Category: Games

IGN is delighted to exclusively reveal Knight Fever, a brand new level coming to Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout Season 2.

Designed as an episode-opening race, ideally featuring 60 players, of which 75% will qualify, Knight Fever is a long, crowded gauntlet through a selection of Season 2’s new medieval-themed obstacles. You can check out a video of Knight Fever in action below:

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Like other races, Knight Fever is split into distinct sections, each with different obstacles to overcome (and you can check out concept art of the full level below). In turn, those obstacles are:

• Two uphill sections outfitted with spinning blades and holes in the floor
• Two sets of spinning logs covered in patterns of spikes
• A downhill slime slide, also covered in spinning blades
• A stretch of ground with holes on the floor and swinging, spike-covered logs
• Three sets of drawbridges that open and close erratically
• The finish line!

Knight Fever’s been designed as something of a “skill check” for players who’ve mastered Fall Guys over the last 2 months since release – don’t go in feeling too confident, essentially. You’ll be able to learn a lot more about Knight Fever tomorrow, as we have a full making-of the level with two of the game’s designers coming up.

Knight Fever is just one of a number new minigames coming in the medieval-themed Fall Guys Season 2. The update will also add medieval and fantasy-themed costumes, nameplates and titles, and be a little more generous with the crowns it doles out.

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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].

Ghost of Tsushima‘s 1.1 update arrives next Friday, October 16, developer Sucker Punch has announced. The free update introduces a wealth of new content to the open-world action game, including the previously announced Legends multiplayer mode, a New Game+ option, and more.

Sucker Punch shared more details about the incoming content in a PlayStation Blog post. The aforementioned Ghost of Tsushima: Legends is a co-op mode that features two-player story missions as well as a four-player survival missions, with a Raid game type coming “in the weeks following launch.”

Once you’ve installed Ghost of Tsushima’s 1.1 update, you’ll need to download the Legends unlock from the PlayStation Store. You’ll also need to have an active PlayStation Plus subscription to play it with others.

As previously announced, Legends is inspired by Japanese mythology. Unlike the main game, it does not feature Jin, but rather a character of your own making. Your character can be one of four different classes: samurai, hunter, ronin, and assassin. You’ll choose one of these classes when you first begin Legends, unlocking the remaining ones as you progress through the mode.

Sucker Punch says Legends is “packed with new cosmetics.” All of these will be earned through gameplay, so the studio assures there won’t be any microtransactions. You’ll unlock rarer and more powerful gear as you complete more difficult challenges, and new techniques will be earned as you gain experience with each of the classes. Sucker Punch also says Legends will arrive with its own set of Trophies to unlock; these will be listed separately from the main game’s Trophies and won’t count toward its Platinum.

In addition to Legends, Ghost of Tsushima’s 1.1 update introduces a New Game+ mode that will let you play through the entire adventure again with all of the techniques, gear, and other items you’ve earned in your previous playthrough. You’ll also discover some new elements in New Game+, including a special horse that boasts “a vibrant red mane and unique saddle,” as well as new charms and a new type of flower called Ghost Flowers. You can exchange these flowers for more elaborate armor dyes.

The Falconeer is one of the games that will accompany Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S when it launches on November 10, optimized for that next-gen consoles to create a more graphically rich experience. An open-world air combat game that also allows for deep exploration, The Falconeer will use Xbox Series X technology to make its ocean world of Ursee more detailed and vibrant.

“Over the last few days I’ve been adding more and more ships to the harbors with absolutely no impact on the game’s performance, and that’s the sort of thing you can do with this new generation – richer worlds, with more detail and life,” developer Tomas Sala said to Xbox Wire. “The extra performance on the next-generation Xbox and a high-end PC means developers can make worlds feel more alive.”

Two other aspects of The Falconeer that Sala focused on were the frame rate and resolution of the game, which runs at 4K and 60 FPS on Xbox Series X. At that frame rate and resolution, Sala said that The Falconeer achieves a level of graphical clarity akin to gazing at fine art in your living room.

“In my opinion I believe 60fps should be a foundational feature of the next generation,” Sala said. “As a maker I don’t accept that 30fps is sufficient for action games with high-intensity gameplay, like you experience during dogfights in The Falconeer. Achieving 60fps on previous generations required compromises and sacrifices you won’t have to make next-generation – sacrifices to AI, to visuals, to background simulation, to the scale of your open world, to levels of detail. 60fps is a must, and a huge benefit to players.”

“But if I run a game at 6K or 8K I can pause the game and it’s like having a piece of art in your living room. It’s so crisp! The other one is 4K… but also 6K and 8K! It’s funny, because when you look at a television, you can always tell you’re looking at a TV, because even on high-quality screens you can see pixels and jagged lines and stuff. But if I run a game at 6K or 8K I can pause the game and it’s like having a piece of art in your living room. It’s so crisp! I think that’s wonderful, and I think players will be blown away by the clarity and crispness of games at higher and higher resolutions.”

The Falconeer will be one of several launch games for the Xbox Series X and the Series S. If you’re curious to know more about the console, you can check out GameSpot’s hands-on impressions with a preview build of the Series X.

Cyberpunk 2077 has reached a production milestone, as CD Projekt Red announced that the game has “gone gold.” The studio took to Twitter to mark the occasion, with a promo image showing Keanu Reeves’ character Johnny Silverhand holding a gold Cyberpunk disc.

Going “gold” is an industry term to describe finalizing and certifying the game code that is pressed to retail discs. It usually comes shortly before a game’s release date, to allow for production time, but it signifies that official work on the base game is completed. The work doesn’t end there, though, as many modern games also come with day-one patches that may squash some remaining bugs or add quality-of-life fixes and tweaks. Going gold also makes the possibility of another delay pretty low, given that it’s already been delayed several times.

For CD Projekt Red, that last stretch has come under scrutiny recently, following reports that the studio had instituted mandatory extra work. CDPR studio head Adam Badowski referenced the game nearing completion in his statement confirming the crunch period.

“These last 6 weeks are our final sprint on a project we’ve all spent much of our lives on,” Badowski wrote. “Something we care for deeply. The majority of the team understands that push, especially in light of the fact that we’ve just sent the game to cert and every day brings us visibly closer to shipping a game we want to be proud of.”

CDPR hasn’t outlined what to expect in a day-one patch, but those details will likely come closer to launch. Cyberpunk 2077 is coming on November 19 to PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Though it will be playable on Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5, it won’t be native to those consoles. CDPR has promised free upgrades coming to the next generation, but has not set a release target for those versions. For more details, check out our Cyberpunk 2077 preorder guide.

While Team Fortress 2 was one of the biggest games around in the late 2000s, many gamers probably don’t even give it a second thought in 2020. Yet somehow the classic game reportedly attracted more players than it has in years, thanks to its Halloween event Scream Fortress XII–though observers caution not all of the players logged are real people.

As noticed by PC Gamer, tracking sites such as SteamCharts and SteamDB show TF2 recently hitting a new number of concurrent players–though whether that is an all-time record is unclear. SteamCharts shows a new peak player count of 130,548 logged this October, beating a previous high of 117,917 in August 2012. However, the site’s data only begins in 2012, five years after TF2’s launch.

That’s not to say the numbers are insignificant for a 13-year-old game, but there is reason to view the specific number with some skepticism. While Scream Fortress XII adds a few new Halloween-themed cosmetics and maps, it’s largely comprised of recycled Halloween content from years past. The real answer for the surge, according to Twitter user @Stamosxd, is bots. Of the 130,000 odd players logged, only around 25,000 are real players, as shown by Teamwork.TF’s server-based player tracking.

Bots have become a big problem for TF2 players in recent years, possibly in part due to efforts to farm items that can then be sold on Steam’s marketplace. To combat the problem, some have taken to creating “extermination bots,” which are intended to hunt down other bots to stop them from ruining the game experience for human players.

Call of Duty: Warzone Season 6 has kicked off with a new limited-time game mode, called Recon: Armored Royale. In it, several squads comprised of four players each will be dropped onto the Verdansk map with an armored vehicle and armed only with a pistol.

The vehicle itself is more heavily armored than a regular cargo truck, comes equipped with a fortified gun turret located above the driver’s cabin, and a custom buy station that will allow for repairs and upgrades.

The trucks are also capable of reviving downed teammates, provided that it is still operational and is within a safe area for an operator to respawn into, as the Gulag will not be around in this mode. Respawns will also be disabled after the sixth circle collapse and should your truck be destroyed you’ll also lose the ability to cheat death.

While players won’t need their truck to survive along with them, the upgrades that can be purchased for it makes the vehicle a tactical advantage in this last team standing mode. The turret can be upgraded to deal more damage, more armor can be purchased for the truck, and a UAV upgrade adds a radar sensor that will reveal enemy positions nearby.

Recon: Armored Royale isn’t the only new content coming to Call of Duty: Warzone. Players who reach battle pass tier 18 will receive the Edward Finishing Move, a sneak attack that allows them to summon a vampire bat to bite attack an enemy.

In other Call of Duty news, Activision recently detailed the Zombies mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War ahead of its launch on November 13 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and Series S. For more on this year’s latest Call of Duty game, check out our preorder guide to learn about the bonuses and editions that will be available.

Even if The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim isn’t the most ported game in history, it certainly feels like it. While not an official port, Redditor Mr_Murdoc managed to get Skyrim running on a tiny OLED display fitted to a keyboard, showing how the game’s opening scene looks at a minuscule resolution.

The keyboard is a SteelSeries Apex 7 TKL, and while it doesn’t have the hardware to run the game itself, it does have a tiny screen that can work as a monitor. The display is usually used to show keyboard functions, though it can also be used to play videos or gifs. Mr_Murdoc explained that the game as shown in the video is actually playable, however, and involved using a program that would mirror the game as it ran on their main monitor.

The graphics look pretty similar to Skyrim on a pregnancy test, though that version was just playing a video of the opening scene.

In 2018, Todd Howard famously told gamers “if you want us to stop releasing [Skyrim], stop buying it.” Hopefully he doesn’t take the popularity of the Reddit post as demand for a keyboard-native version of Skyrim.

Elder Scrolls 6 was officially announced by Bethesda in 2018, though news about the sequel is still thin on the ground. As Bethesda was recently acquired by Microsoft, there’s been a question of whether Elder Scrolls 6 will now be exclusive to Xbox and PC, though Microsoft seems to be looking further than console exclusivity with the acquisition.