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Bungie is dropping more and more details about its plans for Destiny 2‘s next content year, including how it means to change the progression of its weapons and armor. Starting in the fall season, Destiny 2 gear will come with a power cap that effectively gives them a lifespan, dictating how long you can use them–and when you’ll have to move on to something else.

The changes are detailed in the developer’s This Week at Bungie blog post, which runs down how weapons and armor will be shifted starting in Season 12 this fall. The gist is that weapons and armor pieces at the legendary level, which compose most of a player’s go-to equipment, will come with a new stat: a maximum Power level. That maximum will be whatever Destiny 2’s Power cap will be three seasons into the future, effectively marking the end of that equipment’s usefulness for endgame activities.

It’s an alteration to how gear works that effectively means you’ll need to farm up new armor and weapons every so often, instead of just relying on your favorite (or best) pieces indefinitely. Destiny 2 determines your character’s overall lethality and damage resistance as an average of the “Power” level of each piece of armor you equip, and you’re able to cannibalize new gear with higher stats to raise the level of your older, better gear with the game’s Infusion system. That allows you to increase the levels of your favorite gear so you use it in higher-level activities, such as Raids.

Bungie raises the Power cap in Destiny 2 periodically, requiring you to play to get better gear and increase your character’s overall strength to handle endgame activities. But an ongoing problem, according to director Luke Smith, is that Bungie is constantly adding new weapons and armor to the game, but players don’t necessarily need or use them when they already have what’s considered “best.”

Once the new changes are in place, you’ll only be able to infuse gear up to its set maximum Power level, which will match the Power cap three seasons after the item is first released. After that, the Power cap will keep going up, but you’ll need new gear to match it, effectively retiring the old stuff. Bungie says that should encourage players to try new guns and armor and experiment with new character builds, instead of just sitting on the same old gear they’ve been playing with for years.

We’ll start to see the new system in play next season, when weapons and armor get the new Maximum Power stat, but the actual changes won’t go into effect until Season 12 and the start of Destiny 2’s Year 4. It’ll start to have effects pretty soon, though–everything from before Shadowkeep will have its max Power level set to the Season 11 Power cap, which means it’ll start to be obsolete in the fall with Season 12. Everything from Shadowkeep forward will be viable for a full year from when it was released, so Season of Dawn gear will last until the Winter 2020 season, Season of the Worthy gear will be good until Spring 2021, and Season 11 gear will last until Summer 2021.

The good news is, Exotics are exempt from this new change–they won’t get a max Power cap. Armor and weapons from the Last Wish and Garden of Salvation raids also get an exemption to make them last longer than most other legendary gear. But for everything else, the timer of planned obsolescence is about to start.

Ubisoft’s educational Discovery Tours for Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey are currently free to download and keep on PC.

The educational expansions go beyond the mythological heights of the main games and let players explore the ancient history behind the worlds you may have explored as Alexios/Kassandra and Bayek. You can take part in guided tours curated by historians and learn more about Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece from the experts.

Take a historic journey from home with Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece & Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt FREE to download and keep  #PlayApartTogether

https://t.co/UVftq2CaBr

— Ubisoft (@Ubisoft) May 14, 2020

Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt and Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece can be redeemed via this link, alongside a host of over Ubisoft games, including Rabbids Coding! and Might & Magic Chess Royale.

This is part of Ubisoft’s Play Your Part, Play at Home campaign, which is offering free games to fans in an effort to help keep people busy as they stay safe at home under quarantine. The promotion will run from today, May 15th until May 21, so head on over to Uplay to redeem it.

We don’t yet know if Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will include a Discovery Tour mode, but we know 44 other details about the upcoming Viking-based entry in the series.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN who wishes Ubisoft would hire him to make a discovery tour for Black Flag. Ask him about pirate archaeology on Twitter.

CBS All Access has announced a series order for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a series featuring Star Trek: Discovery’s Captain Pike, Number One and Spock.

Strange New Worlds will be based on the years that Captain Christopher Pike commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise, and will feature the returning Anson Mount as Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Science Officer Spock. These actors portrayed these same characters in CBS All Access’ Discovery too.

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“The series will follow Captain Pike, Science Officer Spock and Number One in the decade before Captain Kirk boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise as they explore new worlds around the galaxy,” according to CBS.

The series premiere was written by Akira Goldsman with a story by Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet. These three will serve as executive producers for the series in addition to Henry Alonso Myers, Heather Kadin, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth. Aaron Baiers, Akela Cooper and Davy Perez will serve as co-executive producers. Goldsman will remain an executive producer on Star Trek: Picard as well.

“Fans fell in love with Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck’s portrayals of these iconic characters when they were first introduced on Star Trek: Discovery last season,” CBS All Access Executive Vice President and Head of Programming Julie McNamara said. “This new series will be a perfect complement to the franchise, bringing a whole new perspective and series of adventures to Star Trek.”

Only last year, we asked Anson Mount what he wanted from a Captain Pike show, given the huge fan response to his work in the role – here’s hoping he gets at least some of what he wanted.

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Strange New Worlds will join Discovery and Picard on CBS All Access when it launches on the streaming service. The franchise will get its first-ever animated series with Star Trek: Lower Decks on the service as well. A CG-animated Star Trek series for younger audiences is also in the works at Nickelodeon.

No release date was announced for Strange New Worlds. For more Star Trek, read about how we thought the season finale of Picard was good, giving it a 7 out of 10. For Season 2 of Picard, Star Trek actor Jonathan Frakes will return to the director’s chair. Elsewhere in the Star Trek universe, William Shatner said not to expect a Kirk series after Picard.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Nioh 2 has received its first big update, bringing with it a robust Photo Mode and additional missions as Team Ninja prepares its three DLC expansions for later this year.

The update, which you can download now, includes a Photo Mode with all the bells and whistles you’d expect. That means filters, exposure controls, lighting adjustments, and more. You’ll also have access to nine new sub-missions which Team Ninja says is a small taste of a larger commitment to post-release content that starts this summer.

Nioh 2 has three expansions in the works, with the first launching on July 30. Titled The Tengu’s Disciple, this first expansion will take you to Yashima–a place which has seen numerous wars in the past. As a result, the shadows of yokai can be seen roaming the land, as fallen heroes wielding the Sohayamaru rise again to reestablish peace.

Team Ninja says that each expansion will present players with new stories, yokai, weapons, skills, and, of course, bosses to defeat. The new content will also usher in additional difficulty modes and end-game content that Team Ninja hopes will give players incentive to continue playing after seeing Nioh 2’s new content. The remaining two expansions don’t have dates yet, but Team Ninja says to expect them in the coming months.

Back in March we were impressed with Nioh 2’s demanding combat and unrelenting challenging. In our 8/10 Nioh 2 review, critic Mike Epstein wrote, “Though it sometimes feels like a curse as you play, it is a testament that Nioh 2 successfully grabs and holds your complete attention so close for so long.”

Scorn was one of the surprise hits of last week’s Inside Xbox showcase, its blank storytelling and H.R. Giger-inspired aesthetic standing out from the rest of Series X’s third-party slate. We’ve known about the game, as a PC title, for several years at this point, and it turns out the lure of Series X for developer Ebb Software was the fact that a console version could now match the vision it has always had for its PC project.

“It was about bringing it in line with the PC version”, says game director Ljubomir Peklar when I ask what the thinking was behind releasing Scorn for the new Xbox. “We don’t want to make any compromises and Series X certainly enables us to do just that.”

I ask what, specifically, Series X offers the team that current-gen consoles couldn’t: “It’s mostly evolutionary improvements that are going to make the biggest difference. The most important one is elimination of the CPU bottleneck that exists in the current-gen consoles and much faster loading of assets thanks to the SSD. It’s all about responsiveness and not having to wait on things.”

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For Scorn’s developers, compromise seems to be out of the question, and Series X’s power is a draw. Scorn is being built in Unreal Engine 4, and appears to be an exercise in pushing those tools as far as they’ll go – Peklar doesn’t say it outright, but Ebb appears to be aiming for high resolution and framerates as much as it is shiny (or should that be slimy?) new looks: “If developers decided to opt for lower resolutions and 30fps they could get more spectacular results, like in the new Unreal 5 showcase few days ago. What you have to remember is that responsiveness and motion clarity are also part of the overall presentation, so you would still be losing detail in a sense.”

The last direct gameplay we saw from Scorn came in 2017, and Peklar assures me that the game has changed significantly since then: “That pre-alpha level we showed is about 80% different right now. That demo was created to show backers we can develop a proper game and an overall potential of what the game could be. It wasn’t supposed to be a final representation of the game.”

What remains less clear is whether Series X is the only console platform on which Scorn will arrive. When I ask if this is a Series X exclusive, or if it could hit PS5 sometime after launch, Peklar says he can’t discuss that information. We still don’t know if the game will come to Steam and Windows Store simultaneously with Xbox Series X, either.

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A slightly more interesting mystery is what story Scorn actually aims to tell. Ebb has been purposely mysterious about what Scorn is about, to the point where, when I innocently ask what the initial pitch for the game was (intending to mean the look and gameplay ideas), Peklar says it feels like I’m trying to be “clever” and get him to tell me what the story’s about, and refuses to answer directly. “The initial pitch hasn’t changed that much,” he tells me, “but we will never disclose it.”

He will, at least, divulge what the gameplay will be made up of. The 2017 demo showed off exploration and puzzle-solving around one of Scorn’s several promised nightmarish areas, and a touch of gunplay as the local, disgusting wildlife subsequently turned hostile. That mix will seemingly remain the case in the final product: “It’s pretty much 50/50 when it comes to gunplay and puzzles,” says Peklar, “all wrapped up in an atmosphere that will elevate it much further than the sum of its parts.”

Despite that early gameplay, most people watching Inside Xbox won’t have seen Scorn before, and its sheer blankness of vision, and the team’s unwillingness to give too much away, must have made this very public showing slightly nerve-wracking. Thankfully, Peklar and his team emerged pleased with the experience: “We were interested in seeing if people were reacting to the specific beats we expected them to. Failing to adequately realize and present the mood is always our biggest worry. Thankfully it all went as expected. The overall reaction was pretty good too.”

Scorn will be released for Xbox Series X during the console’s “launch period”. Windows Store and Steam versions are also planned, with no release date specified.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News, and Scorn makes him feel deliciously grim. Follow him on Twitter.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has rightfully gotten a lot of attention as a salve for our troubled times. The friendly, low-stress gameplay is complemented by smooth music that makes the whole thing a relaxing respite. Now the performers behind the main theme reconvened virtually for an encore performance.

The short-but-sweet video was shared by the official Animal Crossing Twitter, with each musician performing out of their homes–sometimes multiple times so that their various instruments can be compiled into the mix. The result is a nice overview of the work put into the iconic song and lets Animal Crossing fans put faces to the performances.

Between some combination of its chill vibes and recent big spending on video games in general, Animal Crossing has had a booming launch, already earning a spot in the top-sellers for Nintendo Switch. It’s also gotten a fair amount of mainstream pop culture attention, from the likes of NFL teams and members of the US Congress.

Nintendo has even started leveraging the popularity of Animal Crossing into other games, like a special event in Tetris 99. If you’ve caught the fever (and found a Switch), check out which fish and bugs you should be on the lookout for this month.

Control’s next DLC expansion, AWE, will further explore the game’s link to Alan Wake, and provide answers for players who “didn’t quite understand what happened”.

Talking to Game Informer, Remedy’s creative director and writer Sam Lake has said that we can expect to learn much more about the Federal Bureau of Control’s research into the Bright Falls incident when playing through AWE.

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“We have this opportunity of looking back at what happened in Alan Wake and how does the Bureau see it,” said Lake. “Well, there was this otherworldly event that took place in Bright Falls and they suddenly have this terminology. We have people that say, ‘I loved Alan Wake but I didn’t quite understand what happened, and now I played Control and I understand what happened in Alan Wake!’”

Lake confirmed that AWE will definitely explore the events of Alan Wake. “I can say that you will find out more about the Bureau’s research on what happened in Alan Wake and where they are with it today,” he added.

Alan Wake, which released ten years ago, famously has an obscure conclusion. The two-part DLC story line – The Signal and The Writer – later helped clarify and extend certain plot elements, but to this day many players remain confused as to exactly what happened. Now that Remedy has built a shared universe for its games, the AWE expansion provides a new opportunity to clear up what happened in the strange town of Bright Falls.

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AWE will be the second expansion to Control, following The Foundation, which our review explains is a wonderful return to the weird world of the Federal Bureau of Control. After that, Remedy is embarking on two more next-gen games set in the same franchise.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.