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Ghost of Tsushima was an amazing game when it came out a year ago, with a meaty campaign, stellar samurai combat, and arguably one of the most gorgeous open worlds ever created. This Iki Island expansion is its first paid DLC, which is also included as part of the new Director’s Cut, and it delivers a brand-new island, a new story chapter, new sidequests, and a healthy heap of new secrets and collectibles to discover. And while none of it goes any further than just “more Ghost of Tsushima,” in my book, more Ghost of Tsushima is always a great thing.

In order to play the Iki Island content, you’ll need to progress to at least Act 2 of the main campaign (you can also circle back and do it after beating the story). That’s when Jin discovers that a group of Mongols, led by a woman named The Eagle, are planning an invasion of Tsushima from the neighboring Iki Island. Wanting to nip the invasion in the bud, Jin heads to Iki Island himself, which is a mostly lawless land inhabited primarily by bandits who are also suffering at the hands of The Eagle and her tribe.

Iki Island is a place of great significance to Jin because it’s the place where his father died, which makes the story deeply personal. We get to see Jin’s character explored to a degree far beyond what happens in the main campaign, which is great. There are certainly one or two head-scratching plot reveals that border on illogical, but all things considered, I enjoyed the tale of Iki Island and the way it forced Jin to reconcile with his past.

But story aside, the best part about this expansion is the whole new island to explore. Once again you begin with a map that’s almost completely blank and are free to set out in any direction to discover its many landmarks, areas of interest, and some of the coolest Easter eggs I’ve seen in a while. Many of these landmarks are identical to the kind of thing found in the main campaign, like bamboo shoots, hot springs, lighthouses, and Haiku Spots, but there are plenty of entertaining new distractions to discover, too. That includes archery challenges, animal sanctuaries, playable flashbacks, and a handful of sidequests. Two new Mythic Tales are also awesome, and have especially worthwhile rewards – even to someone like me, who already had 100% completion in the base game.

While the context of every quest varies, the content feels very familiar. You’ll infiltrate lots of Mongol camps (whether by stealth or standoff), follow footprints to track people and animals down, and charge through open fields for large-scale battles. It’s all well-trodden ground, since we’ve done these same types of quests before, just in different locations and for different characters, but a year later I was far enough removed that it was fun to do them again.

The one way where Iki Island truly shakes things up is in its enemies. There’s a new type called the Shaman that is not only a formidable fighter, but will also buff all nearby enemies with their song and dance. In addition to that, there are now enemies that will switch up their weapons mid-fight. That means you might begin a fight in Water Stance to deal with an enemy that’s wielding a shield, but then have to swap to Stone Stance once they strap that shield to their back and pull out two swords. It sounds simple, but it can actually be a good challenge to juggle when you’re also worrying about the crowd of enemies surrounding you, all wielding different weapons. It’s just another layer to think about that makes combat even more enjoyable.

It took me eight hours or so to get through the main storyline of Iki Island, even while taking my time and doing a healthy amount of exploration and outpost clearing to expose the map. I’ve since put in another four or five hours to clear out all the landmarks, and at this point I feel like I’ve generally experienced everything substantial this DLC has to offer, making it a small but relatively dense package.

Marvel president Kevin Feige has addressed a number of concerns that have been voiced by Chinese audiences ahead of the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

As reported by Variety, Feige participated in an interview with Chinese film critic Raymond Zhou during the U.S. Shang-Chi premiere this week, in which he responded to some of China’s biggest gripes surrounding the MCU feature and assured fans that careful consideration had been given on the road to taking the comics to the big screen.

In particular, Feige stressed that the upcoming Phase 4 movie doesn’t feature Fu Manchu, a character who serves as Shang-Chi’s father and primary nemesis in the comics who has been on the receiving end of backlash for years, with many seeing the character as a racially insensitive caricature. Feige confirmed he doesn’t appear “in any way, shape or form.”

“[Fu Manchu] is not a character we own or would ever want to own. It was changed in the comics many, many, many years ago. We never had any intention of [having him] in this movie,” Feige emphasized, adding: “Definitively, Fu Manchu is not in this movie, is not Shang-Chi’s father, and again, is not even a Marvel character, and hasn’t been for decades.”

Instead of Fu Manchu, Shang-Chi’s father in the movie is Wenwu, portrayed by Tony Leung. As explained in a recent featurette, our titular hero will find himself returning to his father’s world after running away in his youth, which is quite a different story to the one sometimes told in the comics that sees the character abandon his Chinese roots to embrace the West.

“That’s certainly one of the elements we’ve changed,” Feige stated, reassuring potential moviegoers. “All of our comics go back 60, 70, 80 years. Almost everything has happened in almost every comic, and we chose the elements that we like to turn into an MCU feature. So that story is not what this is about.

“That sense of running away… is presented as one of his flaws,” he added, noting the narrative change. “It is a flaw to run away to the West and to hide from his legacy and his family — that’s how the movie is presented. And how he will face that and overcome that is part of what the story’s about.”

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is set for a wide theatrical release on September 3. The movie doesn’t yet have a release date in China despite it being an important market for movies, with its box office previously taking $629 million for Avengers: Endgame, making it the country’s highest-grossing foreign film ever, plus the sixth-largest earner overall.

For more on the MCU film, get a glimpse of the movie’s dragon character in the latest poster, check out our explainer on Shang-Chi himself, and if the Ten Rings are actually magical.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Splitgate, the portal-based shooter from 1047 Games, will remain in its open beta period for the ‘foreseeable future’ after its recent unexpected popularity has seen more than 10 million users download the game in under 30 days.

In a press release, 1047 Games announced that Splitgate will remain in open beta as the studio continues to work on scaling the game. The game’s surge in popularity has caused a string of server queues and wait times for players hoping to access the Halo-like shooter.

1047 Games has been active in addressing the strain on its servers through social media and the game’s official Discord channel, whilst at the same time working to increase player capacity on the game. In just the past four weeks the studio’s team of just 30 people has increased its server capacity to now support up to 175,000 concurrent players, and significantly reduced player wait times.

It took a few weeks, but our server situation is better than ever! We can now support 175k concurrent players! And the server improvements are only going to continue. https://t.co/E2sWrxQevx

— Splitgate (@Splitgate) August 15, 2021

CEO and co-founder of 1047 Games, Ian Proulx, shared in the press release his thoughts on the game’s overwhelming popularity and what it has meant for scalability. “This has been the most surreal time of my life,” said Proulx. “The fan support has been incredible as we work to improve the player experience. We never dreamed of having to scale this big this quickly, and as a result we have had to overcome challenges to keep up with player demand. We met several major milestones in a short time, creating a stable platform where fans can expect to find a server to play on relatively quickly, and I’m proud of what our team has accomplished – but there’s a lot more to come!”

Proulx continued, “In looking at the issues facing the scalability of the game’s backend, the process includes far more than simply dealing with server capacity. We are focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game’s concurrent capacity in order to minimize player wait times. We want to do this the right way, and we want to be prepared for massive scale when we officially launch, all the while continuing to improve the beta with frequent updates, additional features, and improvements to server capacity.”

1047 Games says that it has several content updates planned for fans across the rest of the year whilst further changes to the game’s backend framework continue to be rolled out. Splitgate’s first content update will feature on the game later today (August 19) and will bring with it a Ranked Duos mode as well as increased server capacity. 1047 Games will be announcing further updates in weeks to come including what the company describes as a ‘significant announcement’ at Gamescom 2021.

The development team at 1047 Games are certainly striving high with the FPS title. In a recent Q&A, the team discussed its hopes to bring the title to other platforms including a possible port to mobile and Nintendo Switch. For more on Splitgate, make sure to check out our review-in-progress for the game where we have so far awarded it a 7/10.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN who spends a lot of his time in Splitgate tentatively shooting through blank enemy portals. You can follow him on Twitter.

Skyblivion is a mod that’s very easy to explain: it’s aiming to bring the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion into the engine used by The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. But the reality isn’t that the team of volunteers making it simply wants to upscale the 2006 game we already know – they want to make the dream version of the game that Bethesda’s developers had in their heads back when they came up with Oblivion.

In a way, the Skyblivion team is treating Oblivion like a sketch, and painting in new details drawn from a number of sources. Seen in a recent dev diary, areas like the city of Leyawiin have been fully redesigned based on unused Oblivion concept art, bringing to life ideas that could never be realised in the original game. Others, like the Fall Forest, have been expanded and enriched with more foliage and areas of interest, with the Skyblivion team guessing at what the original designers might have aimed for with more technological grunt at their disposal.

This mixture of realising unused ideas and adding modern sheen to areas left fairly basic is part of the Skyblivion team’s philosophy. “We are definitely taking some creative freedom here and there,” project lead K Rebel tells me over email. “If we didn’t, you might as well replay the original Oblivion. Rest assured, though, that we are approaching this as fans of Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls games.”

You can see a Skyblivion quest in action below:

“Our cities, interiors, dungeons and environments are larger and filled with a lot more detail than anything in Oblivion, and in many cases Skyrim too,” K Rebel continues. “This already feels like we added some ‘cut content’, as I’m sure the original developers would have loved to create a bigger and more detailed world, but in the end were held back by the technology of the time. For example, a lot of the fortresses from the original Oblivion were singular towers, which in a lot of cases we have rebuilt into actual fortresses that are inspired by the stories you can find about them.”

It’s not just the world that will see those improvements, but the game’s mechanics, too. “Our approach to this project is similar in a lot of ways to any other AAA game’s development cycle. We focus our efforts redesigning areas of the game that need it the most, such as environments and unique weapons. Nobody likes finishing a long questline only to receive a generic sword, or exploring through empty forests.”

For the initial release, at least, there is a line being drawn on what can be added, though. The first goal – and one the team’s been working on for many years already – is to bring to life a new version of the original Oblivion, while keeping its basic make-up intact. “Anything else that wasn’t part of the original game won’t be touched until after our first public release,” K Rebel explains. “We have recovered a big list of [cut] quests, for instance, but unless our questing department has time to spare before the release these won’t be added until later.”

That goes for the original game’s DLC, too – the 1.0 version of Skyblivion will include the team’s take on the base version of Oblivion, so don’t expect to be able to use the infamous horse armour right away.

Even while still in development, Skyblivion feels like a fascinating mixture of homage and fan fiction, resulting in something that doesn’t sit totally comfortably in either camp. I ask whether K Rebel sees this game as designed for those who already love Oblivion, or those who never played it: “It depends. I think that people who have recently played through Oblivion will be able to really appreciate Skyblivion on a new level, as they can clearly see how much work has been put into remaking this game. On the other hand, I think a lot of people, including myself, would kill to be able to re-experience Oblivion for the first time again – and on top of that a version of Oblivion which has much improved environments, better unique weapons and is overall a less janky and buggy experience (although a lot of this jank is what gave Oblivion its goofy charm).”

Of course, the worry that hangs over any project like this is that, no matter the good intention, a developer or publisher might see it as theft rather than tribute. Thankfully, the Skyblivion team doesn’t see trouble on its horizon. “There has been some contact with Bethesda, but projects like these are in a bit of a legal grey area,” K Rebel admits. “Bethesda allows us to do what we do but won’t openly support it. Having that said, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to a number of Bethesda employees, some of which even worked on Oblivion, and they had nothing but kind things to say about our project, which has been very humbling to say the least. A takedown is something I can safely say I never see happening.”

The last major question is when we might be able to try Skyblivion for the first time – and it’s really the only question K Rebel can’t give me an answer for. The project lead explains that the team has an unwritten rule not to promise a date, but that they are working on a public road map to make the road to the finish line a little clearer.

It’s a fair answer (if a slightly unsatisfying one for those excited by the prospect of the mod) – this is a team made up purely of volunteers, working on the game in their spare time. It’s a mammoth project, and one that K Rebel says takes up practically all of their spare time. So why take it on? In a way, it seems to be that making the dream version of Oblivion is, in itself, the dream:

“I think once you get to a certain age, everyone is going to try and chase their childhood. When I read comments on our updates I think that’s something that our ‘fans’ are the most excited for – reliving a memory from the past. For me personally though, the project started out as a dream to work on my own game and make it what I wanted it to be. This soon grew into a massive project that we want to work on together and are able to make it everything we want it to be in an Elder Scrolls game. We may not get paid for our work but it’s a really unique experience to be able to work with like-minded individuals and work purely on something out of love and passion.”

Skyblivion is looking for volunteers to join its development team – you can sign up here, or follow the team on Twitter.

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].

It seems unfathomable that ten years after the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched, the game could still have any secrets yet to be uncovered. But following on from yesterdays developer revelations about a bee derailing one of the most well-known (and memed) openings in video games, another development secret has been revealed, this time regarding the game’s treasure hunting foxes.

The story comes by the way of Joel Burgess, who was a developer at Bethesda during the creation of Skyrim. In a series of tweets, he outlined one of the games biggest post-launch rumours about mysterious foxes that would appear and lead players to treasure chests and other goodies.

Alright, so inspired by @NPurkeypile‘s bee post yesterday, here is one of my favorite bits of Skyrim oral history – the myth of the treasure fox.

I’ve told this story before in talks/etc, but I don’t think I’ve shared it with twitter. Here goes. pic.twitter.com/7uaUlbpmQ8

— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021

Burgess outlined that after the game released, a number of players would tip each other off that if you followed the game’s many foxes, they would lead you to areas of the map filled with treasure. Since this had never been a deliberate feature that had been added into the game, Burgess was naturally confused, and quickly sought to uncover how and why this was happening.

From consulting with other members of the development team, Jean Simonet, Jonah Lobe, and Mark Teare, it quickly became apparent that the culprit was not part of the game’s script at all, but part of the navmesh system, “an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go”. Once spooked, the foxes were supposed to flee along a generated path, using the navmesh for guidance. But for some reason, the fox would automatically flee towards the area with the largest number of triangles on the navmesh.

Skyrim uses something called ‘navmesh’ for AI navigation.

For non-dev folks, this is an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go.

This red stuff is navmesh. You can read about it here: https://t.co/3vutoKhEHk pic.twitter.com/W37PHbxeDi

— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021

The answer to this strange behaviour was eventually discovered: it was happening because the fox fleeing would travel 100 triangles away, as opposed to using real-world measurements, such as 100 metres away.

“You know where it’s easy to find 100 triangles? The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration,” said Burgess.

Areas of interest like camps and treasure caches contained large numbers of triangles due to the increase in detail, and so in its hunt for a lot of triangles to travel over in order to flee, the foxs’ AI routine pretty much always took them to a camp or something similar. In Burgess’s words: “foxes aren’t leading you to treasure – but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing”.

So there you have it: another story of how tricky and unpredictable game development can be. And another example of how, ten years after launch, games can still throw up surprises, quirks, and interesting tales here and there.

For more from Skyrim, check out the news of it receiving an FPS boost on Xbox Series X, our favourite console-friendly Skyrim mods, and the copy of Skyrim that sold for $600.

Liam Wiseman is a Freelance News writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @liamthewiseman.