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Nintendo’s latest Pokemon Direct revealed a bunch of new details for the upcoming Pokemon Sword / Shield. Among the two games’ new features, one of the more notable additions is Dynamax evolutions, which up the scale of Pokemon battles to gigantic sizes.

Similarly to Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves, Dynamax Evolutions are temporary moves you can activate in battle. Doing so grows your Pokemon to giant sizes and boosts their overall power, transforming all their moves into Max Moves. “Max Moves are powerful, and some can even trigger additional effects,” Nintendo wrote in a press release. “For example, the Normal-type Max Move, Max Strike, has the additional effect of lowering the Speed stat of an opponent it hits. The Max Moves the player’s Pokemon can use are determined by the kind and types of moves they knew before Dynamaxing.”

Much like Mega Evolutions, Dynamax Evolutions can only be activated once per battle. The transformation only lasts for three turns as well so you’ll need to be strategic in deciding when to activate it. You’re not the only one who can tap into Dynamax’s power either. Gym Leaders will use the transformation on their strongest Pokemon, adding a challenging new hurdle to defeating them in battle. You can also encounter Dynamax Pokemon in Sword / Shield’s new Wild Area–a location where you encounter wild Pokemon in the open world, much like in Pokemon, Let’s Go! Pikachu / Eevee.

To battle against these giant wild Pokemon, you and up to three other players (or NPC-controlled trainers) join forces. These new types of battles are called Max Raid Battles, and they’ll see your team of trainers take on a Dynamax Pokemon in a challenging fight that will require coordination. Only one of the trainers in your group will be able to Dynamax Evolve their Pokemon to match the wild giant Pokemon, so you’ll have to choose wisely. These wild Dynamax Pokemon vary by area and weather, so you’ll have to explore the entire region to beat and catch ’em all.

In case you missed the Nintendo Pokemon Direct, we’ve compiled all the information in a series of articles, which you can find listed below. Pokemon Sword / Shield is scheduled to release for Nintendo Switch on November 15.

Pokemon Sword / Shield Nintendo Direct Breakouts

As promised, The Pokemon Company shared a ton of new details about Pokemon Sword and Shield during the latest Pokemon Direct broadcast. Along with confirming the games’ release date, we got a look at some of the new characters players will encounter on their journey, as well as a handful of new Gen 8 Pokemon you’ll be able to catch.

First is the Grass-type Gossifleur, whose pollen has healing properties. Gossifleur is able to evolve into Eldegoss, the Cotton Bloom Pokemon. We also got a look at Wooloo, an adorable sheep Pokemon covered in fluffy wool, as well as the vicious snapping turtle-like Drednaw. Finally, The Pokemon Company revealed Corviknight, the raven Pokemon. Interestingly, Corviknight will be able to taxi players back to any town they have previously visited, much like the Fly HM of old.

Those aren’t the only new Pokemon we got a look at. The Pokemon Company also revealed Sword and Shield’s Legendary Pokemon, the wolf-like Zamazenta and Zacian. Few details about the Legendaries were revealed, but the former is covered in armor that resembles a shield, while the latter wields a sword in its maw. In their reveal trailer, the Legendaries could be briefly seen fighting each other before a sound catches their attention.

That certainly isn’t all we learned about Pokemon Sword and Shield during Wednesday’s Direct. As speculated, the games are introducing a new battle mechanic called Dynamaxing. Like Mega Evolution and Z-Moves before it, Dynamax is triggered via its own button and can only be used once per battle. This causes your Pokemon to grow into a massive size, giving them a power boost and turning their attacks into Max Moves. However, Dynamax Pokemon will only remain in that state for three turns. Players will also be able to team up with others and battle wild Dynamx Pokemon in Pokemon Go-like Raids while exploring the Wild Area, an open-world like environment between cities in Galar.

Pokemon Sword and Shield launch for Nintendo Switch on November 15. You can learn more in our Pokemon Sword and Shield pre-order guide.

In the June 5 Pokemon Sword and Shield Direct, we got our first look at the characters and overall story of the upcoming Nintendo Switch games. This included the Galar region’s Pokemon professor, your rival, and the Champion, all mainstays of the Pokemon series. And while we didn’t get a look at a Team Rocket equivalent or any overall mysteries to the story, we did get a better idea of what the Galar region is all about: Pokemon battles, of course.

In the new Galar region, Pokemon battles are an especially big deal. The stadiums shown in the reveal trailer are, in fact, Gyms, and tons of people gather to watch challengers take on Gym Leaders. According to The Pokemon Company, “Pokemon battles are regarded as the most popular form of entertainment” in Galar. Pokemon are also important in the Galarian economy and actively participate in the workforce when they’re not battling.

Of course, the main goal of Sword and Shield is to take on the Pokemon League and become the Champion. The current Galar Champion is an exuberant anime-looking guy named Leon who’s shown with a Charizard. His younger brother, Hop, is your rival and, in classic fashion, wants to train to be the best. You’ll be helped along the way by Professor Magnolia–who studies the new Dynamax phenomenon–and her granddaughter and assistant Sonia, who is also Leon’s childhood friend. All roads seem to lead back to Leon.

Finally, we were briefly introduced to the Grass-type Gym Leader, Milo. Gym Leaders have powerful Dynamax Pokemon, a big new battle mechanic introduced in Sword and Shield. It also appears that Milo uses at least one of the new Galar Pokemon, Eldegoss.

In other Pokemon Direct news, we were introduced to Sword and Shield’s legendary Pokemon, Zamazenta and Zacian. The Direct also revealed the games’ release date: November 15. They’ll be sold both individually and as a double pack, the latter of which includes a special steelbook.

In the Nintendo Direct presentation for Pokemon Sword and Shield, Nintendo introduced a new mechanic called Dynamax. This makes your Pokemon huge and boosts their abilities, but it also plays into another brand-new feature: cooperative raid battles.

The Wild Area is all of the territory between towns where you can encounter Pokemon, and some special areas in the Wild have nodes where you can join up with other trainers to fight in Max Raid Battles. While your own Pokemon can only go Dynamax for three turns and can only be triggered once, these Max Raid Battles will have you face off against a mega-sized Pokemon for the entire encounter. You’ll need to coordinate with other players to bring them down, and only one of the trainers will be permitted to use a Dynamax of their own. If you manage to beat them, you can catch them.

These Max Raid Battles will vary by area and weather, and some Pokemon can only be caught by participating in a Max Raid Battle. You can team up with three other players, but if three humans aren’t available, AI support trainers will be automatically added to your team. It all seems inspired by the Raid battles in Pokemon Go, albeit with a super-sized twist.

Dynamax Pokemon swap their abilities for Max abilities, and during the presentation we saw several Dynamax battles taking place in specialized Pokemon arenas full of fans. Other details from the Nintendo Direct include new character and story details, and our first look at the two new Legendary Pokemon that represent the Sword and Shield.

Pokemon Sword and Shield is coming on November 15.

As part of a special Nintendo Direct for Pokemon Sword and Shield today, Nintendo introduced us to the newest Legendary Pokemon to grace your Pokedex. As you might expect, the two new Legendaries represent the “Sword” and “Shield” aspects of their titles.

The two Pokemon, named Zamazenta and Zacian, look like similarly colorful wolves. Zamazenta has a fur pattern on its face and chest that looks like a shield, while Zacian carries a sword-like object in its mouth. In the brief trailer, the two are seen fighting with each other, before something else attracts both of their attention.

Presumably, Pokemon Sword and Shield will follow the pattern of prior Pokemon games and make one Legendary available in each version. Nintendo also announced a double-pack available for pre-order that will include both versions when the games release on November 15.

Other details from the Nintendo Direct included other new Pokemon, multiplayer raid battles, and the new kaiju-sized Dynamax system that can make a Pokemon grow to massive size.

Clocking in at a few minutes shy of two hours, X-Men: Dark Phoenix certainly doesn’t seem like it should be a movie that overstays its welcome–by the conventions of the superhero genre it should have another forty-five minutes at the very least. Yet, somehow, it manages to make all but a scant handful of scenes feel inexorable, inexplicably boring. It drags on listlessly, completely unsure what to do with any of its characters–not even Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), the titular “Phoenix” of Dark Phoenix has any real clarity or purpose. She’s got a new power now, and it’s causing her psychic mutation to go haywire. That’s about as complicated or nuanced as things get.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast putters around just as directionlessly. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) has a handful of zingers (“You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women”) directed at her childhood friend/adoptive brother, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who, at some point of screen, has taken a full-on pivot from well-meaning-but-doomed altruist to fame-grubbing asshole for no discernable reason. Sure, this incarnation of Xavier might be a little more faithful to his comic book self but it simply doesn’t track–and makes absolutely no effort to track–back to the McAvoy version of the character we’ve spent three prior films getting to know. Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) is there, but really only to emote awkwardly at Jean whenever the camera is on him. Quicksilver (Evan Peters) is around, too, but only for a handful of scenes–none of them managing to capture what made the character memorable or funny in previous films.

Magneto (Michael Fassbender) would be the most baffling of the lot, flip-flopping his motivations and emotional realities seemingly at random and in the middle of his scenes, but that dubious honor has to go to Jessica Chastain, whose character apparently does get named a grand total of once, and is otherwise never directly addressed again–so good luck trying to remember it when you leave the theater, and god help you if you’re like me and happened to miss the throwaway line the first time around.

Name confusion aside, Chastain plays a villainous alien who wants the power–don’t call it the “Phoenix Force,” the movie never does–that resides within Jean. There’s some vague exposition about how the power would help resurrect their race or terraform the Earth or something but it never quite becomes clear how or why just like it never becomes clear what role Jean plays in any of this. There are other aliens on Earth, too, but they all look like humans–presumably to save on that VFX and makeup budget–and Chastain is apparently their leader–or maybe some sort of princess? Who knows–the movie certainly doesn’t seem to care, so why should we?

The end result is an absolutely baffling sequence of inexplicably drawn out scenes wherein various physic mutants scrunch up their faces at the camera while objects fly around them and buildings crunch and collapse. They occasionally monologue to one another about learning important life lessons, or about being scared of their own power, or about recovering from trauma, but they may as well be talking about the weather for all the impact it has.

There are, of course, other mutants whose powers aren’t mentally based–but the movie doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do with them. Storm (Alexandra Shipp) is back, but instead of being able to control the weather on a god-like scale, she spends the majority of her time on screen zapping people with lightning fingers like Raiden from Mortal Kombat. Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) makes a return, too, with his iconic “BAMF” teleportation inexplicably dubbed over with what honest-to-god sounds like a totally unaltered whip crack sound effect. He has a handful of neat fighting moments, but only really gets to shine for less than a minute at the very end.

Chances are, at about the halfway mark, you’ll find yourself desperately wondering when the movie is going to put itself out of its misery–or, at best, wondering what the point of any of this is. Not even the major set-piece battles that bring familiar mutants together to showcase their powers feel like they have any real point or purpose outside of, well, being major set-piece battles to bring familiar mutants together.

It’s hard to really pinpoint just where everything started going wrong. You could blame it on the cast being too large, or the script trying to juggle too many things, or the narrative not really knowing what it wanted to say or how it wanted to say it, but the reality is it doesn’t really matter. The sum of Dark Phoenix’s parts is a mess–a mess that, at the end of the day, might have a handful of pretty okay fight scenes and some well-tailored costumes, but still a mess. Sure, it may be slightly closer to adapting the actual Dark Phoenix Saga source material than 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, but only by default.

Apart from being remembered as an amazing open-world RPG, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is also known for being one of the first console games with microtransactions. Specifically, horse armor. Bethesda boss Todd Howard has now reflected on the horse armor controversy.

Speaking to IGN, Howard said, “People will buy anything.” He added: “That doesn’t mean you should do it. [But] they will buy anything. That sounds terrible.”

Howard went on to say that there is nothing wrong in practice with horse armor, but the issue with it is how pricey it was. He said someone at Microsoft–he wouldn’t say who–told the team at Bethesda to charge more, so they did.

At the time, themes–or wallpaper for your Xbox 360–were a big deal. The price point Bethesda proposed for horse armor was below the price of a theme. So Microsoft asked Bethesda to increase the price; it was sold at the time for $2.50 USD.

“Horse armor is not bad. I think horse armor is fine. The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it’s probably worth this,” he said. “I won’t say who at Microsoft said, ‘Well, that’s less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it.’ We were like, ‘Okay!’ It’s a price-to-value proposition at the time, not do I want armor for my horse. And looking back now, it’s quite cheap.”

In the ensuring years, Bethesda sold Oblivion’s horse armor for twice the normal price as an April Fool’s joke, and it sold well because people were in on the joke and wanted to participate, Howard said.

The next mainline Elder Scrolls game is The Elder Scrolls VI, which is still a long ways off. The game will not be at E3 2019 this month, and it might not release until the next-generation of consoles.