As another week comes to an end, two more PC games are free from the Epic Games Store if you need some weekend entertainment: mystery thriller Alan Wake and action fighting game For Honor. Epic has been giving away free games regularly for over eight months now, but it seems to be switching things up a bit lately. For one, this week’s free games became available on a Friday, rather than a Thursday, as usual. Secondly, for the past two weeks, Epic has been offering a pair of games rather than just one. The company explained that anytime it gives away a game with an M or PEGI-18 rating, which could be restricted by Parental Control settings, it will offer another free game that’s more accessible to younger players. In this week’s case, For Honor is rated M, and luckily, that means Alan Wake is available too.
Alan Wake is an action-adventure game that unfolds like a mystery-thriller. The story follows best-selling writer Alan Wake, whose wife disappears during their vacation in the Pacific Northwest; soon after, he discovers pages from a thriller novel he doesn’t remember writing. “The foreboding atmosphere that permeates every inch of this wilderness never lets you forget the dangers that await the unprepared, but the feeling of dread that defines the early portions dissipates as you get deeper into this moody adventure,” wrote critic Tom McShea in GameSpot’s Alan Wake review, which scored the game an 8.5/10. “Alan Wake doesn’t offer enough surprises to keep you unhinged, but the storytelling is so enthralling and the combat is so frantic that you’ll be sucked in until the thrilling conclusion.”
For Honor is also free this week. Set in a medieval-fantasy world, the fighting game features four main factions to choose from–Knights, Vikings, Samurai, or Wu Lin, the latter of which was added in the Marching Fire expansion. It earned an 8/10 in our For Honor review for its satisfying combat, rewarding skill progression, and multiplayer modes, although GameSpot’s Matt Espineli found the narrative lacking. “In its highest moments, For Honor is difficult to put down,” he wrote. “Its slow combat pace and narrative shortcomings might turn off those unwilling to take the time to dive deep into what it has to offer. However, make no mistake–those who do will be rewarded with some of the most satisfying multiplayer melee fighting conceived in recent years.”
Both Alan Wake and For Honor are free to claim now through August 9, when they’ll be replaced by Epic’s next freebie, GNOG. To claim the games, all you need is an Epic account, which is free to create if you don’t already have one. After adding the games to your account, they’re yours to keep forever.
The developer behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has addressed criticism over its decision to use the controversial real-world weapon white phosphorus in multiplayer mode.
Multiplayer design director Geoff Smith told VG247 that Infinity Ward views multiplayer as a playground and separate to the darker themes of single-player campaign. As such, it doesn’t make comment on any real-world aspects of war.
“Our game is more about two sides, that there is no good guy or bad guy, you play on either one. We’re just creating this playground to play on,” he said. “I always felt like in the previous games that multiplayer is like the distant weapon fire that you hear a few blocks away from where the single player is.”
Cardy and Matt have been lucky enough to see Quentin Tarantino’s 9th/10th (depending on who you ask) film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. They possess different views on the film, sparking MUCH chat. Joe’s been spending more time playing hard Japanese games so here is to tell us all about Fire Emblem: Three Houses and the upcoming Monster Hunter: World expansion, Iceborne. We also break down Amazon’s The Boys and pay a brief visit to Fast and Furious spin-off, Hobbs and Shaw.
Joe has a new Endless Search offering this week and crisp conversation also takes place, but we’re opening up the tuck shop this week…
Hello Games has announced that No Man’s Sky will receive its next major update, called Beyond, on August 14. The Beyond expansion includes the ability to play the entire game in virtual reality. It will be a free update on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Beyond includes No Man’s Sky Online, which introduces a new social and multiplayer experience, allowing players to meet and play together. Hello Games previously announced this feature as an easier way to meet up and play with your friends, but it says it doesn’t consider this a shift to an MMO structure because it doesn’t feature a subscription or microtransactions. The update also brings NMS Virtual Reality to PS4 and PC, letting you explore the entire procedurally generated galaxy in VR.
This is the seventh major expansion to No Man’s Sky. Last year, the game received the Next expansion, which was such a major overhaul we named it one of the best expansions of 2018. It also recently released the underwater Abyss expansion and tons of new biomes in the Visions expansion.
All of this has helped revive the game after a release window that some considered disappointing. Hello Games recently opened up about why it went dark after No Man Sky’s rocky launch, and how attempting to placate the fans with words wouldn’t have worked.
There’s a lot to like about Obsidian Entertainment’s next RPG, The Outer Worlds. It’s pretty much a conglomeration of all the best things about the developer’s past games, like Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, with a big emphasis on an expansive conversation system and plenty of consequences for your actions. It utilizes its turn-of-the-century aesthetic perfectly to create the game’s expansive, funny send-up of capitalism and corporate culture. And it provides you with a band of companion characters who react to the story and situations as they unfold, and who make the game a lot more interesting with their presence.
Obsidian recently gave GameSpot a chance to get hands-on with The Outer Worlds, providing roughly two hours to dig into one of the game’s locations, a lawless and hostile world called Monarch. As Obsidian has detailed in the past, you play a character of your own creation, with the game reacting heavily to your choices as you decide whether to be good, evil, or something in between. Instead of venturing straight out in a random direction to tangle with various creatures, I spun around to speak with the other two major characters of the demo: your companions, Nyoka and Parvati.
“They have opinions of their own and they’re reacting to the choices you’ve made.”
Companion characters are a big part of The Outer Worlds, as they have been in other, similar Obsidian RPGs, like New Vegas. You can have two in tow at any given time once they’ve joined up with you, and of course, they help in combat with whatever weapons you decide to equip them with. They’re also a major component of your story in The Outer Worlds.
“We wanted to integrate companions quite a bit more, so each of the companions has a backstory and a companion quest,” lead designer Chris Staples said during an interview at the press event. “Talking to them along the way opens up those companion quests and you can do things for them. But also, how those companion quests play out influences what they think of you. Your decisions and how you treat various factions also plays into that.”
“For example, a companion might not like the Board [the corporate overlords of The Outer Worlds] at all, and if you start helping them, they’ll have issues with that,” he continued. “They’ll bring that up and say, ‘Hey, I don’t like what you’re doing, if you keep doing this, we can’t work together.’ We wanted to make sure that there was a lot of–I mean part of the space fantasy is, you know, building your crew and flying through space and having adventures with your crew. And that is sort of what we’re going for, to try to make sure they are involved along the way. They have opinions of their own and they’re reacting to the choices you’ve made.”
Helping Out
With no quests on the docket, we were free to wander into a nearby outpost and talk to its denizens or go tromping across Monarch’s monster-filled fields to see what we might find. As it turned out, though, our demo had a companion quest ready to go from Nyoka, a character who has been living on Monarch, working as a hunter and general monster killer. Talking to her triggered a conversation that gave the backstory for her companion quest. She told a story about her former crew, several of whom had been killed during a monster attack and hastily buried or, worse, left behind. Nyoka asked for help in retrieving some mementos from the burial sites in order to properly honor the team–and take some sweet revenge on the giant alien mantiqueen that murdered them. If you accept, things get altogether more complicated than that.
The first part of the mission sends you running across the fields of Monarch in search of the gravesite of one of Nyoka’s friends. Getting there isn’t exactly easy since the area is populated by groups of bandits (who also have alien attack dogs) and families of vicious aliens that can spray you down with swarms of bugs they exude from their abdomens.
Luckily, you’re pretty proficient in combat, too. Your backstory is that you were frozen in cryostasis for decades while Monarch and its counterpart planet, Halcyon, were colonized. Now that you’ve awoken, your experience has given you the strange capacity to slow down time, allowing you to line up shots or melee strikes on specific parts of enemies’ bodies. The Outer Worlds packs a variety of weapons, from blades that poison to sniper rifles and giant mini-guns, and in our demo, we had a variety of different tools for blasting away at enemies.
Combat felt strong during our demo, especially compared to New Vegas, which The Outer Worlds draws inspiration from. But it’s your companions who give the whole experience a fast-paced, strategic feel. Each companion has a special ability move, Staples said, which comes with a cooldown timer. You can activate it on the fly with one button, ordering your teammate to use it on whoever you’re targeting. Doing so triggers a brief cutscene as the character executes their move–Nyoka unloads a torrent of armor-shredding ammo from a mini-gun, while Parvati winds up for a big, stunning strike with an electricity infused melee weapon. Both moves were essential to victory in battles, as teammates could stun some enemies briefly while weakening others.
You also have a few squad commands. Similar to what you might expect from a Mass Effect game, you can order your teammates to specific locations or to focus fire on a particular enemy. Mostly, though, you’ll let your teammates handle their own fights, but you can dictate their behaviors from The Outer Worlds character menus. The game provides all sorts of options, allowing you to set how aggressive a character is, from what ranges they’ll attack, and a lot more. You can even set one of your companions to function as the squad leader, shouldering the burden of commanding the team. They’ll still follow you around, but if you’re a person who’s not great in combat situations, letting another character lead can make things a bit easier.
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Bantering It Up
Nyoka’s mission involved picking up a decaying necklace from the grave of one of her friends and then looking to enlist some help to find the cave where the rest were killed. That meant finding two members of the team who’d left Monarch, which required the help of a local hermit with access to some communications gear. We found him on top of a nearby mountain, which was surrounded by mercenaries who’d basically taken the place over.
Nearby, we found a team of mercenaries who had been contracted by the facility’s owner to protect the place. Their contract stipulated that they had to stop attackers coming from a nearby cave–since it didn’t mention anyone marching up the mountain pass the way my squad did, the mercenaries ignored the attackers. In order to talk them into doing their jobs (and therefore putting them into the line of fire, instead of us), we had to venture into the cave and help their missing commanding officer
Working our way across Monarch gave Nyoka and Parvati a few chances to swap stories. Mostly, those became opportunities for more of The Outer Worlds’ humor to creep in. Despite comments from Obsidian about how the game doesn’t take a political stance, it’s clearly a pretty hilarious send-up of capitalism. At one point, Nyoka mentioned that her life on Monarch wasn’t so bad because she at least got weekends–a concept completely foreign to Parvati, a resident of the completely corporate Halcyon.
Which companion you bring with you will matter beyond the banter you’re likely to hear on missions. Staples said that having the right character with you can change how a mission plays out.
“Sometimes you’ll talk to a quest-giver and they’ll mention it, or like Nyoka has a history with some of the other characters on Monarch,” he explained. “So she can chime in and say certain things that might open up either different paths of a quest, where if you didn’t have her, that option wouldn’t be available.”
Each character has one main companion quest, Staples said, plus the ability to interject and influence a lot of other quests, as well. It’ll be up to you to pay attention to the characters, talk to them, and learn about them, to find out where, when, and with whom they’re most likely to have an impact.
I wasn’t able to finish the mission in the demo–although I did talk a local corporate mercenary gang into fighting the bandits for me–The Outer Worlds did give a taste of how a lot of its systems will work, most notably its companion characters. Staples said a big priority for Obsidian is making the game feel highly reactive to you and your choices, and that means presenting different options based on your chosen character traits and the personality you flesh out through conversations. And that goes for which characters you have with you, too.
From our short time getting hands-on with The Outer Worlds, spending some time with your companions seemed to be the best part. Combat works well, but it’s better with your AI buddies. The same goes for exploring the world and trying to talk your way out of all the trouble you’re liable to get up to on various planets. While Obsidian’s dumb, hyper-capitalist sci-fi world is fun on its own, it’s the characters you hang around with that really make it feel real. And it seems like spending time to get to know your companions will pay off, not just in what it adds to the story, but in the gameplay capabilities and options they offer to help you accomplish your goals in The Outer Worlds–whatever they might be.
Here is a pretty sweet deal: Microsoft is throwing in a free copy of Madden NFL 20–which launches today, August 2–with the purchase of a new Xbox One console. The offer is available from the Microsoft Store, and it’s good on 13 different Xbox One bundles, most of which already come with a free game or other extras.
It’s really easy: just visit this Microsoft Store page and add one of the consoles to your cart. Madden NFL 20 will be automagically added to your order; the game comes in the form of a digital code, in case that matters to you. Also, it is the standard edition of Madden NFL 20, not the premium versions.
The cheapest option is the $250 USD Xbox One S All-Digital Edition (which also comes with Forza Horizon 3, Sea of Thieves, and Minecraft), while the offer is also good on various other Xbox One S and Xbox One X bundles.
To help you get an idea for if Madden NFL 20 is worth your time and money, we’re collecting review scores and excerpts from a variety of outlets to give you an at-a-glance idea if you want to pick it up or not.
Here at GameSpot, I scored Madden NFL 20 an 8/10. The new QB1 story mode generally felt like a disappointment to me, while I particularly enjoyed the new X-Factor and Superstar abilities that shake up the franchise’s familiar formula in new and exciting ways.
You can see a roundup of review scores and excerpts from other publications across the internet below. You can also visit GameSpot sister site Metacritic to see a wider look at the critical reaction to Madden NFL 20.
Madden NFL 20
Game: Madden NFL 20
Platform: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Developer: EA Sports
Release date: August 2
Price: $60 / £60 / $100 AUD
GameSpot — 8/10
“When it comes to the on-the-field action … the new X-Factor and Superstar abilities shake up the familiar gameplay formula to give seasoned players and newcomers alike a fresh way to scheme plays and orchestrate strategy on both sides of the ball.” — Eddie Makuch [Full review]
Shacknews — 4/10
“Once the crown jewel of the EA Sports catalog, Madden NFL 20 seemingly revels in its reputation as recycled garbage and belongs in a bin.” — Chris Jarrard [Full review]
IGN — 8.1/10
“In addition to the usual incremental graphics upgrade and respectable new story campaign, Madden NFL 20 meaningfully improves on a lot of the issues that plagued the previous iteration(s). The running game is noticeably smoother and X-Factor traits make superstar players actually feel like a force to be reckoned with on the field, and while there are still problems that linger with animations, it’s safe to say that EA Tiburon is making large strides in the right direction.” — Robert Kollars [Full review]
GamesRadar — 4/5
“Collectively, it feels like Madden is in the early stages of re-building a perennial contender. Like drafting a left tackle with the first overall pick, the changes to Madden 20 aren’t flashy, but they feel like the right moves to make in order to compete for years to come.” — Mark Delaney [Full review]
SportingNews — 4/5
“Whether it’s the X-Factors, new Face of the Franchise mode, or even signature player animations, ‘Madden NFL 20’ feels more true to life than ever before. The lack of advancement in core areas such as presentation and Franchise Mode, however, hold this edition back from being the complete package.” — Bryan Wiedey [Full review]
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“The new Face of the Franchise mode is totally underwhelming and fails to tell a meaningful story and the X-Factor abilities are helpful for newcomers but don’t really change how a solid player would play the game any. These changes are all a positive for long-term but it lacks any selling point and has launched in a frustrating state that undermines the solid football mechanics that EA has refined over the past several decades.” — Tyler Treese [Full review]
Metro Game Central — 7/10
“The casual fan will find plenty to enjoy but diehards will see Madden 20 as just another facelift to a franchise that knows how to succeed but struggles to innovate.” — Jay Jaffa [Full review]
Be sure to visit IGN Tech for all the latest comprehensive reviews and best-of roundups. Note that if you click on one of these links to buy the product, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.When it comes to storing all the stuff on your gaming PC, you have two options: cheap, slow, and spacious hard drives (HDD) or more expensive yet much faster (and lower capacity) solid-state drives (SSDs). A good SSD makes everything you do on your PC feel snappy. Programs pop right open. Files copy in seconds. Perhaps most importantly, your games will load faster, allowing them to run smoother with fewer hitches and hiccups.
Shopping for the best SSD can be a bit intimidating with so many drives operating at different speeds, at all sorts of capacities, and a variety of form factors. Don’t fret though, I’ve done the research for you and created this handy list of the best solid-state drives on the market. From budget options to speed up your laptop to the highest performance NVMe drives that will turbocharge your gaming PC, here are the best SSDs you can buy.
The Samsung 860 EVO is the best SSD you can buy as it offers solid transfer speeds and reliability at an affordable price. It’s the perfect example of how cheap solid-state storage has become over the years as the 1TB version costs just $150. Better yet, the Samsung 860 EVO offers nearly the fastest transfer speeds (up to 550MB/s reads and 520MB/s writes) possible on a SATA III interface.
Crucial gives you a lot of bang for the buck with the MX500. Don’t be fooled by other inexpensive drives with slightly faster transfer speeds – in real-world testing, the MX500 consistently outperforms them, with performance just a little bit slower than drives that cost considerably more. The Crucial MX500 is also well regarded in the SSD world as being one of the most reliable storage drives you can buy.
Introduced at the start of the year, the WD Black SN750 is still one of the best-performing NVMe SSDs and was partially responsible for all the cheap, super-fast storage we have today. See whereas you can get an 1TB WD Black SN750 for just $250, the 1TB Samsung 970 Evo launched eight months earlier for $450. Aside from being one of the first truly affordable NVMe SSDs, the WD Black SN750 delivers some of the fastest data transfer speeds on par with Samsung’s flagship solid-state drives, the 970 Pro.
Although the Adata XPG SX6000Pro is an NVMe SSD, it’s just as affordable as a bargain SATA drive. Seriously, a 512GB Adata XPG SX6000Pro and 500GB Samsung 860 EVO cost nearly the same at around $60. As if saving all that dough wasn’t great already, you’ll also be able to enjoy up to 2,100MB/s sequential read and 1,500MB/s sequential write speeds – which is about three-to-two times faster than any SATA SSD.
While the WD Black SN750 has earned the title of the best gaming SSD, Samsung has retained the crown for the best NVMe SSD with the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. You won’t find another storage drive faster than this and that’s even including the company’s own flagship Samsung 970 Pro. Beyond gaming, this drive is perfect for tasks that demand an uninterrupted stream of data like 4K video editing, working with the highest-resolution RAW images, and real-time 3D rendering.
Remember when I said that the WD Black SN750 was partially responsible for driving down the cost of NVMe SSDs? Well, the Corsair Force Series MP510 another equally affordable NVMe SSD option. Just look at this 2TB drive that costs only $319. Getting the same storage capacity with a Samsung 970 Evo would cost significantly more. This huge Corsair NVMe drive also offers screaming fast speeds – albeit, not the fastest – up to 3,480MB/s sequential reads and 2,700MB/s sequential write speeds.
Thanks to AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation processors and X570 motherboards, PCIe 4.0 is finally here and it has made even faster NVMe SSDs possible. The Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD is one of the total three PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market and it offers the fastest speeds with 5,000MB/s sequential reads and 4,400MB/s sequential writes. This blisteringly fast SSD also comes equipped with its own heatsink and is priced at a surprisingly affordable $260 for a drive with 1TB in capacity.
This is the best performing SSD going right now, and it’s even got the glowing blue LED lights to prove it. Intel’s Optane line uses super low-latency ‘3D XPoint memory’ that’s in an entirely different solar system when compared to NAND flash. Think of it as storage that operates more like DRAM, though – not quite as fast as – and that’s 3D XPoint. If you’re thinking, ‘That sounds expensive,’ it is! The 960GB module you see above costs about $1,300, so this is for those with deep pockets only.
Samsung surprised us a bit when it introduced a third-line of mainstream SSDs, but this one is particularly catered to those on a budget and looking for globs of storage space. With prices starting at around $100 for a 1TB drive and capacities up to 4TB for roughly $550, this a great option for users looking to completely move off of hard drives.
The best SSDs aren’t just the ones that go in your PC anymore, there is also a growing segment of portable drives that offer just as much speed and performance. Meet the Samsung X5 Portable SSD, it’s essentially a portable NVMe drive that connects over Thunderbolt 3 to give you 2,800MB/s sequential read and 2,300MB/s sequential write speeds. This is the perfect solution for giving content creation and gaming laptops an extra jolt of external storage that operates almost as quickly their internal SSD.
What to Look in for an SSD?
Below I break down the various form factors and types of connectors most solid-state drives use.
Before you buy, you need to know what kind of SSD you want. Newer motherboards have sockets for M.2 drives, which are long, flat sticks of storage that lie flat against the motherboard. If you don’t have that in your system, you can buy a 2.5-inch drive that uses power and data cables just like an HDD.
Now things get a bit more varied once we start talking about connectors. For starters, M.2 drives might utilize a PCI Express- or Serial ATA (SATA)-based interface. The former delivers incredibly high transfer speeds up to 4,000MB/s, meanwhile, SATA is limited to a maximum 600MB/s speed. 2.5-inch drives are the other form of solid-state storage you’ll find and they mostly utilize a SATA connection.
SSDs have only gotten cheaper and faster in recent years
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The next major thing you should know about is ‘NVMe’ and it stands for the Non-Volatile Memory Express technology. That’s a mouthful, but it’s basically a communications standard, which allows SSDs connected over PCI Express to operate more like fast memory than storage.
M.2 drives aren’t the only type of drives that can tap into this wickedly fast PCIe NVMe connection. For example, there are solid-state drives like the Intel Optane 905P that connect directly into the PCIe slot on motherboards. Alternatively, you may also find some 2.5-inch drives that utilize a U.2 connection and operate just as fast as the best NVMe SSDs, though, these are becoming increasingly rare.
That’s everything you need to know about SSDs for now and there has never been a better time to ever buy one. The SSD market is so vibrant right now with manufacturers topping each other with increasingly faster and cheaper SSDs
Whereas $500 used to buy you a 128GB or 120GB SSD with, at best, 500MB/s transfer speeds, you can now buy a 4TB Samsung 860 QVO for roughly the same amount of money and kiss hard drives goodbye forever. Alternatively, cheap and fast SSDs like the WD Blue SN500 and Adata XPG SX6000Pro allow anyone building a new PC to use an NVMe SSD as their main drive
Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
