Both Wanda and Vision have complicated histories in the comics. The pair met while on the Avengers and eventually fell in love. For quite some time, the “witch” in Scarlet Witch was completely literal–her abilities were magic based and, as such, needed to be honed with practice and mentoring by another, more experienced magic user.
Enter Agatha Harkness, another witch who helped Wanda learn better magic. In WandaVision, we’re convinced that Kathryn Hahn’s Agnes is the MCU’s incarnation aforementioned mentor witch. Back to the books, Agatha decided it would be worthwhile for her to grant one of Wanda’s most unlikely wishes–you see, Wanda and Vision were in love and, for a while there, they quit the Avengers and became completely determined to live normal, human lives in a normal human community.
And part of being a normal, human couple was starting a family. But Vision was a synthezoid, or artificial human, and therefore, not able to organically have kids. So Agatha “magically” helped it happen and Wanda got pregnant, had twins, and for a brief moment, everyone was very happy. Watch the video above to learn more, and Mason’s theories on what Wanda and Vision’s twin babies could mean for the show and for the MCU!
Hitman III is here, having launched for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, Stadia, and PC. That’s a lot of options and you may be wondering which version is right for you. Well, if loading times are a big part of your decision-making process, then you’ve come to the right place.
In the video above, we test the loading times for Hitman III on five different consoles. Apologies if you were considering buying the game for Switch, Stadia, or PC–this is a PlayStation vs. Xbox video.
For PlayStation owners, we compare the loading speeds between the standard PS4 and PS5. Xbox owners can skip ahead to when we put the Xbox One S up against both the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. And if you happen to own both of the current gen consoles, we have a PS5 vs. Xbox Series X comparison to round things out.
The exact time stamps are listed below if you’re looking for a specific comparison.
In GameSpot’s Hitman III review, Phil Hornshaw writes, “What’s good about Hitman–its level design and the creativity, experimentation, and exploration that affords–is great in Hitman 3. It closes out the trilogy by brilliantly playing off everything that came before it, making use of and then subverting expectations, and rewarding players for their willingness to master the complexity of both its individual levels and the series as a whole.”
Hitman 3 caps off the journey with a mission that’s quite out of the ordinary for the series. Carpathian Mountains (Untouchable) takes on a more linear design, leaving you little room to work with and fewer options for clever methods–think of it more as an epilogue mission to tie up the story’s loose ends. While it may be straightforward, it can still be challenging, so we’ll walk you through it in case you need some pointers.
For your first time in this mission, you’ll start with Agent 47’s flashbacks and visions followed by walking up in a secluded test lab. You won’t have any items to start with and you have no guidance since there are no Missions Stories to follow, similar to how Berlin, Apex Predator started. But fret not, this one’s not as complex or free-roaming as Berlin. Take note that every NPC is fair game in this mission and you will actually be rewarded with XP for every kill.
If you need help with any previous missions in case you want to complete leftover Mission Stories or knock out every assassination challenge, be sure to check out our full Hitman 3 guides and walkthroughs hub.
Waking Up
Once you wake up from the bed in this mysterious lab, you’ll be in a narrow room with one doctor present. Knock him out, take the disguise, and the keycard dropped (or the one on a desk nearby). The next room will have a guard and a doctor talking to each other. After their brief conversation, they’ll alternate short patterns within the room. Walk past them and go to the next room; there will be a door locked by a keypad, but don’t worry, the code is literally written on the wall to your left (it’s 1979). Take the rusty crowbar and use it to bust open the door in the previous room in order to progress in this mission.
Working On The Railroad
Turns out you’re on a train heading up through the Carpathian Mountains–yup, this entire mission is on a set of train cars. Keep moving forward by scaling the sides and tops of the train cars. Knock out the guard standing outside and take his disguise since this will help you walk through most of the mission without resistance. Go inside the next train car with a missing valve wheel, find the valve wheel in the back of the train car, then use the valve to open the roof.
Once you get past the train car’s roof and drop down, turn around to enter a room full of guards. Only one will suspect you; walk right past them and pick up the rusty crowbar at the far end of this area. Walk back out and continue moving forward.
Scaling Trains
From this point forward, you’ll move past a series of train cars with various guards posted up. You can get past them by carefully avoiding the ones who are suspicious of you, or jumping out of the side of certain windows to shimmy across to the next window to jump into the next room. Ledges with ice on them cannot be scaled, frozen windows cannot be jumped through, and when you’re walking on the roof, lookout for signal posts that will cause damage if they hit you.
You’ll eventually make it to a room that has a workbench; use this to craft a silenced pistol which can be useful if you want to get lethal. Progressing is quite self-explanatory around these parts, but keep an eye out for higher level disguises that let you access subsequent train cars with ease. The next one being right after you pass the bar where two guards are talking about the secrecy of this train operation. Check one of the rooms where an armored guard is sleeping; take the outfit right next to him and the silenced SMG just in case.
Guard Duty
The next train car has two armored guards, one of which will be suspicious–there are weapons and ammo in this room if you want, otherwise you can keep moving forward past them. On the way to the next train car, there will be a fuse on the ground that you can use to power a light and blind the patrolling guard. The next train, where two guards are sitting down talking to each other, will have a rusty crowbar and a valve wheel which you can take back to a previous train car, but you’ll simply get weapons and ammo.
As you move forward, you’ll notice guards with winter camo uniforms, keep walking past them, avoiding the suspicious ones. The next train car will have the Commando Leader inside. He’ll have his back turned when you walk into the room. It’s important that you knock him out and take his uniform; you’ll walk past the rest of the guards and they’ll address you as the commander and let you pass free.
An Easy Stroll To Your Target
You can switch into the office staff suit in the next train car but you won’t be able to carry an SMG or shotgun if you want to do that. The guard in this room is suspicious of you regardless, but once you get past him, it’s just a simple walk past a few office spaces and guards to get to your target.
Once you get to the final train car, use the lever to disconnect it from the rest of the train and confront your target. There’s a secret ending you can get if you do things a certain way, but the rest is up to you.
As with Resident Evil 7 before it, Capcom has provided fans with a short, intense look at Resident Evil Village in the form of a standalone demo. That demo, dubbed “Maiden,” is available now on the PlayStation Network store for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. It’s not quite as puzzling as the demo for RE7, but it’s definitely possible to get hung up and miss important clues that will show you the way to work your way through this short, frightening slice of the castle.
Below, you’ll find a quick, spoiler-free walkthrough that will lead you through the demo and help you if you find yourself stuck. We won’t spoil any scares or story elements, although we do highlight a few notes that can give you a little extra insight into what’s going on. You can check out the video below for a full runthrough of the entire demo, as well.
The Dungeon
Upon waking up, you’ll find yourself in a dark dungeon cell. Look to one side to find a crumpled-up note hidden in the wall. Reading it provides you several clues you’ll need to escape the dungeon, but they’re a bit obtuse. First, you need to get out of the cell–crouch down and look under your wooden bed for a hole through which you can crawl.
Once you’re out, you’re free to explore. There are several other cells, mostly filled with various implements of torture. You’ll find two of them are chained closed with hanging, half-devoured bodies inside. Follow the blood trails through the dungeon and you should find the body of a woman slumped in another cell. With the doors chained, there’s nothing more you can do here.
Follow the dungeon hallway to a barred door at the end. You won’t be able to open it, and it’s here that you might be a little confused as to what to do next. Look for a metal box on a stand to the left of the door, in front of it. The box is locked, but examine it anyway–you should hear a sound back the way you came when you do. You have to interact with the box in order to find your next clue.
Examine the locked box at the end of the dungeon hall, then return to this dead woman to find her slumped over.
Follow the sound back through the dungeon to the cell with the dead woman. You’ll find her in a new position with a set of bolt cutters sticking out of her back. Grab them and cut the chains off the nearby cell to get inside it. Here, look for a bucket filled with blood. Interact with that and you’ll fish out the item you need to move on: a lockpick. Use it on the metal box at the end of the hall to leave the dungeon.
The Cellar
You’ll find yourself in a strange, ornate room next. If you remember, the note you read suggested you’ll soon find a locked door, and that you’ll have to follow the light to make your way forward.
Keep moving through the hallways and up a ladder until you reach a round room with a barrel and a small table. Look carefully and you’ll notice a hand sticking out of the barrel, fluttering weakly. You can’t leave this room by its door, but if you walk around the table, you’ll find the doors to a wooden cabinet slightly cracked, with light slipping through from the other side. Open them to reveal another hole you can crawl through.
Look for some light leaking through a pair of cabinet doors in the locked room with the record player. You can open those doors to find a hole to climb through.
The note now mentions hitting a dead end and finding a secret that will let you advance. As you move into the next room, you’ll hit that dead end. Duck down into the recessed fireplace, where a few candles burn, to find a brick you can push, activating a switch. That’ll reveal a hole in the wall that lets you advance.
Through the hole, look to your left to find a note that provides some context for what’s going on. Written by a maid, it describes working for someone who viciously attacks her servants if they make any sort of mistake. Being carried to the cellar sounds like what might have happened to the character you’re playing.
Take the ladder from here and push through another hole in the wall to reach the next area.
The Castle
We don’t know exactly what the necklace in this demo is for yet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick it up.
Now you’ll find an opulently decorated, actually clean room. Pick up the Necklace (which is made of bone) on the table as you go by. Exit through the door and follow the hallway to a large foyer. You’ll find a door in this hallway with a bust set in it, which is missing an eye. Log that info for later and head downstairs. Look in the fireplace for another clue as to who you might be playing in this particular demo.
In classic Resident Evil fashion, you’ll need to find what’s missing from this ornate door in order to open it.
Two of the doors here are locked, but the one left of the fireplace can be opened. Check the side table right in front of it for another note, listing names of potential candidates–for what, however, we don’t know.
Through the door, you’ll find a room with an open window and another big, locked door. Out the window, you’ll see a snowy courtyard lit with torches. Next, check one of the wine glasses on the table in front of the door to discover a ring with a maroon eye set into it. Open your inventory and examine the ring more closely to remove the eye.
Examine the wine glass in the room with the open window to find a ring with a round maroon eye inside.
As you might have guessed, this will unlock the door with the bust upstairs, so return to the foyer and head there now. Open that door and find another note discussing a particular vintage of wine made by the Dimitrescus, the family that owns the castle.
You can open several of the cabinet doors close to the floor in this room. The cabinet immediately to the right of the note about the wine holds a key to the courtyard, which sounds like the locked door you found in the room with the open window. Return and use the key to unlock the door to trigger the end of the demo.
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CD Projekt Red has released Patch 1.1 for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC, consoles, and Stadia.
As detailed on Cyberpunk.net, this update’s big focus is on stability improvements. As noted on Twitter, this update “lays the groundwork for the upcoming patches.”
Memory usage improvements in various systems within the game are part of this patch, and should improve “characters, interactions, navigation, in-game videos (news, tv, etc.), foliage, laser effects, minimap, devices, AI, street traffic, environmental damage system, GPU-related, and more.”
There have also been various crash fixes related to, among others, “loading saves, game opening/closing, and Point of No Return.”
Many fixes for Quests and the Open World are detailed (which you can see below), as well as others for UI, Visual, Achievements, and more.
Those on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are experiencing the most issues in Cyberpunk 2077, and Patch 1.1 looks to fix crash issues on PS4 and “Improved memory usage for character creation, mirrors, scanning, camera remote control, menus (inventory, map) on Xbox One, Xbox One X and Xbox One S.”
Memory usage improvements in various systems within the game: characters, interactions, navigation, in-game videos (news, tv, etc.), foliage, laser effects, minimap, devices, AI, street traffic, environmental damage system, GPU-related, and more.
Various crash fixes (related to, among others, loading saves, game opening/closing and Point of No Return).
Quests/Open World
Fixed an issue where calls from Delamain would end immediately and seem like they cannot be picked up in Epistrophy.
Fixed an issue where players would not receive calls from Delamain when approaching relevant vehicles in Epistrophy.
Fixed an issue where the objective could get stuck on “Answer the call from Mr. Hands” in M’ap Tann Pèlen.
Fixed an issue where Judy could teleport underground in Pyramid Song.
Fixed an issue where it would be impossible to talk to Zen Master in Poem of The Atoms.
Fixed an issue where Takemura wouldn’t call in Down on the Street.
Fixed an issue where Jackie could disappear in The Pickup.
Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to get out of the car in The Beast in Me: The Big Race.
Fixed an issue where players could stop receiving calls and messages after moving too far away from A Day In The Life area.
Fixed an issue where opening the package wouldn’t update Space Oddity.
Retro-fixed the saves affected by a rare issue where speaking to Judy in Automatic Love would be impossible due to an invisible wall. The underlying issue is under investigation.
Fixed an issue that prevented players from collecting the reward in Gig: Freedom of the Press. The quest will auto-complete for those who could not collect the reward previously, and the reward will be provided automatically.
Fixed an issue where Delamain would remain silent throughout Epistrophy if the player initially refused to help him.
UI
Fixed an issue where prompt for exiting braindance could be missing.
Removed an invalid item from loot.
Visual
Fixed an issue where a grenade’s trajectory could be displayed in photo mode.
Fixed particles’ hue appearing pink when viewed close up.
Fixed cars spawning incorrectly in Reported Crime: Welcome to Night City.
Achievements
Fixed an issue where completing one of theassaults in progress in Santo Domingo would sometimes not contribute towards progression for The Jungle achievement, preventing its completion.
Miscellaneous
Addressed the issue responsible for saves getting oversized (related to the modifier indicating if the item is crafted), and trimmed the excess size from already existing saves (note: this won’t fix PC save files corrupted before 1.06 update).
Fixed an issue where input could stop registering upon opening the weapon wheel and performing an action.
Fixed an issue where the “Continue” button in the Main Menu could load an end game save.
PlayStation-specific
Performance optimization of crowds on PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5.
Various crash fixes on PlayStation 4.
Xbox-specific
Improved memory usage for character creation, mirrors, scanning, camera remote control, menus (inventory, map) on Xbox One, Xbox One X and Xbox One S.
PC-specific
It will now be possible to obtain achievements while in Steam offline mode. Note: Offline mode needs to be enabled before starting the game. This change does not work retroactively.
Addressed the game startup crashes related to loading cache on NVIDIA graphics cards.
Stadia-specific
Concert audio should no longer be inaudible in Never Fade Away.
Fixed corrupted textures on several melee weapons.
Tweaked default deadzone settings to be more responsive. Note: the change will not affect settings unless they’re set to default.
One of the best things about Destiny 2‘s Beyond Light expansion is how much concrete story it has delivered. Destiny’s story has always been unwieldy, largely because there’s a lot of it–but most of it took place in the distant past, somewhere outside of what’s actually in the game. In Beyond Light, Bungie tied together a host of dangling lore threads, filling in gaps we’ve been wondering about for a long, long time. Names like Clovis Bray finally have faces, and characters we’ve been wondering about from Destiny 1, like the Exo Stranger, have finally explained their actions.
Every so often, Bungie collects some of those lore entries together into book form, as Destiny Grimoire Anthologies. The books center on specific themes, like the influence of the Darkness or the history of the Fallen, and each one has been relevant to whatever stories Destiny 2 was telling at the time of their release. Grimoire Anthology Vol. 3, which was released right around the launch of Beyond Light, includes lore relevant to the Exos, Rasputin, and Clovis Bray–and gives some clues about what we might still learn on Europa.
Beyond Light’s backstory is all about the birth of the Exo race–robots into which human consciousnesses have been downloaded. That’s a major part of the third Grimoire Anthology book as well, with the book compiling lore entries about the Exos’ strange relationship with the Deep Stone Crypt. The book ends with what feels like a major clue as to what we can expect from the story on Europa as it continues to unfold in coming seasons. The last portion of the book focuses on Destiny’s most famous Exo, the former Hunter Vanguard and the character who was murdered to kick off the Forsaken expansion: Cayde-6.
The Cayde lore entries in the Grimoire Anthology compile some information about his past. One explains that, back when he was still fully human, he owed a big debt to Clovis Bray, the genius industrialist whose company was responsible for creating Exos (as well as other things, like Rasputin, the giant artificial intelligence that controlled all the solar systems defensive weaponry). When Bray came to collect, the human who would become Cayde expected some dire consequences, but he was instead offered an opportunity to join the Exo program.
Cayde’s history from there is a bit spotty, in part because of the fact that Exos often get their memories wiped to keep their human minds functioning well inside their robotic bodies. We know he worked for Clovis Bray as an Exo bodyguard and soldier for a while, and he seems to have lost track of his human past–including his family. As somebody who was part of the Exo program and worked for Clovis Bray, he seemingly got pretty close to the company during the Golden Age.
The relevant part for what might be next on Europa comes from some story points uncovered after Cayde-6’s death in the Forsaken expansion. After he was killed, players could depart on a mission to find several stashes of gear Cayde hid on Titan. In each one was a recorded message Cayde created for whoever killed him; since he didn’t know who that might be, he recorded a bunch of messages for a bunch of people, including his friends.
The message that matters is the one Cayde left for the people who built the Deep Stone Crypt, the facility where Exos were first created and the scene of Beyond Light’s raid. It’s also the very last entry in the book.
“This one’s for the minds behind the Deep Stone Crypt,” Cayde said in the recording. “You think just ’cause you made me, you can unmake me? Hey, I understand. [If] I were you, I wouldn’t want people knowing what I did either. Guess you better hope I didn’t tell anyone about the Crypt. Or about the, uh, what was it? Oh yeah… Long Slow Whisper. ‘Cause if I did, that would be real bad for you, huh? I may be dead, but I guarantee you ain’t heard the last of me.”
The message itself raises some questions about what Cayde might have been threatening to share, and who in particular he was threatening. We’ve uncovered a lot on Europa, but the phrasing of Cayde’s message, the reference to the Long Slow Whisper, and Cayde’s closing line suggest there’s more to uncover.
Having found the Crypt itself and other secrets hidden on Europa, we have a fair sense of some of the things the creators of the Exos might have wanted to keep people from knowing. First, there’s the fact that Exos are not just robots–they’re made possible through the use of both Darkness energy and Vex technology. Lore entries suggest that Exos have strange dreams whenever they’re reset that often include them fighting (and killing) an army composed of everyone they’ve ever met. Pair those frightening visions with the fact that Exos have elements of the Darkness and the Vex baked into them from the moment they’re built, and you might suddenly become a little distrustful of your robot Guardian pals.
Second, Clovis Bray didn’t just have an epiphany and start building Exos. The process of finding a way to get human minds to accept their new robot bodies was a long and difficult one; early in the process, Exos would fall to madness and literally tear themselves apart. Exploring Europa reveals the brutal experiments Bray and his workers committed on their test subjects to try to find a solution to the Exo problem, which included injecting them with Vex radiolarian fluid and grafting robotic parts onto their human bodies. It was all pretty horrific.
But since we already know about those things, they don’t seem likely to be what Cayde is referring to when he threatens to reveal information about the Deep Stone Crypt. We uncovered Clovis Bray’s crimes and the inner workings of the Exos just by wandering around on Europa, so you’d think that the insider knowledge Cayde possessed would be something even deeper and more nefarious.
“Long Slow Whisper” is the name of the emblem players who completed the Deep Stone Crypt raid on Day One, and it could refer to the influence of the Darkness on people who get too close to it (we know it was influencing Clovis Bray and the researchers who discovered the pyramid on the Moon, which is the centerpiece of the Shadowkeep expansion). But this is such an explicit phrase that it feels like Bungie’s writers would have made a bigger note of calling attention to it, and its specific link to Cayde and the Forsaken story. So maybe the Long Slow Whisper is something more, something we haven’t yet learned about.
The other question this all raises is one of who Cayde is referring to in his message. We know some of the people behind the Deep Stone Crypt at this point. They include Clovis Bray, who downloaded himself into an Exo body and eventually became Banshee-44, the Gunsmith. Another copy of Clovis’s original personality persists as the AI in charge of the Europa research facility. Elsie Bray, the Exo Stranger, was also a key figure in running the Europa facility, but Clovis kept her in the dark about the inner workings of the Exo program, and when she learned the truth, she tried to stop him–she’d be fine with Cayde publicizing whatever he knew. These people don’t really seem like the folks Cayde would be threatening. The AI head was more or less dormant before Guardians arrived on Europa; Banshee doesn’t remember being Clovis and has no ties to that life; and Elsie hasn’t shown up since Destiny 1’s vanilla campaign. So who was Cayde threatening to expose?
There’s some additional evidence that there might be more story about Cayde on the way as we continue in Destiny 2’s story past Beyond Light. Recent events in the game have been heavily related to Cayde’s story in Forsaken, bringing the murdered Vanguard back to the forefront in players’ minds. Running simultaneously with the release of Beyond Light was the Season of the Hunt, in which players worked closely with a character named the Crow to hunt down enemies corrupted by a new Hive villain, Xivu Arath. The Crow is actually Uldren Sov, the guy who murdered Cayde and who players killed in revenge at the end of the Forsaken story campaign. Soon after his death, Uldren was revived by a Ghost named Glint, turning him into a Guardian who calls himself the Crow–which means the Crow has no memory of the man he used to be, or the circumstances of his own death.
That made the events of the Season of the Hunt pretty charged as we got to know the Crow and the person he had become. We worked closely with the Crow, the murderer of Cayde-6 who we, in turn, murdered. In what seems to be the final story mission of the season, though, the player character accepts the Crow as a Guardian, effectively forgiving him for his past crimes and acknowledging that he’s a new person. But while we learned a lot about the Crow, there’s a key piece of information the Crow doesn’t have about us: that the player character is the one who killed him, in Cayde’s name.
All that is to say that the effects of Cayde’s death are still being felt, and that the character–as an Exo, as someone who worked for Clovis Bray, as a member of the Vanguard, and as a memory–is relevant to everything that’s going on in Destiny right now. Hell, even the final boss of the Deep Stone Crypt raid, Taniks, has major ties to Cayde. Among his stashes, Cayde left a recording to be played in the event that Taniks was the one who finally killed him. The pair had a long-standing history of trying to kill each other, and it was Taniks who murdered Andal Brask, one of Cayde’s best friends and his Hunter Vanguard predecessor.
Since the release of Beyond Light, we destroyed a character who might be Cayde’s greatest nemesis and witnessed the redemption of the guy who murdered him, while also learning about the people who helped create Cayde in the first place.
So although Cayde has been dead for two years now, he still looms large on the landscape of Destiny 2’s storytelling, and there seems to be business left unfinished as relates to his character. After all, there’s still no Hunter Vanguard to replace Cayde, and we’ve spent the last few months wandering the halls of Clovis Bray’s Eventide settlement and the Deep Stone Crypt. Cayde said that, even dead, the folks behind the Deep Stone Crypt hadn’t heard the last of him, and I have a feeling we haven’t either.
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Something weird is happening with GameStop stock in that it’s currently trading at an all-time high. But this isn’t a sign that GameStop has miraculously turned its fortunes around overnight. Instead, the stock surge is a result of a very strange confluence of opposing stock traders and dare I say, stock trolling.
The video game retail chain saw its stocks jump to an all-time high of $76.76 per share today. Compared to last year when shares were trending as low as $3 a share. The 80% surge today from its already upward trending $43 per share opening price forced GameStop to temporarily halt trading according to Bloomberg.
How did this happen? GameStop’s stock (traded as GME) has been trending upward all January. But behind the scenes, the reasoning for the jump has less to do with GameStop’s actual business performances and more to do with a fight between short-sellers like Citron Research and the subreddit r/WallStreetBets.
Short selling is a strategy where an investor will borrow stock in exchange for an IOU. They can then sell the stock for a set price, let’s say 20 shares for $400. That stock could then lose value, and the investor can buy back 20 shares for $300. They’ll then return the 20 shares back to the original stock owner and pocket the extra $100.
Several firms have shorted GameStop, including Citron Research, a short-seller specializing in bets that companies will fail. The idea wasn’t far-fetched given the spate of GameStop’s bad news ranging from store closures to the general health of stores during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the opposing “side” so to speak are users of the subreddit WallStreetBets and finance influencers on TikTok (or FinTok) who, through a combination of chaotic investing and savvy, predicted investors would try and short GameStop stock and made moves to profit from it.
There were also signs the market became somewhat more optimistic for GameStop after it promoted Ryan Cohen, co-founder of pet retail empire Chewy, as a board member. Cohen has spoken publicly about plans to turn GameStop into some kind of digital retail leader.
Redditors and others moved ahead of short-sellers by buying GameStop stock early when it was incredibly cheap. As short sellers moved to “cover” their short by buying back the stock they needed to return to their lenders, prices began to climb, forcing the short sellers to accelerate their buying, which in turn continued to drive up stock prices, creating a short squeeze.
Basically, it set off a chain reaction of short-sellers trying to cut any of their losses by purchasing more GameStop stock, which drove prices up even further.
There are testimonials on Reddit and elsewhere of people profiting from this sudden surge. Some have shared their GME portfolios hitting as high as $5 million USD in value.
Vice and Ars Technica have excellent explainers on the full “war” between WallStreetBets and short-sellers, but ultimately GameStop’s stock success is a strange case of the wild world of speculative investing.
GameStop has declined to comment on its stock performance.
Microsoft knew that announcing a significant price hike to Xbox Live Gold wasn’t going to go over well. That’s why it dumped the news on a Friday. So what’s the deal – or lack thereof, in this case? In short, $60 will now get you just six months of Gold instead of 12. Three months is $30, and one month is $11. The new pricing isn’t quite as bad as it looks on the surface, but to be clear, it isn’t good either, for a number of reasons.
First, it’s a straight-up surprise considering how Microsoft has spent the past few years not just saying but doing the right thing by gamers. Backwards compatibility, Xbox Game Pass, Smart Delivery, etc. – Microsoft has been focused on doing the right thing by its consumers, earning goodwill from the gaming community for a while now. This sharp price increase on the service, which is required to play even free-to-play multiplayer games, is both unexpected and unfortunate.
Similarly, while Microsoft would probably say it worries about its own business and not its competition, the reality is that for a company trying to woo back gamers who fled to PS4 after the Xbox 360 and lure in new gamers making a critical choice of which video game platform to buy for the very first time, Xbox Live Gold now costs twice as much as PlayStation Plus does. But OK, let’s look at PC. Microsoft has repeatedly insisted that they don’t care if you buy an Xbox console or not, as long as you’re in the Xbox ecosystem, and this move seems to rather darkly back up its own statement. Xbox Live Gold services are still, for the time being, free on PC! For instance: if you’ve got the rig to run it, Halo Infinite multiplayer will be completely free to play for you this Fall. On Xbox, that privilege will cost $120 per year.
In theory, the Xbox community might be more accepting of this price change had it been executed gradually. After all, Microsoft isn’t running a charity. Costs go up. Revenue and profits must be had. Netflix raised its prices not too long ago. And to its credit, Microsoft hadn’t upped the price of Xbox Live Gold in a decade. The company obviously made a deliberate choice to rip the Band-Aid off all at once. OK, that’s the team’s choice, but making that choice in the middle of a pandemic, when times are tough for many people and video games are one of the few forms of entertainment still completely accessible from home…well, again, it’s not a good look, and for consumers on a budget, it downright sucks.
Xbox Live Gold → Xbox Game Pass Ultimate? Microsoft Hopes So
What’s clear to most people reacting to this news is that it seems like an obvious push to drive more Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions. The top-tier Game Pass service runs $15 per month or $180 per year compared to $10 per month or $120 per year for the standard Game Pass. Either remains a heck of a great deal for the Netflix-like bounty of games on offer each month. The difference, though, is that Ultimate not only adds Game Pass on PC, but it also includes Xbox Live Gold, whereas regular Game Pass does not. And so, should you opt to choose Game Pass Ultimate, one way you could look at this is that you’re paying the same $120 per year for Game Pass and the same annual $60 for Xbox Live gold, but getting the PC benefit for free. The choice feels like a no-brainer, but for the wrong reasons.
The bottom line is that Xbox Live Gold is a worse deal today than it was yesterday – particularly for players who are heavily invested primarily in one multiplayer game, be it Destiny, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. The silver lining – if you can call it that – is that it’s only a worse deal for new players. Existing Gold subscribers on a 6- or 12-month membership will continue to have their memberships renewed at the old rates. I suspect that’s most of the people reading this, but again, punishing new players at the start of a generation in which Microsoft is looking to regain some of the marketshare it lost to Sony last generation is (say it with me) not a good look.
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
Marvel’s WandaVision features a handful of familiar faces and a lot of brand new characters. The first MCU series on Disney+ revolves around the post-Endgame lives of Wanda Maximoff and her android beau, and it also brings back supporting players like Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis and Randall Park’s Jimmy Woo.
But what about new characters like nosy neighbor Agnes, the creepy Dottie and poor, unlucky Phil? Who are all these newbies, and are they based on actual comic book characters? Check out our slideshow below for a full breakdown of the ensemble cast of WandaVision and what we know about their roles in this weird, sitcom-inspired fantasy land.
Warning: spoilers for the first three episodes of WandaVision ahead!
