A new first person campaign shooter set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Necromunda: Hired Gun, has been leaked by a Microsoft Store entry.
The store page, which is currently still available to view at time of writing, details a single-player FPS set in the planet-sized hive city of Necromunda in which players take on the role of a bounty hunter. Players are accompanied by a cyber-mastiff dog companion who can be upgraded, and the description promises “endless” weapon and augment customisation.
“Pick your contracts. Hunt your targets. Collect the bounty.” reads the game’s tagline, which suggests that there may be some level of freedom in the way you take on jobs in Necromunda: Hired Gun. The few other details also explain that your dog is able to sniff out and kill enemies for you, and that a grappling hook will allow quick traversal of the game’s “massive” environments.
A pre-order pack known as the Hunter’s Bounty Pack includes a unique knife, outfit skin, and the classic 40k weapon, the stub gun. It also has a ‘new look’ for the cyber-mastiff’s toy, which indicates how we’ll interact with the robot dog.
The game is being developed by Streum On Studio, the developer responsible for Warhammer 40,000 game Space Hulk: Deathwing back in 2016. It’s published by Focus Home Interactive, and is – according to this store page – due to release on June 1.
Twitter account Idle Sloth has managed to unearth five screenshots from the game, which show an action packed shooter that includes what appears to be a variant of a plasma cannon, as well as the cyber-mastiff in action and… is that a Cawdor Bomb Delivery Rat? Among the familiar Necrumda ganger we also see what is clearly a Luther Pattern Excavation Automata “Ambot” charging towards the player, too.
As of right now, we only know of Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One platforms for the game, as those are the only ones listed on the Microsoft Store. We’ll have to wait for an official announcement to see if PC and PlayStation formats will also be supported.
Asymmetric co-op puzzle game Operation: Tango is launching this Spring. The spy adventure sees an agent player infiltrating locations, while a hacker player helps them to do so. The game will also launch on PS5, as well as its previously announced PS4, Xbox One, and Steam versions.
We showed off the game at Gamescom 2020, and PlayStation’s blog dives into its multiple art styles, as well as telling us that the game will range from office break-ins to high-speed chases.
This adventure game about a dog using a magical paintbrush to explore and solve puzzles was funded on Kickstarter earlier this year. It’s now been announced for PS5 and PS4 release this spring.
The game sees a world stripped of colour, with the player asked to manually paint it back to life, offering personalisation as well as puzzling. On PS5, the game will use the DualSense touchpad to control the brush (with a left-handed option), and the developer has “added lots of soft texture rumbles which makes the whole thing feel warm and cozy, like petting a cat.”
Nour: Play With Your Friend looks like a heck of a trip in the tastiest way. Published by the same company as Untitled Goose Game and coming to PS5 this summer, Nour is a game where you play with your food, and the game’s music and sound will react accordingly.
Using “adaptive background music,” Nour’s tunes and sound effect will shift depending on what you do to the (extremely nice looking) food in front of you. Different foods correspond to different sounds; you can move them around, make messes, and even blow into the microphone for different effects. In a PlayStation blog post, developer Terrifying Jellyfish’s Maximillian C Mueller describes “noodle harps,” airy marshmallow flute sounds, ice cube grand pianos, turning toasters into drum sets, and a meat grinder set to heavy metal.
The video above explains it best by showing how food interfaces with sound, but Mueller also sums it up best in the blog with an example:
“Perhaps the best example of physical instrumentation in Nour is the noodle harp. Make some noodles, arrange them to form an elegant slope (or monster) using the magnet, and freeze them. While there are many ways you could choose to play the harp, one of my favorites is simply letting a gyoza tumble down the sculpture to create a descending melody.”
A man’s dog slips into a sinkhole, so he goes in after it and ends up on an unexpected journey. In Where the Heart Leads, husband and father Whit Anderson is visited by memories of his past, present, and future. What’s more, he can change them as he goes, turning his life and the lives of others in an entirely different direction.
Where the Heart Leads is a narrative game focused on decision-making throughout the life of one man. Developer Tod Keller from Armature Studio says the game is inspired by titles like Heavy Rain, Oxenfree, Xenogears, and Vagrant Story, and includes the influences of David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Nicolas Winding Refn.
Love doing jigsaw puzzles but hate making a giant puzzle piece mess? Puzzling Places is a 3D jigsaw puzzle game for PlayStation VR where you’ll assemble puzzles of actual locations, all in 3D and all based on real-life scans made by people all around the world.
Puzzling Places is extremely straightforward: it’s all 3D location puzzles, with relaxing sounds and music to go along with them. It’s only for PSVR, and it’s coming out in the winter of this year.
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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].
Nintendo recently announced the Joy-Con Fortnite Fleet Force bundle, which includes a pair of blue-and-yellow Joy-Con, 500 V-Bucks, and in-game cosmetics. The bundle will be available on June 4, but you don’t have to wait to reserve a pair for yourself. This stylish Switch accessory is now available for preorder at a couple of retailers.
The retail price for this set is $79.99, the same price you’d pay for regular old Joy-Con that don’t include digital Fortnite extras. These kinds of accessories do tend to sell out and become hard to find, so if you want them, you’d be well advised to lock in a preorder. Here’s where you can find them.
The pair of controllers are in the same color combination that accompanied last year’s limited-edition Fortnite Wildcat Nintendo Switch (sold out, unfortunately), but the colors are reversed. In this stand-alone set, the left Joy-Con is blue and the right one is yellow.
The Fleet Force bundle also includes some Fortnite-inspired details. The face of Peely the Banana (RIP) appears on the front of the yellow Joy-Con (one of the character’s eyes is the Home button), and the words “Nana Nana” appear on the back side. Emblazoned on the rear of the blue controller is a white “F” in the Fortnite logo font.
They look pretty great. Plus, anyone who picks up these Joy-Con also gets 500 V-Bucks, a glider, and a pickaxe at no extra cost. If you could use another set of Joy-Con and you enjoy the occasional round or two of Fortnite, there’s no reason not to grab these.
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Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
Microsoft has announced an Age of Empires Fan Preview event for April 10, and promises ‘surprising reveals’ for Age of Empires 4.
The event will be broadcast on April 10 at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern / 5pm UK (that’s 2am on March 11, Sydney time), and will include news on Age of Empires 4, as well as Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition and Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition.
Age of Empires 4 has been a remarkably quiet project for some time, with our last proper look at the game in a 2019 trailer. The game was announced in 2017, and is being developed by Relic, the studio behind Company of Heroes, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.
Microsoft’s been ramping up to the new installment in the series by releasing Definitive Editions of previous games. Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition launched in 2019, with Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition following in 2020. We awarded the latter a 6/10 review, saying it “preserves for posterity the core of this weirdest 00s RTS experiments while making some much-needed changes. Love it or hate it, the definitive edition is Age of Empires 3 amplified.”
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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].
The world of Apex Legends is rich with lore, but the frantic, fast-paced nature of a battle royale shooter doesn’t necessarily allow for a story-driven experience. That’s where Apex Legends: Overtime comes in. This comic book spinoff digs deeper into the Apex: Legends/Titanfall universe for a story that brings all 16 Legends together for a common goal.
Apex Legends: Overtime is a four-issue limited series written by Titanfall veteran Jesse Stern and drawn by Neil Edwards (Assassin’s Creed), with inks by Keith Champagne (Stranger Things), colors by Antonio Fabela (Skyward) and letters by Nate Piekos (The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys).
Art by Bengal. (Image Credit: Dark Horse/Respawn Entertainment)
Here’s Dark Horse’s official description for the series:
Apex Legends is a squad-based battle royale experience where players select from one of 16 Legends – each with their own unique abilities and playstyles – and the last team standing wins. In the comic series, the Legends find themselves pulled together to rescue the city from Mad Scientists, brutal assassins, and the sudden and sinister grip of The Syndicate, a corrupt cabal attempting to “fix” arena outcomes in their favor. Will the Legends hold up to their celebrity status and be the heroes Solace needs?
Not counting the previously released lore book Apex Legends: Pathfinder’s Quest, this is the first time the game’s storyline has been spun out into other media. We’ll have to wait and see if Overtime is the start of a a recurring line of Apex Legends spinoffs at Dark Horse, similar to how the publisher continues to expand on the world of Blizzard’s Overwatch.
For PC gaming, 1440p is the current “sweet spot,” offering improved visuals over 1080p but higher frame rates compared to the performance demands of 4K. With the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD has this resolution squarely in its sights. This also places the card in direct competition with Nvidia’s RTX 3070graphics card. At $479, it comes in $20 cheaper, but does it have the performance to compete?
The RX 6700 XT is the fourth Radeon card to release this generation and continues the same styling of its predecessors. That means a GPU that looks almost like a futuristic sports car with its mix of black and chrome-accented silver. The blacked-out heatsink even looks a bit like a grille, though I suspect the red trim and illuminated Radeon logo won’t be to everyone’s liking, especially if they already have custom lighting in their PC. Still, it’s a sleek, svelte card with a two-fan cooler and two-slot width that should fit in most PCs.
As expected, the RX 6700 XT is built on the RDNA 2 architecture and is part of AMD’s effort to deliver a full range of GPUs for gamers this generation. At the time of its release, the 6700 XT is the lowest-tier offering and the most accessiblely priced. As such, there are some scale-backs here, but this is definitely a full-featured card designed to compete with the current generation of gaming GPUs.
That means gamers can expect most of the same benefits I’ve reported on with previous Radeon RX 6000-series cards: hardware-based ray tracing, Smart Access Memory, and AMD’s Infinity Cache solution to reduce memory latency and boost performance. This also means higher clock speeds and better performance per watt than the RX 5700 XT.
Importantly, RDNA 2 also works with DirectX 12 Ultimate. Of specific note are mesh and variable rate shading. This allows the GPU to intelligently control the level of detail and shading of scenes to prioritize what’s most perceptible to the gamer. It’s a smart way to save performance and prioritize what matters most. Nvidia also supports these features, so while it isn’t exclusive to AMD, it’s an important feature to even approach performance parity.
On paper, the RX 6700 XT impresses. It features 17.1 million transistors, a 67% improvement from last-gen’s RX 5700 XT, and runs ridiculously fast. The Game Clock speed is rated for 2.42 GHz with a maximum Boost Clock speed of 2.58 GHz. In contrast, the RTX 3070 often peaked just shy of 2 GHz. In fact, the RX 6700 XT is the fastest card AMD has released this generation by a good margin. The RX 6800 XT was rated for a top speed of 2.25 GHz and pushed to 2.5 GHz with Rage Mode enabled. The 6700 XT, on the other hand, peaked at an incredible 2.64 GHz and tended to hover at 2.5 GHz on stock settings. The Radeon Software also supports automatic, one-button overclocking to push this even further should users desire.
All of that speed comes at the cost of heat. In my testing, the card peaked at 85C and hovered only slightly lower at 83C while gaming. I expected this after testing the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, and AMD has been quick to point out that this is nothing to be concerned with. The RX 6700 XT uses a network of sensors to determine its thermal threshold instead of a traditional single-point probe and can actually hit 110C before thermal throttling, so that shouldn’t be an issue for most gamers. Still, after experiencing the impressively low temperatures on Nvidia’s RTX-3000 series, I would have liked to see AMD answer with lower temperatures of its own, even if that means a larger heatsink.
Compared to the next-step-up RX 6800, the card is expectedly more limited. It features a total of 40 compute units versus that more expensive card’s 60. In addition, it sports only 12 GB of GDDR6 video memory (versus 16 GB) and utilizes a 192-bit bus instead of 256-bit. To close that gap, AMD has equipped the card with 96MB of Infinity Cache, claiming “2.5x effective bandwidth” compared to 12 gigabytes of VRAM on the wider 256-bit bus. In practice, I didn’t find this scaleback to be a major limitation to my gameplay in any way. Likewise, the overall capacity is a smart match for the trajectory of games today. Very few major titles utilize 12 GB of memory, which gives the card a bit of headroom to grow into future games without over-delivering and driving up costs.
The card also supports AMD’s suite of software enhancements. The FidelityFX suite is easily accessible and has undergone tremendous improvements over the last two generations, making it easy to navigate and enable image-enhancing features. Radeon Image Sharpening is a particular favorite of mine to add a level of crispness to the picture though it still falls short of an actual upscaling solution like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling.
That omission continues to be an important one. Like the rest of the RX 6000-series, the RX 6700 XT supports hardware-level ray tracing. At 1440p and 1080p, it can deliver playable frame rates on many games that offer ray tracing, but since many of those titles also support Nvidia’s DLSS, the 6700 XT feels handicapped in comparison. DLSS uses machine learning to intelligently upscale games from lower resolutions to near-native quality, dramatically reducing the performance hit of ray tracing. Since there is little reason not to use DLSS when it’s available, this leaves AMD at a significant performance disadvantage in many RT-enabled games, albeit while maintaining a crisper overall image. AMD has a solution in the works it calls FidelityFX Super Resolution, but as of this writing there’s no firm date or hard details on when that will be available or the performance gains it will be capable of.
Turning away from ray tracing, another major feature of the RX 6700 XT is Smart Access Memory. This feature debuted with the RX 6000-series and has the potential to offer meaningful performance boosts to owners of select Ryzen 3000 or 5000 CPUs. Smart Access Memory, or SAM for short, allows the CPU to access the 6700 XT’s entire memory pool versus the usual 256 MB, removing a potential rendering bottleneck. That free access allows some games to run more efficiently, leading to increased FPS.
Unfortunately, I was not able to test this for myself since it requires a Ryzen CPU and IGN’s test system is built around an Intel Core i9-9900K. In time, I hope AMD opens up support for Intel processors since Nvidia’s solution, Resizable Bar, is compatible with either. That said, independent testing and AMD’s own marketing materials demonstrate that the benefits are highly dependent on the game in question. Using its figures across nearly a dozen games, the uplift ranged from 4-17% on a Ryzen 9 5900X at 1440p. These results are fairly close to independent testing conducted by TechSpot, so it’s fair to say that the performance enhancements are real but varied.
Finally, when it comes to inputs and outputs, the card sports three DisplayPort 1.4 connections and a single HDMI 2.1 capable of 4K120 or 8K60 frame rates. It delivers decoding support for AV1 and VP9 and encoding/decoding support for H.264 and H.265 for every major streaming need.
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT – Performance
With background out of the way, it’s time to get into testing. I run each card through a series of synthetic tests, including several specific to ray tracing, as well as a series of real-world gaming benchmarks. All tests are conducted at ultra settings unless otherwise noted. This allows me to run all cards through the same series of assessments and gauge relative performance and value at different resolutions.
One important thing to note is that ray tracing tests are conducted with DLSS enabled on Nvidia cards. It is true that this lends Nvidia cards an advantage over AMD; however, it also represents the exact situation gamers buying these cards today will be faced with. Since so many ray traced games also support DLSS, the question prospective customers will be faced with is whether to opt for Nvidia with RTX and DLSS or AMD at native resolution without. These tests reflect that. When AMD releases its FidelityFX Super Resolution, that feature will also be factored into testing.
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT – Synthetic Benchmarks
Graphics Card
3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra
Uniengine Heaven 4.0 (1440p)
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode)
12,317
3725
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
12,105
3671
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
8,426
2488
Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition
8,547
2785
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition
7,306
2258
Beginning with synthetic benchmarks, the RX 6700 XT places remarkably close to the RTX 3070. Likewise, it surpasses last generation’s RX 5700 XT by a huge margin. These results offer a very promising first look at the potential of the card.
Graphics Card
3D Mark Port Royal
3DMark Ray Tracing Test
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode)
9107
27.2
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
9054
26.7
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
5919
13.6
Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition
8,131
31.9
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition
6,941
25.6
Turning to the ray tracing tests, the tables expectedly turn. These tests are extremely hard on AMD Radeon 6000 series cards. As such, the RX 6700 XT lands where I would expect considering its place in AMD’s line-up: at the bottom of the ladder. Don’t read too much into these results, however, as real-world gaming tests provide a much more accurate picture of the kind of performance you can expect while gaming.
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT – Gaming Benchmarks
After running the card through our initial series of five tests, a few things become clear. First, this is absolutely not a 4K card. It was never promised to be but if you were holding out hope, it’s time to exhale. Second, 1440p and 1080p performance are quite good! Even with ray tracing set to high and without the benefit of DLSS upscaling, it was able to run Metro Exodus at 46 FPS. Lowering settings, it would certainly be possible to push this to 60 FPS. For rasterization, however, this card has no trouble playing games at max settings at this resolution at high refresh rates.
The biggest point of comparison is against the RTX 3070 which retails for only $20 more (theoretically). With Metro included in the overall average, the RX 6700 XT lagged behind by 8% at 1080p, 13% at 1440p, and 21% at 4K. With that game excluded to create a better apples to apples comparison, the results are much closer with the RX 6700 XT only lagging behind by 4% at 1080p, 7% at 1440p and 14% at 4K. Remember, also, that my system does not have the advantage of Smart Access Memory, so these results could potentially be even closer.
Compared against AMD’s RX 6800 in all games, the RX 6700 XT was 14% slower at 1080p, 15% slower at 1440p, and 21% slower at 4K. Against the RX 5700 XT, the tables turn in rasterization performance. There, we see the RX 6700 XT offer a massive lead of 32% at 1080p, 35% at 1440p, and 34% at 4K.
With general testing out of the way, I put the RX 6700 XT through a round of expanded testing against a selection of competitive cards: the RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, and the RX 6800.
At 1440p, the RTX 3070 maintains its lead. When ray tracing and DLSS are factored in, the results lean heavily in favor of Nvidia’s $499 GPU. The RX 6700 XT lags behind by 19 FPS in these results. In sheer rasterization things are much closer with the gap coming in at only 9%. Thanks to DLSS, the RTX 3060 Ti also tops the RX 6700 XT by 10% average across the whole game set. With that removed from the equation, the RX 6700 XT surpasses it by 7%. When compared against the RX 6800, it comes in 15% slower.
At 1080p, things tighten up considerably. Against the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti, the difference across all titles is only 13% and 3% respectively, even without the benefit of upscaling. In rasterization, the RX 6700 XT beats both cards by 3% and 14%. Against the RX 6800, the gaps remain consistent with 1440p at 12% slower.
Like the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, the RX 6700 XT is a fast gaming GPU and an excellent value for rasterization. With Smart Acif thacess Memory factored in, Ryzen users could find themselves with an extremely competitive card compared to Nvidia. That said, without an answer to DLSS, it underperforms in ray tracing scenarios. That’s a shame because this is a genuinely good card that feels artificially handicapped without an upscaling solution to square off on even footing.
As in the last two Radeon RX 6000 reviews, I found myself wishing AMD had held this launch until FidelityFX Super Resolution was ready. Its release could dramatically change the value proposition. As it stands, if you care about ray tracing and can find a card at MSRP, the RTX 3070 is the better buy.
And that’s really the rub: being able to find a GPU at MSRP. While AMD is promising additional stock, only time will tell how that will pan out. If the current GPU marketplace is any indication, these cards will sell out fast and then be resold at exorbitant prices. At their suggested price, most gamers will be better served spending the extra $20 on an RTX 3070, but if you can find the RX 6700 XT at MSRP and the RTX 3070 is still $600-700, then it’s reasonable to accept the modest performance gap and wait on FidelityFX Super Resolution.
Obsidian has leaned hard into turning The Outer Worlds into a sci-fi detective game with its two DLC expansions – a direction that plays to the strengths of its characters and writing. That’s smart, considering the combat has pretty much fully run out of gas by this point. The second and final one, Murder on Eridanos, is a more intimate and local whodunnit that has you following a trail of clues around a series of colorful floating islands to interview weird suspects and hold up a high-tech magnifying glass to highlight clues. It’s not a grand sendoff for this upstart RPG, but it’s another good chunk of time spent in its universe.
After a brief setup in which the star of an in-universe TV show is murdered, you’re handed a badge and sent off to be an impartial investigator. I only wish we’d gotten to see or at least hear more of these noir-ish Halcyon Helen serials, since the small taste we do see is tons of fun and right up the alley of The Outer Worlds’ dark humor.
The crime boss, the jilted lover, the weird self-help guru, the arrogant co-star, and more are on the list of people of interest, and most of them are in fact interesting people to talk to. It’s a bona fide murder mystery, and there’s a lot of dialogue here since so much of the sleuthing is climbing every branch of their conversation trees, and between that and reading emails on terminals, going through every detail for evidence it can take a while. Depending on how thorough you are, that can be over 10 hours – which is not bad at all for an expansion to a 25-hour RPG.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=It%20feels%20great%20to%20make%20a%20call%20and%20then%20find%20out%20if%20you%E2%80%99re%20right%20or%20wrong%20about%20it.”]As far as I can tell there isn’t a significant effect on the story based on your roleplaying dialogue choices, but there are a couple of big decisions to make once you close in on a suspect: for one, you get to actually guess at who killed the actor, which is a refreshing breath of fresh air when so many detective games are on rails. Sure, no matter who you accuse, the final confrontation is effectively the same, but it feels great to be given the chance to make a call and then find out if you’re right or wrong about it, which is a lot more than Peril on Gorgon did. And of course, then you have to decide what to do when you discover what really happened and the secret Halcyon Helen was killed to protect, and you’re given some justification to go either way.
You never actually leave Eridanos as part of the main quest, or even need to return to your ship – you’re given a temporary base of operations where your whole team hangs out and a billboard is automatically filled out with photos of suspects and crazy-person string connecting them so you can visualize everything without taking too many of your own notes. That makes Murder on Eridanos feel more self-contained than any other adventure; almost like its own game. But since you never leave, it’s a good thing that the map is impressively diverse, with each of the connected floating islands containing one or two distinctive areas. There’s the scene of the crime at an upscale hotel, the distillery Helen was there to promote, a crime boss’s lair, vast fields of purple flowers, weird caves, and more – this doesn’t have the feeling of a map that’s cobbled together from existing parts. The only obnoxious thing about it is the long bridges that connect the islands where you do nothing but walk straight ahead for about 15 seconds at a time, and how eagerly the main quest sends you back and forth across them. This kind of thing is exactly what fast travel was invented for.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=This%20kind%20of%20thing%20is%20exactly%20what%20fast%20travel%20was%20invented%20for.”]I didn’t feel bad about taking that shortcut in part because by the time you’re at the required level 30, The Outer Worlds’ combat doesn’t hold up and feels obligatory, even on hard difficulty, so skipping it felt inconsequential. Even the handful of new weapons on Eridanos don’t spruce fights up much at all, and the enemies are very much more of the same but with more splash damage.
Genshin Impact‘s Update 1.4 has arrived, bringing with it new quests and events, and the return of fan-favorite limited character Venti. While a lot of the update’s new content has yet to go live, such as the upcoming Windblume Festival event, Venti’s Ballad in Goblets banner is live now.
While the banner name, Ballad in Goblets, is the same as the original Venti banner that launched with the game last October, the rate-up 4-star characters featured alongside Venti have changed. The new banner will give players increased chances to pull 4-stars Sucrose, Razor, and Noelle.
This update marks the first time one of Genshin Impact’s characters has been re-run. As Venti was the first banner launched when the game came out, this re-run will let players catch up if they started playing after Venti’s initial banner had already finished. Venti has a number of unique abilities that makes him a useful character, both for exploring the world and for co-op domains in particular.
Update 1.4 will also introduce new 4-star character Rosaria in a later update, with rumors suggesting that she will be included in a banner that will make previous 5-star character Tartaglia available again–meaning players shouldn’t expect character re-runs to happen in strictly chronological order.
Also available now is the new “Hangout Events” feature, which will remain as an ongoing part of the game after this update. The feature has been likened to a dating mini-game, allowing players to get to know certain playable characters better. The Outland Gastronomy daily login event has also gone live, which is the in-game part of Genshin Impact’s ill-fated KFC promotion. The login event will allow players to unlock a number of new recipes, including one for “Golden Fried Chicken.”
The rest of the events coming with Update 1.4 are still yet to be unlocked, with the Windblume Festival coming on March 19, and a new Archon quest arriving after all aspects of the Festival are finished.
The update has also added a number of bug fixes and quality of life changes. Most notably, players will now be able to lower their World Level or restore it to their normal level, with a 24-hour cooldown between World Level changes.
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After being announced as Apple’s first in-house exclusive back in 2019, it looks like Masters of the Air is finally gaining some momentum. The Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks-produced limited series has added Anthony Boyle to its cast, who joins Austin Butler and Calum Turner for the Band of Brothers sequel, Deadline reports.
Based on the book of the same name by Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air follows up the award-winning WWII miniseries’ Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010). Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman have been reunited for the new series, along with writer John Orloff, who also wrote Band of Brothers.
Newly cast Irish actor Anthony Boyle will be playing the lead role of Major Crosby. While Boyle has done some work in TV and film, he is most well-known for his award-winning rendition of Scorpius Malfoy in The Cursed Child at London’s Palace Theatre. He joins Austin Butler as Major Gale Cleven, and Callum Turner as Major John Egan.
In January this year, the WallStreetBets subreddit surprised the finance world when its massive user base bought up GameStop shares in numbers that couldn’t be ignored. Now, those users are making a dent again, but this time it’s in the form of $338,000 raised for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
The gorilla-adopting trend comes from “apes together strong,” one of the subreddit’s favorite memes. The phrase, taken from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, refers to the power the sub’s individual investors can leverage against large investment firms when they work together. The meme has resulted in WallStreetBets users referring to themselves and each other as “apes,” which has now caused users to give some of their profits to benefit real-life apes.
Users of the subreddit started posting screengrabs of the gorillas they had adopted through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, often under names that included WallStreetBets, Gamestop, or GME. The trend caught on to the point where the charity publicly acknowledged WallStreetBets, keeping a running tally of the amount its users had raised. At the time of writing, the charity’s latest update attributes over $338,000 in fundraising to the subreddit.
Some users decided to adopt bonobos, another type of ape, with charity Ape Initiative also thanking the subreddit for its support. Ape Initiative has now added the “Apes Together Strong” meme to the adoption banner on its website. Some users decided to branch out from apes, with one user adopting a sloth, and others adopting elephants and rhinos through the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.
While some users on WallStreetBets became instant millionaires thanks to their investments in GameStop, others would have only made small gains, whereas many would have lost money as well. It’s heartening to see the subreddit’s users giving back, even while many still hold their risky GameStop investments waiting for a squeeze that may or may not ever come.
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