can find the caches that are available in the mission so far.

Hidden Cache 1: Inside The First Vent

Right after you find the entrance to the ship by platforming around the side of it, you’ll enter a tight, red-tinted ventilation shaft. Watch for a vent cover you can shoot out on your left, covered by some of those weird Darkness vines. Inside is the datapad and your first locked door.

Hidden Cache 2: In The Floor

Keep moving through that first set of vents and you’ll walk right over the second hidden cache. It’s in a hallway painted blue along the path back to the front door of the Glykon, still in the first set of hallways after you enter the vent from the outside.

We’ll continue to update this list as more caches become available.

What The Dead Man’s Tale Catalyst Does

Like all Exotic catalysts, the one for Dead Man’s Tale significantly changes how the weapon works, adding new benefits to using it. First, the gun will now drop Orbs of Power whenever you score multikills, which can allow you and your teammates to earn your Super abilities more quickly.

The catalyst also adds a new perk that increases the gun’s hip-fire rate, making it fire very quickly when you’re not aiming down the sights. The catalyst also does away with the targeting penalty you’d normally suffer for not aiming, making it possible to score headshots with the gun a lot more easily. Essentially, this makes Dead Man’s Tale very similar to another well-loved Exotic, The Last Word, allowing you to unload on targets from the hip with a high degree of accuracy. The catalyst increases the lethality of Dead Man’s Tale quite a bit, especially in PvP situations.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Season 2 will launch on all platforms on February 25 at 12 AM ET, or 9 PM PT on February 24. However, the content varies a little bit based on the game you’re playing. It introduces new multiplayer modes and maps, new weapons, and new zombie-themed challenges across both games. Read on more for about what Season 2 has in store, including a link to the patch notes where you can find a full breakdown.

In the case of Call of Duty: Warzone, there’s a rolling update happening on February 24 between 9 PM PT and 11 PM PT. The Outbreak content will last until March 5, so you won’t want to wait to try it out.

For Black Ops Cold War, updates are also rolling out to prepare for the full Season 2 launch, and you can gain immediate access to the new Death Machine scorestreak reward as well as other minor cosmetic additions.

What’s In Season 2?

You can check out a full breakdown of the Season 2 update, including the patch notes. Along with the addition of the Apocalypse map, Gun Game, new featured playlists, Death Machine, and Outbreak, the update also makes several changes to League Play and other quality-of-life changes across nearly every aspect of both games. Even Dead Ops Arcade 3 got some love with changes to events and a number of gameplay fixes.

If you’ve been champing at the bit for a new mid-range graphics card from AMD, your prayers may finally be answered on March 3rd.

AMD has just announced it will reveal the latest addition to its Radeon RX 6000 graphics family on March 3rd. At 8am PT/11am ET/4pm UK/2am AET, users will be able to tune into the livestream on AMD’s website.

The computer CPU and GPU maker promises its event will continue the journey for RDNA2, the architecture behind AMD’s latest Navi graphic cards for gaming PCs as well as the graphics processors found inside of the Xbox Series X and PS5. We strongly predict that AMD will announce a new or several new graphics cards to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3060.

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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam

Nintendo Switch owners can snag a free copy of Ghosts ‘n Goblins if they claim it by February 25. It comes as part of Capcom Arcade Stadium, which is a digital arcade that you can fill with a bunch of classic Capcom games. The arcade collection comes with 1943: The Battle of Midway, and there are additional game packs you can purchase it. You can claim Ghosts ‘n Goblins below–just sign into your Nintendo account, then “purchase” it.

Ghosts ‘n Goblins is one of Capcom’s most beloved retro games, and while it did release on the NES and multiple home computers, Capcom Arcade Stadium focuses on the company’s arcade titles. That means you’ll get the arcade version of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which is considered by most to be the superior version.

This giveaway ends on February 25, which also happens to be the day that Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection releases on Nintendo Switch. It’s an all-new game in the series that uses the same engine as the recent Resident Evil remakes. Despite that, it retains the series’ classic 2D gameplay, paying tribute to its past and creating new surprises at the same time.

After over a year of internal overhaul on Anthem, EA and BioWare have decided to stop development on the 2019 action-RPG, and move on to other projects.

In an announcement today penned by executive producer Christian Dailey, he explains that the decision to quit work on Anthem was motivated by a mixture of the impacts of COVID-19, and a desire to focus on other BioWare projects, like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

“2020 was a year unlike any other however and while we continue to make progress against all our game projects at BioWare, working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before COVID-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams,” he wrote.

“I know this will be disappointing to the community of Anthem players who have been excited to see the improvements we’ve been working on. It’s also disappointing for the team who were doing brilliant work. And for me personally, Anthem is what brought me to BioWare, and the last two years have been some of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career.

“Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.”

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Dailey also notes that Anthem’s existing live service will continue running as it is now for the foreseeable future.

Anthem had a rocky launch, plagued with bugs and criticism that while its combat was interesting, its story was a grind and its endgame didn’t have the chops to sustain the game long-term. As the game stumbled through 2019, EA ultimately opted to overhaul Anthem in late 2019, taking over a year to completely change the game’s core loop and systems like loot, quests, and social elements. Earlier this month, EA reportedly reviewed the state of the game and subsequently made the call to cease development at that time.

In an exclusive interview with IGN, EA chief studios officer Laura Miele offered her thoughts on the shuttering of Anthem development, contrasting the decisions EA had made in regards to the game’s overhaul with those it made on Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Battlefront 2 was successfully overhauled post-launch based on community feedback, if not perhaps as dramatically as Anthem was planned to be.

“What’s really important about Battlefront 2 is we said we were going to do something,” Miele explained. “We made a commitment to players and we needed to act on what we said we would do, so our teams are clear, if we publicly say we’re going to do something we must deliver. Creating new content for games can also come to a natural conclusion for various reasons and when that happens we try to be as transparent as we can with the community and explain why.”

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Miele then pointed to Battlefront 2’s community post-launch as an example, saying that even though the game’s community had asked for more post-launch content beyond what DICE was going to deliver, the studios were keeping that feedback in mind for future Star Wars games.

In contrast, while Anthem also had a community interested in its overhaul, Miele says that ultimately the best decision based on the resources BioWare has at their disposal was to focus development on its other games instead.

“We’ve believed in Anthem every step of the way, we’ve invested in this game for close to a decade and we’re proud of the work the team has done,” Miele said. “Starting with the game’s launch two years ago, the team at BioWare has listened to player feedback and brought updates and improvements to the game.

“However, 2020 and 2021 are unprecedented years when it comes to game development, so we must prioritize both the player experience and what’s best for the people working on these games. We want to make sure BioWare is able to focus on making the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect games the best they can be, while also continuing to provide quality updates to [Star Wars: The Old Republic]. That’s ultimately the best way we can be in service to our players, focusing on these fan favorites and delivering on the communities’ expectations.

“Anthem was a creative risk and its challenges have taught us a lot about game design and even how we can improve our development process. This not only benefits developers, but players as well.”

Miele talked at length about EA’s relationship with its game communities and goals to adapt based on fan feedback in the rest of our interview as well, which you can read here.

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.