An article written by Square Enix Producer Naoki Yoshida has detailed the world and story of Final Fantasy XVI, and introduced us to heroes Clive, Joshua, and Jill.
You can read the post in full over on the PlayStation Blog, where you can check out some artwork from the game and learn more about the motivations of the trio of main characters, as well as the world they inhabit. You can also check out the official Final Fantasy XVI website, which reveals even more details about the game’s setting and cast, and the game’s tagline: “The legacy of the crystals has shaped our history for long enough.”
Final Fantasy XVI takes place in Valisthea, a land “studded with colossal mountains of glittering crystal called Mothercrystals.” The Mothercrystals have blessed the realms with aether for generations, allowing Valisthea’s people to live in comfort. Of course, wars have been fought over the ownership of the Mothercrystals, which has created a set of conflicting nations, known as the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, the Holy Empire of Sanbreque, the Kingdom of Waloed, the Dhalmekian Republic and the Iron Kingdom. A “ruinous Blight” has recently overcome the land, which is threatening to disturb the “fragile peace” achieved between the warring states.
The game’s main protagonist is Clive Rosfield, the firstborn son of the Archduke of Rosaria. Rosfield is a knight known as the “First Shield of Rosaria” who is tasked with protecting his younger brother Joshua, described as “the Dominant of the Phoenix.”
A Dominant is a special person who is essentially a vessel for devastating creatures called Eikons, special Summons that “can level nations.” Depending on the nation, Dominants are treated as royalty or used as weapons of war. The blog notes that more Eikons will be revealed in the main game as players journey through Valisthea.
It was expected that Clive would become the Dominant of Rosaria, but destiny chose Joshua, who can transform into a Phoenix to protect his nation. Joshua has bestowed Clive with “the Blessing of the Phoenix,” which allows the protagonist to “wield a part of the Eikon’s fire.” Joshua also “quails at the sight of a carrot on his dinner plate,” and laments the fact that he, the more frail Rosfield brother, received the Eikon’s power.
Then there’s Jill Warrick, a confidant of the brothers who is an expatriate from the Northern Territories and ward of the Duchy of Rosaria in order to sow peace between the two factions. She’s a member of the Rosfield household and a close childhood friend of the brothers.
Black Friday 2020 is laid out differently compared to prior years. We’re used to seeing most Black Friday deals happen during a brief 5-day window that spans from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday. This year, several vendors are launching their Black Friday deals early and spreading their deals out through the entire month of November. In fact, several Black Friday deals have gone live already. The good news is that you don’t have to wait around for the best deals to happen, and there’s more time to pick and choose which deals you’re after. Extended holiday return policies have already gone into effect.
As early Black Friday deals go live, we’ll add them here. As of now, Best Buy has several deals go live, but Walmart and Amazon are soon going to follow suit. Stay tuned.
Best Buy Black Friday Deals That Are Live Now (Ends Sunday)
Eric Song is IGN’s deal curator and spends roughly 1/4 of his income on stuff he posts. Check out his latest Daily Deals Article and subscribe to his IGN Deals Newsletter.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I found myself watching Archer more out of loyalty and a sense of commitment than because of its inherent quality. Like many of its fans I’d grown to love the series in the first place for its trademark espionage antics and quick-witted zingers. Times had changed. Season 11, however, represents the first batch of post-coma episodes, and they nailed my expectations for a return to normalcy with simple storylines coupled with surprisingly interesting character growth. The season finale doesn’t quite land the helipad as it should have, but it certainly has me eager to see what’s next.
It should go without saying, but SPOILERS for the Season 11 finale and all the great episodes before it. Archer isn’t a show that relies on big plot points to nail jokes or move characters along, but the show does have a tradition of setting up cool and interesting scenarios for the next season, something this finale does to moderate success.
Season 11 gives us a look at our very capable but very inappropriate cast of characters once they’ve had Archer himself ripped out of their lives. All season we’ve been watching these now “reformed” characters return to their former messy selves, culminating in the awesome rescue mission of Archer and Lana’s daughter in the penultimate episode. It begged the question of why we needed an additional episode to wrap things up, and until about the last five minutes, this stayed true throughout the majority of the season finale.
The episode begins in proper Archer fashion as Malory gives a briefing of the mission while Cyril manages to find his face planted to the floor once again. A murder at an Antarctic compound spurs a murder mystery that brings the entire agency on board, including usual stowaways Pam and Cheryl. A few interrogations later, along with a quick game of strip solitaire with Pam (of course), a second character kicks the bucket. It’s quickly revealed that a hydrogen bomb is in the mix and a plot to blast the ice caps to flood the planet is in the works. Some quick thinking involving pickle juice and your classic Archer bravery brings the bad guys, and that pesky helicopter, down and stops sea levels from rising to massive heights. End credits.
It’s a perfectly serviceable Archer episode, but for most of its run-time it’s also hard to believe this is a season finale. The episode is not here to tie up storylines. It’s not here to push characters to advance or even complete character arcs set up right when Archer returned from his three year coma. It’s a fun whodunnit that gives our characters one more chance to behave inappropriately and throw out ridiculous one-liners. That is, until the last five minutes. Suddenly there’s characters reflecting on how they’ve changed over the last eight episodes and we even get quick glimpses of Archer’s coma season characters flashing before his eyes. I loved this portion but it felt like the episode only realized it was a season ender in the last few scenes.
Even so, the ending taps into some strong themes. There’s Archer as a terrible person. Hilarious, yes, but also narcissistic and incredibly selfish. We know that, the characters know that, and for the first time in his life, Archer begins to truly know that too. More than that, since his first days out of his coma, in which it was clear his friends had infinitely improved and became better versions of themselves in his absence, Archer has had to accept that he’s a terrible influence on his pals. And by the end, he was just a margin away from admitting it out loud.
All that seems perfectly true until Archer’s massive truth bomb shortly after being berated for his irresponsible yet heroic bombing of the submarine. Everyone is using Archer as an “excuse to be your worst self” as Archer so eloquently put it. Even Lana couldn’t refute this revelation and it’s absolutely true. These people are animals. They get the job done but they’re wild to the core and they’ve been itching to get back to their natural dispositions. Archer waking from his coma is all they needed to revert back. I love that Season 11’s message is ultimately that Archer is to not be blamed for everyone’s problems and that they’ve convinced themselves otherwise.
Now onto the coma sighting shenanigans! Is Archer still in a coma? Probably not! Is it possible Archer hasn’t fully recovered from his three year slumber? Sure, why not! Were these just cool Easter Eggs to give us a chance to see the space crew and Crackers the parrot again? I’d say no. In Season 10 when Archer was constantly seeing flashes of his actual non-coma life, that built up to something. While this is on a much smaller scale, these wouldn’t be included unless there’s something not quite right with either Archer’s awakening or current reality. It would be a shame to erase what Season 11 built up so I expect some funky coma character interjections next season but nothing that makes it feel like we deleted an entire season. Krieger, your time is here!
Isn’t it great to know Archer will be back for a Season 12? Not just because Archer is once again consistently funny and back to its humble roots, but because we have a number of loose ends to catch up on. What happened with the incredibly powerful exo-suit from the third episode? Archer is friends with Barry now? That can’t last! And we definitely don’t expect Lana and Robert to stay together, right? If anything, Archer has a lot of work ahead of him regarding his daughter AJ so it’s no time to stop the Archer train yet.
Archer is best when it delivers genuine laughs without going out of its way to produce a wild plot to shake things up. Maybe the noir detective season or the pirate focused pocket of episodes is what I needed to appreciate the spy aspects of Archer again. Either way, Season 11 is a return to form that I hope continues the next time the world’s best spy pops up on our screens.
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Michael Koczwara is a writer who is ready for the permanent return of phrasing. Follow him on Twitter and Twitch.
The Xbox Series X and S consoles are going to be sold out at retail this year, and that’s something Xbox boss Phil Spencer has now apologized for.
In an appearance on the Dropped Frames podcast, Spencer said demand will outstrip supply for the new consoles this year and beyond. He said stock shortages will continue “for a few months” after release.
“We know what our supply will look like basically for the rest of the year. We’re going to have more demand than we do supply,” Spencer said. “And I will apologize in advance to people for that. We saw it with pre-orders, how much energy there was, and we were basically out [of stock] in a couple of hours, which is unfortunate. I think we are going to live in that world for a few months. We’re going to have a lot more demand than we do supply.”
This is a comment that Spencer has repeated in interviews recently. Before this, he told GameReactor that both Microsoft and Sony will sell every new console they make this year. “I am going to predict that we are both going to sell every console we build in 2020,” Spencer said.
Tropico 6 has been announced for Switch during the most recent surprise Nintendo Direct Mini. The game, which casts players as the leader of a small island nation, came to PC, PS4, and Xbox One last year. It’ll be available on the Switch Eshop from November 6.
The game, called Tropico 6 – Nintendo Switch Edition on the hybrid console, will ship with all previously released content and updates, plus a new palace design, Flamingo Pond accessory, and outfit for your El Presidente to wear. The game is available to pre-order now.
In the Tropico series, you don’t just lead the nation from afar–you also build on it, establishing infrastructure and placing buildings across your island.
Kalypso has released a trailer for this new version of the game, which you can watch below. The visual downgrade is pretty clear, but if the gameplay has survived intact, that might not matter too much.
Screenshots of the Switch version have also been released, showing off how the island will look on the console’s handheld screen.
Gallery
Tropico 6 received an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review of the PC version. “You have more than enough tools to control just about everything that happens in Tropico,” critic Daniel Starkey wrote in his review. “Failure and success, then, can feel quite a bit like a referendum not just on your policies, but on your rendition of El Presidente. The notion of dictatorship as a role that you play for yucks is still there, if that’s a hat you want to wear–though it’s harder to indulge your own selfish impulses when you can see how your actions are condemning Lydia the lumberjack to a lifetime of poverty.”
When Microsoft announced the Xbox Series X back in December 2019, people immediately roasted its design for looking like a refrigerator. Microsoft took the comments in stride, embracing the chatter with its own memes. This went even further recently when Microsoft created an actual Xbox Series X refrigerator that it sent to Snoop Dogg and other people. You can win one of these fridges, but the odds are you will get shut out.
However, Xbox marketing director Aaron Greenberg has now teased that Microsoft might release a mini-fridge version of the Xbox Series X refrigerator for everyone to buy. He asked his nearly 200,000 followers if they would be interested in buying an Xbox mini-fridge, and people resoundingly responded positively.
Help me out here for some market research. Q: Would you be interested in buying an Xbox Mini-Fridge if we made one for sale?
Of course, this is not confirmation that Microsoft will release an Xbox-branded mini-fridge at all, or anytime soon. But it would be a pretty brilliant and self-aware piece of branded marketing for Xbox. The company is known for this, too, as it previously released a line of Xbox onesies following a positive reaction to what was a silly marketing stunt.
Anthem, BioWare’s loot-shooter, has had a rough time since releasing in early 2019–so much so that the developer has promised an extensive overhaul. At the beginning of 2020, BioWare said that the update would be a long process, and now some new details about some of the changes being made have been released.
In an update on BioWare’s blog, we’ve been given some more details about the Anthem NEXT update that’s in the works. The post looks at how Javelin builds and skill trees will work after the update, and how they will change gameplay. There are some fundamental shifts here, like components being done away with and a greater emphasis on abilities.
A new work-in-progress UI for modifying your Javelin
BioWare has presented a series of bullet points explaining how gameplay and builds will change, which you can check out below.
Choice and Experimentation in your Loadout
All items are categorized to one of the 11 available equipment slots
Weapons are either Primary or Secondary, allowing distinctiveness in their role
Mods and Artifact slots replace Components
Manage Equipment and Abilities in your Loadout Screen
Reliably Create Builds
Abilities are unlocks, not drops! Play with the Abilities you want, when you want
Empower your Abilities by equipping them with Mods
Builds are defined by the synergies of Specializations, Abilities, and Equipment
Inscriptions improve build synergies, but are no longer the primary factor
Provide Choice and Progression through Skill Trees
Each Javelin can level up, awarding Skill Points
Skill points can be spent to unlock Abilities, Passives, and Stat Boosts
Each Specialization has its own Advanced Skill Tree
Expand on the Fantasy and Playstyles of Each Javelin
Javelins have access to multiple specializations that cater to different styles of gameplay
Each Javelin now wields a powerful Artifact that can be customized
Skill trees are being implemented because BioWare has realized that a player’s “Pilot Level” isn’t necessarily a good marker of progress. Players can unlock abilities, passives, triggered abilities, and stat boosts for their Javelins through the skill tree, and can focus on how they want to play to customize their build through the tree. Specializations are being tested now, which would allow players to unlock more powers through an advanced skill tree.
Artefacts, which are extremely powerful, useful pieces of tech, are also being added to the game, replacing components. These will give players more scope for adapting their Javelin, and hopefully lead to more exciting builds.
The developer has previously talked about how the game would overhaul loot, and it all sounds like an improvement. Of course, whether this revitalizes the game’s player base remains to be seen.
Anthem has not officially announced PS5 or Xbox Series X versions or upgrades, but the game is playable on next-gen systems through backwards compatibility.
There’s a lot going on in Watch Dogs: Legion. As a member of the hacker resistance group DedSec, your job is to bring down the terrorist organization Zero Day and fight back against Albion, a paramilitary company that has all but taken over London in the wake of an attack on the city. To do that, you have a bunch of tools at your disposal, like the ability to hack all sorts of machinery–and you can recruit just about anyone in the city to serve as a playable character, with each potential recruit bringing their own skills.
There are a lot of systems to keep in mind as you run around London fighting fascism, though. You’ve got your hacker gear, weapons, and a melee fighting system that’s new to the series. You’ll also find all kinds of side quests that have various benefits and with a city full of potential recruits, it can be tough to decide who to bring into your organization.
To help you get DedSec on its feet, we’ve compiled 10 tips you should know about as you begin your career as a cyberpunk insurrectionist. Here’s a rundown of what you should upgrade, what you should look for in recruits, and what you should prioritize in the game’s first few hours. And if you haven’t yet, make sure to check out our Watch Dogs: Legion review.
You can find tech points in the world or get them as rewards for completing missions, but make sure you spend them on upgrades whenever you can.
1. Find Tech Points And Spend Them, Quick
After the first few missions at the start of the game, you’ll liberate your first London district, which reveals the hidden locations of all its tech points. It’s worth going after them (and keeping track of the ones you’re earning for completing missions)–tech points allow you to unlock a host of additional hacks and gadgets. These include weapons, AR cloaking tech, and more, and having access to those gadgets can drastically change how you approach situations. Early on, it’s easy to forget that you’re accumulating tech points and that you can spend them on the Gear menu, but you should identify what you want to upgrade and start making moves to get better gear as soon as you can.
You’ll use your spider bot almost constantly on stealth missions and it can be great for keeping your DedSec operatives out of harm’s way.
2. It’s All About Spider Bot
In Watch Dogs: Legion, you’ll use Tech Points earned from completing missions or found in the world to buy and upgrade different gadgets you can equip to your characters, or to earn additional hacks to your repertoire of abilities. One of the first options you can afford is the spider bot, and you should prioritize it. The spider bot is ridiculously useful–it allows you to send a tiny robot pal into hostile territory, where it can climb through vents, hack most objects, and even flip some physical switches or pick up collectibles and additional tech points you’d otherwise need to reach yourself. The spider bot can’t do everything you need to do in a given area–sometimes you need human hands to work on a circuit board or ctOS breaker–but when the spider bot can do the job, it keeps your character well out of harm’s way. You’ll get a ton of use out of your spider bots, so unlock them and upgrade them early.
Drones can be a real problem in infiltration and combat scenarios. Unlock the ability to shut down the strong ones as early as you can to save yourself some grief.
3. Upgrade Your Drone Hacking
There are lots of drones in London, and they come in many varieties. You’ll start with the ability to hack the most basic ones–your ctOS surveillance drones and traffic drones, essentially–but you’ll find before long that there are tougher, better-armed drones in closed-off areas that can give you trouble. One of your first priorities should be to upgrade your drone-hacking to at least get the ability to shut down Riot Drones and other combat drone types. If nothing else, you want to be able to disable any drone that’s about to spot you (or shoot you) while stealthing through an area. That’ll give you time to reposition or smash the drone before it gets a second chance to sound the alarm.
Further upgrading your drone-hacking lets you hijack combat drones so you can use them to scout an area or even fight enemies, which can go a long way toward keeping your operatives alive. Hacking the right drone can let you go loud and fight a host of enemies without your operatives ever facing danger–which is great if you decide to play in permadeath mode.
Use cameras to scout locations and, most important, to mark targets for easier tracking later.
4. Scout With Cameras And Mark Targets
This one is a pretty standard Watch Dogs element, but if you haven’t played an entry in the series in a while or this is your first one, it’s worth explaining. Your primary hacking capability is hijacking cameras, which allow you visual access to areas you can’t otherwise reach or would have to sneak into. Cameras can let you scout out an area before you enter it, which is extremely useful for finding a path toward your objective and seeing what opposition you’re facing. You’ll also want to sweep your targeting reticule over enemies as you look around with a hijacked camera. Doing so allows you to “tag” enemies so you can keep tabs on them on your radar and at a distance with a little bit of extra highlighting on your screen. It’s extremely helpful to pan over all the enemies you can find before you head into a restricted area, so use cameras to your advantage. It’s also worth noting that you can often hack objects through cameras if you have line-of-sight on them.
You can hack traps to arm them while you’re hijacking cameras, allowing you to take down enemies without ever entering an area.
5. Go All-Out With Traps
As you’re scouting a location through hijacked cameras, you should spot a bunch of interactive items throughout most restricted areas. These are traps you can set that will explode if any enemies wander past them, and if you want to soften up a location and make your job a lot easier, go ahead and arm them all. Enemies on patrol will often just meander into traps and take themselves out, and while that can put other nearby enemies on alert, they’ll never quite figure out what’s going on. In areas with lots of traps, you can knock out a bunch of enemies before you ever even set foot inside the building, which means a lot less opposition or fewer opportunities to get found out. Traps are easy to deal with and they’re just about everywhere, so make use of them when you can.
Stealth is often a lot easier when you ride to your destination on a cargo drone.
6. Cargo Drones Make Stealth A Lot Easier
Though you can go just about anywhere in London early in Legion, you should prioritize getting through story missions early in the game. Though you can go anywhere in London from nearly the start to recruit some extra characters and get access to one of the best abilities in the game: the cargo drone. These big, crate-lugging robots are large enough for a character to ride on, giving you the ability to ascend, Lakitu-like, over the streets of London–and the rooftops of most buildings.
The cargo drone makes infiltration a lot easier in many circumstances. Instead of having to find a way to unlock a front door, bypass a security system, and sneak past guards, often with the use of a spider bot to open the way, the cargo drone lets you just float over walls and above security. It won’t work in all circumstances, but it works in a lot of them, offering different and easier ways to approach some tough stealth situations. You’ll find you can float through an area to reach a tough spot, or get close to an objective and then chuck in a spider bot to finish the job. Prioritize working through the story far enough to get a cargo drone, as you’ll find plenty of opportunities to use it.
The Deep Profiler upgrade gives you a lot of extra information about tough-to-recruit characters.
7. Your Next Upgrade: The Deep Profiler
We’ve recommended several upgrades you should prioritize from the Gear menu, but once you’ve got drone-hacking in place and a spiffed-up spider bot, you’ll want to snag the Deep Profiler upgrade. This thing gives you additional information about possible recruits, and while you won’t need it right away if you’re just following the story, it quickly becomes extremely helpful for getting better, tough-to-sway recruits on your team.
As you profile possible recruits in London, you’ll find that some aren’t too keen on DedSec in general. Without some work to change their opinion of the hacker group, you can’t get them to join up. The Deep Profiler will give you information on those people’s schedules and backgrounds, providing you with information about the tasks you can perform to bring them around to your side, and the places their schedules will take them. With that info, you can work on recruits who can be extremely helpful for your team, like Albion soldiers and police officers. Which brings us to our next point…
You’ll want a variety of operatives on your team with skills in different areas–but not every potential teammate is worth recruiting.
8. Build A Well-Rounded Team
The early portions of Legion’s story will net you a few recruits without much difficulty–you’ll pick a recruit near the start of the game from a large batch, get a high-level hacker when you follow the story quests to liberate Camden, and add a construction worker with a cargo drone within an hour or two. But once the story starts to pick up the pace and brings you to tougher locations (around the time you start looking into Clan Kelley), you’re going to start building out your team so that they can handle a variety of situations. At this point, you should begin profiling people whenever you’re wandering around to keep an eye out for teammates who might be helpful.
In addition to a quality hacker, you’ll want teammates who are good in a variety of situations. Look for operatives who are good in a brawl, ones who have a focus on stealth, and ones who get perks in a gunfight. There are also potential recruits who give the entire team benefits–doctors can shorten the heal time of anybody who’s injured, and some recruits provide buffs like making it easier for your squad to escape the cops. And some characters come with uniforms that allow them easier access to certain restricted locations. Take the time to build a team with multiple strengths and you’ll provide yourself with a lot more options for dealing with missions, as well as one that can adapt to unexpected situations more easily. You can always dismiss a recruit from the team if you find someone better later on.
Scouting out London will help you pin down where objectives are and help you learn how to escape from chases.
9. Explore The City And Its Districts
Unlike past Ubisoft open-world games, there’s no magic map-revealing towers to climb or outposts to destroy in Legion. If you want to know what’s going on in London, you’ll need to cruise around the streets and figure it out on your own. There are a lot of fast-travel points in the game that can make getting around a little easier, but when you’re first starting out, steal a car and drive as much as you can. You’ll want to get familiar with the boroughs of London for when you inevitably have to flee the police or avoid an Albion checkpoint decked out with turrets, for instance. Uncovering the map will also show you where shops are so you can deck out your operatives in new clothes.
The most useful things to find in any given district, however, are the places you need to attack in order to eventually liberate it from Albion oppression. Each district has several objectives you’ll need to complete, and they won’t all immediately be apparent until you do some exploring. Liberate a district and the map will reveal all its tech points, so you can earn yourself some quick upgrades, should you need them. Uncovering the map as early as you can will give you a lot more information as you make getaways and open up fast-travel locations so you can easily get to missions, and that’ll save you time in the long run.
Liberating districts earns you “skilled operatives,” who come with a bunch of extra perks that make them worth the effort.
10. Make Liberating Districts A Priority
There’s one other major benefit to liberating London’s various districts: every time you do, you unlock a high-level DedSec recruit automatically. These characters are especially good at their roles and come with a bunch of useful passive and active perks, which means they’re going to be very helpful in your quest to bring down Albion and Zero Day. You’ll have to do some extra work to unlock them, though. Each district has objectives you’ll need to complete, like hacking billboards or freeing imprisoned freedom fighters, and once you do that, you’ll unlock a final mission for the district that you’ll need to complete. The effort is worth it, though, especially as you’re building out your team and filling roles to make sure you can handle lots of different situations. Check the districts for what kind of recruits they’re offering and knock out their missions to give yourself a big leg-up in creating a strong, well-balanced DedSec crew.
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