In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, protagonist Eivor will be tasked with securing alliances with the existing rulers of ninth century England. After building your settlement at the start of the game, you’ll have the choice of first aligning with Grantebridgescire (kicking off “The Song of Soma” story arc) or Ledecestrescire (kicking off “The Sons of Ragnar” story arc). The former includes a multi-part mystery investigation where you have to oust a traitor, and one of the clues you need to find–a yellow longship–is a bit tricky to locate.
It’s worth noting that you can technically deduce and/or guess the correct answer to the traitor’s identity without finding all of (or any) of the hints. However, collecting all of the evidence certainly helps make the decision easier, especially the yellow-painted longship, as it is the most important clue to find, recontextualizing many of the other pieces of evidence.
Full warning: the rest of this article assumes that you have at least reached Chapter 5, Part 1 of The Song of Soma, titled The Stench of Treachery. We won’t tell you the answer to who the traitor is, but we need to discuss the mission and the area it takes place in to point out the location of the longship.
In the midst of your investigation, Soma will remind you to check the secret underground tunnel, which only she and her three closest companions–Galinn, Birna, and Lif–knew about. Go down the tunnel and follow the clues, which ultimately suggest that the traitor used some yellow paint to color their longship. The trail of wet paint leads to the river, where the longship once sat.
Here is where the game asks you to make a very large deductic leap. Assumedly, you’re supposed to guess that since no one saw the yellow-painted longship, it must have sailed away from the city of Grantebridge. So sail to the right, up the Great Ouse River. Just past Utbech, you’ll hit a fork. Guessing to go to the right–where it’s foggy and easy to hide a ship–is the correct answer. You’ll know you’re on the right track if it starts getting really foggy, and navigation becomes difficult.
Eventually, you’ll break through the fog and discover a small island-like cropping of marshland. You’ll see the yellow-painted longship beached on its shore, surrounded by a group of bandits. For a more exact location, look at the image embedded below.
Kill the bandits and investigate the longship. On it, you’ll find a clue. This clue doesn’t tell you much but it provides context to what you’ll learn interviewing Galinn, Birna, and Lif, as well as the townspeople around Grantebridge if you haven’t done that already. If you need additional help decoding the clues, go to Soma and she will talk with Eivor about what has been discovered and learned.
You’ll know you guessed right if The Song of Soma Chapter 5, Part 2 (titled An Island of Eels) ends with a character choosing to join Eivor’s settlement. If no character joins you and Soma and Eivor leave on peaceful but strained terms, then you guessed wrong. Unfortunately, if you accuse the wrong person, Soma will remain angry and distant towards Eivor for the rest of the campaign.
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Speaking to GameSpot, lead game designer Tony Flame said players on PS5 and Xbox Series X can expect better graphics and smoother frame rates. He also stressed that, because there is cross-gen, cross-platform multiplayer, the studio has spent extra time making sure the game doesn’t give players on more powerful machines an advantage.
“In general, with next-gen, we had to make sure that across the board, people would have a fair experience, no matter what platform they’re on,” Flame said. “So the graphics are going to be a higher fidelity–kind of like on PC. If you have a better graphics card it will run at a higher resolution, it can run higher frame rate. But we’re paying extra care this time because of cross-platform play, that there is no inbalances due to any particular setting; that any setting that’s available on one platform that could give a gameplay advantage is available on another, like the FOV slider, for example.”
For the PS5 in particular, Cold War will use the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback to make the guns feel more realistic by making the triggers rumble in such a way that it feels like a real weapon.
“The DualSense controller is pretty awesome. It’s got new haptic feedback so when you’re pulling the trigger, it’s shaking, every time a gun fires there is a little motor in there that’s firing every time,” Flame said. “There is sensitivity on the trigger that represents the trigger pressure on a real weapon. All of that has been tuned in the game for each individual weapon. So it’s quite a lot to take in, but it’s pretty awesome, and it gives the guns a feeling like they’ve never had before.”
Black Ops Cold War releases on Friday, November 13, for PS4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. Keep checking back with GameSpot for more from this interview and more in the days ahead.
In a big change for the series, Black Ops Cold War will have “synchronized” XP and leveling with Modern Warfare and Warzone, and you can read more about that here.
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The launch of the next generation is almost here, kicking off with the Xbox Series X and S’s release tomorrow. Preorders for the next-generation consoles have been sold out for quite some time, though some retailers like GameStop have announced they’ll have stock online tonight. Computer and electronics store Newegg will also have both the Xbox Series X and S available tonight at 9:01 PM PT / 12:01 AM ET.
Newegg announced the news via Twitter, though the company hasn’t said how much stock it will have. Other retailers have mentioned having “limited stock” on launch day, and it’s unlikely things will be different at Newegg. Because of this, both consoles are expected to sell out very fast, so you’ll want to act quickly if you’re interested. Newegg is also limiting orders by one unit per customer.
Newegg also plans to have PS5 stock available at the same time later this week–November 11 at 9:01 PM PT / November 12 at 12:01 AM ET. The same goes for Sony’s console. If you want a unit, you’re going to have to be punctual, fast, and maybe even a little lucky.
If you’re looking for other ways to get a new console, a number of retailers will have Xbox Series X and S stock online on November 12. You won’t be able to enjoy the console on launch day, but it’ll guarantee you a unit while keeping you safe. The vast majority of retailers are not selling either the Xbox Series X or PS5 in store, opting to accept only online orders to avoid big crowds during the current pandemic.
The PlayStation 5 begins its international rollout on November 12, and while that date fast approaches Sony is still revealing new details about the system. Now, in an extensive FAQ on the PlayStation Blog, we know more about the recording functionality tied to the DualSense’s “Create” button–and it’s even stronger than what the PS4’s innovative “Share” button offered.
The PS5 will automatically capture the last 60 minutes of gameplay–and when you press the Create button, you can choose to “save recent gameplay” to capture it. You can choose the full 60 minutes, or as little as the last 15 seconds, depending on what you want to capture and share.
By default, footage is captured at 1080p with 60fps. However, if you want to manually record a section of gameplay–meaning that you start the recording yourself–you can capture at 4K. This means that getting higher-quality footage requires slightly more forward-thinking.
In the settings, you can select Manual Recording Resolution if your TV is connected to a 4K television or monitor, and choose between 1920×1080 or 3840×2160 resolution. These settings will remain until changed, or if the PS5 is connected to a different television.
As with the PS4, you can easily capture screenshots too, or start a stream from the Create button.
Screenshots and videos are stored in the Media Gallery, where they can be edited, shared, or copied to USB. From a USB, they can be transferred to other devices. Screenshots can be saved in JPEG or PNG format, and it’s possible to grab 4K screens.
The PS5 will also support HDMI-based capture devices, as long as HDCP is disabled. Unfortunately, videos from PS4 cannot be transferred to PS5.
GameSpot has been digging deep into PS5 review units, uncovering the different settings that can be enabled or disabled within the system, and much more in our full review of the system. The PS5 is currently sold-out everywhere, but keep an eye on our Order Guide to nab one when they reappear.
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From the guy who co-created skits like East/West Bowl and the Substitute Teacher on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele have come two of the weirdest and best horror movies in recent memory: Get Out and Us (not to mention his Twilight Zone revamp). We wouldn’t have expected it either, but now, Jordan Peele’s name is all it takes to get us excited about an upcoming film–even if that’s literally all we know about it.
But now we know not only that Peele is working on his next horror movie, we now know when we can look forward to it. Universal set the release date for his next film this week. In hopes that movie theaters will have re-opened and returned to normal by then, Universal has Peele’s next film set for July 22, 2022. That’s just a week after Warner Bros’ third Fantastic Beasts film premieres (without Johnny Depp).
And that’s everything we know about the movie. Peele keeps details about his films close to the vest. Themes of racism unite both Get Out and Us, along with many of the best Key & Peele skits, but the two movies are otherwise different enough that we’re deeply curious about what Peele has in store. Get Out netted Peele an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the two films have grossed an estimated $510 million for Universal.
In addition to directing horror films, Peele has take to producing as well. While his next film is still a ways out, we can look forward to Candyman, directed by Nic DeCosta, in 2021, and a Peele-produced remake of The People Under The Stairs sometime after.
Image credit: Getty Images/Frederic J. Brown
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Exit the Gungeon, which was previously released for PC, Switch, and Apple Arcade, is now coming to the PS4 and Xbox One. The spin-off from Enter the Gungeon, which sees players escaping from dungeons while surviving waves of enemies, arrives digitally this week, alongside a major update for all systems.
Developer Dodge Roll has announced that the game is coming to these systems on Friday, November 13, alongside a new update for all systems. This update is called “Hello To Arms,” which is an inversion of Exit the Gungeon’s “Farewell to Arms” update. Clever.
This update, which will be available from day one on PS4 and Xbox One, adds various new guns and items, as well as an “Arsenal Mode” and something called a “Glocktopus”. We’re guessing that’s an octopus…but armed.
Exit the Gungeon: Hello to Arms Update hits Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, and PC along with launches on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One!
+ new guns and items + new Arsenal Mode + new Shop Hubs + Glocktopus
This is a free update. The game retails for $10 on Steam and Switch, and will likely cost the same on PS4 and Xbox One.
As the tweet above suggests, this is “likely the biggest news” in games this week–unless, we suppose, you’re interested in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 launches. Which you likely are.
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When in doubt, make more movies about people repeatedly trying and failing to kill a character played by Gerard Butler. That seems to be a winning formula, as a fourth Has Fallen movie starring the actor is in development. What started with Olympus Has Fallen in 2013 has become a very successful franchise of films, each one seemingly trying harder to kill secret service agent Mike Banning (Butler).
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the next film in the series will be titled Night Has Fallen. In it, Butler will once more team with director Ric Roman Waugh, who helmed the franchise’s third entry, Angel Has Fallen. That movie’s screenwriter, Robert Mark Kamen, is also returning for Night Has Fallen.
It remains to be seen exactly what kind of situation Banning will find himself in for the next movie. However, the last movie introduced Nick Nolte as the character’s estranged father, teaming the two up. Hopefully, he returns for this film, as well.
While the Has Fallen films might not immediately spring to mind when thinking about the most successful action movie franchises, the first three movies combined have made over $500,000,000 at the box office, proving there’s certainly an audience that wants to see more of Butler defying death time and again. Here’s hoping there are still plenty more movies to come.
A release date for Night Has Fallen has yet to be announced.
Over the last decade, the MCU has done a lot of legwork for some of the more niche Marvel superheroes, elevating them from relative obscurity to household name status with just a couple of big budget blockbusters. But, unsurprisingly, the transformation from comic book character to A-list live action celebrity brings some changes and updates with it. Sometimes they’re relatively minor–solidifying more obscure or esoteric bits of origin stories or shaving off clunky bits of continuity left over from years and years of publication history–but other times, they can practically reinvent the character from the ground up into something almost entirely new.
This is exactly what happened with Vision, Marvel’s charmingly obtuse superheroic robot played by Paul Bettany. Since he’s going on to star in his very own Disney+ TV series, WandaVision, by the end of the year, we figured now was a perfect time to blow the doors off the character’s lengthy and complicated history outside of the MCU. After all, if that first trailer is any indication, WandaVision is going to be jam packed with layers upon layers of some deeply arcane Marvel mythology, so it’s probably best to go in fully prepared to catch everything you possibly can.
For starters, let’s go over the pieces that you probably know already: MCU Vision was first introduced in the second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, where he was sort of accidentally produced by hybridizing Tony Stark’s AI butler, JARVIS, with the Mind Stone–the infinity stone that once lived in Loki’s staff. The specifics here are a little wonky, but it boiled down to an effort to stop Ultron, another of Tony’s creations (in the MCU at least), who was trying to upload his consciousness into a synthetic body. The theory was that Ultron couldn’t take over a body that already had someone or something in it.
Of course, JARVIS-with-a-body gets the name Vision and winds up being a genuinely good guy who, unlike Ultron, wants to fight on the “side of life,” which gives the Avengers the advantage they need to finally take Ultron out once and for all. From there on out, Vision became a regular member of the team, struck up a charming little romance with fellow teammate Wanda, and provided some pretty solid situational comedy to lighten the mood when he could by being a bit befuddled by human culture. You know, standard robot stuff.
Things were a bit less cut-and-dry over in the comics.
Vision’s MCU origin story borrows pretty heavily from his publication history, but the actual story of Vision as he’s seen in the comics is much longer and more bizarre. He first debuted in 1968 after Stan Lee and Roy Thomas decided to add a new member to the Avengers, who at that point had only been in print for about five years.
At this time in comics history, there was a lot of change going on and most of it was extremely fast and loose–character rights and licenses were being bought and sold as publishers cropped up and disappeared and the concept of shared universe continuity was just beginning to really solidify across bigger brands. This meant a lot of the older, Golden Age characters in Marvel’s stable were being rapidly repurposed and reinvented for new stories where they could actually fit into the bigger picture as it developed. This is exactly what Thomas wanted to do with a character from the 1940s called The Vision that had been created at Marvel’s precursor, Timely Comics, by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. This original Vision was an alien also known as Aarkus who was basically a space cop from another dimension.
Marvel Mystery Stories #13
That dimension was called “Smokeworld.” No, really.
Aarkus didn’t really do much in the ’40s aside from briefly team up and assist the Invaders, the team that Captain America originally fought with in World War II, making him an ideal candidate for a modern reinvention. But Lee and Thomas didn’t quite see eye to eye on the revival. Lee wanted a robot character, not an alien, because it was the late ’60s and that sort of thing was very in style. The two eventually reached an old fashioned compromise and settled on making a “new” Vision who would borrow heavily from the old Vision’s design and overall aesthetic, but would be an android rather than an extra dimensional alien law man.
Of course this didn’t, technically, delete the old Vision/Aarkus from Marvel continuity entirely–but you can worry about that some other time. Seriously, he lived in the sewers under New York at one point, it was a whole thing. Don’t let that distract you.
Anyway, because Vision was now an android–or, excuse me, a “synthezoid,” as he was called–it meant he needed a new android origin story. This is where things will start to sound very familiar. Vision was created by Ultron as a weapon against his own creator, Hank Pym. Pym’s wife Jan is the one who coined the name “Vision,” after encountering him and describing him as–you guessed it–“a vision.”
To actually give Vision sentience, Ultron copied the brain wave patterns of a (temporarily) dead former Avenger named Wonder Man, or Simon Williams. This inadvertently gave Vision a sort of proxy-history with the team and its members and meant that Vision was fairly easily convinced to betray his creator and team up with the Avengers instead.
Oh, and his body initially came from the android Human Torch after it was split in two by Immortus, a time traveling future version of the villain Kang the Conqueror, creating one version just called “Torch” and another that became raw parts for Ultron to use like super advanced, android-making legos.
At one point Simon Williams came back to life and basically claimed that Vision’s photocopied version of his brain had actually removed his soul and that he wouldn’t stand for it, turning Vision into a sort of lifeless black-and-white automaton for a while. At another point, he got a new brain pattern copy that merged with the parts of Simon he had left over, functionally rendering him a new and independently sentient artificial human.
Even before that, Vision became romantically involved with fellow Avenger Scarlet Witch, who used her reality-shaping mutation to allow for them to have two twin children named Tommy and William–both of whom eventually grew up to become Young Avengers themselves.
Also their kids died a few times, and at one point were revealed to be soul fragments of Mephisto, one of Marvel’s most common incarnations of the literal devil–it’s a whole situation. To say that Wanda and Vision’s love and family life has never been particularly stable or healthy would be a very dramatic understatement.
All the while, Vision and Ultron continued their game of endless cat-and-mouse rivalry, which resulted in plenty of kidnappings, brainwashings, and attempted re-creations or cloning. Vision’s “operating system” was even used to grant sentience to a suit of armor owned by Iron Lad (a member of the Young Avengers but also a time displaced version of Kang the Conqueror–the same guy who played a vague part in his early origin stories with the Human Torch’s robot body) that caused some chaos for a while.
More than once, he’s been forced to, willingly or otherwise, completely wipe his memory. More recently, he had to delete the “emotional data” he’s stored, resulting in a functional system reset for himself.
All New All Different Avengers #0
This sort of completely bonkers sci-fi nonsense is sort of a running theme in Vision’s publication history, so it’s really no surprise that the MCU went out of their way to simplify things. Basically any time he was thrust into the spotlight or featured as the central figure in a given plotline or story arc in the comics, you knew things were about to get really complicated and weird–from being killed and rebuilt time and time again, to being hacked and controlled by various villains, to being tangled up in all sorts of existential and cosmic insanity.
In more recent years, Vision received a bit of an overhaul with his very own solo series–one of the few in his nearly 50 years of being a supporting player on countless teams–called simply “Vision.” In this miniseries, he was “reimagined” (more in the sense that he was trying to reimagine himself rather than being reintroduced or changed in an by any editorial edicts) as a suburban “husband” and “father” to his newly created synthezoid family: wife Virginia Vision, son Vin Vision, and daughter Viv Vision. Together they lived in Virginia, the state, and did their level best to blend into their white picket fence neighborhood–though their human neighbors were less-than-thrilled and deeply suspicious.
Vision #1
Of course, this mundane existence couldn’t last long and, eventually, Vision’s past came back to haunt him in some very literal ways–almost all of them deeply tragic. But it did serve to emphasize some of the major themes in Vision’s long, strange journey through Marvel history, namely that while characters like Tony Stark may exist to emphasize things like responsibility and recovery, or characters like Captain America may interrogate things like patriotism and duty, Vision is a character meant to change and transform in stories about the nature of humanity. This makes for some messy, confusing, and altogether mind-bending stories, most, if not all of which are wrapped up in a healthy layer of comic book absurdity. But the point and the purpose is always clear, once you manage to uncover it.
So if you’re gearing up for WandaVision, a show that certainly seems like it’s going to be following that pattern with very deliberate intention, that’s probably the best thing to expect and prepare for. Sure, some of the more bizarre and confusing parts will likely be simplified care of Vision’s more streamlined MCU story, but there’s still plenty of potential for waxing poetic on his own humanity or lack thereof. Don’t forget, as far as we know, he ought to still be “dead” after Infinity War, so you know it’s going to come up.
WandaVision is set to premiere on Disney+ in 2020. get some more links down here to stories about upcoming mcu stuff
The Xbox Series X and S consoles are launching this week, but if you ordered from Amazon, your shipment might not make it to you right away. The retailer has dispatched notices to some people to let them know their new Xbox may not arrive until the end of December.
Here at GameSpot, we received an email from Amazon noting that, “We expect to ship your console in the coming weeks as we receive more inventory in November and December.” The email states that, “We anticipate that you will receive your Xbox Series X by 12/31 or before.”
The notice goes on to state that Amazon is making “every effort” to ship the new console as soon as possible. Amazon also apologized for the delay and reminded shoppers that they will receive a notification by email when the order finally ships.
Other people have reported receiving this message, but as always, your mileage my vary. For example, another GameSpot editor has received a tracking number for their Series X ordered from Amazon, so the delays do not apply to all orders. Check your email and Amazon account for the latest information pertaining to your order.
