Destiny 2’s Forsaken Content Will Be Vaulted “At Some Point”

More portions of Destiny 2 will be removed from the game and placed in the “Destiny Content Vault.” Bungie says the Forsaken expansion is next on the block to get pulled from the game in the developer’s ongoing attempt to balance Destiny 2’s install size with seasonal content drops and yearly expansion releases.

“Forsaken content will be vaulted at some point,” Bungie general manager Justin Truman said in an interview with Eurogamer. That means at least some portions of the game that were added with the 2018’s Forsaken expansion–including the Tangled Shore and Dreaming City locations, the Last Wish raid and Shattered Throne dungeon, and their related activities and story content–could be removed from the game. When the Beyond Light expansion was released in 2020, Bungie removed vanilla Destiny 2 content and content from its first two expansions, Curse of Osiris and Warmind, to make space. In all, four planetary locations and three raids went into the Vault, along with all their story and activities.

“I think in the same way we don’t want eight raids, it’s the same thing with storylines–we don’t want when a new player enters into Destiny, there’s five different competing storylines that they could start playing and in some of them, Uldren’s a good guy, and in some of them he’s a bad guy, and it’s not clear if you’re playing them out of order,” Truman explained, referring to the character Uldren Sov, who was an antagonist in Forsaken but has returned in a new role in the most recent Destiny 2 seasons.

“We want to curate that experience,” he continued. “We’re probably not going to go in strict chronological order–like, oh, the next Destiny 2 destination that came in the launch Destiny would be the next one to Vault. Instead, we’re thinking about it in terms of, which one of these destinations or experiences is doing the least to the overall healthy ecosystem? And that can range from, which ones have the most exciting experiences that we want to stick around, it could be to do with combatant usage, like, hey, if we get rid of this, there just aren’t that many places where Cabal are in Destiny 2 anymore….”

Bungie previously explained that the reason behind vaulting Destiny 2 content was to manage the game’s install size and breadth; removing older content that wasn’t being used as much made space for new content, like the Beyond Light expansion, and to help keep all the existing Destiny 2 content from getting unwieldy. The Vault also doesn’t mean content is gone forever. Bungie brought back a tuned-up version of Destiny 1’s Cosmodrome with Beyond Light, along with three retooled Destiny 1 Strike missions. It’s also bringing back the Vault of Glass, Destiny first-ever raid, with the next content season in May.

If we had to guess, though, we’d assume that Forsaken is headed to the content vault early next year. That’s when Bungie will release its next expansion, The Witch Queen, and presumably add more new destinations to visit. We’ll have to wait to see just what Bungie has in mind, but in the meantime, it’s probably a good idea to start getting in some runs of Last Wish.

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LG Is Pushing More And More Smart TV Ads–Even On Flagship TVs

Have you ever wondered why brand-new televisions with massive, bright, and vivid screens are so cheap these days? It’s all about the ads. Once relegated to the cheapest televisions, owners of LG’s flagship CX line are now discovering that they, too, are enjoying unprompted advertising on their television sets, according to a report from The Verge.

The Verge’s Chris Welch was updating streaming apps on his television when an ad popped up and played with sound in the corner of his screen without a way to skip it or stop it. It was a short one, but a pop-up, hover-over ad all the same. Other users on Twitter and Reddit have noticed the same behavior, so this doesn’t appear to be an isolated occurrence. What’s new about this is that the LG CX television Welch witnessed the ad on is one of the brand’s upper-middle range televisions, the ones that users buy for a premium experience. Every smart TV has ads to some degree, but this a step beyond ads showing up in the corner of the app browser or input menu.

A 2019 interview by The Verge with Vizio Chief Technology Officer Bill Baxter does a good job of explaining this. “This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6% margin industry. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost,” Baxter said. “It’s not just about data collection, it’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.”

Companies like LG, Vizio, and others, can sell us televisions like these because they’re selling them at a razor-thin margin that, on its own, would make it difficult for a company to stay in business. Baxter says that without ads, Vizio would “collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it.” In other words, you’d pay more at the register for the television.

There are a few things that we, as consumers, can do to offset these, though doing so can become especially difficult with the growing prevalence of TVs powered by Roku’s operating system. You could look for a non-smart television–one with a stock on-screen display that serves up only information like you input and configuration information. These are getting increasingly more difficult to find, and are often not on the bleeding edge of technology. If you’re looking for a 65-inch UltraHD television with DolbyVision HDR, and HDMI 2.1 compatibility to pair with your new gaming console, you might be out of luck if ads are a dealbreaker. It’s much easier to find smaller, lower-resolution televisions.

If you want the latest tech in your TV, you’re stuck buying a smart TV. The most effective defense against ads is to simply never connect the television to the internet. Most smart TVs have USB ports and allow for offline software updates over USB, and an unconnected television can’t serve up ads. Instead of using the built-in apps to access Netflix and Disney+, you can connect something like an AppleTV box, or an Nvidia Shield and enjoy your apps through that, rather than the television menu.

If you absolutely have to connect that big, bright rectangle to the internet, the next easiest step is to look at your TV settings and check any boxes to disable (or reduce) tracking and the microphone so that, at the very least, the ads you see don’t feel quite so creepy.

If you’re a bit more technically-inclined, you can also put something between the television and the internet to mitigate ad serving. A Reddit thread from 2019 still has great information about blocking common ad sources. You can also buy a Raspberry Pi computer and configure it with network-wide ad-blocking software called Pi-Hole. While that will help, it seems some smart TVs are finding ways around this.

Of course, this is all out the window once these manufacturers decide to cram a cellular radio into their TVs right next to the wireless and Bluetooth radios so that they can pull ads without even touching our routers and internet connections, though no manufacturer has yet announced such plans.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – Here’s What Comes in Each Edition

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is set to release exclusively for PlayStation 5 on June 11. It’s a third-person shooter developed by Insomniac Games, and it’s meant to showcase many of the PS5’s flagship features. It’s available now for preorder (see it at Amazon, or Amazon UK).

You can pick up the standard edition, of course, or go for the digital deluxe edition if you want some downloadable extras thrown in. Below, we have full details on what comes in each edition, as well as what preorder bonuses you can expect. Let’s get to it.

Preorder Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

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The standard edition of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart comes with the game and the preorder bonus described below.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Digital Deluxe Edition

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Those who choose to forego a disc can pick up the digital deluxe edition. It comes with the game itself, along with the following digital extras:

  • 5 armor sets
  • Photo mode sticker pack
  • 20 Raritanium (in-game upgrade materials)
  • Digital soundtrack
  • Digital art book

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Preorder Bonus

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Preorder the digital standard edition or the physical launch edition, and you’ll receive early unlocks for the Carbonox Armor from 2003’s Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and the Pixelizer weapon, which appeared in the 2016 Ratchet & Clank. US and Canadian customers who preorder will also get a $5 discount off official merchandise on the PlayStation Gear store.

What is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?

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Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the latest in a long line of PlayStation-exclusive third-person shooters that goes back to PS2. This time around, Dr. Nefarious whips up a device that lets him access other dimensions. He uses it to separate the lovable Lombax Ratchet from his robotic friend Clank. Your job is to reunite the friends, while hopping between alternate realities and using a wide array of powerful (and often comedic) weapons. There’s also a new female Lombax in the equation, but we haven’t gotten many details about her yet.

The game also makes use of PS5-specific features, including super-fast loading times, 4K HDR graphics, ray tracing, haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, and 3D sound.

Other Preorder Guides

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Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

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Borderlands 3 Director’s Cut Delayed To April 8 Due To Texas Storm

Borderlands 3‘s Director’s Cut DLC has been delayed to April due to complications from the recent severe weather and power outages in Texas. Gearbox issued a statement saying that the conditions “unavoidably disrupted” its work, forcing it to push back the add-on by a few weeks. The new release date is April 8.

The Director’s Cut had been set for March 18, a date that was set in early February. But a severe winter storm hit Texas and surrounding regions on February 13, causing widespread blackouts and other infrastructure problems. Many Texans had no heat and frozen pipes for several days, and the death toll reached 70 in the United States.

Thankfully, Gearbox says, its employees are all safe. But the studio, based near Dallas, TX, was impacted by the storm regardless. It says it has now shifted the Director’s Cut date to “deliver the best possible experience.”

The Director’s Cut update will include a series of new story missions, behind-the-scenes content like bloopers and bonus footage, and a full-fledged Raid boss called Hemovorous the Invincible. It will cost 500 Eridium to unlock the door and take on the raid.

Borderlands 3 will also get Vault Cards, which offer exclusive cosmetic rewards for completing daily and weekly challenges. Finally, a new set of Multi-Verse cosmetics is coming with the second season pass. These special cosmetic packs do more than simply change the color tone of your characters, instead changing their whole geometry based on how they might look in an alternate universe. The Final Form pack shows the Vault Hunters if they’d never become Vault Hunters, while the Disciples of the Vault pack shows how they’d look if they’d become followers of the Calypso cult.

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Benedict Cumberbatch Completely Rejects Playing Thrawn in Star Wars

With The Mandalorian: Season 2 name-dropping everyone’s favorite blue-skinned Imperial warlord, it seems only a matter of time before Grand Admiral Thrawn makes his live-action Star Wars debut. And while we don’t yet know which actor will take on that role, we can rule out one popular fan choice. Benedict Cumberbatch has torpedoed any possibility of playing Thrawn.

In an interview with Collider promoting his new film The Courier, Cumberbatch admitted he has no idea who Thrawn is and hasn’t taken part in any discussions about taking on the role in The Mandalorian: Season 3 or Star Wars: Ahsoka. More to the point, Cumberbatch has no interest in committing to a part that would require hours of painstaking makeup each day.

“That’s a straight no from me, right now,” Cumberbatch told Collider. “There’s no way I want to be turned blue. I turned the air blue, very recently. No no, seriously, I have precious time with my children and I think sitting in a makeup chair and being painted blue, and the amount of time it would take to do that and then take it off at the end of the day might just… it’s not the right time in my life for that.”

Grand Admiral Thrawn originally debuted in the 1991 novel Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. While the character initially appeared mainly in Bantam’s Star Wars novels and Dark Horse’s Star Wars comics, he later made the jump to Disney’s official Star Wars canon when he appeared in the latter two seasons of the animated series Star Wars Rebels. Thrawn was voiced in that series by Lars Mikkelsen, who coincidentally starred opposite Cumberbatch in the Series 3 finale of Sherlock. It’s not unreasonable to assume Disney might again turn to Mikkelsen to play Thrawn in live-action, especially with actress Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan Kryze already setting a precedent in that regard.

IGN spoke to Zahn’s creator Timothy Zahn in 2020, who revealed he doesn’t see the current incarnation of Thrawn as being a fundamentally different character from the Expanded Universe version. Zahn is currently expanding on Thrawn’s back-story through a new trilogy of novels called The Thrawn Ascendancy.

The Courier is a spy drama based on historical events where Cumberbatch plays Greville Wynne, a British businessman who helps his government gather intel on the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Check out an exclusive clip from the movie below:

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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.

The Unholy Trailer: A Disgraced Journalist Investigates A Faith-Based Horror

Sony Pictures Entertainment has released the first official trailer for The Unholy, an upcoming PG-13 horror film written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos in his directorial debut, scheduled to be released in theaters on April 2.

According to an official synopsis, The Unholy “follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister.”

Alice is played by Cricket Brown (Dukeland), and the journalist trying to claw his way to a career comeback is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead). Check out the trailer below.

The Unholy, which is based upon James Herbert’s best-selling horror novel Shrine from 1983, also stars Katie Aselton (The League), William Sadler (Iron Man 3), Diogo Morgado (MacGyver), and Cary Elwes (Saw). In addition to Spiliotopoulos, The Unholy is co-produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert.

While both greater New York and Los Angeles area movie theater markets are making plans to cautiously re-open with restrictions in place, it may soon be a whole new (old) ballgame around how movie releases work this year–hopefully sooner rather than later.

CoD YouTuber Drif0r Says Swatting Experience Almost Killed Him

Call of Duty content creator Brad “Drif0r” Overbey uploaded a brand-new video to his YouTube channel talking about how he “almost died” when people swatted his home.

About halfway through a video titled “Low Testosterone almost killed me,” Drift0r mentioned how 2019 and 2020’s swattings contributed to his ongoing battle with low testosterone. He said he “almost died four or five times” as armed people approached his Texas home.

“I got swatted a couple of times last year,” Drift0r starts at about the 12-minute mark. “There was an ongoing issue with harrassment. Another creator streamed one of his fans coming to my house with a ski mask and a gun in what I personally assumed was going to be an armed home invasion. Police took care of that in my front lawn, thankfully. And just a whole ton of crazy, bizarre stuff. I almost died four of five times. There were other people that were armed.”

Swatting is not a new concept, originating as an offshoot of bomb threats, but it has been thrust into public consciousness in the 2010s thanks to incidents that have resulted in unnecessary deaths. Individuals call an emergency service responder–like the fire department, FBI, or police department–with false and threatening information typically regarding someone else’s residence. The dispatcher then sends a lethal response to the home in question that ocassionally ends in a misunderstanding but sometimes leads to a violent aftermath. It’s supposed to be a prank but the practice is really a form of criminal harrassment.

Drif0r went on to descibe a “prank” to trick him into killing an escort as part of some break-in fantasy. He later summed up the ordeal as “constant violence” against him and his family.

“Basically, for the better part of a year there was constant violence against me and my family. I worked super hard to keep it private and off of YouTube. I mean, it was like ‘sleep with your AK-47 every single night’ kind of situation. But finally, some of the bad people got arrested.”

Drif0r said all trials have concluded and there is now nothing stopping him from making public comments about it. He hinted at planning to go deeper into the experience “in a later video.”

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Amazon’s The Boys Spin-Off Casts Lizze Broadway And Jaz Sinclair

The still untitled The Boys spin-off has added Lizze Broadway (Bones, NCIS) and Jaz Sinclair (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Vampire Diaries) to the cast, according to Variety. The spin-off was fast-tracked suddenly last year on the strength of the Prime Video series, which isn’t a total shock given the original series was an adaptation of an already successful comic book series.

Broadway and Sinclair are the first announced cast members for the spin-off, which will take place at a college for young superheroes, run by the ominous Vought International–the evil corporation that controls The Seven. The spin-off has previously been described as “an irreverent, R-rated series that explores the lives of hormonal, competitive supes as they put their physical, sexual, and moral boundaries to the test, competing for the best contracts in the best cities. Part college show, part Hunger Games–with all the heart, satire, and raunch of The Boys.”

All that’s known about the new cast members is Sinclair will play Marie, and Broadway will play Emma–both young superheroes. The spin-off has not yet officially been ordered to go to series, but cast members being announced is a good sign that it’s a likely bet.

And while that may not sound like much, it’s still more than what’s known about The Boys Season 3’s status. You can read our report of everything we know so far about Season 3, but as far as marquee headline news–we still have no idea when the season will premiere or when production will get underway.

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