People love Genshin Impact, and people love Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unfortunately, a crossover event in China attracted so many excited fans that it was forced to shut down over COVID-19 protocol violations.
As reported by Kotaku, Kentucky Fried Chicken in China was holding a special promotion with Genshin Impact to award special pins to customers who yelled out to employees when purchasing food.
In both the Shanhai and Hangzhou locations, the promotion had to be canceled soon after it began because of COVID-19 protocol violations. Due to the game’s huge fanbase and our collective desire to get exclusive merchandise, it’s easy to see how it could have gotten out of hand. Despite China’s relative return to normalcy–even at the virus’ starting point in Wuhan–the country is taking no chances.
Genshin Impact is one of the most successful games to ever come from mainland China. Studio miHoYo released the game as a free-to-play title on PC, PS4, and mobile, with PS5 and Switch versions on the way. It has received a steady stream of post-launch content and its gacha-style system for getting new characters has made it hugely profitable.
It isn’t the only impressive RPG coming out of China, either, as the action-heavy Black Myth: Wukong is also in development from studio Game Science. Based on Journey to the West–the same classic Chinese novel that served as the loose inspiration for Dragon Ball–its intense combat looks to be on par with what we’ve seen from studios like From Software and Team Ninja.
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Jonathan Ferguson, a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, breaks down the weaponry of Star Wars Battlefront 2, including Han Solo’s iconic DL-44 pistol, the T-21 heavy blaster, and the most quintessential Star Wars gun:, the E-11 blaster rifle.
There’s a lot to know about in Valheim, from crafting, to survival mechanics, to combat and exploration. We’ve compiled a whole lot of guides and walkthroughs that can help lead you through the Viking world of Valheim, and even help you cheat. Below, you’ll find information about everything Valheim has to offer, to help you find Iron, create Bronze, best bosses, and craft amazing gear.
Stay tuned, as we’ll continue to update this list with more and more Valheim guides, tips, walkthroughs, and information as we discover it.
The first thing you’re going to need to do in Valheim is jump into a game world, and if you want to play with friends, you’ll probably need a dedicated server. Here’s everything about how they work.
Console Commands And Cheats
Console commands and cheats will allow you to spawn anything you want in Valheim–but only in single-player.
While Valheim is a game that’s all about survival, it’s also very creative, allowing you to build and customize structures and bases in a way that’s similar to games such as Minecraft. There’s no creative mode in Valheim, but if you wanted to circumvent the survival components–or just cheat in general–we’ve got a guide for that.
Beginner’s Tips And Tricks
There are lots of ways for you to maximize your time in the early game to stay alive and thrive in Valheim.
Starting out in Valheim can be overwhelming, but these tricks will help you hit the ground running and survive in the new world.
Crafting And Armor Guides
There’s a lot you’ll need to know to make great armor in Valheim and survive its harsher climates.
There’s a whole lot to make in Valheim, and climbing the tech tree to make better gear and better bases is essential to staying alive. Here’s everything you need to smith metal and make yourself some awesome armor and weapons.
Animal Taming
Lots of animals attack and try to kill you in Valheim, but you can make a few friends, too. Taming and breeding animals can be a handy source of meat, and with the right animal companions, you can gain some help in combat, too.
Biome Survival Guides
Each of the biomes is tough to survive–here’s what you need to know to stay alive.
Each of Valheim’s biomes is dangerous in its own way, but with these tips, you can survive and thrive as you seek out new resources.
Boss Fight Guides
Your goal in Valheim is to take down its many bosses, like Moder, the frost dragon of the Mountain biome.
All this survival, base-building, and armor-crafting in Valheim has a purpose: You’ve been sent by the god Odin to dispatch his enemies. Each biome has a boss, and each holds key items you need to access new crafting materials and technologies to keep advancing. Here’s how to take them down, either with a team or solo.
First-Person Mod
If you’re not happy with Valheim’s third-person perspective, you can use this mod to give it a bit more of a Skyrim feel and change its camera to first-person.
The official Xbox Game Pass Twitter account is hinting at a new game that’s supposed to hit the service soon, and it seems to be People Can Fly’s third-person shooter Outriders.
According to an email from the imaginary executive senior vice president lieutenant of general video game communications “Melissa McGamepass,” “that new game has been confirmed and is officially coming to the service.” While it doesn’t explicitly state the game’s name, the references to “mysterious signal” and “anomaly” has people talking about Outriders.
In an Outriders story and world reveal from February 2020, a “mysterious signal” is what drives the superpowered militia group to face off against the “anomaly.” At the end of the Outriders demo, players end up chasing a mysterious signal in the distance. These two callbacks are seemingly enough for people to assume that Outriders will make its way to Xbox Game Pass.
This wouldn’t be the first time Xbox Game Pass teased a game coming to the service only for it to end up there later. The same sort of events played out with Control; “Melissa McGamepass” teased the announcement on November 30, 2020, then it dropped on the service on December 3. The service is brimming with all kinds of games and gets new ones frequently, so be sure to check out our roundup of all of the available titles on Xbox Game Pass right now.
Outriders launches on April 1 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Hit up our Outriders preorder guide to learn about what comes with buying early.
The landscape of digital art is being upended by NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to the point where it’s difficult not to have heard the term in passing. But what is an NFT? Why are people spending millions of dollars on JPEGs? And could it change how microtransactions in games work?
Just what is a Non-Fungible Token?
First and foremost, NFTs are intrinsically tied to the blockchain–an online ledger that is maintained by thousands of users globally through the process called mining. Transactions on the blockchain aren’t centralized, so it’s difficult (but not impossible) to edit the ledger to make fraudulent transactions. This is the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin ($BTC), Dogecoin ($DOGE), and Ethereum ($ETH) around the world. NFTs exist on various blockchains, but most being sold are found on the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike the currency, however, they’re non-fungible. That means that one NFT is entirely unique from the rest, unlike the fungible Ethereum, where one coin is identical to all others, thus allowing it to be used as a currency. NFTs, then, are one-of-a-kind in a way, which can explain why they’re being used to verify purchases of digital goods. The goods themselves are specifically unique to the token (an image sold as an NFT can still find its way online for anyone to see) but the token itself is an indicator of the purchase.
So what does an NFT actually give me?
This is where things get a little strange. For example, an artist can choose to mint a piece of digital artwork with an NFT and then sell the token through multiple auction houses. The token itself does not determine who can view the artwork, but rather who holds the rights to it. There’s some grey area here, where the artist can still govern overall ownership and distribution rights, but for the most part, the owner of the NFT is technically the owner of the artwork, even if the image is hosted on Google and available for anyone to right-click and save.
Although not a perfect analogy, you can think of it as someone owning the real Mona Lisa, or a cheap copy made at a novelty gift store. Both feature the same underlying work, but only one is the “real” Mona Lisa. With physical art, there’s more to an original than just being the first of its kind, but with digital art, the difference is almost negligible. A copy of an image, a song, a gif, or anything of that kind can be shared in an unaltered state, diluting the relevance of owning a token to the original.
Wait, why are NFTs valuable then?
Those who see value in NFTs might see the potential to make a profit in the future, as the exclusivity of the token takes on a collector’s status. Others might just want the bragging rights that come with owning the only minted NFT associated with a digital asset, whether it’s accessible to everyone else or not. Although it is technically possible to mint multiple unique NFTs for the same digital asset, it seems most artists aren’t doing this to help preserve the value of the single token that is generated.
Artist Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days is the first NFT sold by auction company Christie’s, selling for $69 million.
Mike Winklemann, an artist known as Beeple, started minting NFTs for his artwork last year, making several sales for thousands of dollars before reaching into the millions. His latest piece, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, was the first NFT sold by Christie’s, a major art auction house. It sold for $69 million, but if you want to save Everdays to your desktop, you can just copy the image tweeted out by Christie’s and do so. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of the difference between purchasing an NFT for an asset, and the asset itself.
Winklemann isn’t alone in the gold rush surrounding NFTs. Musician Steve Aoki sold an NFT to John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, for $888,888.88. The asset was a 36-second music snippet accompanied by a gif, part of which has been shared online. For nearly a million dollars the ownership of the gif will remain on the blockchain as Legere’s, even if the full gif eventually finds its way online and is experienced by millions of other people.
This is definitely finding its way into games, isn’t it?
NFTs aren’t exactly new, and their first big use case was actually in a game. Cryptokitties, which launched in 2017, allows players to purchase NFTs for specific digital cats, which they solely own. These cats can then breed with other digital cat purchases and produce entirely new cats that can then be sold as unique NFTs of their own. This market has generated millions since its inception, with some single cats costing well over a million dollars alone. A curious glance at the website shows that many cheaper cats are simply reskins of the same designs, but the ability to own one for yourself is part of the allure.
CryptoKitties is a game about collecting and breeding weird cats, but uses Etherium and NFTs to create a marketplace for buying and selling them.
If that makes you think about the possibility of NFTs to merge with cosmetic microtransactions in games like Fortnite, Overwatch, or Dota 2, I think it’s safe to bet that there is at least conversation being had over the potential around a system like that. There are already games using NFTs in novel ways, too. The Sandbox is a community-driven creative space that lets users create voxel-based assets or gaming experiences. You could say it’s similar to Roblox, outside of the fact that these gaming experiences all exist on finite virtual land that users can buy using NFTs. The tokens correlate to a piece of land where you can host game creations for other users to visit, with the value of the size and position of the land determined by simple supply and demand.
Mythical Games is planning to use both NFTs and the blockchain in its upcoming PC and console title, Blankos. The studio is designing another game driven by user-generated content, but where items such as cosmetics can be sold in finite numbers. In-game items are transferred to players using NFTs, which can then be resold on a marketplace where the value is determined by the buyers. Think of it as Steam Trading Cards and Valve’s Marketplace, except powered by blockchain transactions for items that come in finite waves.
Can an NFT be minted against anything then? That sounds dangerous
Given that an NFT can be minted for almost anything digital (Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is selling an NFT of the first tweet ever sent, for example) the ease of creating the token has helped give artists the ability to make money via a new platform. But it’s also led to a lot of abuse, which has already started dominating the conversations around NFTs. Artists are finding tokens minted against their art without their consent, letting someone else reap the benefits of a sale without any of the work. It’s also difficult to prevent this right now, given the way in which social media allows digital art of any kind to be shared. NFTs aren’t solving the root problem of copyright online, but they are giving those who would abuse it a lot of freedom to do so.
An official merchandise creator for Among Us recently stumbled upon thousands of NFT sales based on artwork from the game, none of which had been authorized by the studio. This is just a glimpse at the issue thousands of artists are facing, leading to a divide on whether NFTs are the future of digital art collection or a new problem for creators to fight against.
There’s also the environmental impact to consider, which isn’t so much tied to NFTs but rather blockchain technology. Since the blockchain is essentially a ledger maintained by users around the world, requiring computer processing power to authenticate transactions, each one takes up some unit of energy. Combined, studies are showing that the consumption of the overall system is incredibly high, with the Bitcoin blockchain consuming more electricity in a year than the whole of Argentina.
Maintaining the blockchain and facilitating all of the transactions that take place requires incredible amounts of processing power, which incurs large electricity costs. Given that electricity and its generation is still one of the biggest environmental impactors, this has brought the cost of cryptocurrencies to the environment into focus. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said he’s appalled by the harm that cryptocurrencies present to the environment, but also notes that the push towards greener electricity could mitigate it. “If it’s green electricity and it’s not crowding out other uses, eventually, you know, maybe that’s ok,” Gates told the New York Times.
Ethereum is far more efficient than Bitcoin (one of Ethereum’s founders similarly spoke out against the energy consumption of Bitcoin), which means that it’s using less electricity overall on its blockchain than the most popular cryptocurrency on the market. That still does not make it emission-free, however, and it is no secret that popular tokens like NFTs lead to more transactions, which lead to more energy consumption. This also ties into the scarcity of hardware powerful enough for processing the blockchain, which is a big reason why you might have trouble buying a GPU or power supply for your next PC right now.
So where do NFTs go next?
That is the state of NFTs currently, and it’s bound to grow even more now that it’s reached a point of public consciousness that helped propel Bitcoin a few years ago. It’s difficult to say what the future might hold for NFTs as a tangible collector’s item, but for now it’s a bit of a minefield, where you can either sell art to an entirely new, wealthy audience or have even more work illegally stolen from you. And there is no indication of how those problems might be solved just yet.
Haley Bennett (Hillbilly Elegy, The Devil All the Time) will play a new role in Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie, IGN has exclusively learned.
Bennett’s character is unnamed, but we know they will be “key to the past of Cate Blanchett’s character, Lilith.”
In the games, Lilith is a Siren, one of only a handful of people in the Borderlands universe to demonstrate magical abilities – it could be that Bennett’s character will be a part of her gaining or harnessing those powers.
Directed by Roth, produced by Avi and Ari Arad (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Erik Feig, and with the latest screenplay handled by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, HBO’s The Last of Us), it also has some major Hollywood names behind the camera. To shore up the gaming connection, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick are executive producers.
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].
An Arms graphic novel coming from Nintendo has seemingly been cancelled, if the author’s portfolio is anything to go off of.
Ian Flynn wrote an introductory Free Comic Book Day 2018 issue of what was set to become an entire Arms graphic novel, but as reported by Video Games Chronicle his portfolio now says the project was planned but “unfortunately canceled.” The free comic book’s cover literally reads “Graphic Novel Coming Fall 2018!” and when that Fall came without a trace of an Arms graphic novel, fans began to assume something was up.
Perhaps it had been delayed, but as the years passed by, the general read was that it had probably been canned. Reddit user, Dr-Richie-74, noticed that on Flynn’s portfolio page, it says the following under an Arms section: “Wrote the introductory Free Comic Book Day 2018 issue for a planned, but unfortunately canceled, graphic novel series based on the popular Nintendo fighting game franchise, ARMS.”
VGC discovered that on March 11, someone on Twitter reached out to Flynn to ask if the Arms graphic novel had been officially cancelled. Flynn said he doesn’t think he “can or should say anything in an official capacity.”
I don’t think I can/should say anything in an official capacity.
It seems there’s still no official word on whether or not this comic has been cancelled. Considering, though, that it’s been nearly three years since the free introductory comic book was released and the author behind it is calling it a cancelled project on his portfolio, it’s probably safe to assume this graphic novel is no more.
After you spend thousands of hours playing online survival games – even the newest, most popular ones like Valheim – it can be easy to become bored with the more repetitive tasks. Outside of any major quests or boss fights, you can only chop down so many trees and mine so many chunks of ore before you have to get creative.
Since Valheim offers such a vast and dynamic game world (particularly thanks to its procedurally generated maps), you can’t really ever know exactly what’s around the next corner. That’s why one intrepid survival game expert decided to test his luck against Valheim’s current final boss not with an army of like-minded friends, but with a battalion of wild, ferocious wolves.
Who Let The Wolves Out
The road to overcoming Valheim’s most powerful foe in such a unique way wasn’t necessarily an easy task, and Calvin – or Alpaca, as he’s known online – explained how his journey toward beastmaster wasn’t an intentional one.
“As for breeding the wolves, that all started as more of an accident really,” Alpaca said in a recent interview with IGN, explaining that he was still getting his bearings as a breeder when his wolf pack started to grow. “I kept my first set of wolves fed all the time. I noticed they kept multiplying over and over to the point where I had around 30 basic wolves.”
No stranger to survival games – with thousands of hours logged in games like Day Z and Atlas – Alpaca says part of his commitment to survival games comes from a love of breeding and animal taming systems. “I am one of those annoying Perfect IV breeders when I play Pokemon,” he says, “and when I played Ark and Atlas, I spent most of my time finding perfect tames.” The troubling thing about breeding animals like wolves in Valheim, he explains, is that they’re naturally aggressive creatures. Once you’ve tamed them they won’t attack you reactively anymore, but if even simple enemies, like Greydwarves or skeletons, wander too close to a wolf’s attack range, then the wolves will pounce – even destroying any base the player has built in the way of their meal. The AI isn’t designed to “protect” a base, but they’re good at neutralizing threats that get too close.
Basic wolves don’t make a very deadly (nor efficient) traveling army for taking on Valheim’s big boss monsters, though. Corralling that many animals is tough, especially because of how sporadically they move, and Valheim isn’t built for herding dozens of creatures so framerate issues alone usually deter most people. At its core, Valheim is typically about small bands of players, not shepherding battalions of wild animals across the map. All the animals in Valheim have different tiers denoted by star rankings, and if you can find a 2-star variant they’re much, much more powerful.
“A game like this really speaks to my interests,” Alpaca says. “Due to my job, I have a lot of free time in the Winter – Valheim lets me channel that into gathering resources, building, and of course taming animals, all for the betterment of our group.”
Eventually, Alpaca had a group of 30 2-star wolves ready to take on the final boss in Valheim’s Early Access form: the colossal skeletal monster, Yagluth. Alpaca and his friend group hadn’t fought it yet and weren’t aware of what they’d need to prepare. Although all the wolves died in the battle , they got the boss down to just a sliver of health remaining before Alpaca and his friends had to join the fight and finish it off. But that first battle was just the start of Alpaca’s wolven ambitions.
Breeding Better Wolves
“I figured, with enough wolves, I could get a Yagluth kill without needing to participate at all,” he said – but he knew summoning an even more impressive army would require some additional work.
“After that attempt, I started looking into breeding methods that other people had discovered, and saw the popular ‘Boar Breeding Tower’ on YouTube,” Alpaca said. “I figured I could modify it for wolves, and after about four hours of working at it, I had a functioning wolf breeding tower.”
The tower method is crucial to having animals in Valheim reproduce as quickly as possible. Breedingis based entirely on the amount of space in an area. So, if two fed and happy animals are near each other and their immediate vicinity isn’t occupied by cubs or other similar animals, they’ll fill that space with offspring. Which means, usually, the bottleneck to expansion is space. The tower, which has players build a ramp up to a small, square, enclosed area elevated a few meters off the ground with a small opening for babies to fall through (they’re fine, don’t worry!), solves this problem. Since the immediate vicinity is always empty after the offspring falls down the chute, they just keep making more babies. It might sound like a barbaric way of gamifying the wolf cub birthing process, but if it works it works, right?
“With the tower, you elevate your breeders so that when the wolf cubs are born, they fall to the ground,” Alpaca said. “This causes the breeders’ [area] to never exceed two wolves, so they procreate as fast as they can and indefinitely.”
The end result is what Alpaca posted on Reddit: a decisive victory for his wolf pack. They end the fight so quickly, Yagluth barely had time to finish its spawn animation. “I was very surprised with how fast they killed him to be honest,” says Alpaca, “but I couldn’t have been prouder.”
While Alpaca was certainly proud of the work his army had accomplished, he knew those wolves weren’t meant to be housepets – though it wasn’t as altruistic a decision as you might think. “Due to FPS issues with so many animals, I took them out into the middle of the island I was on and ordered them to stop following me,” he said. He keeps two back at base for breeding, just in case, but lets the majority of them roam free.
“Now, they just roam that area whenever in render distance, and when they aren’t rendered they just sit in limbo,” Alpaca says. “With the ‘normal’ amount of wolves I keep around my bases, I let them free roam the perimeter/inside the moat area to defend the base from random events and creatures.”
It’s perhaps no surprise Alpaca let them roam free, as trying to actually control such a large group of wolves that strong is no small feat. They’re capable of destroying an entire village in a matter of seconds if an enemy gets too close. He learned this lesson the hard way, after one crushing moment when over 30 wolves tore through a wall and support beam to escape an enclosure while chasing an enemy.The wolves’ ferocity resulted in the collapse of the entire fortress, demolishing half his base while he was AFK from the game and let breeding happen in the background. Eventually he had to start storing them underground in a bunker since they can’t destroy the ground itself.
“I had a few weird things happen through all this,” Alpaca said. “I’ve had some wolves escape over our moat at our main base before, and I actually found them swimming out in the ocean somehow. To this day, I don’t know how or why they went that far out to sea, although they were probably chasing a swimming deer or something like that.”
Emergent and entirely unscripted moments like these are in large part what has contributed to Valheim’s rise as a multiplayer survival experience to both play and watch, as it’s now sold over five million copies in just a few short weeks and continues to land big audiences on Twitch. And with Valheim only at just the start of its planned Early Access journey, Alpaca and others’ breeding methods may be just the beginning of more incredible stories to come from players’ Viking adventures – though players will be hard-pressed to top a rampaging army of super-wolves.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Dishonored: Definitive Edition, and Prey are all getting the option to boost their framerate. Xbox’s Larry Hryb and Jeff Rubenstein shared the announcement and details during Friday’s recording of the official Xbox podcast.
If for any reason you actually prefer to play the games at their original framerates, Rubenstein confirmed that players will be able to toggle the setting on their consoles. Rubenstein added that players can expect an “increase from 30 up to nearly 60 frames per second” when FPS boost is activated. The boost will require you to update your system to the latest version.
A meteorite discovered in an Algerian desert is actually a piece of an ancient planet older than Earth itself.
The meteorite, formally known as Erg Chech 002, was discovered in May of last year in the Erg Chech desert located in Algeria, according to a report from Science Alert. Upon its discovery, scientists quickly recognized that it was different from the usual meteorite in that it had an igneous makeup, or in other words, featured a composition likely derived from solid lava or magma.
Erg Chech 002
Its igneous texture indicates that Erg Chech 002 was formed by way of a volcano, which, as Science Alert points out, likely means it could have once been a piece of the crust of a protoplanet, which is the scientific term for a tiny or dwarf planet. Because of this, it was classified as an achondrite, which is quite rare. As noted by Science Alert, of thousands and thousands of meteorites discovered on Earth, only 3,179 are achondrites, according to the Meteoritical Bulletin Database.
Most achondrites are basaltic, but Erg Chech 002 is what’s known as andesite, something University of Western Brittany geochemist, Jean-Alix Barrat, discovered upon further inspection of the meteorite as noted in his research team’s report. Barrat and his team determined by examining the radioactive decay of Erg Chech 002’s aluminum and magnesium isotopes that those two elements formed in the meteorite around 4.565 billion years ago, which makes it older than our 4.54-billion-year-old Earth, as noted by Science Alert.
This makes Erg Chech 002 the oldest magmatic rock ever analyzed, according to the research team’s report, and sheds light on how the crusts of ancient protoplanets like that where Erg Chech 002 originated were formed.
Barrat’s team compared the way Erg Chech 002 interacts with light, otherwise defined as spectral characteristics according to Science Alert, with asteroids in the Solar System and how they interact with light, but they couldn’t find any link between the two. This doesn’t necessarily indicate that Erg Chech 002 is from a different universe, but rather, that the protoplanet or type of protoplanet from which it originated from is no longer present in the Solar System.
Science Alert says it’s likely that Erg Chech 002’s home protoplanet was merged into other space rocks. The publication also notes that because of Erg Chech 002’s age and how close it is in age to Earth, other rocks from its protoplanet might have helped form our planet.
