Apex Legends Season 9 launched to an enthusiastic response from players–but developer Respawn’s servers weren’t prepared for just how enthusiastic they would be. Since the season’s release earlier today, players have faced an array of problems with Apex Legends due to overloaded infrastructure, including extreme difficulty getting into matches.
Respawn has been sharing its progress on rolling out fixes all day today on Twitter, but it has yet to fully squash the issues plaguing its servers. In its latest tweet, Respawn stated that unlocked characters and marketplace services should be returned to normal soon. In addition, some players have increasingly had success joining matches, but the problems seem to persist for others.
It’s always a shame when server issues pester a game during a launch window like this, but scaling server infrastructure is always extremely hard and Respawn has committed to focusing on regaining stability. We’ll update this story when all of the issues are resolved.
Call of Duty: Mobile may not capture all of the headlines that the full Call of Duty releases do, but it nonetheless has accumulated a huge audience. Activision has announced that the game has passed 500 million downloads across mobile platforms since its launch in October 2019.
This is an enormous number of players in comparison with the console entries, which generally top out around 30 million in sales. Unlocking that many more players is likely a huge reason why Activision pursued a mobile Call of Duty at all, as it has undoubtedly brought in millions of new people to the series.
It’s also been very lucrative for the company. As Activision revealed in its earnings call, the free-to-play game has brought in over $1 billion since its launch from in-game transactions. Its rate of growth may actually be accelerating, too. It took a year for the game to cross 250 million downloads and reach $500 million in revenue; it took just six months to double those numbers again to their current values.
In addition, we are–not surprisingly–getting another full release this year. Although next to nothing is know about it, Activision confirmed a new Call of Duty is coming to consoles and PC later this year. It’s in development at Sledgehammer Games and will have integration with Warzone.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Hot on the heels of their Castlevania Season 4 trailer, Netflix has released a collection of new images for the gothic action-horror show ahead of its release next week.
The images show us most of the show’s principal characters, from Trevor and Sypha getting ready to fight, to series antagonist Carmilla wielding a blood-red blade. Plot details are light. Here’s the synopsis offered up by Netfilx:
“Wallachia collapses into chaos as factions clash: some attempting to take control, others attempting to bring Dracula back from the dead. Nobody is who they seem, and nobody can be trusted. These are the end times.”
Gallery
The series is based very roughly on the plot of 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System game Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. It follows Trevor Belmont and his vampire-killing whip as he befriends young sorcerer Sypha and Dracula’s wayward son Alucard. The trio works with them to defeat the legendary vampire in his teleporting castle. With the big man out of the way, vampires like Carmilla and other powerful magic users like Isaac have their own designs on seizing power.
Castlevania is hitting just a couple weeks after Netflix’s bloody anime Yasuke, telling an (almost entiretly) fictionalized version of the historical figure’s life. Castlevania Season 4 was written by Warren Ellis before the sexual misconduct accusations came out against him last summer. As a result of Ellis’ departure, Netflix has decided to end the series with Season 4, but has a spin-off in pre-production.
Castlevania Season 4 brings the series to an end when it hits Netflix on May 13.
May the 4th is about celebrating treasured Star Wars memories, some of which you might want to capture in the future with deals on two Star Wars-themed instant cameras. From both Fujifilm and Polaroid, these instant cameras give you a new way to personalize your pictures with instant exposure film with Star Wars borders or keep it sleek and subtle with camera designs that pay homage to the film series without projecting that love out to everyone around you. The Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 Star Wars camera is on sale for $61 (down from $116) while the Mandalorian-themed Polaroid camera is down to $85 from $120. If you’ve got a Star Wars fan in your life, either of these would make a great gift as well–don’t forget Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend.
The Fujifilm Instax is one of the most recognizable instant cameras on the market today, with the company’s Star Wars-branded model on sale at Amazon. The cream and blue coloring of the Instax Mini 9 doesn’t immediately scream a galaxy from far, far away, but the BB-8 and Rebel Alliance embellishments really drive it home if you somehow miss the iconic title font on the front of the camera. This bundle also comes with two packs of film, each of which features Star Wars borders on the credit card-sized pictures. This is a great gift to capture any future Star Wars memories.
The Polaroid Originals Now I-Type camera is quite different to the Instax, featuring a far more nostalgic design that includes autofocus, double exposure, and an accurate flash. In that sense, it’s a far more accomplished camera in this market, but what makes this one special is the subtle Mandalorian styling that will make it stand out from the rest of the colorful range. The camera features the series’ title on the front, as well as The Mandalorian’s signet on the top. With the gunmetal and brown finish, it looks the part, too. This model doesn’t come with any film, but Polaroid also sells The Mandalorian-styled film packs separately.
Both deals are in celebration of May the 4th, which has already been bursting with great Star Wars deals for all sorts of gadgets. There’s a R2-D2 mini projector that even makes the same sound effects as the droid did in A New Hope, a great chance to save on Star Wars: Squadrons and Star Wars JedI: Fallen Order, and even the chance to grab your own Tauntaun sleeping bag that thankfully doesn’t smell like the real thing. I’m sure Han Solo would’ve preferred that at the time.
The enemy outnumbers us two-to-one and reinforcements are still days away. The raucous Gaul army is at our gates, baying for blood; each enemy soldier is coated in white and blue war paint and a select few operate battering rams that’ll plough through our modest wooden defenses in a matter of minutes. The scent of death is in the air and we’ve got no choice but to stand our ground and fight. “One of you is worth any number of them,” bellows our general, shattering the tense silence with an impassioned war cry. “We face adversity, a band of brothers, dedicated to the warrior’s code of strength and victory,” he continues, rallying the troops. “But we will never know defeat while we stand together! This day we add another triumph to the history of our people! We will be honored as men!”
Whether you go on to achieve victory or succumb to overwhelming odds, moments like this are part of what made Rome: Total War such a beloved strategy game when it launched in 2004–and why its popularity still persists today. It put Total War on the map and laid the groundwork for what has since become a blockbuster series in the strategy genre. With Total War: Rome Remastered, developer Feral Interactive has updated Creative Assembly’s seminal title by overhauling the visuals and adding a number of quality of life improvements that make it slightly more appealing for modern sensibilities. Under the hood, however, this is still very much the same game as it was back in 2004, for better or worse.
Total War: Rome Remastered hasn’t messed with this engaging setup, although you can now play as the other 15 factions without having to unlock them first–unless you’d prefer to do it the old-fashioned way by defeating each faction during the campaign as one of the Romans. When it comes to upgrades, the most obvious ones are visual, with improved lighting and more detailed terrain making both the battlefields and world map pop with added vibrancy. Environments are still overly sparse, which does make battles fairly lackluster to watch unless elephants are hurling soldiers 30 feet in the air, and the updated units aren’t nearly as impressive either, falling some way short of the graphical fidelity we’re used to seeing in modern Total War games. As a trade-off, however, Total War: Rome Remastered does feature an experimental “Extreme” setting for unit sizes, allowing you to partake in chaotic battles with an overwhelming number of forces, provided your hardware can handle it. Though loading times are still lengthy no matter which unit size you choose–even if you’re running the game off an SSD–which can make the campaign fairly laborious at times.
Gallery
Most of the other changes revolve around the UI and improving its readability. A new faction summary gives you immediate access to basic information such as your allies and enemies, number of family members, and your rankings for military, population, and so on. Meanwhile, quick lists allow you to see a useful overview of all of your settlements, armies, agents, and fleets, with all of their relevant stats included. There are also a number of new screens for the world map that give you information on the current state of your campaign at a glance. This includes color-coded factions so you can quickly see who owns what, where specific resources are, and the location of fortifications such as chokepoints and watchtowers.
All of these changes make it easier to engage with Total War: Rome Remastered’s empire management. You’ll spend most of your time choosing how to improve your settlements, whether that’s opting to invest in your city’s infrastructure to increase population growth and boost public order, upgrade trade to receive immediate income, or build military structures to amass an army and gain access to new units. You’ll also need to micromanage the various agents at your disposal, such as spies that can infiltrate enemy cities to learn about their infrastructure and units, and potentially open up the gates if you decide to try and seize the settlement for yourself. Or the newly added agent type merchants, that can be placed in settlements to generate income or placed on resource nodes to monopolize whichever material is located there. You’ll also have to contend with rioting, diplomacy, and bribes, appoint governors and generals, and so much more. Rome: Total War’s strategic depth has remained intact, and there’s now a modern tutorial that makes it easier to digest if you’re a newcomer or revisiting the game again for the first time in 18 years.
Unfortunately, the real-time tactical battles don’t hold up quite as well as the empire management. These skirmishes are clunky, particularly in cities where the AI pathfinding struggles to navigate with any semblance of rhyme or reason, and they lack the dynamism of modern Total War battles. The main culprit for this is the enemy AI, which is easy to trick and defeat with adept use of your cavalry units and obvious feints. It’s too passive to put up much of a fight, and its use of simplistic tactics turns most battles into a dull slog. All of this contributes to making the auto-resolve button more tempting than it should be.
It’s difficult to recommend Total War: Rome Remastered to anyone who didn’t already play and love the original game as the series has significantly evolved for the better over the past 18 years. A new lick of paint and some quality of life improvements aren’t enough to make this remaster an appealing option for newcomers when better Total War games already exist. That’s not to say it doesn’t deserve its place either. At this point, Rome: Total War is unaccommodating on modern hardware, so this remaster solves that issue with an improved and updated version of the original game. It might not stack up against its contemporaries, but Total War: Rome Remastered is the best way to play a series classic, warts and all.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director of The Witcher 3, has resigned from CD Projekt following workplace bullying allegations, which he denies.
As reported by Bloomberg, CD Projekt had been conducting a “months-long investigation in to accusations of mobbing, a Polish term for office bullying,” against Tomaszkiewicz. The commission that was formed to investigate these allegations found him not guilty, but Tomaszkiewicz decided to still leave the company as there was clear discomfort between him and other members of the studio.
“Nonetheless, a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me,” he wrote. He apologized to staff “for all the bad blood I have caused.”
“I am going to continue working on myself,” he continued. “Changing behavior is a long and arduous process, but I’m not giving up, and I hope to change.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined CD Projekt as a junior tester in February 2004 to work on The Witcher, and has worked on all three Witcher games and was the Design Director, VP of Game Development, Secondary Game Director, and Head of Production on Cyberpunk 2077.
I’ve built a few advanced LEGO sets, many for IGN. But building the new LEGO R2-D2 was challenging and difficult in a way that those builds were not. This is not a build designed for multitasking, where you can watch a movie or browse social media while constructing it. It demands your undivided attention, which for many LEGO enthusiasts, is as good an excuse as any to buckle down and shut out the ambient noise and distractions. You don’t have to ask me twice.
The prior Ultimate Collector Series R2-D2 nailed the character’s iconic color scheme, but not the rounded, smooth design of the body, an essential component of its lovability. The new R2-D2, released in celebration of Lucasfilm Ltd.’s 50th anniversary, rectifies this with giant, smooth plating, built separately from the model, that hangs on the underlying LEGO Technic skeleton via cross pins. The build is a rectangular prism. But it does an excellent job at communicating the illusion of roundness and hiding its seams.
Like the prior model, the new R2-D2 contains hidden components in its chest cavity. Side flaps fold back to reveal its utility arms/probes, which it uses to fix machines, redirect elevators, and turn off garbage compactors. Additionally, this model has an interactive dome, which can rotate 360 degrees. There’s a compartment for Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, which R2-D2 launched to his master at the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi. There’s also a hidden, retractable periscope on the back of the droid, which R2-D2 used to find his bearings after falling off Jabba’s sail barge.
The model has a retractable third leg, but can easily balance on two legs. To switch from two-leg to three-leg mode requires you to lift the model, manually bend the body backwards, and set it down again in its new configuration. All of the hidden features in this model are manually performed; there are no remote, battery-operated functions, which would have added considerably to its $200 price tag.. It comes with a plaque that recognizes the aforementioned 50th anniversary, plus a factoid sticker detailing R2-D2’s specs. Mounted on the plaque is a mini-figure of R2-D2.
Interestingly, the R2-D2 designers anticipated builders’ mistakes. They used color coding on the LEGO Technic pieces to serve as warning lights: “Do this wrong, and you’ll likely spend hours undoing your error.” To wit: all of the rod pieces on the backside of R2-D2 are red. All of the rod pieces on the front side of R2-D2 are green.
Photo credit: Kevin Wong
During my build, the red coloring tipped me off that I had attached the legs and feet on the wrong sides. The realization came at a crucial moment, before I started plating over the Technic with the brick finish. It took a bit of backtracking to correct, but if LEGO had decided to make all the rods grey and indistinctive, it would have been much more.
Time and again, I felt LEGO’s attempts to save me from hours of unnecessary rework. A piece wouldn’t fit into its insertion point properly, because I hadn’t properly aligned the bricks four steps beforehand. Another piece wouldn’t be able to support itself, because the underlying bricks from ten steps ago were placed at the wrong orientation. LEGO is consistently excellent at pointing out small mistakes before they become large mistakes, hours after they’re too late to diagnose.
Photo credit: Kevin Wong
The end result is worth the fastidiousness. The final R2-D2 is adorable, decently-sized, and uncommonly pliable and poseable. Most LEGO recreations are accurate looking, but stiff to the touch–they’re a nostalgic, still snapshot from a moment in our childhoods.
But the R2-D2 model feels more alive. Its legs are held to the body by flexible pins and rods, which allows the model to jiggle about, similar to how Kenny Baker would make R2-D2 waddle on two legs in the original trilogy. If you interact with it in any tactile manner, the model is reactive. In this sense, the model captures the spirit of the character in addition to its appearance. But fair warning; this is not a build for a novice. Even an expert builder will need to give this model their full attention; there’s a fine line between being pliable and breaking apart at the seams, and this model walks it.
Photo credit: Kevin Wong
I’m struggling to explain the experience of building this to readers who do not build LEGO on a regular basis. Here is an attempt: building the new LEGO R2-D2 is somewhat akin to playing Red Dead Redemption 2 back in 2018. You’ll remember in that game, the developers would punish you for moving too quickly. Gallop through a town, and you’d likely run someone ever. Run through the town square, and you’d bump into an NPC.
And after multiple punitive dealings with the law, you eventually realized that this was a game meant to be walked through. You were supposed to interact, explore, and mosey about in real time, and make progress at a detail-oriented pace. And like that game, the LEGO R2-D2 build is defiant, demanding that you slow down in order to match its speed.
The LEGO R2-D2, Set #75308, was created by a design team led by Creative Director Jens Kronvold Fredericksen. It’s composed of 2314 pieces and retails for $199.99.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Kevin Wong is a contributor to IGN. Talk LEGO with him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.
The Lord of the Rings’ Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, who played the hobbits Merry and Pippin in all three films, are launching The Friendship Onion – a podcast where they will reveal stories from their time working on the franchise, interview members of the cast and crew, answer fan questions, and much more.
The Friendship Onion will launch on YouTube and Podcast services like Apple Podcasts and Spotify on May 18, 2021, and Monaghan and Boyd have teamed up with Kast Media to make this weekly show a reality.
“I am contractually obliged to make a glowing comment here in regards to the podcast Billy and I are making together. This is proving difficult as Billy has abducted me and is holding me for ransom to the price of 44 bananas. PLEASE, SEND bananas,” said Monaghan.
“Dom took a little persuading, it’s true, but this podcast is going to rock! He is such a joker, you have to love Dom! Ha….but you also have to love bananas, so….yes! send bananas,” said Boyd.
While it doesn’t appear to be a straight rewatch podcast like The Office Ladies or the Scrubs podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends, it should be worth a listen for fans of Middle-earth as they “as they peel back the layers of their experiences, both in real life and from the screen.”
“I am contractually obliged to make a glowing comment here in regards to the podcast Billy and I are making together. This is proving difficult as Billy has abducted me and is holding me for ransom to the price of 44 bananas. PLEASE, SEND bananas,” said Monaghan.