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During the latest developer livestream focusing on Path of Exile, developer Grinding Gear Games showcased the next expansion coming to the online free-to-play action-RPG, known as Ultimatum. In the upcoming update, coming to PC on April 16 (with console launch the week after), a new league event will let you jump into a challenging activity that focuses on wave-based encounters for rare loot.

The Ultimatum expansion centers on the new NPC named the Trialmaster, who comes from the Vaal civilization. Upon meeting him in Act 2, you can engage in a new trial event, which appears sporadically across Path of Exile’s maps, that tasks you with facing off against waves of monsters. After specific intervals, you’re given a unique reward and the offer to continue fighting. Choosing to take the prize from your completed fights will end the trial, but pressing forward with the trial will lead to tougher battles for better rewards.

During a preview for the latest on Path of Exile, Grinding Gear Games studio head Chris Wilson explained some of the newest content and the other updates coming to existing content. The Trials in the Ultimatum expansion offer some easy rewards initially. Still, if you push yourself too far into the activity, you’ll run the risk of losing your haul of rare loot. If you fail to complete the trial, you’ll lose all the special rewards acquired from the challenge’s various milestones. Trials can last up to 10 different milestones, with each becoming more difficult than the last.

While previous expansions have already featured activities with high risk and high reward gameplay, Ultimatum focuses on quicker encounters that let you jump right into extended fights. While the new league content is open for all players once they reach Act 2, the activity’s content offers the best rewards when played at endgame level. Along with new gear, the league also adds in eight new gems for you to add to your gear.

Besides the Ultimatum activity, other league activities have also been reworked to offer new rewards and rebalances. For instance, the dungeon exploration Delve activity, which has you explore a deep cavern with an automated trolly to mine resources, has been reworked to offer more incentive for players of all skill levels to dive in. Along with Delve, content from the Betrayal, Bestiary, and Blight leagues will see rebalances to offer better loot. Furthermore, traders and vendors have also been tuned to have better gear and recipes for players.

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Along with the Ultimatum expansion, Grinding Gear Games also showed off new gameplay for Path of Exile 2, aiming to build off the foundations set by the current game and present a new campaign. While the sequel is still a long way out, Path of Exile 1 will still continue to receive new expansions and events for the foreseeable future.

For more on Path of Exile 2, be sure to check out our impressions of the latest gameplay demo.

A new update for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is now live on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S that fixes progression issues with four quests that occur around the mid-to-late point in the game.

The four quests in question are Old Wounds in Essexe, Unholy Father in Grantebridgescire, The Thegn of Lincoln in Lincolnscire, and the Falling Stars mystery in Lunden. Each quest had progression issues where players couldn’t complete them for one reason or another. For example, a bug prevented players from interacting with Estrid during the Old Wounds quest.

These issues should be resolved now. Players still experiencing problems with these quests will need to create a manual save, quit and relaunch the game, and load the manual save to resolve any lingering progression hiccups.

In the meantime, Ubisoft said it’s working on “more permanent solutions” for these progression issues.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Hotfix Update (April 8)

• Unable to proceed with Old Wounds:
  • Cannot interact with Estrid.
• Unable to proceed with Unholy Father:
  • Cannot interact with NPC.
• Unable proceed with The Thegn of Lincoln:
  • Cannot interact with Aelfgar.
• Unable to complete Falling Stars mystery:
  • Ysane doesn’t follow the player.

In other Assassin’s Creed Valhalla news, the game received an update at the end of March that doubled Reda’s shop inventory. The update also reduced the opals needed to buy certain things from Reda and decreased the cost of other items like tattoos.

Bungie has revealed a set of four new weapons that’ll be available in the next season of Destiny 2 for players willing to take on the challenge of its Iron Banner competitive event. The slate of guns includes a hand cannon, a sniper rifle, a machine gun, and a shotgun. The former two are weapons that previously were released in the Iron Banner in Destiny 2’s first year, while the latter two are brand new.

The new guns were shown off in a This Week at Bungie blog post, but the developer didn’t give much in the way of details. It didn’t even tell us which guns are coming back, but the two returning weapons aren’t too hard to identify. They are the 140 round-per-minute Energy hand cannon Finite Impactor and the Aggressive frame Energy sniper rifle Occluded Finality. Both were released with the Warmind expansion in Year 1.

We haven’t seen these two guns in the rotation in quite a while, and as we’ve seen with other old Iron Banner weapons getting updates of late, it’s very likely these two will have a whole new pool of perks when they pop up in Season 14. Finite Impactor in particular seems like it could shine in the Crucible with some range perks. In any event, random rolls should bring the guns up to par with Destiny 2’s other current guns. We’ll have to see what Bungie brings to the new shotgun and machine gun, and whether they find a way to shine in either PvP or PvE.

In addition to new guns, Bungie hinted that it’s working on new Iron Banner-themed armor. For quite a while now, Bungie has re-released older versions of Iron Banner armor, making the older looks available with the new Armor 2.0 mod system. Though you can only earn that armor during a given week-long Iron Banner event, it’s been a bit disappointing to get new versions of old stuff, particularly because Bungie is soon rolling out its armor transmogrification system, which will allow you to make any piece of armor look like any other piece.

Bungie says the new armor designs are on the way, but don’t expect them in Season 14. “These sets won’t appear for a few Seasons, but we have heard your desire for some new digs,” the blog post reads. We don’t know when exactly they’ll be released, but Bungie says it’ll share more information in the future as it becomes available. The blog post also detailed some changes to weapons that are coming in the next season, which will nerf a few gun types and weapon perks that have been dominating in the Crucible.

Meanwhile, the last Iron Banner event of Season 13 kicks off on April 13 and runs until the weekly reset on April 20. Destiny 2’s Season 14 is slated to start on May 11.

Standing atop a rolling, gothic mini-city dragged through bleak deserts by bizarre beasts of burden, Path of Exile 2’s second act immediately looks like the kind of foreboding, imaginative action RPG adventure I expect from Grinding Gear Games. And that’s not just because of the enhanced graphics compared to its predecessor, with new lighting effects that really pop and set the tone for anything from a scorched sand dune to a properly dreadful dungeon. It’s a nightmarish, gore-soaked, yet oddly beautiful and distinct world that I’m eager to sink my sabatons into.

Much like the original Path of Exile, the sequel will start you off as a half-naked wretch sentenced to doom, making your way up from the very, very bottom ranks of the world of Wraeclast. Considering how cosmically over-the-top things got and how many gods we killed in the previous game, the developers very deliberately aimed for this kind of reset. They want Path of Exile 2, which was first announced back in 2019, to be something brand new players can jump into without feeling like they’re missing years and years of context, even though your characters from both games will eventually be able to team up in unified endgame scenarios.

We won’t be able to get our hands on Path of Exile 2 until 2022, but in the meantime, you can check out the brand new trailer showing off a bit of Act 2, and keep reading for insights on what to expect from the long-awaited ARPG sequel.

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Learning The Hard Way

This doesn’t just apply to the story, either. Grinding Gear Games have put an emphasis on better tutorialization this time around, which I found to be a welcome change given that I probably spent a dozen hours at least poring over Path of Exile wikis and build guides to figure out what I was doing in the original.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There’s%20an%20advantage%20to%20not%20doing%20too%20much%20hand-holding.”]That being said, they have no intention of doing away with the freedom and complexity that fans of Path of Exile love. I asked about how the original’s skill tree had so many options that it basically gave you enough rope to hang yourself with, making it very possible to fall into some easy traps and end up with a bad build.

“Philosophically, this is a tricky one for us,” said Grinding Gear’s Chris Wilson, “because we think there’s an advantage to not doing too much hand-holding.”

However, he was open to the idea of constraining the options at first for newer players, making more straightforwardly effective choices readily available and unlocking the full, wild potential of the tree down the line. This fits into their larger tutorial philosophy, which is to only offer help if it seems like you need it. Pop-ups will appear if it seems like you’re struggling or not understanding a key mechanic. But Path of Exile veterans who seem like they already know what they’re doing won’t be bothered with them.

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Glittering Prizes

One of the most significant changes you’ll see building a character in Path of Exile 2 (and in the original, as many of these basic systems improvements will apply to both) is that gem sockets are now independent of armor pieces. There was nothing more frustrating than getting a new, awesome piece of armor but not being able to use it until you went back to town and rerolled all the gem slots to match what you already had on, as otherwise you’d be breaking your entire build. These are the kinds of changes the devs see as a win-win: they make Path of Exile far more intuitive for new players without removing any of the complexity veterans expect.

Bosses and minibosses will have some new surprises in store to test us too, though. With nearly a decade of updates, I was curious how Grinding Gear has gone about creating a new, seven-act story that isn’t going to feel like we’re walking through variations of the same fights over and over again. One of the main ways Path of Exile 2 will do this is by including bosses that interact with the arena in more interesting ways. One example we saw involved a miniboss who can collapse part of a cave to make rocks fall on you. But the broken parts of the ceiling let light in from outside, so standing in the illuminated areas will prevent the attack from being able to hit you again.

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Stabby Stabby

Path of Exile 2’s new weapons also look like a lot of fun to play with, opening up new gameplay styles. We got to see the spear and the crossbow in action, and the spear skills seemed like exactly my kind of mayhem. Equipping it gives you an engage attack that thrusts you into the thick of things, granting a potent damage boost for a short time. When it expires, you can hit disengage to back out of danger and heal up. Thus, you get into a nice tempo of dancing in and out, which seems a lot more fun than some of the more conventional “lawnmower” melee builds that tend to dominate in ARPGs.

The crossbow is unique in that each one comes with an alternate fire skill of some kind. One we saw was a sort of siege mode, which allows you to launch bolts into the air to rain down on the enemy like a one-woman artillery piece. I could see this being very useful if there’s some kind of pesky summoner or healer hiding behind a wave of tanky melee enemies and you just need it gone right away. It’s easy for combat in this genre to become monotonous, especially at higher levels. And it seems Path of Exile 2 is on the right track to combat this with these new mechanics.

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Leana Hafer is an avid PC gamer. Talk action-RPGs, strategy games, and more with her on Twitter at @TilFolkvang.

After teasing new content for the Path of Exile franchise, developer Grinding Gear Games has revealed new gameplay for Path of Exile 2, the sequel to its popular and growing free-to-play RPG. During a special developer livestream focusing on what’s to come with Path of Exile, the developers gave fans the most thorough look at the game yet, which hasn’t been seen since its reveal back at ExileCon 2019.

The new trailer and subsequent gameplay demo focused on the Act 2 section of Path of Exile 2, which is set in a vast desert filled with demons and other supernatural entities. Set sometime after the end of Path of Exile 1, the sequel’s seven-act campaign will carry forth many of the intricate character building, gear customization, and open-ended exploration across its various maps.

Just before the livestream reveal, we got to see a preview of the game with commentary from Grinding Gear Games studio head Chris Wilson, who explained what’s new with the game. Much like the current Path of Exile, and other Diablo-likes, the sequel focuses heavily on the loop of finding loot and procuring new gear for your characters. However, the sequel puts a more significant emphasis on building upon the original game’s content, which includes a shared endgame across both games and a more present story throughout its levels in the seven acts. The new campaign will see your character team up with key figures in the overarching story, acquiring new loot from quests, and explore the more dense environments.

“Path of Exile 2 is a true sequel to Path of Exile, which means a new seven-act campaign, a whole new skill gem system, new items, new monsters, character classes, and all the Ascendancy classes are completely new,” said Wilson during the presentation. “It’s got cutting-edge next-generation graphics, as you just saw. Basically, it’s everything you would expect from a sequel to Path of Exile. But we’re not just throwing away our legacy; we’re embracing it. Both campaigns [PoE 1 and 2] will be fully playable from within the same game client. You’ll be able to play through the original Path of Exile storyline or the new Path of Exile 2 campaign on the way to the shared endgame. All of your old characters will still be playable and of course, any microtransaction purchases you made in Path of Exile will carry on to the sequel.”

While certain aspects of player progress from PoE 1 will carry over, the sequel will have you start fresh with a new character. Along with new gameplay updates such as new weapon classes like the spear, and a new gem upgrade system, Path of Exile 2 also has an entirely new graphics engine and animation system that gives the game a noticeably more pronounced and dynamic than its predecessor. Some sections of the gameplay demo even featured more cinematic touches, with cameras taking more sweeping shots and angles to showcase the environment’s depth of scale. The original Path of Exile released almost 10 years ago, and it was impressive to see the jump in visual fidelity and quality for its sequel.

Path of Exile 2 looks to carry on what made the original such a well-liked game within its community. While the demo shown for Path of Exile 2 was impressive, the sequel is still far from release. During an extended talk with Wilson after the presentation, he stated that the COVID-19 pandemic had slowed the sequel’s development more than they expected, but in recent months, progress on the game has picked up.

“[Development] is going well, but the two problems we had in 2020 was the pandemic itself, which was very disruptive and wasn’t great for the productivity of the team, but also because it prevented us from hiring more people to the team,” he said. “The other problem we ran into was the amount of work that went into the various expansions for Path of Exile 1. While that was great for PoE1 and the community, that sort of paralyzed the team and our work on the sequel, so we’ve been smarter about using our limited resources now. The pace of the development on the sequel has picked up, and it does feel like there’s the light at the end of the tunnel now.”

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It seems the isometric Diablo-style action-RPG has been on the upswing in recent years, and Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games is pleased that the genre is flourishing. During our chat, Wilson spoke candidly about the popularity of Path of Exile’s direct competitor, the Diablo series, and how the latest reveals for Diablo IV has resulted in increased interest for Path of Exile.

“So whenever another competitor gets press, that actually ends up helping our game as we found out, he said. “In the case of Diablo IV, that’s not a game you can play today, but you can play Path of Exile. Our goal is to be free, be good, and just hope for people who want to play action RPGs. But I am incredibly excited about Diablo II: Resurrected–I cannot understate how much I’m excited about it.”

For more on Path of Exile, be sure to check back with GameSpot for more info from the on going livestream.

Justice League writer Chris Terrio has offered new insight into how the early roadmap of the DCEU was established. According to Terrio, studio-mandated release dates, not story plans, dictated the release order of these DC movies.

That’s one of the big takeaways in Vanity Fair’s new interview with Terrio, who also scripted Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice before effectively being shut out of the DCEU during the Justice League reshoots. According to Terrio, there was little effort to coordinate story plans between movies like Justice League, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, only a mandate to “conform to this schedule.”

“[Kevin] Tsujihara, as far as I can tell, and the brass at the very top, decided the order of the films,” Terrio told VF. “I was not consulted on the order of the films, even though I was the person writing Justice League. They just determined that it was going to be Batman/Superman, and then Wonder Woman, then Justice League, and then Aquaman. So there was never any thought to how the world was constructed before they issued this edict. They said, ‘Conform to this schedule.’”

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Terrio explained how that caused creative headaches while writing Justice League, particularly given the fact that he didn’t have access to a completed Wonder Woman script.

“The Wonder Woman script wasn’t even finished when I wrote Justice League,” Terrio said. “So I had no basis to write Wonder Woman other than Batman/Superman. Themyscira didn’t even exist. I was never shown anything on the page for it. I didn’t know whether people could talk underwater. That was a thing that I had to ask, because I didn’t know if I could do underwater scenes with Aquaman and Atlanteans. It was all just from scratch because there had been no [solo] character films.”

Terrio continued, “So Justice League needed to establish three of the characters; it had to create a long game mythology for the DC Universe. It had to resurrect Superman because he was dead at the end of the last movie. I just don’t know how you could do all that in under two hours. Maybe the 2017 release proved that you couldn’t.”

Terrio’s comments certainly help explain some of the discrepancies between Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Aquaman, including the drastically different appearance of Willem Dafoe’s Vulko and the fact that Amber Heard’s Mera has a British accent in The Snyder Cut.

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Terrio also spoke out about his dislike for the original ending of Batman v. Superman, which was abandoned when he was brought in by Ben Affleck to rewrite the script.

This new interview comes right on the heels of another unflattering look behind the scenes at WarnerMedia. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ray Fisher accused Joss Whedon of threatening Gal Gadot’s career and refusing criticism of his Justice League rewrites.

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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

More than 15 years after its initial release, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is getting a new edition–this time on 4K UHD Blu-ray. The 4K UHD version will include the additional footage added in the 2009 Blu-ray release, making this the definitive way to watch the animated follow-up to the classic Square Enix JRPG. Advent Children’s 4K UHD Blu-ray is available to preorder now at Amazon for $31.

Advent Children takes place two years after the events of Final Fantasy 7 and revolves around a mysterious disease that is running rampant. The disease has even afflicted Cloud Strife. If you’ve only played Final Fantasy VII Remake and don’t know the whole story from the original game, you may want to hold off on watching Advent Children. The movie assumes you know all of the plot points from the game.

The 4K UHD edition of Advent Children releases just two days before Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade launches on PS5. The upgraded edition runs in 60fps at higher resolutions with improved textures. It also comes with a bonus episode starring Yuffie. Those who own the PS4 version can upgrade to the PS5 edition for free but will have to pay extra for the Yuffie DLC.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has gotten its second update in as many days. The April 8 update for the military shooter introduces a new modes in the form of Gunfight Tournaments and Gunfight Blueprints, while a new Throwback Moshpit playlist is also now in the game.

In Gunfight Tournaments, sixteen teams fight in 2v2 Gunfight matches in a single-elimination tournament that progress through four rounds. You can earn rewards for winning matches, including an emblem, calling card, charm, and a weapon blueprint. Competitors will also get XP bonuses for each match you win.

The Gunfight Tournaments are scheduled to run for a week, ending on April 15. New tournaments start every five minutes, so you shouldn’t have to wait long to get involved.

Another new mode is Gunfight Blueprints, which is a 2v2 playlist that lets you try out some of the new weapon blueprints in Season 2. These matches play out on some of the smallest Black Ops Cold War maps, including the new Mansion map.

The Throwback Moshpit playlist, meanwhile, includes team deathmatch, domination, kill confirmed, and Hardpoint.

This Black Ops Cold War update also includes some fixes for the Zombies mode. In Dead Ops Arcade 3, the bug causing the Gladiator enemy to fail to spawn is now fixed. Additionally, this patch fixes an issue that could case the Gladiator’s aces to stay on the screen for longer than they should.

Additionally, Treyarch reminded players that double XP is now available in Black Ops Cold War for a period of four days, wrapping up on April 12. You can see the complete patch notes below, as posted by Treyarch on its website.

It’s not just Black Ops Cold War that’s getting new playlists, as the battle royale game Warzone also recently welcomed three new playlists.

Black Ops Cold War April 8 Patch Notes

GLOBAL

Events

• Double XP Weekend
  • Four days of Double XP now available in Multiplayer, Zombies, and League Play through 10AM PT Monday, April 12.

MULTIPLAYER

Gunfight Tournaments

• Sixteen teams of two clash in a 2v2 single-elimination tournament for exclusive rewards. Win and move on to the next round. Lose, and you’re out.
• Register for a Tournament and get matched up with 31 other players of similar skill.
• Each Tournament is broken up into 4 Rounds: Preliminaries, Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals, and the Tournament Finals.
• Each Tournament introduces new exclusive rewards as you win your way through the bracket. Rewards for the first Tournament include a new Emblem, Calling Card, Charm, and Assault Rifle Weapon Blueprint.
• XP is also awarded as players win their way through each Tournament and can be earned repeatedly with each Tournament participation.

Modes

• Control
  • Each segment captured by the Attackers will now add 20 seconds to the game clock. Time will no longer be added after capturing a single zone.
  • Overtime Defense is now awarded to the team that captures the most zone segments in the previous rounds. In the event of a tiebreaker, the team with the most kills will be awarded Defense in Overtime.
  • Also applies to CDL Control in League Play.

Featured Playlists

• Gunfight Tournament [NEW]
• Gunfight Blueprints [NEW]
• Throwback Moshpit (also available in Hardcore)
• Snipers Only Moshpit
• Nuketown 24/7 (also available in Hardcore)
• Prop Hunt
• Face Off (also available in Hardcore)
• Multi-Team Moshpit

ZOMBIES

Dead Ops Arcade 3

• Enemies
  • Addressed an issue where the Gladiator enemy was not spawning under certain circumstances.
  • Addressed an issue where the Gladiator enemy’s axes remained on the screen longer than intended.

Featured Playlists

• Outbreak
• Firebase Z
• Die Maschine
• Dead Ops Arcade: First Person
• Dead Ops Arcade
• Onslaught (PS4/PS5)
• Onslaught Containment (PS4/PS5)
• Onslaught Nuketown (PS4/PS5)
• Onslaught Apocalypse (PS4/PS5)